James Carafano

Blood and Bollywood - previewing the next target

"Tell them that this is just the trailer. Just wait till you see the rest of the movie." "It's a small example. A preview." "The rest of the film remains to be seen." These comments come from one of the last calls made by the terrorists in Mumbai as they butchered innocents in November 2008. During those days of terror, the murder squads trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba -- LeT (the Army of the Good) -- received their directions via cell phone from their handler in Lahore. Listening to the killers' narrate their string of slaughter -- in calls intercepted by Indian intelligence -- is bone-chilling. One line is particularly haunting: "The rest of the film remains to be seen." Though...

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Obama waging unhelpful war against contractors

Waging war requires serious acts as well as sober words. And in that arena, the Obama administration has yet to prove itself. Indeed, at times it seems the White House is intent on fighting another war -- one in which the perceived enemy is America's defense industries. Leading the apparent offensive against this vital sector of the economy is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. When the West Wing switched from right-wing to left-wing, Gates quickly seemed to discover that one of the great nonstate threats facing America was the companies that provided the Pentagon goods, services and materials. The first target in Obama's war was LOGCAP -- the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. LOGCAP...

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Trade is no substitute for strong defense

"More than trade follows the flag." -- historian John Keegan. Viking marauders ravaged Europe for well over 200 years. But they didn't start out that way. Decades before the long ships began to plunder the islands and northern coast of Great Britain, Scandinavian traders worked the sea routes connecting the western world. As they bought, sold and bartered, they noted the rich warehouses of the coastal towns, the great wealth stored in the churches and cathedrals. Then they came back with sword and ax. Trading turned to raiding, and raiding turned to conquest. Viking kingdoms sprouted up from Britain and France to Sicily and Iceland. The Vikings were neither the first nor last...

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Predicting the next bomb plot

By James Jay Carafano Muhammad bin Nayef is Saudi Arabia's chief counterterrorism official. A member of the royal family, he's in charge of fighting terrorists. That is why they tried to kill him. Last August, a known terrorist -- Abdullah Hassan Taleh al-Asiri -- declared he wanted to surrender personally to the prince. Saudi officials regarded the announcement as a small victory in the war on terror. Their policy is to actively encourage extremists to return home, turn themselves in and enter a rehabilitation program. Abdullah, they thought, was coming back to the fold. He waltzed through security and presented himself to the prince. Unfortunately for the prince, Abdullah had...

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Why the coming year could be tough for U.S.

Mass murder often begins with words. Long before 9/11, Osama bin Laden attacked America -- with words. He wrote fatwas. A fatwa is a "legal" opinion issued by an Islamic scholar. They rule whether a given act is obligatory, permitted or forbidden. In one of his many acts of apostasy, bin Laden appropriated fatwas to launch his attack on the West. Following the form of the fatwa, bin Laden combed religious texts including the Quran and the Hadith for anything to justify mass murder. "Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, seize them, and beleaguer them," he quoted, "and lie in wait for them in every stratagem." The head of al Qaeda vowed to fight as long as it took,...

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No margin for error on Iran's nukes

Christmastime in the secret city proved more beautiful than anyone expected. Construction sites and hastily plowed dirt roads were covered by snow. "The town resembled an old-fashioned Christmas card, with a thick frosting of powder transforming the lodge and rustic cabins into gingerbread houses," wrote Jennet Conant in "109 East Palace," a history of the top secret installation. Soldiers chopped down spruce trees to decorate the laboratories.Some of the scientists braved the drifts to hunt wild turkey. On Christmas Eve, a community choir caroled throughout town from the back of an Army truck. But there was little time to celebrate the holidays.The next day the scientists were...

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Stop dithering and renew key Patriot Act provisions

They were fast friends. And when they found a common cause -- online -- they began to consider themselves as something more: brothers in arms. The Web led them into a worldwide web of terror. No, we're not talking about this month's story of five young men from Virginia who were picked up on terrorism charges in Sargodha, Pakistan. This story goes back years, to two young men from Atlanta. Arrested in 2006, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed were recently sentenced on a slew of terrorism-related charges. Theirs is a textbook case of domestic radicalization. They spent hours online chatting and watching videos produced by terrorist groups. Then they started to mimic their...

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Preparation means planning ahead of time

Few wars were more unexpected. On April 2, 1982, the Argentine military occupied the British Falkland Islands. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered them taken back by force. Years later, a British officer -- asked to cite the greatest lesson from the campaign that followed -- said, "That is simple. Never fight a no-plan war." Britain's military had never seriously thought it would have to defend the Falklands. That fact alone almost cost it victory as it scrambled to fight an extraordinary battle at the bottom of the world. To win a war witnessed mostly by penguins and sheep, British forces had to travel about 7,000 miles, engage in the biggest naval battle since World War II...

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Let Mexico join NORAD

It was a war the president did not want to fight. In the end, he had no choice. He ordered 40,000 additional troops into the fray. Upon his 2006 swearing-in as president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon inherited a nation at war with itself. It's a multifront conflict, with a handful of powerful cartels fighting to control a network of multinational criminal enterprises. Make no mistake; it is nothing less than a war. One cartel, Los Zetas, was even founded by pros: former commandos and deserters from the Mexican military. The group employs paramilitary tactics with deadly efficiency. In July, eight Zetas armed with assault rifles and 40-milimeter grenade launchers blasted the home of...

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War spending is not frivolous spending

He witnessed his nation humiliated in war. He vowed it would never happen again. Carl von Clausewitz served as the young aide-de-camp to Prince August Ferdinand of Prussia. At the battles of Jena-Auerstedt (1806), he stood by as Napoleon's forces obliterated the once-proud legions of Frederick the Great. Branded by defeat, Clausewitz dedicated his career to reforming the Prussian army. He rose to the rank of major general and commanded the war academy. His greatest accomplishment was authoring "On War," the most widely studied tome on military theory in the Western world. [Warning: It is also one of the most difficult reads.] One of Clausewitz's most famous maxims was that war was...

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Our new politically correct Pentagon

West Point's motto reads "Duty, honor, country." But from the start, America has always had some military leaders who couldn't distinguish between serving self and selfless service. Take Horatio Gates. An indispensable field commander, he was the hero of Saratoga. He was also after George Washington's job. Throughout the American Revolution, Gates spent as much time scheming how to embarrass and humiliate Washington as he did battling the British. Gates had an avid co-conspirator in Brig. Gen. Thomas Conway, a man of whom Washington wrote: "[His] merit ... as an officer, and his importance in this army exists more in his imagination, than in reality." Conway, for his part, wrote...

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Missing in action: U.S. trade policy

Politics "down under" can be pretty upside-down. Kevin Rudd led his Labor Party to victory in Australia's 2007 election. Shortly after settling into the prime minister's office, Rudd and his team did something rarely seen from the leadership of a left-leaning party: call for a big increase in defense spending. Indeed, Rudd announced the biggest military buildup in Australia since World War II. The Australian Defense White Paper, released last May, offered a blueprint for a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in new hardware from ships and submarines to planes and cruise missiles. Even more startling, Rudd vowed that government would find a way to pay for the more than $100...

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James Jay Carafano: Abandoning the study of military history

General George S. Patton cried. It's true.His son saw it. Major General George S. Patton, the oldest son and namesake of "Old Blood and Guts," once shared with me his vivid memory of a night, sometime before the war, when the family was stationed in Hawaii.He had gone into his father's library, where the old man retired each evening to read military history. On this particular night, he found his father weeping. Patton had been reading "Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure," by J.F.C. Fuller. The pamphlet argued that generalship in the last war (i.e., World War I) was poor because all the generals were too old. To make the point, Fuller appended a list of the great captains...

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Why 1978 was a very bad year

He followed an unpopular president. He received a strong election mandate. He changed the tone in Washington. He said that Human Rights mattered. That America's image in the world had to be remade. He would receive a Nobel Peace Prize. As the end of his presidency's first year drew near, the future looked bright. He had brought change -- change that mattered. It was 1977. The next year was very bad. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords, formalizing peace between Israel and Egypt. (It's what won him the Nobel.) He also signed a bill that legalized the home-brewing of beer. Almost all the other news that year proved uniformly bad. A Soviet-backed...

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Web 2.0 has anti-social networking, too

Spies! They were all over Washington. Yes, they liked us. They were British, after all. But they had a mission: to get their American cousins into the war against Nazi Germany ... even if they had to play dirty. They did. Part of Britain's World War II spy network was the "Rumor Factory." It manufactured only two products, half-truths and misleading stories designed to whip up anti-Nazi and pro-British sentiment. The factory had rules for spreading rumors on the Potomac. Jennet Conant cataloged them in "The Irregulars," her fascinating history of wartime Washington. The list included advice like "a good rumour should never be traceable to its source" and...

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Immigration reform kept behind closed doors, under wraps

Call it an after-action review. The Bush administration's attempt to craft a "comprehensive" immigration reform bill had crashed and burned. As the legislative rubble still smoked, a high government official met with conservative groups that had balked at the White House proposal to grant amnesty to illegals. He began his remarks with one word. "Ouch." He went on to concede that the administration had made several mistakes fatal to the bill: » They had tried to ram it through without open debate. » They had ignored or pooh-poohed legitimate concerns over how the proposal might affect other policy goals, ranging from sovereignty to security. » Their approach...

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In guns vs. butter, butter is winning

H. Rowen Gaither Jr. advised the great men of his era. He helped found RAND, the original U.S. think tank. He headed the Ford Foundation and served on numerous presidential committees. Ultimately, President Eisenhower tabbed him to chair an independent assessment of America's national security needs. For once, Ike got more than he asked for. The Gaither report argued for an astronomical increase in defense spending to fight the Cold War. As if to underscore its recommendations, the Soviets launched Sputnik just weeks before Gaither delivered his report to the Oval Office. After watching the Soviets win the "space race," many Americans believed Moscow's military power might soon...

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Home, Homeland security on the range

Chicago's 1893 World's Fair was a 600-acre celebration of American exceptionalism. There, amid the wonders and marvels of the modern world, the American Historical Association held its annual meeting. Among the learned papers heard at the conference was "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," an essay by Frederick Jackson Turner that later earned a Pulitzer Prize. The Turner thesis held that life on the frontier shaped the unique American character. Turner's reflections were said to have been inspired by a 1890 declaration from the director of the U.S. Census. The American West, the director observed, "had been so broken into by isolated bodies of...

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Homeland Security's blind spot

By James Jay Carafano More than just the Twin Towers crumbled on 9/11. The terror attacks that day acted as a weapon of mass destruction among New York City's small-business economy. On Sept. 10, 2001, Manhattan was something of a small-business paradise. The borough was a magnet for high-paying jobs. And all those suits needed lattes, shoe shines, pressed shirts and a morning paper. That changed in a single day. Just ask Robert Garber. In 1997, he started a downtown eatery called Bits, Bites and Baguettes. Sept. 10, 2001 was his busiest day ever. The next day he found his restaurant barricaded. It remained so for more than two months. When Garber finally reopened, he had almost no...

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What really remains of the day

It was July 4, 1916 ... or so the story goes. The world was at war. Americans weren't in the fight yet, but they knew whose side they were on ... and it wasn't Germany's. That day, four Hun-hating refugees met at a Coney Island hot dog stand. Arguing over who was prouder to be in America, they decided to settle the matter with an eating contest. An All-American eating contest. One in which they would devour -- not the hated frankfurter -- but the All-American "hot dog." Legend holds this was the origin of Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest. This year 40,000 people watched. ESPN covered it live. Now, some sports fans may get excited watching Joey...

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Obama's dirty missile defense secrets

While campaigning for president, Barack Obama promised to support missile defense that was "pragmatic and cost-effective" and "does not divert resources from other national security priorities until we are positive the technology will protect the American public." This measured support for missile defense, coupled with his pledge to combat terrorism and follow through on the mission in Afghanistan, was meant to reassure America's voters. The intended message: A President Obama would not be negligent on national security. Once in the White House, he would protect Americans. That was the promise. Americans believed it. And it helped carry him into the Oval Office with...

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'Buy America' is bad for national security

Willis Hawley and Reed Smoot thought they had a great idea. Hawley chaired the House Ways and Means Committee. Smoot oversaw the Senate Finance Committee. Faced with a national economic meltdown, they brainstormed ways to jump-start the economy. Their solution was new tariffs. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 slapped duties on about 20,000 imports. Rather than spur consumption and production of American goods, it sparked an international trade war. By 1932, American exports to Europe were just one-third of what they had been in 1929. Worldwide trade fell two-thirds as other nations retaliated. The protectionist measure protected nothing. Jobs evaporated. The stock market crash of...

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James Jay Carafano: Uncle Walter's ghost is still with us in Afghanstan

On the Vietnamese holiday of Tet in 1968, U.S. troops in Saigon woke not to the pop of firecrackers, but to the riddle of machine gun fire. The enemy attacked throughout the city and across the country. Veteran CBS Evening Newsman Walter Cronkite witnessed the Tet Offensive, and it shook him. He returned stateside and, on Feb. 27, ended his broadcast with an unprecedented “editorial opinion” in which he concluded, “We are mired in a stalemate.” Upon hearing the broadcast, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly declared, “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Thus, birthed the legend that the press lost...

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Robert Gates: 21st century cold warrior

It is 50 years in the future. America’s most distinguished historians (all arriving in carbon-free rocket cars) gather for a conference assessing “the secretary of defense who best exemplified Cold War thinking.” Their subject: Robert Michael Gates. It might seem odd that future chroniclers would pick a man who ran the Pentagon 20 years after the fall of Communism as the defense leader who most typified the era of hyper-superpower competition. But Gates’ approach to the defense authorization bill recently pushed through Congress is riddled with “old think.” The quintessential Cold Warrior belief was they faced a predictable enemy. Planners assumed...

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An EMP attack: Thinking the unthinkable

When the 9/11 Commission issued its report, it complained that federal agencies had a colossal "failure of imagination." Nobody could accuse Newt Gingrich from suffering that shortfall. When he delivered a major address on national security last week, the former Speaker of the House went after Defense Secretary Robert Gates for planning for the future the Pentagon wants, rather than dealing with the many serious problems it may actually face. Gingrich mentioned one challenge that many find too terrible to contemplate -- which is why our government should spend a lot more time doing exactly that. I'm referring to the Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). This method of attack is...

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James Jay Carafano: "Smart and tough" immigration enforcement fools no one

In his diary, the president wrote, "Immigration bill now in conference committee. Decided we could not acceptÉbill will probably die. Too, bad, because we've lost control of our borders." The president was Ronald Reagan. The year was 1982. Four years later, he took another shot at solving the problem--and got the bill he wanted. Reagan's three-piece solution to comprehensive reform was: * a mass amnesty, * followed by serious workplace and border enforcement, * paired with effective temporary worker programs. As it turned out, we got the amnesty--and nothing else. At the time of the '86 reforms, the illegal population was about 3 million. Now it is around 11 million. In...

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Newt gnaws on nation's security

He was a fixture of national politics for decades, a commanding presence on the national stage. He led conservatives out of the wilderness to the pinnacle of power. But at the height of influence, he suffered a crushing political defeat. Resigning his leadership post, he returned to his great love-writing. History, however, wasn't done with Winston Churchill. One of his most memorable and important speeches was yet to come. In 1946, he embarked on an extended American tour. His itinerary included a stop at a small college in Fulton, Missouri. There, he challenged the United States to exercise global leadership. "To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away," Churchill warned,...

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Killer pigs and politicians

When Mexico reported an outbreak of swine flu last April, fear of an epidemic quickly spread. One member of Congress claimed he knew exactly how to handle the situation. "We need to close our borders to Mexico immediately and completely until this is resolved," said Rep. Eric Massa, D-NY, a Naval Academy graduate and Gulf War veteran. Nobody listened to him. Now the science is in. And guess what? It makes the Congressman and all the other seal-the-border alarmists look foolish. Dr. Kamran Khan at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto leads a research team that studies international air travel to help predict the spread of infectious diseases, like the swine flu (officially called...

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Our dumb and dumber Congress

Something extraordinary will happen at Washington, DC's Newseum on July 3. There, on the day before Independence Day, those who suffered through the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon will tell their stories. For the ages. It's part of an oral history project sponsored by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, in partnership with StoryCorps. Attack survivors, members of victims' families, first responders, volunteer rescuers and other witnesses will record the horrors and heroics they witnessed that day. Their interviews will be maintained at the Library of Congress and become part of the permanent collection at the 9/11 memorial in New York. (While the interviews are being...

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Next-up in the terrorist-batter’s box

It was called “the terrorist attack of the century.” The last century. In 1905, former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg was dynamited. The bomb (the WMD of its day) was strapped to a gatepost on his garden fence. The authorities arrested “Big Bill” Haywood, a labor organizer for the Western Federation Miners. J. Anthony Lukas chronicles the crime, investigation and trial in his book Big Trouble. Few history books even mention the turn-of-the-century terror incident. But at the time, it was huge. Headlines heralded it as the harbinger of everything from an age of anarchism to a populist revolt. The incident remains important because it tells us...

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