"The person that sits in the Oval Office will determine the outcome of the war on terror and the economy."

-George W. Bush, speaking to supporters in Michigan yesterday

Is it just me, or is the situation in the predominately Sunni areas almost completely absurd?

The January elections are fast approaching, and much of Al Anbar province remains, to put it mildly, inhospitable territory for the American military. American commanders are hoping to convince Sunni leaders that it is in their best interest to come to the table, participate in the electoral process, and actively take part in the reconstruction of their country. If their attempts to reach out fail, the second and supposedly final invasion of Fallujah will begin soon. A shadowy, 8-12,000-man strong coalition of traditionalist sheikhs and imams, foreign jihadi fighters, former Ba'athist spies, ordinary criminals, and other rejectionists stands in their way. For a variety of reasons, they don't want to participate in the election; instead, they want to kill all Westerners and any Iraq who cooperates with them. It's unclear how large the insurgents' base of passive and active support is, but I sure don't see a meaningful groundswell of revulsion for the insurgency within that subregion. There may be a silent majority of Sunnis in Al Anbar province that is eager to vote, but they sure aren't doing much to make the elections happen. They're either afraid, apathetic, or hostile.

So far, negotiations have proven a dismal failure. Our only remaining option, it seems, is to try to isolate the insurgents from the general population and either crush them or marginalize them just enough so that elections can go forward. When the Marines hastily went into Fallujah this past April in retaliation for the brutal slaying of the four Blackwater contractors, dozens of Americans died and over 600 Iraqi civilians were killed in the crossfire. The Arab satellite channels showed grisly footage of the carnage nearly around the clock. War is bloody. No doubt growing nervous about their ability to keep their the regional temperature to a low boil, our Arab allies both in and outside of the country pressured us to stand down before the Marines had completed their mission. Our ignoble figleaf solution, the Fallujah Brigade, saw its members either viciously tortured and killed, driven out of town with their tails between their legs, or absorbed into the insurgency itself.

It was a debacle.

Unlike in the case of Najaf, the residents of Fallujah are not particularly eager to see the fighters go. For the most part, they are the fighters. We keep hearing about splits between the foreigners and the locals, and yet the town remains defiant. No Grand Ayatollah Sistani will appear at the last minute with a nonviolent solution. The Iraqi Army, aside from one elite group of Kurdish peshmerga, is wobbly, untested, and is probably penetrated by insurgents. Unless a miracle happens between now and January and the insurgents suddenly back down, the best-case scenario going forward is that we deliver democracy to the Fallujahns at the point of a gun.

Literally.

How did we get to this point?

Columbia Journalism Review had arranged with Farnaz Fassahi to keep a journal of her experiences during the time she was reporting from Baghdad late this summer for the Wall Street Journal. It was only toward the end of her assignment that her email to family and friends became a cause celebre on the internet. CJR has now published her journal.

Although Senator Kerry deserves to be excoriated for allowing himself to be politically pressured into semi-supporting invasion with a force authorization vote, invading Iraq was nowhere near the political radar screen until Bush gave his disastrous Axis of Evil speech, the speech that set the wrong course for his Presidency and should set your lever-pulling course on Tuesday. The decision to invade and conquer Iraq was and is entirely the property of George W. Bush. It was probably the most disastrous foreign policy decision in our nation's history, and its author should not be given the opportunity to strike again.   more »

I have three term papers coming due at the end of the next month and a half or so, all theoretically running at 10-15 pages each but which, depending on my ability to focus, may well end up sprawling past that nominal limit.

For my Islam in South Asia course, I have chosen to focus on Uighur separatism in China's western Xinjiang province. Muslim minority separatist groups in places like Chechnya have in the recent past successfully exploited their identity to appeal to a broader Pan-Islamic community, drawing in material, monetary, and ideological support as well as the occassional corps of foreign volunteers like the Arab Afghans of the 1980s; given the considerable efforts by Beijing to repress Uighur nationalism and the Han colonization campaign in the west, it's important to determine whether those small handfuls of Uighurs you always hear tacked onto the end of the list of Egyptians, Jordanians, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian militants captured or killed in the news reports are signs that Xinjiang might develop into the newest front of radical Islamic revivalism sometime in the near future.

For my China course, I'm planning on writing something on the danwei work unit system, with all the incorporated housing, educational, and social controls that come with employment in a state-owned factory unit; the basic focus of that will be the penetration of the CCP party-state apparatus into Chinese society and asking whether the CCP leadership can continue to effectively rule China without the use of such interventionist state organs to prop up their rule.

And for my Japanese Foreign Policy course, I'm trying to explain why the Self Defense Forces continue to operate under a system of such binding hadome ("brakes"), because frankly it just boggles my mind the kind of restrictions they place on their military forces. Did you know they can't even take part in land mine removal missions? I don't think they have to wait for a Diet resolution to return fire any more, but some of this stuff puts even the American aversion (that keeps repeating itself every other chapter in my American Military Experience course) to funding a standing war-fighting Army during times of peace to shame.

Right now for all this I have... an introduction for one of them and an outline for the other two, so if I'm not blogging much from now till early December, I trust you'll understand why. If I get any good excerpts while writing, I'll be sure to post them here, otherwise I'll put the whole things up when I can finally get them finished.

And unfortunately, he is employing some highly manipulative rhetoric.

As an American, I'm of course deeply worried about new terrorist attacks on my fellow citizens. As a partisan Democrat, I'm dismayed that Osama's surprise resurgence will undoubtedly help re-elect George W. Bush, who in my opinion has greatly damaged America at home and abroad and does not deserve a second chance. Fear of external threats always helps the right wing in any country. I'm also embarrassed that Bin Laden is using tropes from Farenheit 9/11 (which I did not like, for the record), thus providing some unhoped-for ammunition for the GOP.   more »

Von at Obsidian Wings highlights the ongoing kerfuffle within the neoconservative foreign policy apparatus. Pointing to this Danny Postel summary of the debate between Charles Krauthammer and Francis Fukuyama on the pages of The National Interest, Von declares himself a foreign policy realist who, because no WMDs were actually found in Iraq, now views the invasion as a mistake. (The text of Fukuyama's critque is here, along with a solid discussion).   more »

[UPDATE 10-29-04] by nadezhda

From Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED:

SITES TO SEE. There are a number of Web sites that you'll want to look at if you're hoping to keep up on the many, many Election Day controversies. A few to note:

* Election Law @ Moritz -- the Web site of the election law division of Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State. This site is simply indispensable for following the legal challenges around the country.
* Election Protection's Election Incident Reporting System -- Election Protection is logging all complaints received by their call center; they've already registered more than 200 calls for Miami-Dade County alone, ranging from the innocuous ("Wants to know where to vote") to the troublesome ("She reported that Haitian immigrants had been intimidated by 'Republican' lawyers").
* Equal Vote -- The blog of Dan Tokaji, one of the professors behind Election Law @ Moritz.
* Election Law Blog -- The news-clipping blog of Rick Hasen, Loyola law professor and co-editor of Election Law Journal.
* Vote Watch 2004 -- An ever-growing list of news clippings about vote suppression, voter fraud, voting irregularities, and the like.

I'm sure I missed a couple sites, so please email me if you know of any resources people might want to check out.

--Jeffrey Dubner

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[original post 10-25-04]
You may have noticed a new nifty button at the top of the sidebar that shows the current projected tally for the electoral college. As of Sunday nite, Bush is up by one, but yesterday it was Kerry by two.

It's a link to Electoral-Vote.com, which has wonderful maps and graphics if you're into that sort of stuff. And they're trying to beef up their servers so they'll be fully prepared for election night.

I wasn't planning to put anything election-related in the sidebar, but the more we learn about extension dates for returning overseas ballots, electronic voting machines crashing, voter registration cards being trashed, and assorted hijinks in GOTV and poll-watching by both parties... well we may need an electoral college vote counter around for a few more weeks or months, not days. And anyway, it's cute.

[UPDATE 10-29-04] by nadezhda

Things are getting a tad nastier in Bahrain's tug-of-war over free speech, and Mahmood in his den doesn't appear terribly optimistic about either the commitment to Freedom of Speech or the political IQ of certain MPs (Concentration Camps: A Natural Progression). Even with the apparent leadership of a modernizing crown prince, the forces of conservatism act as a dead weight. Mahmood's cri de coeur is, unfortunately, one heard all to frequently across the region when attempts at reform are taken.
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"Vast amounts of weapons-related material missing, official says." -- seems Knight-Ridder also has inquiring minds

In addition to getting help from some military folks who are defending the guys on the ground from the Washington decisionmakers, K-R seem to have found some folks in the CIA to help them with their inquiry.

The CIA has convened a "mini taskforce" of experts to assess precisely what equipment is gone and what threat it could pose if it fell into the wrong hands, said two U.S. officials.

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