CAIR's Dirty Tricks against Me

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
September 7, 2007
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4886

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, North America's foremost Islamist group, bills itself as a "civil rights organization," suggesting it maintains high standards of decency and morality. But, as I personally can attest, it fails abysmally to do so. Its seven-year-long campaign against me has included misappropriation, misrepresentation, misquotation, defamation, and inaccuracy, prompting one one writer recently to compare its propaganda with that of Nazi Germany.

Consider several dirty-trick episodes:

DanielPipes.com: On December 15, 2000, simultaneous with the debut of my website, www.DanielPipes.org, John Michael Janney registered the domain www.DanielPipes.com. Janney was both a member of CAIR and an employee at InfoCom Corporation in Richardson, Texas (a firm subsequently shuttered by the U.S. government and its owners found guilty of illegal transactions with Hamas, Libya, and Syria). Shortly thereafter, his rogue "com" website automatically redirected visitors to a page on CAIR's site defaming me. After I threatened a lawsuit, Janney failed to renew www.DanielPipes.com and I took hold of it in early 2002.

Cybercast News Service article: A cub reporter from CNSNews.com attended a talk I gave on July 24, 2003, at the Young America Foundation conference in Washington. She mangled what I'd said in a report the next day, ascribing to me terms I never use ("militaristic Islam," "Palestine"), sentiments I do not espouse (that Middle Easterners are reluctant to "go the Christian way"), and policy recommendations I vehemently reject ("We should be saying to the state of Israel to integrate [the Palestinian refugees] and let them become citizens").

Worst of all, she stated that "Pipes added that he doesn't perceive the Islamic people as divided into two groups: the radical terrorists and those who are not." In fact, I said that I don't perceive Islamists dividing into two groups but see them all as totalitarians. Using this faulty report, CAIR "action alert" number 390, dated July 27, trumpeted the headline "Daniel Pipes Compares ‘Islamic People' to ‘Nazis'."

I pointed out to the CNSNews.com editors the mistakes their reporter had made. They listened to a tape of my talk, acknowledged their journalist's errors, and retracted her article, pulling it from the website and sending letters, both electronic and paper, to CAIR to inform it of this action. CAIR, however, refused to acknowledge the retraction, and its calumny against me remains on its website to this day.

Shi‘ite endorsement: On August 20, 2003, a group calling itself "American Muslims of the Shia tradition" sent me a letter endorsing President Bush's nominating me to the U.S. Institute of Peace board, which I promptly posted. Leading the charge against my nomination, CAIR pressured the signatories to withdraw their endorsement, which some did. CAIR then accused me, in its "American Muslim News Briefs," dated September 15, of having "misrepresented" their support.

In response, the Shi`ites favoring my nomination issued a second statement exposing CAIR's methods: "On August 20, 2003, a group of Shia organizations endorsed Mr. Pipes. However, on September 13, 2003, few members of this group withdrew their endorsement stating that they had no knowledge of that endorsement. Also, they alleged that Mr. Pipes misrepresented the issue by listing their names as the endorsees. That was not so. He acted in good faith on the statement that was made available to him. We regret this action on their part." In short, the Shi`ites accused CAIR, not me, of misrepresentation.

Edward Kennedy letter: In a letter to the Boston Herald on August 29, 2003, Sen. Edward Kennedy explained his opposition to my USIP nomination earlier that month. He also praised me, writing that "Pipes is a serious scholar, and I would support him for another post." In its distribution of this letter (American Muslim News Briefs, August 30, 2003), CAIR reprinted Kennedy's letter, omitting the above sentence.



Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has for years engaged in dirty tricks against Daniel Pipes.Hijabs: Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's "national communications director," stated in January 2007 that I think "that if a woman wants to wear a headscarf, it's the beginning of the end of Western civilization." It's witty but it's wrong; I oppose the wearing of niqabs and burqas but accept hijabs as a matter of self-expression.

Giuliani campaign: As PipeLineNews.org showed in its article, "CAIR Continues Its Campaign of Deceit against Daniel Pipes," when the news came out in August 2007 of my connection to Rudy Giuliani's campaign for the presidency, CAIR sent out an attack piece, "Muslim-Basher Joins Giuliani Campaign," that thrice twisted my words. For example, CAIR quoted me telling the American Jewish Congress in late 2002:

I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews.

Ah, but as with the Kennedy letter, watch out for those slippery ellipses. Here is the full quote:

I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American Jews.

"Because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership" - i.e., I worry about American Muslims because they are led by CAIR and other groups with an extremist agenda. Mysteriously, that phrase dropped out. My statement takes on a different meaning with it back in.

As PipeLineNews.org puts it, "CAIR has once again proven itself to be comprised of dissimulators, engaging in a well-established pattern of half truths and misrepresentations that would make any of the Third Reich's propagandists proud."

Other items in category Council on American-Islamic Relations
Other items in category Daniel Pipes autobiographical

'New Al Qaeda plot to blow up planes on September 11' smashed
Last updated at 16:17pm on 5th September 2007
Comments (24)

Police have smashed a suspected al Qaeda terror cell nursing a "profound hatred of US citizens" plotting to bomb civilian and military jets.

The force of the planned explosions would have been worse than the train bombings in Madrid and the Tube and bus attacks in London on 7 July, 2005, according to German security sources. Those attacks killed 191 and 52 people respectively.

Three men aged 22, 28 and 29 have been arrested in Germany days before they planned to strike, and bomb-making equipment and explosives have been seized.

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One suspect was taken away by helicopter in handcuffs

Another of the suspects is led away in handcuffs. Click to enlarge

Read more...
Danish police arrest 8 Muslims in alleged bomb plot
US likely to start pulling troops out of Iraq in March, says Petraeus
Top aide brands Bush a liar over Iraqi army's fate
The arrests come a day after Danish police conducted raids and took eight young Muslims into custody whom they suspect of plotting a bomb attack and having links with al Qaeda. No direct link has yet been established between the two plots.

Federal prosecutor Monika Harms said the three suspects had bought 700kg (1,500lbs) of hydrogen peroxide to make massive bombs. She said: "We have prevented what we believe would have been the worst terror attacks ever on German soil".

She declined to name specific targets but said the suspects had an eye on institutions and establishments frequented by Americans in Germany, including discos, pubs and airports.

Citing unnamed security sources in Berlin, the broadcaster Suedwestfunk said Frankfurt International Airport and US Ramstein Air Base were among targets.

Joerg Ziercke, the head of Germany's federal crime office, said the men had a "profound hatred of US citizens".

German security sources have reportedly said the men belonged to the Islamic Jihad, an Egyptain terrorist group that merged with al Qaeda in 2001.

Confiscated canisters labeled as hydrogen peroxide are displayed during this morning's press conference in Germany
Wolfgang Bosbach, an MP with Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, said the plot may have been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 2001 atrocities in the US.

Franz Josef Jung, the defence minister, said: "The attacks were planned for the near future. They presented a real threat to life."

The suspects are believed to have been planning simultaneous attacks on aircraft sitting on the ground. Security services had been watching them for six months until yesterday, when the investigators spontaneously made the arrests after the men were observed moving chemicals from one storage location to another.

As is customary in Germany, the suspects have only been identified by their first names and last initials. Daniel S comes from the Saarland, Fritz G from Ulm in Bavaria and Adem Y from Turkey, although there are reports that he holds a Pakistani passport. The two Germans are 22 and 28, while Adem Y is 29.

The men were arrested yesterday as two dozen raids took place across Germany. They are believed to have been detained in the Frankfurt area.

One of those held, Fritz G, put up a fight when police raided the men's house in the Frankfurt area. He escaped through a bathroom window and managed to reach an outer cordon of officers about 300 metres away before being aprehended. He was able to snatch a gun, which went off, from a policeman. No one was hurt.

A German network reported that shots had been fired when police raided a house in a town in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The Germans are converts to Islam. At least one of the men is reported to have received terrorist training overseas.

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Frankfurt Airport. Reports suggest the terror plot targeted civilian and military planes at the airport

The US military base at Ramstein was also believed to have been targeted

The German intelligence service is said to have learned of the plot through emails.

The suspects are reported to have confessed. Security services are trawling their contacts to make sure there are no back-up teams.

Ramstein serves as America's main logistical base to service the war in Iraq. Germany has ground troops in Afghanistan.

"There are clear indications that at a minimum Ramstein and the Frankfurt airport were possible targets and that they would not have waited long to strike," leading conservative politician Wolfgang Bosbach told German television station N24, adding the attacks could have been timed to coincide with the anniversary of September 11.

The terror attack that authorities believe was foiled in Germany may have been timed to coincide with the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York
Police believe that the men wanted to experiment in the coming days and weeks with the chemicals and possibly start building a bomb. They were, however, far away from making a bomb that could be detonated.

A "bomb factory" is said to have been found in the village of Oberschledorn in the Sauerland. Locals said undercover police had been watching the house from a caravan.

Captain Jeff Gradeck, a spokesman for the US European Command (EUCOM) in Stuttgart, said: "We don't have any information yet that US facilities were targeted."

There was no comment from Frankfurt airport, one of Europe's busiest. The Ramstein base in the nearby state of Rhineland-Palatinate, 130 km (80 miles) southwest of the airport, is one of the most important US air bases overseas.

Germany, which has forces stationed in Afghanistan, has been on high alert for attacks. The country has feared a re-emergence of militant Islamic groups since 2001, when the northern city of Hamburg was used as a base for planning the September 11 attacks.

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors charged a Lebanese man held in detention over an unsuccessful attempt to detonate bombs on two trains in Germany in 2006.

He and another suspect were caught on surveillance cameras wheeling suitcases containing bombs aboard trains at Cologne's main railway station.

Both men left suitcases on the trains, which they planned to detonate later in the day with a timed explosive device. Despite being activated, the bombs failed to go off because of a technical error, the prosecutor's office said.

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Add your comment | View all Comments (24)
24 people have commented on this story so far. Tell us what you think below.

Here's a sample of the latest comments published. You can click view all to read all comments that readers have sent in.

Has anyone wondered how these terrorists manage to move around the world so freely without arousing suspicion and find accomodation in the country they wish to settle in the carry out their plans probably don't have a job or can speak the native language yet they survive? Something is amiss somewhere.

- Cathy, Norwich

Whatever might be going on in those deluded folks' minds, they will neither stop me from travelling by plane nor will they spoil my joy in living!

- Lucia, Germany

I don´t believe a word of it! Schäuble has had a hard time pushing his new laws. It seems quite convenient that a day or two before the next debate in parliament our highly efficient BND should arrest highly dangereous terrorists... A sensible question we should think about: who are really the bad guys?

September 6, 2007
State of the Art
High-Speed Video Store in the Living Room

By DAVID POGUE
If you had to make a master list of all the world’s problems, “limited access to movies” probably wouldn’t appear until Page 273,996.

Truth is, life is teeming with opportunities to see movies: movie theaters, video stores, DVD-by-mail services, TV movie channels, pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox 360, iTunes, Internet downloads, hotel rooms, airplanes and so on.

But according to the team at Vudu, all of those outlets are flawed.

Video stores: you have to drive back and forth, and the movie you want might be out of stock. Netflix and Blockbuster by mail: you have to wait a day or two for each movie to arrive. Pay-per-view, video-on-demand, Xbox, iTunes and hotel rooms: puny movie selections. Internet downloads: they arrive on your computer, not your TV.

Vudu’s new $400 movie box, to be available at month’s end, has none of those problems. It’s a little black box (about 7 by 9 by 2 inches) that connects to your TV and to the Internet through a high-speed link — and it comes darned close to putting a video store in your house. Its built-in hard drive permits your choice of 5,000 movies to begin playing instantaneously. There’s no computer involved, no waiting and no monthly fee.

There are four really great things about the Vudu box. First, the picture quality is terrific — like a DVD. If you have an HDTV, the box even “upconverts” the picture into pseudo-high definition. Moreover, Vudu will offer movies in true high definition once it finishes negotiating with the movie studios. (Tech note: The Vudu box will play high-def movies through its HDMI connector only — not its component, S-video or composite jacks.)

Second, the remote rocks. It has only four buttons, plus a clickable scroll wheel like the one on a computer mouse. The wheel is a breakthrough; it lets you zoom through lists of movies and categories. During playback, the wheel is a rewind/fast-forward shuttle control. It lets you jump almost instantly to any spot in the movie; it does not, however, actually “seek” — that is, speed up playback while you’re scanning for a certain scene.

The remote is not illuminated, but it doesn’t have to be; if you cannot memorize the four buttons in five minutes, you have bigger problems.

Third, you pay by the movie, not by the month. When life gets busy, you don’t pay anything. You can either rent a movie (usually $2 to $4) — you have 24 hours to finish watching it — or you can buy it ($15 to $20), meaning that it stays on your Vudu hard drive forever.

The 250-gigabyte drive holds 100 full-length movies. In about six months, Vudu plans to activate the box’s U.S.B. jack, so you can attach another hard drive to hold more movies.

Finally, Vudu movies begin playing instantly. There’s nothing to it. Find a movie, either by typing part of its name or by browsing the New Releases, Genres, Staff Favorites or Most Popular lists. Click past the price/confirmation screen. Start watching.

How can one hard drive hold 5,000 movies? This is the best part: it doesn’t. It actually holds only the first 30 seconds of each movie — typically the movie studio logos. While you watch that, the rest of the movie quietly begins to download; the handoff from the starter stub to the downloaded portion is undetectable.

This impressive engineering feat also explains two other quirks of the Vudu box. First, you cannot fast-forward into a movie that just started. Second, you cannot use the Vudu box without a fast Internet connection — preferably a wired one. Cable modems are great, but basic D.S.L. and dial-up connections are not fast enough. Higher-tier D.S.L. plans might have the required speed; a speed-testing button appears at Vudu.com.

(Here’s another clever backstage tech trick: the Vudu boxes communicate with one another, using a peer-to-peer system. When you start watching, say, “The Last Mimzy,” your box receives chunks of that movie from the Vudu boxes of other people who have already downloaded it. None of this affects you one bit — it’s all invisible to you — but it’s a pretty clever way for Vudu, the company, to save money, since it does not have to pay for its own servers to pump out those gazillions of gigabytes.)

The box itself runs cool, it is totally silent, and its remote uses radio waves rather than infrared. That way, you can put the box in a closet; it does not require line-of-sight with the remote. That’s lucky, because the box’s oddball size and shape mean it does not stack well with standard DVD players, VCRs and so on.

The catalog of movies is updated with 10 or 20 new titles each week, and an equivalent number is retired. Since you always have 5,000 to choose from — Vudu plans to expand the list to 10,000 — the odds are excellent that when you’re in a movie mood, you will find something you like. The movies come from every major Hollywood studio, plus a healthy number of independents.

But if you look for one particular movie, you might sometimes be disappointed.

One reason: plenty of the movies are pure filler. They range from no-name horror cheapies (“San Franpsycho” or “Night Fangs,” anyone?) to superniche flicks like “The History of Texas Longhorns Football” and “Yoga for Depression and Gastro-Intestinal Disorders.”

Another reason: Vudu’s catalog is a victim of what Hollywood calls distribution windows. After a movie leaves theaters, it becomes available through other channels in a strict order: (1) hotels and airlines; (2) DVD; (3) pay-per-view television; (4) movie channels like HBO and Starz; (5) TV and everywhere else.

Vudu, as it turns out, gets movies during Phases 2, 3 and 5. Weirdly, that means that a movie might appear on your box, disappear during the HBO window and reappear a year later.

Maybe that’s why the Vudu box, at introduction, has 41 out of 50 movies on Formovies.com’s current Top Rentals list (it has “300” and “Blades of Glory”), but only 10 out of the 50 on Moviefone’s “Best of 2006” list (it is missing “Dreamgirls,” “The Departed” and so on).

Vudu’s dependence on the notoriously conservative, profit-driven movie studios also explains many of its frustrating inconsistencies. Some Vudu movies are available for purchase or rent; others, only for purchase. Some movies have previews (movie trailers); others do not. The list includes hundreds of movies from some studios (Paramount, Sony, Warner) and only a handful from others (Disney).

While we’re nit-picking, it’s worth noting that Vudu offers no DVD extras — deleted scenes, subtitles and so on. Be prepared, too, for a less obvious loss: serendipity. With other movie sources, the limited selection or the wait for the mail carrier can provide a moment of happy surprise when you find something good or open the mailing envelope. Vudu is more like shooting fish in a barrel.

If Vudu sounds familiar, by the way, that might be because of its similarity to MovieBeam, which has been around for a couple of years. MovieBeam’s hard drive contains only 100 movies at a time, but it costs only $150 and does not require an Internet connection (its movies are beamed through the air).

Vudu is clearly a more high-end offering, which may be why it will be initially sold only through www.vudu.com, Amazon.com and home-theater retail stores.

Vudu is a clear win if you, like 30 million other Americans, make several trips to the video store each month. It’s also great if you like pay-per-view but wish you had a better selection. Vudu may not be a Netflix killer, though, unless you think Vudu’s instant access is more important than Netflix’s much larger selection (more than 70,000 movies).

If you do do Vudu, with the time you would have spent driving to the video store or waiting for the mailman, you can do other things — like solving the world’s more pressing problems.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com.

September 5, 2007
News Analysis
Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq

By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 — With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

That shift in emphasis was implicit in Mr. Bush’s decision to bypass Baghdad on his eight-hour trip to Iraq, stopping instead in Anbar Province, once the heart of an anti-American Sunni insurgency. By meeting with tribal leaders who just a year ago were considered the enemy, and who now are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a president who has unveiled four or five strategies for winning over Iraqis — depending on how one counts — may now be on the cusp of yet another.

It is not clear whether the Democrats who control Congress will be in any mood to accept the changing measures. On Tuesday, there were contentious hearings over a Government Accountability Office report that, like last month’s National Intelligence Estimate, painted a bleak picture of Iraq’s future.

It was the White House and the Iraqi government, not Congress, that first proposed the benchmarks for Iraq that are now producing failing grades, a provenance that raises questions about why the administration is declaring now that the government’s performance is not the best measure of change.

The White House insists that Mr. Bush’s fresh embrace of Sunni leaders simply augments his consistent support of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But some of Mr. Bush’s critics regard the change as something far more significant, saying they believe it amounts to a grudging acknowledgment by the White House of something these critics themselves have long asserted — that Iraq will never become the kind of cohesive, unified state that could be a democratic beacon for the Middle East.

“They have come around to the inevitable,” said Peter W. Galbraith, a former American diplomat whose 2006 book, “The End of Iraq,” argued that Mr. Bush was trying to rebuild a nation that never really existed, because Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had never adopted a common Iraqi identity. “He has finally recognized that fact, and is now trying to work with it,” Mr. Galbraith said Tuesday.

Still, like the other strategies Mr. Bush has embraced, this one is fraught with risks.

There is no assurance that the willingness of Sunnis in Anbar to join in common cause with the United States against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia can be replicated elsewhere in Iraq. And as reporters who have been embedded with units working to enlist the support of the Sunni sheiks have written, in vivid accounts from the scene, there are many reasons to question how sustained the Sunnis’ loyalty will be.

The sheiks and their followers have been barred from the Iraqi military, and it is unclear whether Mr. Maliki’s government will let large numbers of Sunnis sign up in the future. That creates the risk that the Sunni groups, once better trained and better armed, will ultimately turn on the central government or its patron, the American military.

Then there is the worry that, even if Mr. Bush is successful in working in promoting “moderate” Sunnis in Anbar and “moderate” Shiites in the south, the result will be exactly the kind of partitioned state — with all its potential for full-scale civil war — that the White House has long insisted must be avoided.

“Those are real risks, and they explain in part why the strategy was not pursued before late in 2006,” said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who, as a member of the National Security Council staff at the White House until he left this summer, was one of the architects of the “New Way Forward,” the plan Mr. Bush unveiled in January.

“But the first principle we embraced in the new strategy is that Iraq is a mosaic,” Mr. Feaver said, “and that the risks of approaching it that way were deemed worth taking, given the alternative.”

The White House insists that by flying into the tribal areas, Mr. Bush is not undercutting Mr. Maliki or cutting him loose. Instead, White House officials say that ever since his January speech, Mr. Bush has been pursuing a dual strategy, pressing for “top down” change from Baghdad as well as “bottom up” change from the provinces.

The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a while.”

As he flew from Iraq to Australia on Monday, Mr. Bush cast the Sunni leaders he had met in the deserts of Anbar in the most positive light possible.

“They were profuse in their praise for America,” he told reporters on Air Force One, according to a pool report. He said they “had made the decision that they don’t want to live under Al Qaeda,” adding that “they got sick of them.”

Mr. Bush, of course, has had similar public praise for just about every Iraqi leader he has met, even a few leaders now disparaged by White House officials as unreliable, powerless or two-faced.

Mr. Bush himself has told associates that in the end, the Iraq experiment depends on whether Mr. Maliki and his aides are truly willing to share power, or whether they are determined to keep the Sunnis down.

For now, however, the White House is arguing that the ground-up relationships they are building in places like Anbar are more important than keeping a scorecard of legislation passed or stalled in Baghdad. Whether that argument is enough to keep a few wavering Republicans on board may determine whether Mr. Bush gets a bit more time to try his latest strategy.

What a Civilian Reserve Corps Would Look Like

By Ilya Shapiro : 28 Aug 2007

BAGHDAD—Last week I argued that neither civilian nor military structures, as currently organized, are quite right for leading the Rule of Law (ROL) component of a reconstruction (or "nation-building") effort. Instead, I floated the idea of a Civilian Reserve Corps modeled on British colonial institutions specializing in such efforts, such as the India Civil Service.

The idea is that the military, despite its valiant service in stepping up to man civil affairs capacities in Iraq, was not designed for such activities, and can carry with it a perception of imposing an occupying power's will by force. Civilian capability is lacking, however, because the Departments of State and Justice, and other relevant agencies, lack both the manpower and the legal authority to deploy the civilian experts necessary to enable a wholesale national reconstruction. And the U.S. also lacks a national police force and stability police (constabulary) units altogether, so dealing with civil disorder and police training is complicated further.

Fortunately, I am not alone in drawing this conclusion, and the U.S. government is now moving to create the organization to put some hard lessons learned into practice. On December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day), 2005, President Bush signed a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-44), assigning responsibility to the Secretary of State for planning and coordinating the activities of civilian agencies during post-conflict interventions. The State Department in turn assigned the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stability Operations (CRS) to create a Civilian Reserve Corps of police, constabulary, and ROL experts to work alongside the military in stabilization operations.

As described by Robert Perito of the U.S. Institute of Peace's (USIP) Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, the CRS has developed a three-tiered plan to deploy critical civilian elements at the outset of a peace or stability operation.

The first tier, the Active Reserve Corps (ARC), would be composed of 100-150 personnel with diplomatic, police, justice, and other ROL skills who would deploy on 24-hour notice from their government jobs at a variety of agencies. The second tier, the Standby Reserve Corps (SRC), would be composed of over 1,000 new hires who would be trained and deployable within 60 days of assignment. While ARC officers would be assigned to military commands or embassies, SRC officers would man mobile or regional teams.

The third tier, the Civil Response Corps (CRC), would be composed of personnel from state and local governments and the private sector who would sign contingency agreements with the federal government. Like the Army Reserves, they could be activated by the appropriate authority for international service, at which point they would become federal employees. Over time the CRC, including its police aspect, would grow to about 4,000 people.

The CRC is obviously the most radical idea of the three—heretofore no provision exists for deploying civilians akin to a military unit—but all of this A-S-C system addresses a gap in American foreign policy capability that becomes more obvious with each international engagement we undertake. (I would have called the second tier Bystanding Reserve Corps, so the acronyms would go A-B-C but never mind.)

To finance this plan, including the recruitment of the first 500 members of the CRC, Congress appropriated $50 million in the latest Iraq supplemental funding bill, which President Bush signed May 25, 2007. The funds will not be available, however, unless Congress passes a companion piece of authorizing legislation, the Civilian Management Reconstruction and Stabilization Act, sponsored by Senators Lugar (R-IN) and Biden (D-DE).

Congress is expected to pass this legislation such that the Civilian Reserve Corps should begin operations by the end of the year—although nearly identical legislation (one its own bill, the other a part of the main State Department appropriation) failed in the previous Congress. It is not so much the Democrats' takeover that has turned the tide in favor of this project, but the realization that if our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan—and, it is left unsaid, the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future—are to succeed, we need to have this motivated corps of civilian experts available for quick deployment, especially in the critical early stages of the mission.

For that is the far-reaching ROL lesson here: Setting aside the question of whether we should be involved in building ROL, or intervening abroad in circumstances that create a need for stabilization and reconstruction—we have in the past and we will in the future, regardless of the theory or partisan politics behind it—we need a capability beyond those provided by current agencies, whether civilian and military.

I am not at all a fan of big government, or new government programs, or creating bureaucracies, but if there's one thing I've learned during this stint in Iraq, it's that if we are to do this kind of work—for national security, humanitarian, or other policy reasons—we have to do it right.

Ilya Shapiro, the incoming Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, is currently a Special Assistant/Advisor to the Multi-National Force-Iraq's (MNFI) Law and Order Task Force (LAOTF). He writes the "Dispatches from Purple America" column for TCS Daily.com and a blog [link to http://dispatchesfrompurpleamerica.blogspot.com/] of the same name. The opinions expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of any institution with which he is affiliated.