Untitled Document

24 April 2004

Three If By Sea

Paul Revere had it worked out, from an indications and warnings standpoint. If the British forces were coming to Boston by land, his surveillance and reconnaissance people were instructed to put one lantern in the spire at the Old North Church, which he probably just called the North Church.

If they were arriving by boat, two lanterns would be lit and he could tell from a distance what version of "The British are coming! The British are coming!" he would yell as he galloped along spreading the alram.

One, if by land.

Two, if by sea.

The Arab suicide bombers came by sea yesterday, and they came in three.

They took three dhows - the picaresque little Arab work boats of the Gulf- and loaded them with high explosives and tried the same sort of attack against two major offshore oil terminals that succeeded against the USS Cole in the harbor of Aden.

A dhow was sighted near the Khawr al-Amaya oil terminal by Navy security patrols. As the Americans approached in their semi-rigid hulled Zodiac the terrorists detonated their payload. The intensity of the blast apparently flipped the patrol craft. Two sailors were killed outright and as many as five were injured.

We have had a lot of experience in the Maritime Interdiction Operations, or MIOs, as they were known. But those were to stop Saddam from smuggling oil out of the country. Twenty minutes later the patrols had taken the lessons-learned aboard. The two dhows near the al Basra Oil Terminal, or ABOT, blew themselves up without damage to the patrols.

This attack was a new wrinkle in the year-long campaign against the export of oil. The insurgents are determined to maintain a level of misery with which they are comfortable and curtail the funds available for reconstruction.

Initial reports said there was no damage to the terminals. The main southern oil terminus at Umm Qasr closed briefly for security reasons but should be open for business Monday and , when export of Basra Light crude oil should resume. Iraq is almost entirely dependent on the facility for export, and on the oil platforms offshore to load it onto the tankers. The water gets shallow as you head up to the Shatt al Arab, and not suitable for navigation by the big boats.

The insurgents are going to have a harder problem at sea than they do in the city. Afloat, we can kill anything that moves within the security perimeter, and our sensors never sleep. That is not true ashore, where the ground clutter is much more significant.

They might as well hang at least two lanterns in the steeple anyway, since the insurgents killed four soldiers and provoked us into killing thirty or so of them. A roadside bomb hit a civilian bus in Southern Baghdad, killed at least a dozen, and seven more died in a mortar barrage on a market in Sadr City.

The Americans were killed when two rockets were fired from a truck near Taji town north of Baghdad. Helicopter gunships then destroyed the truck and whoever was in it.

The body count for this bloody April is around a thousand Iraqis, and a hundred for the Coalition. There are figures available for the number of dead since the beginning of the war. Our numbers are painfully accurate. The number of the Iraqi dead is considerable less so. There is no way to sort out the guilty from the innocent. Not now.

Meanwhile, the Marines are still poised to invade the recalcitrant city of Falluja. President Bush declared on Friday that "America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers." He was responding to coordinated car bombings that had killed over seventy people, either Iraqis killing their own, or other Arabs kiling Iraiqs in the interest of the higher truth.

The President needed to make a bold statement, even if it sort of missed a key point about the people we are dealing with. They are murderers, to be sure, but also self-murderers, human cruise missiles. That is quite a different kettle of fish from your average Tony Soprano.

Mr. Bush then flew to Camp David in Maryland, where officials said he planned a working weekend with videoconferences with the military commanders in Iraq. They will be losing a lot of sleep to get on Washington time, since they are halfway around the world, where Washington day is Baghdad night. But then, who is getting a lot of sleep anyway?

There is quite a buzz in the local media about the latest controversy involving the role of Colin Powell as the Cassandra of the Administration. I heard the other day that Mr. Powell has said that his model is George C. Marshall, another retired general who went into the diplomacy business.

Mr. Powell has been accused of a certain tepid approach to the Administration's aggressive strategy on Iraq. Marshall reportedly had similar problems with President Truman over the Middle East. The President wanted to support the plucky Zionists who in 1948 were on the verge of establishing their own state in the Transjordan, against the passive assistance of the British Empire.

I know Truman felt bad about the Holocaust, and I think he was trying to do the right thing. But Marshall was a pragmatist, and I think he saw there would be an issue in the future about setting up a religious state centered around the second holiest city in the Islamic tradition.

Like Mr. Powell, Secretary Marshall stayed on the job, even while telling President Truman that he strongly disagreed with him. It did not become an issue for popular debate. Marshall kept his objections to himself.

I wonder if anything would be different today if the state of Israel had not come to exist. The crimes against the Jewish people are monstrous, and perhaps it is fate that they have returned to the lands of their fathers. It is awful to contemplate that they might not enjoy the right of self-determination. Like the Palestinians.

But without that, would we be marching down this path toward the little patch of desert they called Armageddon?

Honestly, I get so confused sometimes about what is right. It is almost like this isn't black and white.