Andrew Hagen

Michael Yon has a must-see series of photos of Iraqi kids. (*)

They want us to turn our backs on them.

No.

Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Novel Peace Prize in 2003. (*)

Recently, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map. (†) Even the UN has derided Ahmadinejad’s comments. (‡)

To her credit, Ebadi has recently spoken out against her government in its detention of a journalist, Akbar Ganji. (§) To date, however, Ebadi has not publicly criticized Ahmadinejad’s blood-chilling genocidal statement.

In her speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Ebadi criticized Israel for not following UN resolutions.

VDH says we don’t have a new age of warfare. This war reminds him of the Peleponnesian War. (*) Limb-lopping, terrorism, hostage-taking, and more all happened before.

The reason we say this is a new age of warfare, though, is not that there are new tactics. Instead, we base the statement on the nature of warfare being linked to the form of the political state. New forms of warfare create a need for people to turn to new and different political entities to protect themselves from war. This is a simplistic statement derived from Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles.

Military theorists that speak of 4GW (Fourth Generation Warfare) tend to base their take on technological change over time. That turns out to not be terribly dissimilar from Bobbitt’s Shield theory.

The import is that Al Qaeda–a formless, shapeless ideologic-centric organization that nonetheless is capable of leveraging technology in the hands of a few to wreak destruction that previously only large armies could have done–may have found a way to defeat, specifically, the post-Cold War form of the parliamentary democracy. To translate broadly and imprecisely, it is possible that Western liberal democracy is headed for the chopping block unless we rethink and reconstruct the nation state into some other form of state that can defeat an Al Qaeda-like organization.

In Shield, Bobbitt proposes the market state. Here on this web log I’ve stated that I am skeptical of the market state concept, and that we therefore need to keep looking, and in the meantime pound Al Qaeda as hard as we can militarily to buy time to rethink and rebuild our defenses here in the free countries.

NPR is reporting that checkpoints and other measures have helped to reduce attacks on the key road to Baghdad’s airport. (*)

It’s another hopeful sign that we are winning in Iraq.

Update: 6 November 2005. Lara Logan of CBS News “60 Minutes” reports that “attacks continue.” She doesn’t specify whether they are decreasing. (†) It sounds like a classic example of the fog of war. I still find the NPR report more persuasive because it’s more specific.

Apparently the US government and US defense establishment are rife with a culture of dislike of, distrust in, and non-cooperation with counterintelligence. The following is an excerpt of “The 10 Commandments of Counterintelligence,” by James M. Olson, dated 2002. (* PDF)

The Eighth Commandment: Do Not Be Shoved Aside

There are people in the intelligence business and other groups in the US Government who do not particularly like CI officers. CI officers have a mixed reputation. We see problems everywhere. We can be overzealous. We get in the way of operations. We cause headaches. We are the original “black hatters.”

Case officers want their operations to be bona fide. Senior operations managers do not want to believe that their operations are controlled or penetrated by the opposition. There is a natural human tendency on the part of both case officers and senior operations managers to resist outside CI scrutiny. They believe that they are practicing good CI themselves and do not welcome being second-guessed or told how to run their operations by so-called CI specialists who are not directly involved in the operations. I have seen far more examples or this in my CI career than I care to remember.

By the same token, defense and intelligence contractors and bureaucrats running sensitive US Government programs have too often tended to minimize CI threats and to resist professional CI intervention. CI officers, in their view, stir up problems and overreact to them. Their “successes” in preventing CI problems are invisible and impossible to measure, but their whistle blowing when problems are uncovered generate tremendous heat. It is not surprising that they are often viewed as a net nuisance.

When necessary, a CI service has to impose itself on the organizations and groups it is assigned to protect. A CI professional who is locked out or invited in only when it is convenient to the host cannot do his job.

My advice to my CI colleagues has always been this: “If you are blocked by some senior, obtuse, anti-CI officer, go around him or through him by going to higher management. And document all instances of denied access, lack of cooperation, or other obstruction to carrying out your CI mission. If not, when something goes wrong, as it likely will in that kind of situation, you in CI will take the blame.”

This is pretty much outrageous. Noncooperation with CI should be hazardous to careers.

In the wake of the Kristina Leung affair, we now know that China has been stealing Aegis and other secrets from the US Navy for about fifteen years. We have apparently just stopped that ring. (*)

It looks like China might now be able to track US submarines.

Unknown is how many other of these rings are out there.

Perhaps this is a hopeful sign that the post-9/11 counterintelligence efforts are taking root. Maybe the current path is working, and we don’t need an MI5-type agency. Is the NCIX up to the job? (†) Does it have enough authority to get the job done?

Secondly, we need to reevaluate our free trade with China policy. Why are we shipping our capital and knowhow overseas into China when China sees itself as our military rival?

Updated.