Permit a novice to weigh in on the recent SCOTUS decision.  This 185 page document should make for interesting bed time reading, which I will do later.  For the time being, it appears that:

1. The rage we feel at the “justices” of the left, who have given us some of the worst decisions ever made (and who, by the way, I predict will be reversed on many things in the coming years), is justified.
2. This rage should not cloud our judgment as to what the decision really says.

This decision has no teeth.  First of all, the SCOTUS Blog says:

The Court expressly declared that it was not questioning the government’s power to hold Salim Ahmed Hamdan “for the duration of active hostilities� to prevent harm to innocent civilians. But, it said, “in undertaking to try Hamdan and subject him to criminal punishment, the Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction.�

Second, we read:

Justice Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, Kennedy and Souter, wrote separately to answer the dissenters’ complaint that the ruling would hamper the President’s ability to deal with a new and deadly enemy. The Court’s conclusion, Breyer said, “ultimately rests upon a single ground: Congress has not issued the Executive a ‘blank check.’…Indeed, Congress has denied the President the legislative auhority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary.”

Then finally over at the Counterterrorism Blog (hat tip Michelle Malkin), from Andrew Cochran, we read:

The decision is actually a huge political gift to President Bush, and the detainees will not be released that easily. The President and GOP leaders will propose a bill to override the decision and keep the terrorists in jail until they are securely transferred to host countries for permanent punishment. The Administration and its allies will release plenty of information on the terrorist acts committed by the detainees for which they were detained (see this great ABC News interview with the Gitmo warden). They will also release information about those terrorist acts committed by Gitmo prisoners after they were released. They will challenge the “judicial interference with national security” and challenge dissenting Congressmen and civil libertarians to either stand with the terrorists or the American people. The Pentagon will continue to release a small number of detainees as circumstances allow. The bill will pass easily and quickly. And if the Supremes invalidate that law, we’ll see another legislative response, and another, until they get it right. Just watch.

Let me make a novice prediction.  This decision will make absolutely no difference to the troops in the field.  They will continue to fight and kill the enemy.  As for granting Geneva rights to the prisoners, we don’t torture them anyway.  It is contrary to U.S. law.  We will retain these prisoners for an indefinite period of time (in the words of the SCOTUS, “for the duration of active hostilities”).  This might be a very, very long time.  I predict we will have active hostilities with Islamic facism well into the lives of our children and even our grandchildren.  We will continue to operate Gitmo, we just won’t bring anyone else up on charges.  They will rot at Gitmo.  Finally, the congress will pass legislation that allows the President to take these prisoners before a military tribunal, effectively undoing the SCOTUS decision.  He just won’t do it.  This decision is a hollow victory for the ACLU.  It means between very little and nothing.

This decision is actually a gift.  Think about it.  ” … for the duration of active hostilities.”

Hmmmmmm ……

In “New Taliban and Al Qaida Strategy,” I scoped out what I believe to be a revised “going-forward” plan for the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It primarily involves the terror tactics used heretofore, such as beheadings, torture and other acts of brutality. But there are two elements present in this approach that seem to have been previously absent.

The U.S. forces, and especially the Marines, were keenly aware of the fact that factions of malcontents, thugs, criminals and other shady elements of society would band together into heterogeneous groups and cause general harm to the effort of the coalition forces. This was described in the Marine Corps “Small Wars Manual,” 1940 Edition. The two new elements we are seeing now include (a) the use of non-combatants as shields, and (b) an aggressive propaganda war to allege U.S. troop atrocities.

I have discussed in earlier posts, Haditha, Hamdania, and then Guardsmen being charged with civilian deaths near Haditha. The Marine Times carried an AP story about the proliferation of charges against U.S. troops, and so the issue is being recognized by the MSM (although I see the article as being somewhat wobbly, coming to no real conclusions and providing no substantive framework for this phenomenon — an interesting failure given the title of the piece, Experts: Put atrocity accusations into context). At least one of these three instances involved the use of civilians as human shields, and two others involve the killing of civilians in the heat of battle (the circumstances will be brought to light at trial).

In any battle in the Sunni triangle, my bet is that we will be able to find “witnesses” who would be quite willing to testify to U.S. troop “atrocities.” The effects of each of these (and similar future) instances will be fourfold:

1. To diminish the U.S. public resolve.
2. To make the U.S. troops hesitate when in potential danger, thus making Iraq a much mroe dangerous place for them.
3. To proliferate instances of accusations against U.S. troops as the insurgents and unsympathetic public better learn how to engage in this slander.
4. And thus to dishearten the U.S. troops.

The U.S. troops will be impaled squarely on the horns of a dilemma: do I defend myself if I feel threatened, thus ensuring charges if I kill a civilian who later is found out to be unarmed or used as a shield, or do I hesitate, thus ensuring my harm?

Do you think I am stretching things a bit? In “Spinning Haditha,” W. Thomas Smith, a Marine, makes the following insightful statement:

I went on to explain that Haditha had everything to do with the war in Iraq being a counterinsurgency. And every student of military science understands the ugly nature of insurgencies; where insurgents are un-uniformed, unconventional fighters who move freely throughout the community during the day, and become bushwhackers at night. They routinely use women and children as human shields, and often coerce the latter into the service of operating guerrillas.

This is particularly effective against U.S. forces, because the enemy knows that no matter how much stress they may be under, American soldiers will go to great lengths to avoid killing women and children; and even hesitate (at great risk to themselves) when they see women and children shooting at them.

There are the horns of the dilemma. Each and every time a Soldier or Marine fires and a civilian is killed, he can just about count on some other civilian being a “witness” to the incident where the account has him guilty of murder execution-style. Whether this is true or not, the seed is planted in the minds of the Soldier and Marine and eventually becomes a cancer.

American Forces Press Service reports that:

Alleged incidents of misconduct, such as those surrounding the Nov. 19 deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, do not reflect the honorable service of the overwhelming majority of coalition forces in Iraq, a U.S. general in Iraq said today.

“Almost without exception, the dedicated men and women who serve as part of Multinational Corps Iraq perform their duties in an exemplary manner every day,” Army Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, chief of staff of Multinational Corps Iraq, said via satellite in a Pentagon news briefing.”

In my opinion, this is profoundly unhelpful. As far as the General knows, the U.S. forces perform their duties completely and without exception. At the very minimum, he should have waited until the trial was finished before anything was said about what some small percentage of our troops do. The General doesn’t know for sure. He is speculating on Haditha.

And this is the heart of the matter. Will the U.S. brass react to this new strategy by participating in the proliferation of charges against our troops, or will our troops get the benefit of the doubt? Will our troops fear defending themselves, or will they react as they are taught to?

The Marines are taught that their purpose is to “locate, close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver.” Will they be free to do this?

This is an admittedly small and inadequate tribute to the honor, character and courage of Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge, a double-amputee who lost one leg above the ankle and another above the knee to an IED in Iraq about a year ago. Today … he runs with the President. This is way cool. By the time we pass away, most of us will never be half the man that Staff Sgt. Bagge is right now.

Iran is taking a hard line position on the U.S.  According to a commentary in the Washington Post (hat tip to Blogs of War):

Two weeks ago, the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, dismissing the United States as a paper tiger, said: “Something very important is happening. . . . The Americans are no longer saying that Iran must be deprived of its nuclear rights forever. Iran has accomplished a great thing.”

But we should remember that this commentary is by Richard Perle, and like everything else he writes or says, it is moralizing, preening, self-serving and condescending.  When Richard Perle speaks, it is the “gospel according to Richard.”  This, in my opinion, leads Perle to believe that the Bush administration has “blinked.”  This might just be a fatal error for Perle’s analysis (and for Iran, if they agree).

In fact, there is much behind this decision to go political with Iran.  According to a Washington Post article:

The troubled Iraq war also hangs over Iran diplomacy. Administration officials have little confidence in the intelligence on Iran’s programs, while allies overseas view U.S. actions through the prism of Iraq. That concern has forced the administration to emphasize diplomacy to avoid the breach with its allies that characterizes the Iraq war. 

In hard negotiations, the Bush administration constructed, together with the international community, a package of rewards for dropping the enrichment and reprocessing programs.  Cheney raised an objection to where this might take the U.S.:

Officials said there was essentially no dissent among Bush’s top advisers on joining the talks. The Pentagon raised no objections, and the only cautionary tone came from Cheney, who said that the shift should not lead the administration down a “slippery slope,” in which they end up retreating from their core red line: an end to enrichment and reprocessing — the two paths toward fissile material. The group agreed to hold their red line.

It would appear to me that the Iranian thinking on this is wrongheaded.  There is apparently no desire to rush to war with Iran, especially when these issues are seen through the prism of Iraq.  However, the needed steps have been taken.  The international community has been briefed.  They have been courted.  They have even participated in the development of the package of incentives to lure Iran away from a nuclear program.

When the difficult time comes, that is, when Iran refuses to end the program, and the decision must be made either to end the program ourselves or let Iran go nuclear, the U.S. will say, “we did our best.”  Besides, you were involved just like we were.

Additionally, it gives the U.S. intelligence community the time to QA (quality assure) the information it is giving the administration.

Iran sees this as a win for them.  The U.S. sees this as a win-win.

And so Richard Perle is still on the outside looking in.  Just the way it should be.