Monthly Archives: November 2013

Zarqawi

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Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh (30 October 1966-7 June 2006) was born in Zarqa, Jordan.  He sprang from a Bedouin family which had settled down in Jordan’s one factory town.  Something went wrong early in life.  He drank a lot and had a great deal of “contact” with the police.  At some point, he got religion and shaped up his life.  A passport photo shows him clean-shaven, with a white shirt and tie—and a sad, mean look.  At some point, he took the alias “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” which means “the father of Musab” and “From Zarka.”

In 1989 he followed the well-worn Young Islamist pathway to Afghanistan.  Here he met Osama bin Laden, may have received basic military training in one of the numerous camps, and wrote some stuff for an Islamist newsletter.  By 1992 he was back in Jordan conspiring to overthrow the monarchy, for which he did five years in prison (1994-1999).  In prison he came under the influence of the Jordanian Islamist writer Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi.  No sooner did he get out than he tried to blow up a tourist hotel in Amman (1999).  This didn’t work out any better than his earlier plot.  From 1999 to 2002 he moved to Afghanistan (where OBL fronted him $200,000 to start a Jordanian franchise of Al Qaeda and the Americans almost killed him in a bombing), then to Iraq by way of Iran.  He may have been recovering from an injury in Baghdad for a while.  In summer 2002 he moved into northern Iraq, where he joined an Islamist group that was waging jihad by cutting pictures of women off ads.

More serious work tugged at him.  He helped plot the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan (October 2002); organized the bombing of the UN’s HQ in Baghdad (August 2003); organized attacks on Shi’ite shrines in Karbala and Baghdad (March 2004); planned a huge abortive chemical weapons attack on the offices of the prime minister and the intelligence service of Jordan and on the American embassy (April 2004); beheaded a captured American civilian (May 2004), then posted the film on the internet; sent terrorists on an abortive attack on a NATO meeting in Turkey (June 2004); beheaded another captured American civilian (September 2004), then posted the film on the internet; organized the bombing of three hotels in Amman (November 2005); and organized the attack on the Al Askari mosque in Samarra (February 2006).  These attacks are only the most spectacular of his operations.

Having been organizing in Iraq from before the Second Gulf War, he had the weapons and explosive, the local contacts, the hideouts, and the local knowledge for insurgent war.  What he needed were fighters.  These began to flow to him in the form of the many Islamist foreign fighters who entered the country from 2003 on.  Without local contacts, Zarqawi became their controller.  He probably organized many of the hundreds of suicide bombings that battered Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Zarqawi had been on American and Jordanian “Most Wanted” lists since early 2002.  In January 2003, the CIA had proposed killing Zarqawi at a camp they had identified in Kurdistan.  The proposal was rejected, possibly out of fear that an attack would release toxic clouds from chemicals stored in the camp.  Once the US invaded Iraq, Special Forces groups hunted Zarqawi with mounting intensity.  Several of these raids came close to capturing him, but always fell short.  (One time they found eggs cooking, but not yet burning, on the stove of his empty hide-out.)  However, the raids did capture some of his associates.  One of these was interrogated—humanely—by an Air Force interrogator who uses the pseudonym “Matthew Alexander.”  Zarqawi had a great many hiding places, but “Alexander” learned the location of one in a village near Baqubah.  It took six weeks of watching before he came in sight.  On the night of 7 June 2006, two precision guided bombs destroyed the house, Zarqawi, and his wife and child–Musab.

The GWOT If Israel was in Charge.

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What if Israel ran the Global War on Terror (GWOT)?

On the wall of his office Meir Dagan had an old black-and-white photograph of his grandfather about to be shot by a German in Russia during the Second World War.  Must be some German soldier’s snap-shot, something he could keep as a trophy or send home to his girlfriend.  I don’t know where Dagan got it.  Probably did a lot of looking through the picture collection at Yad Vashem.  This may not be psychologically healthy.  Perhaps he should consider grief counseling.  On the other hand, Dagan was the head of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.  He can look at it anytime he wants during the day while he tries to figure out how to deal with Israel’s enemies.

One of the units under Dagan’s command is called “Kidon.”  That’s the Hebrew word for bayonet.  (Actually, it probably means “dagger” or “six inches of honed bronze” because Hebrew is a language from the many days ago before Bayonne even existed.)  You go to Barnes and Noble, you’ll find a bunch of books about American snipers with 500 “kills” or sumshit like that.  Kind of FPSy if you ask me.  I don’t think I’ve run across books about sticking a blade in somebody, feeling it grate on a rib, inhaling the coppery smell of blood, hearing the guy gasping for breath like it’s sex.  Nothing FPS about that.  Kidon typifies Israel’s response to terrorism.

After the 1972 Munich Olympics, Kidon launched “Operation Wrath of God.”  (See: “Munich.”)  The Israelis killed eleven PLO terrorists believed to have been involved in the attack.  It took seven years.  Apparently, they’re tenacious and patient.

At least once, in Lillehamer, Norway, they killed a complete innocent.  In front of his pregnant wife.  Apparently, they don’t get thrown off-track by remorse over errors.

After Hamas rose to power in the Gaza Strip in 1993, it sent many suicide bombers into Israel.  The Israelis didn’t take this lying down.  In 1996 they palmed off a “burner” filled with explosives on Yahya Ayyash, the really talented chief bomb maker for Hamas; in 1997 they tried to kill Khaled Meshal, a Hamas leader, by injecting poison into his ear; in 2004 they killed the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, with an Apache gunship; in 2008 they put a bomb in the headrest of a Hamas leader’s car in Damascus.  In January 2010 they suffocated the chief contact between Hamas and Iran in his luxury hotel room in Dubai.  Apparently, they focus on the enemy leadership.

When Hamas took full control of Gaza in 2007, it fired thousands of rockets into Israel.  Israel responded by blockading Gaza: it will not allow in cement, steel, cars, computers, and lots of ordinary food; its navy will not let fishing boats proceed more than three miles from shore; it will not allow any Palestinians out of Gaza.  From December 2008 to January 2009 Israeli forces bombarded the Gaza Strip.  Anything big (police stations, factories, government buildings, schools, hospitals) got blown up; 1,300 people got killed; tens of thousands got “dishoused”—as the RAF used to describe the result of the area bombing of German cities.  Apparently, they don’t care much about making a bad impression on world opinion.

At the same time, Israeli leaders have begun to talk about doing a deal with Syria for the return of the Golan Heights.  Syria is the chief supporter of Hamas.  Probably, the price of the Golan for Syria would include helping eliminate the ability of Hamas to engage in attacks on Israel—before the Syrians get back the Golan. (See: Michael Collins.)  Apparently, they adapt to changing circumstances and will talk to their enemies.

So, tenacity, patience, focus, a thick hide to criticism, and adaptability are keys traits.  The enemy hasn’t gone away, but neither have the Israelis.  They live with a long struggle.

The Majestic Blue

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I say “tuna” and you think “little cans of cat food.”  Not true: blue-fin tuna is light years better than yellow-fin or albacore or skipjack tuna.  Those other kinds end up in tuna-noodle casserole with little bits of potato chip crumbled on top and baked in the oven.  (Or so says Tom Tuttle from Tacoma.)  Blue-fin tuna can grow to be 12 feet long and weigh in at as much as 1500 pounds, although mostly they don’t.  The underbelly on blue-fin yields this yummy meat known as “toro.”  The Japanese use “toro” from blue-fin tuna to make sushi.

I say “sushi” and you think “it’s like eating live bait.”  Not true: sushi consists of fish, vinegared rice, and vegetables.  You can think of it as a rice-and-fish sandwich.  It started out in south Asia, was introduced to south China, and was borrowed by Japan.  In Japan sushi began out as a fast-food sold on the streets.  People going to the theater in the Edo Period often bought sushi from a stall to take to the theater with them.  A sushi-chef (which is different from a sous-chef) made sushi from whatever fish were caught locally.  The main tuna fisheries were off Honshu and Okinawa.  After the Second World War, those clever Americans figured out how to freeze-dry new-caught tuna.  It didn’t lose its flavor sitting on layers of ice in the hold of a fishing boat for weeks before it got back to Japan.[1]  “Toro” became the mainstay of sushi.  Japanese sushi-eaters went wild.

By about 1975 sushi started to become popular in certain quarters of the United States.  OK, you won’t find it on the menu at Appleby’s and you can’t get a McSushi (yet).  But the very sophisticated Don Rumsfeld took General Tommy Franks out for dinner to a sushi place in DC before we invaded Iraq.  It was Rumsfeld’s idea of making nice with the guy he had ordered to invade another country on a sketchy—as you young people say—justification.  Take the Japanese sushi market and add in the American “I-wanna-be-sophisticated” market, you end up with a HUGE demand for tuna.  Now, a big blue-fin fresh offa da boat can be worth $100,000.

I say “tuna” and you think “guppies with a thyroid condition.”  Not true: they’re big fighting fish.  Drag you out of the chair on the back of a 25-foot Bartram sports-fisher if you aren’t strapped in.  It’s OK with the fish if you drown in the Gulf Stream and what’s left of you washes up months later in Plymouth, England.  (It’s kind of like casting for pit-bulls from the back of an F-150 in North Philly.)  So, fishermen started seining for them with big nets.  In 1953, a refugee from Croatia named Mario Puratic[2] invented an improved system for setting and hauling purse seine nets.  (It’s called the “Power Block.”)  Seining fish, including blue-fin, became much easier.  There used to be a lot of blue-fin tuna.  In the 1940s there were 20 times as many Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna as today.  Also, now they’re runty when they get caught.  Tuna caught in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean are only about half the weight of tuna caught in “the old days.”  Pretty soon, no more Atlantic blue-fin tuna.  (Pacific blue-fin stocks seem to be holding up alright for the moment.)  Once they go, there will need to be 12-step programs to help people suffering from sushi-withdrawal.  What do the Japanese think of 12-step programs?

[1] Also, the Americans stopped testing atomic weapons on Pacific atolls, so the fishing boats didn’t have to pass through clouds of radiation on their way home with their holds full of irradiated fish.  See: “Fishzilla.”

[2] Puratic was born in 1917 on the incredibly cute little island of Brac.  If you retired to the town of Supetar on Brac you could sit under the grape arbor beside your old stone house in the afternoon, sipping wine and watching the ferry from Split arrive.  A developer near Dallas is building a resort modeled on Supetar.  The signs at the garbage dump will be in Croatian.  Puratic left in 1938 and wound up working as a fisherman in San Pedro, California.

The Gun That Made the Nineties Roar

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The story of the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle can stand in for the history of the Soviet Union more generally.  First, there is the story of its designer.  Timofey Kalashnikov was a “kulak” (one of the well-off peasants who had profited from the pre-revolutionary regime’s “wager on the sober and the strong”).  In 1919 Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born.  His parents nurtured him through the Russian Civil War.  In 1921 the Bolshevik Revolution ran up against the resistance to “common ownership of the means of production” by the peasant-proprietors like Timofey Kalashnikov.  The Bolsheviks settled for control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, while allowing peasants and shopkeepers to retain possession of their property.  They didn’t like doing this, but they recognized reality.  Then Stalin came to power.  In 1928 he launched the transition to real Communism.  He ordered the “collectivization” of agriculture, by seizing the lands of the kulaks, and by plowing resources into building industry.  The Kalashnikov family had their farm seized, then were deported to Siberia.  Old Pa Kalashnikov soon died.  An older brother mouthed off and got slammed into the Gulag.  So Mikhail Kalashnikov grew up in fear and hardship.  In 1938 Kalashnikov got drafted and learned to drive a tank; in June 1941 Germany attacked the Soviet Union; in October 1941 Kalashnikov was badly wounded.  While in hospital he became interested in weapons design and managed to get transferred to a design unit for the rest of the war.  No Stalingrad for him.  At the end of the war the Allies captured a bunch of German designers.  The US got the great rocket scientist Werner von Braun; the Russkies got the great arms designer Hugo Schmeisser.  Taken to Russia, Schmeisser “helped” design the AK-47, which—oddly—bears a marked resemblance to his own earlier design for the Wehrmacht’s “Sturmgewehr” assault rifle.  So, what did Mikhail Kalashnikov add?

That question brings us to our second theme, the Soviet system of industrial production.  There was a Soviet-era joke that ran: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”  Even the best-rewarded Soviet workers weren’t always delighted with their situations.  A lot of people did sloppy, crude work, chipping at the vodka bottle during the work day.  As a result, the AK-47 is garbage by Western engineering standards.  It isn’t very accurate: it has an effective range of only 200-300 yards.  It is crudely made, rather than engineered so that the pieces fit tightly together.  Perversely, herein lies one of its virtues.  You can get it dirty; you can forget to oil it; and you can blaze away at something without cleaning out the carbon build-up: it still fires.  Then, it is stubby, especially with the butt-stock folded forward, and light, only about ten pounds.  Herein lies a second virtue.  Short and light made it the weapon-of-choice for both child-soldiers and terrorists.  Short, light, and reliable made untrained, even moronic, soldiers a deadly enemy.  In sum, it is a weapon perfectly adapted for war in the Third World.

Third, there is the story of the Communism versus Capitalism.  Colt only manufactured as many M-16s as the market demanded.  The Soviets manufactured stuff to keep their workers employed, without any regard for what the market wanted.  As a result, there are 10 million M-16s, but there may be 100 million AK-47s.  The Soviets gave the surplus arms away to “movements of national liberation” all around the globe during the Cold War.  Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are awash in these things.

As for Kalashnikov, he had all the rewards and special privileges reserved for a “Hero of the Soviet Union” heaped upon him: he was rich enough to buy a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, and even a car.  All were built on the same lines as the AK-47.  No wonder the place folded up.

See: C.J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

Avast me Hearties!

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Piracy is a story about the importance of policing in crime suppression.  Piracy abounded when there were rich cargoes afloat, but no one to protect them or pursue the criminals.  Piracy withered when the navies of imperial powers (British, French, American, Dutch) went around making the world safe for peaceful commerce.  “Blackbeard” famously ended up with his head nailed onto the bowsprit of a British warship.  Still, piracy never ended in some parts of the world, notably in parts of East Africa and Southeast Asia.  After the end of the Second World War, the retreat of the European navies from “Eastern Waters” began to take the lid off of piracy.  Post-colonial governments were just as ill-equipped to fight piracy as to do anything else.

Consequently, piracy has increased from fewer than one hundred reported attacks on ships in 1997 to two hundred reported attacks in 2007.  In such attacks during 2006 15 seamen were killed and 188 taken captive; $15 billion in lost goods is a fair estimate of the material cost.  “Reported” is key here: lots of shipping companies would rather not report the attacks because it will only drive up their insurance costs without getting the generally dysfunctional governments of the countries from which the pirates operate to solve the problem.  The same goes for fighting back against a pirate attack.  Kill one of the sea-borne bastards and the pirates-in-suits ashore will be slapping injunctions all over you at your next port of call.

So, who becomes a pirate these days?  Pretty much the same people who became pirates in the Caribbean in the 17th Century: local poor people who know something about boats.  Dockworkers, fishermen, and beached merchant sailors provide much of the crew for pirate attacks.  Occasionally they are government coast guard units run amuck.  Many of these pirates call Indonesia or Somalia home because shipping must pass through narrow straits, rather than being able to stand well-out to sea.  Oddly enough, there is a “pirate season”: the Indian Ocean is tossed by great monsoon storms in early Fall and early Spring, so pirates tend to stay ashore during these seasons, chewing khat and bothering the wife.  Only when the seas calm do they return to their trade.

Rather than sailing the Seven Seas under the Jolly Roger, however, they operate in speedboats from ashore.  Photographs taken from merchant ships under attack often show the pirates driving high-powered outboard boats and armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and grenade launchers.

Somalia is the Promised Land of modern piracy.  There hasn’t been a real government in twenty years; everybody has guns and is dirt-poor; and oil tankers from the Persian Gulf pass by on their way to the Suez Canal.  In April 2010 Somali pirates captured the “Samho Dream,” a South Korean supertanker.  In November 2010 the owners paid a LeBron Jamesian $10 million to get the ship, cargo, and crew back.  Each pirate got $150,000, minus whatever the pirate-boss had fronted him for rice and beans during the intervening seven months of gastro-intestinal catastrophe.

Lest anyone see this as a silver-lining-to-a-black-cloud story about impoverished Third World villagers getting together to cut through the red tape accompanying foreign aid, the pirate crews appear to be operating at the behest of local crime lords.  In places like Somalia, the pirate-bosses use the ransom money to buy weapons so that they can set up as local war lords.  Having hijacked ships, they’re now thinking about hijacking countries.  (See: Normans.)  Then some Paki scientist probably will sell them nukes.