Shock and Awe

Baghdad has previously suffered shock and awe and it was long ago. First a little history: With the founding of Baghdad in 762, a little more than a century after the foundation of Islam, the Arab world found its metropolitan focus under the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs, who ruled as the titular head of the entire Muslim world. The Caliph also ruled as a successor to the Prophet Muhammad and was therefore the symbolic leader of all Muslims. Basically he ruled as both Emperor and Pope.

Baghdad was the city of Scheherazade, of Thousand and One Nights fame. For 500 years the wealth of the Muslim world poured into the city where the Caliphs lavished it on palaces, mosques, schools, private gardens and public fountains. It was a city of luxurious baths and overflowing bazaars. Serving not only as the center for its Muslim majority , the city served as the religious center for Christians, who erected churches, and a cultural center for Jews who built numerous synagogues and schools

In 1253 Mongke Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, having placed the Mongol empire on a solid footing, decided to pursue his grandfather’s aims in having a dual campaign against the Sung Dynasty of South China and the Muslim civilization of the Arabs and the Persians. Baghdad was the centerpiece of the latter campaign. Mongke Khan assigned his best general, Hulegu, to the task.

Getting there he had to first subdue the heretical Shiite sect known to us as the Assassins but that is for another story.

In 1257 Hulegu, in good Mongol fashion, sent emissaries to the Caliph with a list of legal grievances against him. If the Caliph did not immediately atone for his transgressions by surrendering, Hulegu would conquer his city and capture him. The Caliph scoffed. He said that the entire Muslim world would rise up and defend the city (sound familiar?) Neither God, he went on, nor the Muslim people would allow Baghdad to fall into the hands of the infidels.

Unconvinced of the Caliph’s power to speak either for god or the entire Muslim population Hulegu began to march towards the city. I shall not go into detail but Hulegu had three armies; his own Mongols, an army from Armenia and an army from Georgia (Russia). The main army approached from the north and east and the others from the north and west. Crossing the Tigris and Euphrates, originally thought to be great barriers to attack, very easily on pontoon boats.

The Mongols showed their traditional ability to improvise and use whatever material presented itself as a possible weapon. They chopped down the palm trees and used them as missiles they fired into the city. They dug a huge ditch around the city and backed that up with a rampart and began a terrifying bombardment of the city. Rockets, firelances, smokebombs, mortars were used. They had developed explosive devices able to hurl projectiles with such force they may as well have been using real cannons.

Being bombarded from a distance outside their range of defensive weapons had never happed to the Muslim army and it confused, frightened and frustrated them. Hulegu destroyed the dams and diverted the Tigris to flood the camp of the Caliph’s army and make them take refuge in the city.

After five days the Caliph surrendered. The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Muslim world. No other non-Muslim army would do that again until the arrival of the Americans and Coalition forces in 2003.

And neither God nor the entire Muslim population prevented it in either case.

Gen. Petraeus and Congress

From Gen. David Petraeus' opening remarks to the US Senate Armed Services Committee:

“ Security in Iraq is better than it was when Ambassador Crocker and I reported to you last September, and it is significantly better than it was 15 months ago when Iraq was on the brink of civil war and the decision was made to deploy additional forces to Iraq.”

Last September Democrats were frothing at the mouth as they looked for reasons to declare "The Surge" in Iraq an abject failure.

Unfortunately for the MoveOn.org wing of the Democratic Party, General Petraeus proved to be the military equivalent of Chief Justice John Roberts - intellectually honest and factually powerful.

Democratic Senators - whose staffs had labored for weeks to develop the "killer question" which would embarrass Petraeus - only served to expose the Senators to be the self-promoting, ill-prepared, unproductive academic pygmies they are.

Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had to sit through hours of political theater - mostly amateur political theater - while the Senators postured and the two men at the pointy end of the sword patiently parried.

At one point in the proceedings, Petraeus tried to explain to the Senators that they shouldn't look at the up-tick in violence over the past few weeks in isolation to the overall improvement of security in Iraq.

A significant percentage of Middle Eastern men have attended college in the West. It is not at all unusual to ask someone where he went to college and have him answer something like Colorado State.

The point here is, the bad guys understand the nature of the media. Over the past few weeks they have returned to their first principals: If you want to influence the Western press, toss rockets and mortars into the Green Zone where the Western press will report it.

The bad guys knew that Petraeus and Crocker would be testifying that week, so they increased their bad behavior to attempt to influence policy.

Obviously the American media were specifically interested in the questions posed by the three remaining candidates for President, John McCain, Hillary R.(!) Clinton and Barack H.(!) Obama.

On Fox news Rich Galen suggested that Obama needed a map to find his way to the hearing room.

This is the actual transcript, according to the Washington Post, of Obama's first question:

“Should we be successful in Mosul, should you continue, General, with the effective operations that you've been engaged in, assuming that in that narrow military effort we are successful, do we anticipate that there ever comes a time where Al Qaida in Iraq could not reconstitute itself?”

Read it again.

See? You can read that as many times as you like and it will not make any more sense than it did the first time.

Now say these words to yourself: President Barack H. Obama.

Make you feel comfortable?

Later in his questioning, Barack H. Obama asked this of Ambassador Crocker:

“Can you respond a little more fully to Senator Boxer's point?”

Let me tell you: If it weren't for Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) would be the dumbest member of the US Senate. So Obama depending upon anything that Boxer asked is an open admission of his lack of preparation.

The Democrats in Congress must take care that they are not seen as rooting for failure in Iraq.

Americans are, by our nature, optimists. We may be exhausted by this war, but we will never be so weary that we want our military personnel to lose.

General Petraeus is representative of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have answered the call to duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given that, it is politically very dangerous for Democrats to try and paint Petraeus as anything other than a patriot.

But some will.