The fabulous AllOurMight.com is more or less wrapping up for the year, as of about now…

In all my glorious obnoxiousness, in a few hours I’m jumping on a plane to Paris.  And a few hours after landing, I’ll be here.

I’m sure I’ll get to post occassionally over the holidays, but I won’t be back in full swing until January.  January feels like a really long time from now, but it’s not. 

So wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I wish you nothing but the best holiday season and a hopeful start to 2009.

I encourage everyone to read Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. 

Then, read Noah Shatchman’s total evisceration of same.

I can’t help but take a shot at Prince myself.  The heading of the article is “think of our staff as soldiers who re-enlist.”  He concludes the piece with:

Our teams are not cooking meals or moving supplies. They are taking bullets. They are military veterans who have chosen to serve their country once again. Very few people know someone who would voluntarily go into a war zone to protect a person he has never met.

Let’s get one thing straight - there’s a big difference between serving in the military and working for Blackwater.  If you voluntarily chose to seek employment as a Blackwater security guard, it’s because you developed a highly specialized skill set in the special forces.  The military paid you a pittance for that skill, but working for Blackwater finally lets you cash in.  You assume the risk of being in harm’s way, and expect to be paid for it.

As the Washington Post’s excellent security correspondent Walter Pincus notes in an article from last year:

According to data provided to the House panel, the average per-day pay to personnel Blackwater hired was $600. According to the schedule of rates, supplies and services attached to the contract, Blackwater charged Regency [another sub-contractor] $1,075 a day for senior managers, $945 a day for middle managers and $815 a day for operators. …

An unmarried sergeant given Iraq pay and relief from U.S. taxes makes about $83 to $85 a day, given time in service. A married sergeant with children makes about double that, $170 a day. …

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad overseeing more than 160,000 U.S. troops, makes roughly $180,000 a year, or about $493 a day. That comes out to less than half the fee charged by Blackwater for its senior manager of a 34-man security team.

Find me one Blackwater employee that would take his life in his hands in Baghdad for $85 a day, and I’ll admit I’m wrong. 

There seems to be confusion, retraction, and re-release on the Blackwater story (see comments section in post below). 

Here’s the situation as of this morning’s papers:

NYT:

WASHINGTON — The State Department’s inspector general has warned in a new report that Blackwater Worldwide, the security contractor, may not be licensed by the Iraqi government to continue to protect American diplomats in Baghdad next year, forcing the Obama administration to make new security arrangements. …

Unlike some American contractors in Iraq, Blackwater does not have a license, but it has applied for one. Iraqi authorities have allowed it to operate while officials consider the application. …

The report says the State Department “faces a real possibility”that no license will be granted and that the Iraqi government will ban Blackwater.

AP (updated since last night):

The State Department faces serious challenges protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq and may no longer be able to rely on Blackwater Worldwide to do the job, according to an internal report.

A report from the department’s inspector general says the agency must deal the prospect that Blackwater — its main private security contractor in Iraq — could lose its license to work in Iraq. Officials say that means preparing alternative arrangements.

When the dust settles, here’s what I can tell:

1. Blackwater has been operating in Iraqi without a license (which, until now, doesn’t seem to have been that big a deal). 

2. Blackwater has applied for a license from the Iraqi government.  That decision is pending.

3. Given the Blackwater’s highly questionable behavior, the Iraqi government may choose not to grant them a license for next year. 

4. There is no informationin the State Department’s report that indicates specific knowledge of the Iraqi government’s pending decision on Blackwater’s license.

5. So, the State Department’s report probably serves as a warning to the Obama administration that it better start looking for alternatives should Blackwater’s application be refused.

An internal State Department report might strip Blackwater of its license to operate in Iraq:

An official familiar with the report said initially that it would recommend that department not renew Blackwater’s contract when it expires next year. But that specific language is not included in the document, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The official said later that such a recommendation would not be made until after an investigation of last September’s incident in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in which Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqis is complete. Five guards have been indicted on manslaughter and other charges stemming from that incident. The company was not implicated.

This is big, don’t get me wrong.  But what about all the other security contractors?  Cutting off Blackwater is one thing, but correcting a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality is quite another.

If you were Blackwater and Foggy Bottom slapped you with this scarlet letter, what would you do?  I’d break the company up into its component divisions, rename/rebrand a few of them, and issue some new guidelines about engagement.  In short, there are ways around the problem, and I’d bet Blackwater is smart enough to figure them out. 

Ever flown AirTran?  It used to be called “ValuJet.”

From Haaretz (Israel):

Russia has agreed to supply Lebanon with 10 MiG-29 fighter jets, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr said on Tuesday during a visit to Moscow.

The ITAR-Tass news agency said the planes would be provided as aid. … He [Murr] added that the fighter deliveries would provide a fresh impetus to military cooperation between the two countries.

Russia has sought to expand its clout in the Middle East and hopes to host a Middle East peace conference next year.

That last line is dripping with Tennesee Honey-style irony.  Let’s get this straight:  Russia is giving away WAR planes because it hopes to call a Middle East PEACE conference next year?  Perhaps it’s an ingenious plan - let’s start a war so we can get the credit of negotiating the peace!

But (slightly more) seriously.  Why the goodwill tour?  Aside from the myopic strategic interest of indebting Beirut to Moscow, this is a bit of a headscratcher. 

Is Russia giving away fighters to build the Lebanese bulwark against Syria?  That’s a tough sell - it will take a lot more than 10 fighter jets.

Is there an OPEC angle here?

Robert Kaplan’s op-ed in today’s WaPo seems a bit muddled.  Sure, America has overextended itself, and China and India are growing like gangbusters.  It’s only natural that sooner or later, American hegemony will wane:

The latest conventional wisdom is that the combination of the disastrous Iraq war, the military and economic rise of Asia, and the steep recession in the West has chastened America, ending its period of dominance in world affairs. It is time for us to be humble.

There is a lot of truth to this, but it goes too far. …

Declinism of the sort being preached will go immediately out of fashion at the world’s next humanitarian catastrophe, when the very people enraged at the U.S. military because of Iraq will demand that it lead a coalition to save lives. We might have intervened in Darfur had we not been bogged down in Iraq; after Cyclone Nargis, our ships would have provided large-scale relief, had Burma’s military government allowed them to proceed. …

We should not underestimate the diplomatic and moral leverage created by the combination of the world’s most expeditionary military and a new president who will boast high approval ratings at home and around the world.

Fair enough.  Is he trying to argue against American humility in the face of the decline?  Perhaps, but I don’t think there’s a relationship between humility and declinism.  The fact is that America will remain in relative decline to India and China in the long term; over the same period America will be no less internationally bold when it is both capable and morally justified. 

Kaplan should be more explicit about the relationship between American foreign policy humility and Iraq.  Iraq was a case of questionable morality but international boldness that has declined America’s standing in the world.  However, Iraq is not nearly the sole responsible party of American declinism. 

If Kaplan wants to contend that America should not shirk its internationial responsibilities because of one misguided endeavor, that’s a better argument. 

Sayyid Imam (aka Dr.Fadl) is a long-time associate of AQ #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri (more on that below) and is credited with two books from the late 1980s that AQ uses to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing.  In short:

Usama Ayub, a former member of Egypt’s Islamist community, who is now the director of the Islamic Center in Münster, Germany, told me, “A lot of people base their work on Fadl’s [aka Imam's] writings, so he’s very important. When Dr. Fadl speaks, everyone should listen.”

But hold on.  Serving a life sentence in Egypt, the Christian Science Monitor has an article this week on the ideological feud that has opened between Imam and Zawahiri. For at least the past year, Imam has been issuing tomes from his jail cell decrying the methods and justifications of AQ:

As for Al Qaeda’s idea of violent jihad, Imam calls it “a corrupt, wayward school [of Islamic thinking] to justify excess in shedding blood.” In order to sell it, the group launched “media propaganda to promote the corrupt idea that America is the cause of all the ills afflicting Muslims.”

So what’s going on here?  Has there been a sudden change of heart from AQ ideological gray beard?  Not necessarily - a detailed New Yorker expose from this summer claims Imam and Zawahiri have been butting heads for twenty years:

[Imam] resented the attention that Zawahiri received. (In the interview with Al Hayat, Fadl [aka Imam] said that Zawahiri was “enamored of the media and a showoff.”) And yet he let Zawahiri take the public role and give voice to ideas and doctrines that came from his own mind, not Zawahiri’s. This dynamic eventually became the source of an acrimonious dispute between the two men.

What’s more, that piece argues that Imam espoused violent jihad ideology in the 80s, but only while hiding behind the safety of a pen-name:

[H]is continual use of aliases also allowed him to adopt positions that were somewhat in conflict with his stated personal views. Given Fadl’s [aka Imam's] critique of Al Jihad’s violent operations as “senseless,” the intransigent and bloodthirsty document that Fadl gave to Zawahiri must have come as a surprise. 

Has Imam felt freer to rail against AQ from jail?  Possibly.  Has he been cooerced by American and/or Egyptian intelligence to do so?  I wouldn’t be surprised. 

Either way, Spencer Ackerman calls this war of words “brutal” and says, “any effort from Islamic scholars — especiallyextremist ones, who’d do the most damage — to discredit Zawahiri and Al Qaeda should be strongly encouraged.”

I’d agree, but with one caveat. Certainly, one of the most effective ways to discredit the perversion of Islam is to provide competitive interpretations of Islam that reinforce its non-violent roots.  But procede with caution, especially if the government is sponsoring the “new thinking”. There’s a certain Big Brother aspect to the government meddling in religion - like in the case of (secular) Turkey commissioning a revision of the sacred Hadith texts.   

Case in point, it looks like the jihadis are ready to push back:

Imam’s latest attacks on Zawahiri are so vituperative that some analysts say he has damaged his own credibility. “This is an embarrassment,” former Islamic Jihad member Kamal Habib told Agence France-Presse in Cairo. “I don’t think he realizes what this does to his image.”