Three more moves to Check and mate

Wretchard at the Belmont Club writes about an interesting development in Najaf: bq. News that the Iraqi police have ordered all journalists out of Najaf and are enforcing it, strongly suggests that an operation against the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf is imminent. Interesting... Looks like the gloves are coming off finally. There is more: bq. The principal damage inflicted by the War on Terror has not been to material objects or to human lives, although there have been enough of those. Compared to the tens of millions killed during World War 2 or the millions killed during the Cold War (more than 100,000 Americans in Korea and Vietnam; over a million NVA alone), the current losses have barely nudged the Satanic scale. But the damage inflicted against the fabric of civilization has been immense. And more: bq. So the most terrifying effect of the War so far has been in the slow destruction of taboos and imperatives which collectively allowed civilization to function. One writer observed that although Britain has possessed nuclear weapons for nearly 60 years no one worried about a UK attack on New York city. He might have added that no one in London lost any sleep over the prospect of an American nuclear strike on Picadilly Circus. The electronics, physics and rocketry check out fine; it was civilization that held them back. The concept of asymmetric warfare was supposed to exploit the "fact" that transnational terrorist organizations operating in areas of chaos could strike at a civilization hamstrung by constraints. They could attack orphanages and then seek shelter in the Church of the Nativity; they could fly wide bodied aircraft into Manhattan, then seek shelter in "sovereign" Afghanistan; they could call for the death of millions from the pulpits of Qom; they could fire mortars from the Imam Ali Shrine and never expect the favor to be returned. But the logical flaw in this conception was that civilization could put aside these constraints in a moment. Hiroshima and Dresden are reminders that it could. One of Wretchards commenters for this story sums it up succinctly: bq. Sir, you say-- "The second is the guaranteed access of the Western press to the battlefield." Like that is a bad thing. The "journalist" in your last post was released and thanked his captors. Big Media is the friend and ally of terrorists everywhere. The media has done this to themselves. Like Peter and Eason, they have sold their souls for a story. The journalists in Najaf were only a mouthpiece for Sadr's demands, and a biased lens for the rest of the world. The Iraqis were right to count them among the enemy. Very true - pig Sadr, in fact, the whole lot of these swine, would be in a far less powerful bargaining position if the Western media had not been so fawning over them in their reporting.