Mr. Auster,

Airplanes crash, especially when flown by Arabs. HRS

Has Mr. Sutherland looked at the photos? Does the plane look as though it crashed? And regardless of the precise reason the plane was buried (which apparently we don’t know yet), aren’t these photos striking enough evidence in themselves to show the lengths Iraqs will go to cover up military weaponry in desert sands?

I must say that on the war, I’m starting to get the feeling that if I said, “Saddam Hussein has a mustache,” Mr. Sutherland would rush into print to contradict me. :-)

The MiG-25 in the photos does not look in very good shape, although it is not in pieces (minus wings, though). One thing that would be interesting to know is where this airplane is. Is it at an airfield? Alongside a taxiway or a runway where it ran off into the dirt? Could it be one of the airplanes Hussein attempted to send to Iran in 1991 that never got there? I doubt it has been flown often, if at all, since the Gulf War. It has been some time since the MiG-25 was a frontline fighter. For those who remember, it was in a MiG-25 that Viktor Belenko defected from the Soviet Maritime Province to Hokkaido in January 1976.

It may be that the Iraqis buried the MiG to keep it from our prying eyes. It may also be that they simply abandoned an airplane they could no longer fly, either because it was broken or they didn’t want it shot down. When I was in Egypt in the early 1980s, there were Soviet built fighters and bombers in the sand alongside runways and revetments - abandoned since the Israelis hit them during the Six Day War, in June 1967. The Arab method is a little like the Mexican approach to garbage: when something breaks, just leave it where it is.

Parting shot: Whether the Iraqis meant to hide it or not, we found their MiG. We still haven’t found any WMD. It isn’t an innate desire to contradict Mr. Auster, rather a healthy skepticism (honed by years in the service) of Pentagon pronouncements. HRS

I agree it’s good to have a healthy, not inordinate, scepticism toward official pronouncements. But Mr. Sutherland remains closed to the simple, obvious, dramatic meaning of these extraordinary photos: a rather large weapon—a jet fighter—buried completely in desert sands. That’s not something easy to find. Yet Mr. Sutherland’s response is not to acknowledge the obvious inference here, but to turn it on its head and say, “Well, if we could find this MiG, why haven’t we found that WMDs?” But the whole point is that this shows how effectively WMDs could be hid. That doesn’t _prove_ that they’re hid, but it’s certainly a plausible conclusion. Yet Mr. Sutherland is set against granting anything to the pro-war side of the debate.

The pictures bear Mr. Auster’s inference as well as mine. But I am skeptical for three reasons. As I said, I am skeptical of DoD photo-ops generally. Arabs tend to handle superfluous military hardware by abandoning it. Sand covers things when the wind blows, as it often does in deserts. If that forlorn MiG has been sitting there since February 1991, which strikes me as at least possible, Hussein’s minions might not have needed to lift a finger to cover it by 2003.

Still, desert winds can also blow sand off of things, and I might be wrong. HRS

The MiG appears to have deliberately buried. The tailfins which were sticking out of the ground were covered with camouflage netting. And the MiG appears to have been wrapped in something, but it’s hard to tell. It was probably buried by parking it next to a sand dune and bulldozing the dirt onto it.

Saddam could have buried WMDs just like this, certainly. But why would he have buried them and not have used them? Large WMD programs, moreover, cannot be buried. These take the efforts of thousands of scientists and engineers, and Saddam’s mass graves aren’t big enough to cover up that sort of conspiracy.

The most likely scenario appears to be that economic sanctions starved Iraq of the funds needed to pursue the expensive and mainly militarily useless WMD programs. Bombing had already destroyed Iraq’s industrial infrastructure. Besides, Iraqis aren’t Koreans. The North Koreas are smart. They could probably construct a nuke out of a broken transistor radio and half a can of used coffee grounds. Iraqi scientific talent is somewhat harder to come by.

Was the Iraq war a smart war? The answer to that, in my mind, comes down to what a person believes about the basic characteristics of the terror threat we face. How important a role do state sponsors of terrorism play? The “neocon” foreign policy analysis suggests that state sponsors play a very important role. If that is true, then rogue states need to be reformed through military defeat and enforced political restructuring, so the logic goes.

My own view is that states play only a tangential role in abetting the current terrorist threat. This is especially true when talking about terrorist networks like Al Qaeda. When the “Joint Inquiry” on Intelligence described Al Qaeda as a virtual network of decentralized, international, and self-sustaining terrorist cells loosely organized by Osama bin Laden, I took their words at face value. This is not an organization with a central authority directing attacks and channeling funds. It is a loosely organized structure where most attacks are based on individual initiative. Individual groups probably have varying degrees of collaboration with each other, and that collaboration can be lateral, between-group collaboration, or it can have more centralized characteristics like fund and information sharing as well as collective training.

The majority of the members of Al Qaeda probably never think of themselves as part of Al Qaeda. Mostly they may have some local group affiliations that are primary, and the Al Qaeda affiliations are secondary. They act and plan as individual groups to a large extent. It is possible, even, that the 9/11 attacks were carried out mainly through individual initiative of a single Al Qaeda cell – which would have made our war in Afghanistan no less urgent, of course. What we know of Atta’s whereabouts through 1990s backs this up. Osama bin Laden’s taped confession was interesting because it provided no detail about the attacks that had not already aired on CNN. Even his “engineering analysis” was something that I had already seen several times on television. His claims of pre-9/11 dreams and visions sounded more than a little wacky as well.

That is of course beside the point. What matters is the idea of Al Qaeda as a loose affiliation. From this viewpoint, attacking rogue nations can easily backfire. The suggestion that our actions in Iraq may be creating a new bin Laden and a dozen more Attas is not one that should be quickly dismissed. The terrorism we currently see in Iraq is not naturally limited to that region, and has every possibility of spilling over into more global attacks. It is probable that the terrorism spawned in that region will not quiet down once Iraq has been pacified, but will continue to have future repercussions.

For this reason, the calculus of war in Iraq was probably a bad one. The occupation is going as well as could have been expected, and the hysterical news reports are generally overblown. But a liberated Iraq does not protect us from car bombs going off in New York and D.C. Not having stirred up the hornets nest might have been wiser. Certainly, there are times when it is best to burn the hornets out – but this does not appear to have been one of them.

If the antiwar right had all along made the kind of reasonable arguments that Thrasymachus makes above, the antiwar right would have had much more impact on the war debate, instead of adopting a vicious politics of resentment, and so destroying the possibility of any rational right-wing opposition to the mainstream “conservatives.” As I’ve said before, thanks Buchanan, thanks Rockwell, thanks Francis, thanks Fleming, for assuring that the only rational-sounding organized conservative voice left in America would be that of the neocons.

Here I just want to disagree with one thing Thrasymachus said:

“This is not an organization with a central authority directing attacks and channeling funds.”

The promoters of the state-terrorist thesis including Michael Ledeen have never said that there was a single terrorist organization with a central authoritty. In The Terror Masters, Ledeen speaks of a loose network, with states sometimes helping the non-state groups, sometimes not. The key point of The Terror Masters is that essential political, technical and financial support comes from states, not that there is a single, centralized organization.

States play a substantial role in terrorism with funds, safe havens, training camps, logistics, intelligence, weapons, opposing U.N. efforts to stop terrorism, acting as terrorist apologists, giving moral support, etc. These are the roles North Vietnam played and are the roles which succeeded in wearing down the U.S. The safe haven role was perhaps the most effective role. Our leaders sat on their hands and failed either to invade the North early or to pull out early. It is therefore incredible to me that reasonable people today still disagree over whether we should invade nations that support armed attacks on the U.S. War is often necessary, and people die in wars (which is why I believe in drafting and drafting all age groups but the old, except for desk jobs.)

Unless Islamic theology and behavior changes, we have no choice since they have declared war on us.

I would very much like to hear Thrasy’s often reasonable counterarguments or anyone’s counterarguments.

I think that P Murgos would be essentially correct about the character of terrorism if we were to limit the discussion to the period of the Cold War.

My argument is that we now face a different sort of terrorism. Today’s greatest (though not only) terrorist threat comes from non-State actors. The main reason for this has been the growth of populist movements like Wahhabism, and the growing acceptance of terrorist tactics from within Islam. That acceptance itself has been bred from numerous conflicts between Islamic nations and more technologically advanced nations (sometimes Islamic themselves). All this has allowed networks for fund-raising and information-sharing to spring up. States do not need to be involved to make these work, and more importantly from a practical standpoint, state involvement can be keep completely secret (sometimes even from those running the country).

Providing “safe haven” for terrorists is something that only states can do. However, this is not always a deliberate policy on the part of the nations involved. It can be hard to know who exactly the terrorists are. And if they have popular support, the government may not have sufficient resources to move against them. Afghanistan provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden partially because he was a military ally for conflicts within Afghanistan itself. Pakistan hosts the world’s most vicious and destructive terrorists, but it is not at all clear that Pakistan’s government can get rid of them itself – even assuming that Pakistan was of one mind on the issue of eliminating terrorism from its borders, since it would involve surrendering Kashmir to India. Germany provided “safe haven” to Mohammad Atta and some of his compatriots through the simple act of being a Western nation with Western freedoms. (So did we.) In fact, I would go so far as to say that the West is well on its way to becoming the world’s most important safe haven for international terrorists. Part of this is that savage and backwards countries can breed terrorists and terrorist ideologies, and then simply emigrate them across the open borders of Western nations.

If I were asked to point out the most important state-sponsor of al Qaeda, I would have to say Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia does not support al Qaeda through any deliberate policy. In fact, the government is somewhat afraid of al Qaeda. But Saudi Arabia is so infested with Wahhabbism that oil money is constantly being funneled into al Qaeda’s coffers. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what to do about it beyond what is already being done. An American invasion and occupation would probably just accelerate the process. Even if Saudi Arabia magically transformed into a liberal democracy tomorrow, it is hard to see how that could hurt Wahhibbism. Western style freedom would simply open al Qaeda’s money tap a little wider. My own suggestion would be for America to work on eliminating sources of friction between itself and the Islamic world.