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There is a lot of stuff about Dubai at the moment. The issue of Dubai Ports' purchase of P&O and the reaction by certain American Democrat and Republican politicians is a massive story Stateside, though it has not registered much in the UK, unless you are a reader of the business sections. There is a smell of protectionism in the air in Europe too, with a number of European states scratching each other's eyes out about merger and acquisitions involving banks and utilities. Plus ca change..

Dubai is now a major story on a number of fronts. The BBC recently ran a series of programmes about the incredible amount of construction happening there and the local magnates and immigrants who are driving the economy forward. A vast artificial archipelago of homes and estates has been built into the Gulf. Dubai is also a major business and media centre, a place where a lot of sporting and cultural events goes on. Dubai is also becoming one of the major venues for business conferences in areas such as finance.

So it seems to me that even with all the reservations one might have about that part of the world and the islamist threats not far away, Dubai's vibrancy is a sort of Good Thing. The place has, potentially, the capacity to exert the same impact on parts of the Middle East as Hong Kong did on mainland China. Perhaps it is all a bubble and will go up in smoke, as the Eyeores out there might think, but on the whole I am optimistic. Let's face it, pessimism is a sort of cop-out.

May the meme of liberty spread out from its borders and confound the naysayers. Meanwhile, this man is doing something highly admirable.

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The Khaleej Times is reporting that the Danish consul to Dubai has said:

The massive protests in the Muslim world against the Danish cartoons have helped Denmark, as also Europe, have a better understanding of, and respect for, Islam

Well that is both quite correct and completely false, but of course a diplomat is someone whose job it is to lie for his country. It has indeed given millions of Europeans a better understanding of Islam... and thereby led them to an utter lack of respect for it. Now every time I hear someone saying "Islam is one of the world's great religions", I tend to get very rude rather quickly.

The diplomat was quite sound on the core issue however.

The Danish diplomat made it clear that, however, 'We will not change our constitution (to exert controls over the media)'.

And that is why this site has a 'support Denmark: no burqa on free speech' graphic in the sidebar. Hold the line.

Update: It would appear that Imran Khan is now officially a moron:

I don't think the message has got through that for us it's far more painful than perhaps even the Holocaust for the Jews. Any caricature or any ridicule or any humiliation of the holy prophet is far more painful for the Muslims

These cartoons are more 'painful' that the mass extermination of six million Jews? And this from a much acclaimed 'moderate'? Yes indeed, I think a great many people's understanding of Islam is improving pretty much by the day.

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There was an excellent article the other day in the Prague Post about the whole Jyllands-Posten 'Mohammed cartoons' issue. What a pity such sentiments seem few and far between in the craven media in Britain.

To many, the notion that a cartoon could provoke global riots, dozens of deaths, a $1 million assassination contract and vacillation among Western leaders seems like an abstract fantasy, a trip down the rabbit hole into a theater of the absurd.

But that perspective remains precisely what these protesters have attacked: the rejection of the idea that it's justified - or even rational - to kill people over their speech, particularly a statement as trifling as a cartoon.

The purple elephant in the middle of this crossfire is the contemporary notion - or, more accurately, the Western one - that the values of most Islamic societies have modernized along with the rest of the world.

[...]

The West has naively greeted this scorpion with its Cold War handshake, believing that the virtues of peace and democracy appear self-evident; as if good intentions, by definition, will be good enough. But even the mainstream Islamic mindset has proven inscrutable to the West in a way that communism was mythologized to be but never truly was.

Good stuff. Read the whole thing.

Also, some of the people very much at 'fatwa ground zero', such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, are taking a stand against the new Islamic totalitarianism.

(hat tip to JP)

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For those of you who are following Michael Totten's interesting Middle Eastern adventures, he has written about one of the more interesting religious groups in that part of the world.

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There is an excellent article by Michael Totten, who is currently blogging from Iraq, about what quite a few people think is the inevitable end result: partition into three (or at least two) separate entities. It is interesting to see the facts on the ground seem to back up the view that we already have a de facto independent Kurdistan.

An Islamo-fascist Southern Iraq is not such a great outcome but an independent Kurdistan would seem to have much to commend it.

I really have no problem with that and wrote something on the subject myself called: to hell with nation building, lets see some nation wrecking!

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Andrew Sullivan, reminds me why I was a fan of his blog from the off and remain one:

Leave aside the issue of mob violence for a moment. No moderate Muslim or "sensitive" Westerner is defending that. What of the non-violent request: that one faith be granted its taboos, that Western culture must abide by them, that the law be reformed to protect religious faiths from blasphemy or offense? It seems to me that we should indeed avoid gratuitous insult of Islam, and Christianity, or any faith. But it is a complete delusion to believe that the major source of our problem today is something called "Islamophobia." No: the problem is terrorism and tyranny propagated under the banner of Islam. Without that, no Danish cartoon could have been conceived of, let alone published. That is the real and far more blatant blasphemy. If 10,000 angry Muslims had marched in London after the bombing of a major mosque in Iraq, I'd be impressed. But they didn't. Until they do, the West has nothing to apologize for. The Muslim world needs to take the beam out of its own eye, before it removes the speck from the West's.

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I must say that I always enjoy reading what Michael Totten has to say even if I do not always agree (though in truth I find myself agreeing more and more often). His reports from Lebanon were always compelling.

He is now writing from Iraq (Kurdistan to be exact) and I strong recommend people take a peek at his blog.

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In the past I have had opportunities to spend money at Carrefour, but due to a conflux of circumstances, I am happy to say that I have never bought a thing from this large French supermarket chain. And now I never will.

Via Tim Blair.

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Erik and Arthur Wneir from No Pasaran took on several thousand Muslim protesters and only the intervention of French police prevented a repeat of the Battle of Tours.

More seriously, watch the video to see the characteristic Muslim reaction to people daring to state an opinion different to theirs.

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"As an old Sci-Fi fan, I firmly believe that we will encounter alien races someday. These conversations are good practice. I would imagine there will really be some different worldviews when that happens, esp. if they're hydrogen breathers."

Comment by regular Samizdata contributor calling himself VeryRetired, who describes what it feels like to debate with apologists for radical Islam: ie, the sheer inability to bridge a gulf of understanding between those who support the open society, free speech and enquiry, and those for whom the statements contained in a book written over a thousand years ago contain the sum total of wisdom, the criticism of which should be dealt with violently.

I certainly do tend to think that understanding of how to cope with radical Islam can be usefully supplemented by reading Robert A. Heinlein, say, or Vernor Vinge rather than the editorial pages of the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph.

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The demonstration in Trafalgar square, supported by dhimmi-in-chief for London Ken Livingston, was clearly orchestrated to show a homogenised face of 'moderate Islam' for the world to see. An interesting feature of the demo was that no 'home made placards' were tolerated by the organisers. A small group of Kurds turned up with their own signs and were fairly quickly handed the printed blue-white official signs. I was not quick enough to get a picture of the Kurdish ones before they vanished as I did not expect them to be taken down, but the ones in English were fairly anodyne.

Not even in Islamic green!

I would guess maybe 7,000 people showed up, perhaps 10,000 tops, at least by the time I lost interest around 3:00 and wandered off to a nearby computer faire. Many of the usual suspects were there, such as the inevitable socialist workers and CND set...

Quite what wicked old Blair and BushMcHitler have to do with protesting against cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark was not clear



Hands off secular fascist police states and theocratic police states!



You can be sure those naughty cartoons (or that tee-shirt) would not have been allowed in Cuba!

The large official signs were clearly expensive high quality creations and contained all manner of utterly irrelevant slogans designed to appeal to the 'hard of thinking'.

So if some Muslim desires sharia law for themselves, presumably this is what he also wishes for me... Oh I feel much better now!



Tolerance? Sure, it is yours by right. Respect? You must be joking, that you have to earn



Jyllands-Posten did not 'incite' to violence, they just defended free expression, unlike some others we know of. Respect however has nothing to do with it

And just to remind people what this is really about...

The Danish embassy in London under police guard

And one final picture which tickled my sense of irony... a pleasant looking young woman watching the demonstration in her stylish Christian Dior scarf.

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A Danish blogger and columnist, Henrik Føhns, alerted me to a post on his blog, Mondofunza about a letter to 'Muslim citizens'...

A letter from Another Denmark

Dear Muslim citizens in Denmark and the World

I wish to state the existence of another Denmark: A Denmark that wants to live in peace with the Muslim world. There is another Denmark, which hopes for and believes in respect and tolerance between religions and different groups of people.

As a Dane I have no responsibility for what a single and privately owned Danish newspaper chooses to publish. Even so, I strongly condemn the actions of Jyllands-Posten that have offended muslims around the world, and I understand the need for an apology from the newspaper.

We all have a responsibility for treating each other, our religious faiths, and
convictions with dignity and respect. By publishing the caricatures of Muhammad, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten failed their obligation to exercise with care and consideration the right of freedom of speech.

I condemn all kinds of discrimination, prejudice and racism, whether it is directed against Muslims, Jews, Christians or other groups in a society. Therefore, I reject the hostile and prejudicial way of speaking that has marked several Danish,political parties and media within recent years.

I want to make a request to all parts involved, that opinions and protests may be conducted in a respectful and peaceful manner. Attacks on and threats against individuals and assets only make the situation worse for all of us.

I believe in a world, where religions, ethnic groups and various political and cultural opinions can coexist in an atmosphere of dialogue, tolerance and mutual respect.

I wish to state the existence of Another Denmark that conceives itself as a part of such a heterogenous world and humanity. In the sincere hope of international tolerance and respect.

Despite some agonising, Henrik's response is unequivocal:

I have not signed the letter and do not intend to do so. I too want to live in peace with the muslim world, but I want to live by terms set by a modern democratic society. Not by rules set by autocratic, fundamentalistic, religious regimes. The outrage about the Danish cartoons have other roots than the cartoons themselves. The cartoons and Denmark have just become scapegoats for social and political disorder in the Middle East...

... I have nothing against christianity, islam or other religions. But when they start to preach and act against basic human rights - count me out.

Note: Also, Happy Birthday, Henrik!

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Muslim Action Committee are calling for changes to the law in Britain to implement an aspect of sharia law and they want the British state to do it for them. What they want is to legally ban people from displaying pictures of Mohammed, the seventh century warlord who founded their religion, because it annoys them. Never mind that showing images of this historical figure does not threaten them with violence or prevent their exercise of religion, they want to make it illegal to annoy them.

They are planning to stage a protest march in London on 18 February, expecting to attract 20,000 to 50,000 people. I hope the number is considerably larger because I am sure as hell going to be there expressing my views as well.

If they get their way, we will undoubtedly be prosecuted as Samizdata's response to this islamo-fascist proposal will be a "Mohammed Picture of the Day", each day and every day until hell freezes over or we run out of server space. Intolerant Islam does not like being annoyed? Well guys, you ain't seen nothing yet, I promise you that. Our Dutch friends at The Amazing Retecool are a fairly good place to start for interesting interpretations of Mohammed's image.

If this ever becomes law and I personally get dragged into court over what Samizdata will most certainly do, rest assured that as we are hosted in the USA we will remain on-line and 'expressive' regardless, even if I have to 'host' myself in the USA a few years earlier that I expected. So to all your intolerant Islamic fascists out there who think it is within your power to silence all the voices you dislike, with all due respect (i.e. none), you are very much mistaken.

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As the years pass, I am finding the term 'terrorist' grating more and more on my sensibilities. While this word might still be useful in some contexts, it has been so abused, mis-applied, mis and over-used that we should mostly just drop it.

As a starter, we are not fighting a war on terrorism. I repeat. We are not fighting a war on terrorism. Yes, that is what I said. There is not and cannot be a 'war' on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic. You do not fight wars on tactics; you use tactics in wars. You fight wars against enemies.

We are not fighting 'terrorists' in Iraq and around the world. We are fighting and killing enemies of our nations and our way of life. 'Enemy' is a good, descriptive and lately underutilized word. It says just what we should mean. An enemy is the guy on the other side who wants to kill you. He is the guy you want to kill first. His use of certain tactics might make you wish his demise all the more, but that is not why you are fighting him. You are fighting him to prevent him from achieving his victory conditions.

When you confound tactics with goals and opponents, you leave yourself wide open to rhetorical traps. Is it a terrorist act if our enemy blows up an Abrams tank with an IED? Was it a terrorist act when we blew up German Tiger tanks in WWII? Of course not. A mine is a weapon. Blowing up material and killing members of the opposition is how you wage war. IED's are part of a tactic which almost any of us would use if we were in a conflict and in a similar position.

Does that statement bother you? If it does, I would ask, "Why?" The enemy in Iraq uses IED's. We are not trying to kill them because they use IED's. An IED is a home-made land-mine. We are out to kill them because they are the enemy and because we are right and they are wrong. The enemy firmly believes they are right: if they did not they would not be dying for their cause. Because of their belief they will apply whatever tools and ideas and strengths they have to killing us. We have the luxury of overwhelming force that allows us the rare in historical annals additional luxury of decrying the use of some tactics. If the idea of making a value judgement in favour of your own beliefs worries you, it is your problem, not mine.

So let us just get on with crushing the enemy.

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... in October of last year and nothing happened.

So obviously it took a while for the people who wanted to blow this up some time to get all those highly inflammable Danish flags made and organise the outrage. Maybe we are looking in all the wrong places for the people behind this. Radical Islamic clerics? Nah, it was all a conspiracy by Middle Eastern flag makers.

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Tehran, Feb.05 (ISNA)-Following the insults of some western countries' media to Holy Prophet of Islam, Iran's President, Dr. Ahmadi Nejad ordered Commerce Minister to set up a council on "reviewing and cancellation of economic contracts and commercial exchanges with these countries".

Excellent! Who needs sanctions when these guys will impose them on themselves. Wow, with enemies like that, who needs friends?

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Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the 'Satanic Cartoons' saga in London earlier today.

click for larger image

The placards read Behead those who insult Islam & Butcher those who mock Islam & Slay those who disrespect Islam etc. etc.

Freedom of expression is quite literally intolerable to them. And we cannot and must not tolerate that. It makes no logical sense to tolerate intolerance.

With thanks to H for the picture

And for those of you who say "It's just a protest"...

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The bizarre desire of Islamists to prolong the Jyllands-Posten 'Satanic Cartoon' saga has now escalated the whole issue and caused French newspaper France Soir to join the fight for freedom of expression and also republish the offending cartoons.

To quote what a commenter called Max wrote in an earlier article here on Samizdata whilst arguing with an outraged Muslim commenter:

The truth is that what Jyllands-Posten did was intended to prove that secular western values in Denmark have not been eroded by alien Islamic values. It worked and they won and by not letting it drop, muslims around the world are well on the way to turning a tactical success by an obscure danish newspaper into a glorious triumph for enlightenment values.

It was an act of will by which these Danes defended their values against yours. That you cannot even see you have fallen into a trap that bites harder the more you fight against it is a measure of the irrationality of your position.

Aux armes, mes amis!

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The Big Pharoah has some rather rational things to say about the 'Satanic Cartoons'.

The reaction of the Arab/Muslim public points out the fact that we still do not know what a free press is. In our countries, we are used to see total government control over the media. Even our so called independent media (Al Jazeerah, Al Arabiyah, etc) are linked to one government or another.

[...]

I can't end the post without saying: when will we grow up?? The Da Vinci Code did not harm Christianity, 12 cartoons won't harm Islam either!!

Indeed.

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The story of the satirical pictures of the Prophet Muhammed published by Jyllands-Posten just refuses to die away. I first posted an article about this on 12 November 2005, followed by another on 9 December 2005, indirectly on 10 December 2005 and finally on 23 December 2005 [with a picture of the cartoons].

Usually, a week or so after an article has appeared on Samizdata.net and fallen off the front page, comments pretty much drop to zero 99% of the time. Yet there has been a steady trickle of comments still coming in, presumably via Google hits.

For the most part what is so interesting is what a complete non-meeting of minds these comments represent and they fall into three broad categories:

1. Muslims who simply cannot conceive of tolerating people disrespecting their beliefs. Many seem to claim that disrespecting Muhammed is not 'free speech' at all (in which case quite what they mean by the words "free speech" is unclear)


2. People who just loath Muslims and like the cartoons for no other reason than it upsets them


3. People who understand that free speech means tolerating others saying things you do not agree with and which may upset you

I like to think that if I went to a Muslim site and left a comment, I would at least make some attempt to phrase my remarks in language that at least tried to address the manifest axioms of the readers, even if I intended to challenge those axioms.

Yet to all intent and purposes, this might as well be a 'dialogue' between different species. It really does seem to be a dialogue of the deaf. The internet is awash with anti-Christian images, or ones that make profane use of Christian imagery that many would find offensive and yet do you see many vocal Christians getting so bent out of shape about it that they call for temporal 'punishment' for the people expressing those views? No. Most have the maturity to just say "Oh, another one of those daft atheists/agnostics" and keep moving, not accepting what they see but tolerating its expression just as most atheists generally tolerate expressions of religion they may find offensive (provided they are not being asked to pay for it) without actually accepting there is any truth to them. But what is it about the Muslim psyche that makes the contempt of others who do not share their beliefs so intolerable?

By the way, here is a better link to the 'satanic cartoons' so you can see what all the fuss is about.

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Sometimes people are shown ink blots in the hope of finding clues as to their mental characteristics. If the ink blots remind you of the 'wrong' things then you may have problems.

However, a different form of "ink blot madness" has been doing the rounds for some time: The ink blot strategy.

The ink blot strategy holds that the British won in Malaya (now Malaysia and the independent city state of Singapore) not by killing, capturing or driving out the communists, but by taking bits of Malaya and making life "so good" in these bits that people "did not want to fight the British any more" and then expanding these bits "like ink blots". By copying this strategy we can all win in Iraq - or so it is claimed.

There are various problems with this idea. Firstly it is not what the British army did in Malaya - whatever some people may say they did. In reality the men went out and fought the enemy (in the jungle or elsewhere). Certainly there were 'protected villages' and so on, but Malaya was a fight (it was not a welfare project).

Further the British did not give vast amounts of aid to Malaya. Britain did not have this sort of money to give away in the early 1950's and it would not have really improved economic life anyway (more on that below). In so far as economic life did improve in Malaya during the "Emergency" British aid was not the real reason.

And, of course, the (mostly ethnic Chinese) communists in Malays were not fighting for "better socio-economic conditions" anyway - they were fighting for communism (hint, that is why they were called 'communists'). Try asking someone who knows something about Vietnam how all the welfare statism there did not make the VC or NVA vanish (nor was 'support' for them among civilians based upon poor social or economic conditions, such support was based on terror - you helped the communists or you and your family would be killed)

How can someone be so plain daft as to suppose that the reason someone becomes a suicide bomber in Iraq (whether they are from Iraq or from outside) is because they turned on the light one day and it did not go on. "Oh if only the electricity and the water supply worked better, then I would not strap a lot of explosives to myself and go blow up a bus full of school children".

Also physics teaches us that it is less difficult to destroy that to create. The terrorists left undisturbed (under the ink blot strategy) in 'their' bits of Iraq will find it less difficult to come in and blow things up in 'ink blot land' than the U.S. Army (or anyone else) will find it to build nice services.

The ink blots will not 'spread, they will shrink. Going on the defensive is sign that one has no real will to win - and would mean that soldiers being killed would be dying for nothing (as the poltical choice to give up had already been made - sound familar?).

Then there is the assumption that government can make the lives of people Iraq "so good they will not fight", it is not just that the terrorists are fighting because they would like nicer 'public services' (which is absurd), but the whole idea that the government can make so many millions of people have such happy lives.

One does not have to a libertarian to see the absurdity of this idea. The government can not (for example) make the lives of Compton in greater Los Angeles. "So good they will not want to fight" (after so many decades of welfare schemes and 'urban renewal' schemes) - so how is going to that in Iraq?

Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war, the 'ink blot strategy' is stupid. And whoever the military officers and politicans who are behind may be, it is time they shut up. If the war is justified then fighting should continue (i.e. the enemy, especially the leadership, should be hunted down and killed or caputured), and if the war is not justified then the troops should come home.

But there is no 'socio-economic road' to victory.

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It is a given in Middle Eastern politics that whenever a politician is feeling the heat, the default tactic for distracting people from whatever woes are pissing them off is to start throwing wild accusations at Israel. For extra added points they can even accuse the 'Zionist entity' of whatever it is that you are in fact doing.

Given that Israel had the opportunity to kill Yassir Arafat a thousand times over once he became a (more or less) regular political figure with a regular address in Palestine and a daily routine, for Assad of Syria to start suddenly claiming that Israel assassinated Arafat, a man who was well known to be sick and old and who was really an increasingly irrelevant figure towards the end, strikes me as the sort of thing that would be done by a man who is frantically looking to divert attention away from something else (like maybe his propensity to bump people off in Lebanon).

The Israelis are usually pretty upfront about their willingness to conduct assassination against their enemies, so perhaps it is time the Israeli airforce paid Assad a visit and when asked why they killed him, they should reply "Why not? We wanted to give folks in Lebanon something to smile about and in any case we would have been accused of killing him anyway regardless of how he eventually snuffed it".

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I spotted this in a Jane's newsletter:

"Crash wipes out IRGC ground forces leadership". A civil-registered Dassault Falcon 20E VIP business jet operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) crashed on 9 January killing the crew and much of the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Ground Forces. [Jane's Defence Weekly- first posted to http://jdw.janes.com, 13 January 2006]

I feel soooo bad!

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There is an article by Simon Heffer with the simple title of Doing nothing in Iran is not an option which seems to be stating the obvious to me. Given the leadership of Iran are self-declared apocalypse enthusiasts, I for one do not regard just waiting until Tel Aviv gets nuked as acceptable and I rather suspect the Israelis heartily concur. The shit is going to hit the fan soon, that much is certain and no amount of risible European diplomacy will change that.

As for something that could be done more or less immediately, it was gratifying to see Mark Steyn has come around to my view on how to apply pressure in ways that might really destabilise this regime... do to the Iranians security services exactly what they are doing to British troops in Southern Iraq: fight a proxy war with them, only do it openly and without apology.

Fact is, Britain is already at war with Iranian backed forced in Iraq and has been for months. So the government just needs to take this to its logical conclusion and escalate the war so that the Iranian state finds itself at war with British backed Iranian insurgent forces in Iran. It is not like there is any shortage of Iranians who want to be rid of their theocratic nutters. Sounds like a nice convergence of interests to me.

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U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.

I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.

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Iran made another step forwards towards its long held goal of obtaining nuclear weapons yesterday by restarting its uranium enrichment program.

While Iran's long term strategic goal is quite possibly insane, it must be conceded from a Realpolitik perspective that Iran is playing a very strong hand, and their tactical moves are precise and well executed.

For Iran has played the Europeans charged with negotiating them out of their nuclear ambitions with finesse and skill. While some European figures, such as the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have talked a good game about bringing Iran before the United Nations, others are taking measures to ensure talking is as far as it goes.

Thus, even as Iran announced plans to break the IAEA seals on the centrifuges of its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, Austrian Chancellor (and temporary president of the European Union) Wolfgang Schüssel warned that it would be premature to discuss sanctions. Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, added that "every effort must be made to convince the Iranians to return to the previous situation, to negotiations." Mr. Solana's idea of getting tough with the Iranians is apparently to beg them to show up for lunch.

Of course, the real negotiating tool is the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force. With American troops still in Iraq, Iran knows that it has to tread warily, but the cunning men in Tehran may well be counting that the US will not feel able to take decisive action before the 2008 Presidential elections change the political landscape in a possibly decisive way.

I personally am very pessimistic about these developments.

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I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.

Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):

If Salman Rushdie wrote the 'Satanic Verses' and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the 'Satanic Cartoons'.

Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.

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There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran's bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.

Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.

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The best possible antidote to ignorant and irrational Indonesian Muslim clerics forcibly imposing Sharia and claiming the tsunami was punishment for women not wearing veils would be for people to respond to their violence in kind and simply run the bastards out of town.

The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.

This is an encouraging start but they need to get rather more serious than flicking a few cigarettes at them.

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Michael Totten, who has clearly been having some interesting times in Lebanon, has a fascinating article in LA Weekly about his first hand experiences attending a Hezbollah event as the 'Party of God' is trying to improve its image in the West.

He does a good job of giving a sense of what these people are like and what their ideal vision of the future would be.

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Officials from the Israeli security services, not usually thought of as the Europhiles' favourite, are apparently in France at the moment advising that country's security services on riot control, following the mass mayhem in France a month ago. It strikes me as rather ironic, given the anti-Israel tilt of French foreign policy in recent years, that the country's leaders are calling for help from Israel. Strange days indeed.

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Spending a few days in Turkey and reading their newspapers makes it very clear that the Kemal Ataturk's vision of a modernising, secular Turkish republic is still very much an ongoing battle. It should also be noted that very few secular Turks seem to be anti-Muslim, they are just pro-secular and as the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey are indeed Muslim (at least nominally), that the whole structure of politics are avowedly secular makes Turkey the front-line on the struggle against Islamist governance.

The news is abuzz with political skirmishes on that subject. Articles in the New Anatolian and Turkish Daily News (no individual article links unfortunately) discuss opposition to some municipalities trying to introduce alcohol serving 'red light districts' and banning its sale elsewhere. As many Turks drink raki (Ataturk's favourite drink in fact), this is not just a matter for tourists.

Other articles tell of five teachers in Mersin being driven from their jobs and moved to different schools after pressure from local imams who were angry they were teaching evolutionary theory, on the grounds they were "destroying the religious beliefs" of children. The teachers' union in Mersin responded furiously that their members have been punished for engaging in "secular, democratic and fact-based teaching".

In another article, retired General Hursit Tolon has said that Turkey is "edging away from secularism, which is the first pre-condition of modernism". He is in the process of forming a new political party to try and combat that drift. He also seems to be saying that "the intervention of the West, the European Union and the USA" are behind many of these problems. Exactly what he means by that I do not know but at least in once sense I suspect he is quite correct, though I do not see a conspiracy at work here (and as I cannot read Turkish, I cannot easily find out precisely what General Tolon means unless some Turkish blogger wants to clue me in) but rather the bull-in-a-china-shop threat springs from the parochial and often simplistic underpinnings of so much of the received wisdom that spews forth from the West.

Obviously the struggle between those who want to see laws enforcing Islamic principles and those who demand Turkey remain a secular state out in the open now. I do not know enough about Turkey to venture an opinion on how strong and coherent the political and social forces are defending secular values but historically the final bulwark against Islamic governance has been the Turkish military, who simply take over via a coup d'etat if it looks like the core principles which Ataturk set out are in danger. The US has a constitution to limit the scope of democratically sanctioned change, but for better or worse the Turks have their military fulfilling that function.

There is nothing wrong with the wishes of the plurality being thwarted if what they want amounts to tyranny, so whilst I deplore the past excesses of the Turkish military, I really have no problem the basic idea of them simply refusing to countenance the end of the secular Turkish republic. Democracy is a tool, nothing more and if a measure of it leads to an increase in liberty (and it usually does), then that is good. But it an excess of it leads to tyranny, no matter how popular that tyranny might be, then some sort of effective check is needed to unalloyed democratic politics. Are the social and political forces of secularism strong enough to survive without that final drastic check on Islamist aspirations? I am certainly not qualified to know but I have not heard that question even being asked by all to many people in the West when the subject of Turkey joining the EU comes up.

Yet should Turkey join the EU, without doubt the democracy fetishists will require the military to entirely step back from any political role and I cannot help wondering if the net result of that will be the inevitable progress towards an impeccably democratic but Islamic Turkish Republic that no longer seperates 'church' and state.

Some said much the same about secular Iraqi Ba'athism being a 'good thing' because it kept the Islamo-fascists at bay in that country, but although previous Turkish military regimes may have been no respecters of humans rights (to say the least), it does not seem to me that secular Turkey circa 2005 is comparable to secular Iraq under the Ba'athists. Yet do you think there is any chance the EU could see a positive role for the institutions in Turkey which simply will not countenance the development of an Islamic state? Not a chance. The great and good that make up Europe's political elite are simply not smart or sophisticated enough to see past the simplistic notion "more democracy always good". And of course given the crazed over-emphasis on the importance of democracy (rather than liberty) in Iraq, much the same can be said of the intelligentsia in the USA.

My brief stay in Turkey and exposure to its English language press gave me a tantalising glimpse of what is going on. However I just do not have enough of a feel for the country to know how things will shake out and it might be interesting to see what the Turkish blogosphere has to say.

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Back in November I commented on how some Islamists in Denmark were getting worked up into a lather over some cartoons run by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in which the prophet Mohammed was portrayed in a less than endearing light.

Well it seems that this story is destined to run and run. People in Srinagar, the largest city in Indian controlled Kashmir, have gone on strike in protest over the Danish cartoons. Now am I the only one who finds this truly bizarre? It is hard to imagine a provincial Danish town, say, Esbjerg, suddenly downing tools to protest a comic saying rude things about Lutheranism in a newspaper in the Indian sub-continent.

Still, it does go to show that there truly is a globalized culture war going on and that is it has nothing to do with the "evil plots of the Bush-Hitler Illuminati". The fact people in Srinagar even know about the Danish cartoons is remarkable. That the Islamists should have taken the bait Jyllands-Posten dangled in front of them is rather splendid because you cannot win a war, cultural or otherwise, by just defending yourself.

And this is a war we can and must win and, best of all, we get to fight it on ground of our own choosing because what the people of Srinagar have shown is that the enemies of open society can be easily goaded. It is not about 'social justice' or 'economic deprivation' or any of those smoke screens generally deployed by the Fisks and Galloways of this world when they make their apologias for Islamo-fascism, it is about confronting a culture of intolerance and refusing to tolerate that.

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The biblical notion of 'an eye for an eye' is still taken seriously in Saudi Arabia. Literally.

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Both of which are generally lacking in the public discourse, on the war in Iraq.

First, Mr. Scott accurately captures the view of Iraq held by the quagmiristas:

I can only imagine the perception that many Americans have of Iraq; some nation in the Middle East where jihadists multiply, the Iraqi security forces resemble the keystone cops, U.S. forces are helpless against roadside bombs, and the situation is so dire that only disengagement can solve the problem.

Sound familiar? It contrasts rather markedly with the data, which Mr. Scott summarizes to paint a picture of an Iraqi insurgency that peaked in the months before last year's Presidential election (and Kerry still couldn't beat Bush!), and is now transitioning from decline to defeat. Interesting stuff, and food for thought.

Its a damned shame you never see anything approaching this level of factual detail and context in the media, and even in most specialty press, accounts of the Iraqi war.

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Somebody with a political axe to grind, or someone who has literally bet their life:

When it comes to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.

The ones with a political axe to grind (and the uninformed who follow their lead) think Iraq is a lost cause or a mistake:

A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.

Those with firsthand knowledge and a stake in the matter believe the contrary:

American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.

I have long believed that, whatever its flaws, the Iraqi campaign is on the road to strategic success. Figuring out who is winning requires that you ask a deceptively simple question: which side is making better progress toward their strategic objectives?

I think the answer is very clear - the US and its allies are making progress toward their strategic objectives, and their Islamist/Baathist enemies are not.

We have removed three potential WMD players (Iraq, Pakistan, Libya) from the scene as a direct or second-order consequence of the Iraqi campaign. We have removed one of the major terror-supporting states (the Saddamite regime) from the picture. We are introducing by far the most democratically accountable government into the Mideast (other than Israel), and are destabilizing the long-term prospects for neighboring dictators who, coincidentally, sponsor terror to one degree or another. We have forced the Islamists to fight in the Mideast, and as a consequence are eroding their support as they do what they do, which is attack civilians. We have badly disrupted international terrorist networks.

As for the Islamists, well, what ground have they gained toward their stated goals of a pan-Arab caliphate, the eradication of Israel, the acquisition of WMDs, or the destabilization of the West?

I don't see any real gains on their side, and I see real progress on ours. Sure, progress has come at a cost, but only the most naive (or those with ulterior motives) would believe that we could neuter the Islamist threat without any missteps or losses.

Those on the front lines think we are winning a fight worth fighting. It is those in the perfumed salons who don't think we are winning, and who don't think the game is worth the candle. I know who I believe.

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Yes, make jokes about it, so says Afshin Ellian, an Iranian dissident.

There are a couple very interesting articles over on the Social Affairs Unit blog about Afshin Ellian. As I have been saying, the voices of intolerance cannot be appeased, they need to be uncompromisingly confronted and ideally they should be confronted not just by secular westerners but by other Muslims.

Okay, so did you hear the one about the Imam, his two wives and a goat...

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Al-Quaeda has called Queen Elizabeth II an "enemy of Islam", not least for her being the ceremonial head of the Church of England. I of course hope that the vast majority of Muslims living in this country do not think the same way. In any event, let's hope Prince Charles takes notice.

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Flemming Rose, an editor from Denmark's largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reacted to news that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children's biography of the Prophet Muhammad, by doing exactly that, putting Denmark's policies of tolerance to the test by commissioning a series of illustrations of Muhammad.

In response thousands of Muslims in Denmark marched in protest demanding the newspaper be "punished", though interestingly an Iranian woman, Nasim Rahnama, has organised counter-protests in support of the editor, managing to secure one hundred and fifty signatures affirming freedom of expression.

As I have mentioned before, when I see more people like the commendable Nasim Rahnama taking a stand then I may conclude that things are improving and perhaps modern Islam is not a blight on any tolerant society it comes into contact with. But as it stands, clearly it is the ignorant bigots who can put the largest mobs on the streets and that is why the actions of editor Flemming Rose need to be strongly applauded. It is hard to overstate the importance of confronting intolerant Islam on a cultural as well as a political level.

So when Muslim scholars attack the newspaper for its cartoons:

Lawyer and author Shirin Ebadi, who received the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her fight for human rights and democracy in Iran, told daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten that its decision to call for and print twelve caricatures of the Muslim prophet might have been a well-intentioned attempt to prompt a dialogue on democracy between Muslims and non-Muslims in Denmark. The effect, however, had been the opposite, and in fact risked harming democracy's cause in Islamic countries. 'I would like to stress that I do not personally have any problems with cartoons like these,' said Ebadi, who is a devout Muslim. 'The problem is the way the subject is approached. It splits more than it unites.'

But that is exactly the point: it is intended to 'split' rather than 'unite' and the importance of unity is vastly overrated. No one who values tolerant pluralistic western values should be seeking some sort of compromise with bigotry. There should be no attempt to 'unite' with the people who marched in Denmark demanding the government 'punish' Jyllands-Posten, in fact they must be confronted.

And please, the scholar is making a category error because it has nothing to do with 'democracy'. Even if a democratic majority do not want to see cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad appear in the newspapers, it is still wrong to try and use the force of law to prevent it. Dislike the idea? Fine, do not buy the damn newspaper. The issue here is liberty and democracy is far from a synonym for that.

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I was about to make this a Samizdata quote of the day, but Scott got there first:

One way in which consensus opinion changes is when scattered individuals become aware that many others share their opinions.

That is our own Natalie Solent reflecting on some comments at the BBC.

Of which this was one, from Chadi Bou Habib of Beirut:

I lived in France for 8 years and I have never understood why the "youths" deal with "social problems" only through riots. Until one day, I was admitted in a meeting of a so-called "cultural association" subsidized by the local council. A Muslim "brother" talked for about an hour on the difference between "us" and "them", to conclude that whatever we do to "them" is of god's will, a kind of Jihad. Well, the French authorities should start inquiring on the kind of "culture" they are subsidizing.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn has this to say about Prince Charles and his ill-timed efforts to get the Americans to stop being beastly to the Muslims:

Having followed the last Prince of Wales in his taste for older divorcées, His Royal Highness seems to be emulating Edward VIII on the geopolitical front, too, and carelessly aligning himself with the wrong side on the central challenge of the age.

Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened rioters with prison sentences. But this evening a BBC TV reporter ended his report from riotous Paris by saying that the Muslim Parisians who have been chucking bricks at the gendarmerie and torching cars say that the cause of the rioting is Nicolas Sarkozy with his hostile and unfeeling attitude, and that he should say he is sorry.

Quite so. The cheek of the man. Anyone would think that those rioters were breaking the law.

I guess Chadi Bou Habib has a bit more commenting to do.

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As I have mentioned before, I am weary of the endless programmes going out seeking to show that Islam in Britain is peachy and they are 'just like us'. I do not want to see communal tensions raised either but enough with the damn propaganda.

But what really annoys the hell out of me is when I read yesterday that Prince Charles intends to lecture President Bush and other Americans on how they need to take Islam more seriously and be less 'confrontational'. Oh that is going to down just splendidly. We have heard this before from Charles closer to home and my view has always been that as Britain is an overwhelmingly secular country and most tend not to take Christianity all that seriously, he has got to be joking if he thinks all too many people give a rats arse about what Islam has to offer global civilisation.

The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths. The Prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington. "I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational," the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

And when I regularly read Muslims standing up and openly repudiating putting apostates and homosexuals to death, perhaps I will conclude Islam might be anything other than a blight on any tolerant culture. Oh and please, spare me the tales of how historically 'tolerant' Islam can be because it is only tolerant on its own very narrow terms.

It used to be that many Christians would burn or hang 'witches', slaughter those who did not share their denomination and kill scientific free thinkers. All of those things were done based on biblical justifications, some convoluted and other much less so.

Yet you would be hard pressed to find a Christian who would regard going back to that as desirable and I doubt many would have a problem if someone stood up and said "Yes, I know it says in the Bible that we should kill witches or people who use 'evil magic', but that's barbaric nonsense and we just do not tolerate that sort of stuff any more". Of course no one needs to stand up and say that because it goes without saying.

And when I hear lots of Muslims say "yes I know it says in the Koran that the penalty for turning your back on Islam is death, but that is barbaric nonsense and we just will not tolerate that sort of stuff any more", then, and only then, will I think that Prince Charles is anything other than a fool for suggesting modern Islam could possibly be an overall force for good. I am not a Christian any more but I do not keep looking over my shoulder for a Jesuit with a garrotte sneaking up behind me because I dared to publicly state that fact. Ex-Muslims should feel just as free as I do to publicly repudiate their religion if that is their wish, even if there are social consequences for them in their narrower community.

Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, was also at the meeting at St James's Palace. "His criticism of America was a general one of the Americans not having the appreciation we have for Islam and its culture," he said.

I have news for Khalid, it is not just Americans who do not have much 'appreciation' for Islamic culture. Many aspects of Islamic culture are not something with which people who value tolerance and pluralism should be trying to reach an accommodation. You cannot compromise with something that is inimical and there is nothing illogical about refusing to tolerate the practice of a creed in a way that requires intolerance.

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Yesterday I got into conversation with two sibling members of my family, both of whom are opposed to the US invasion/liberation of Iraq. One is (approximately) an environmentalist, the other is (precisely speaking) a UKIPper, but both are agreed in opposing the war and Britain's involvement in it. I am cautiously and pessimistically supportive, but am not sure. I hope Mark Steyn is right about it, but fear that he may not be.

Anyway, an hypothesis about the state of US public opinion surfaced, as interesting hypotheses will when people who disagree, and who hence bring varied ideas and attitudes to the table, but who wish to remain civil with one another, as I and my siblings do.

For the last few years, the Left in the USA has been saying: It's all about oil, it's all about oil. Now for many Americans, and for most people outside America, fighting a war for mere oil is evil. But what if lots of Americans hear that this war is all about oil, and are pleased? But what if the dime has now finally dropped that actually this war is NOT all about oil?

Could that be what Middle America is getting nervous about? For as long as they were convinced that it was all about oil, they were content. That is our kind of war. Simple, limited, clear, selfish. All the things you want, and not like Vietnam at all. But now that it is dawning on them that this really is about "democracy" and such like, for that exact reason they are getting fidgety. Will it be worth it? When will it end? Where will it end? etc.

It would be entertaining to think that the American Left have been the most energetic de facto supporters of President Bush because of what they regarded as their fiercest criticism of him, but that now that the Left is being defeated in the argument about the true nature and true purpose of the war by the war's most energetic supporters, support for that war is, as a direct result, eroding.

One should probably not be looking for entertainment in such serious things, but, entertainment aside, is this not a rather interesting way of looking at it? I am sure that this theory does not apply to all American supporters or ex-supporters of the war. But to some, maybe?

No links in this I am afraid. I do not recall hearing anyone else saying anything quite like this, although some surely have.

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An Algerian man was arrested and put on trial in Belfast. We hope the evidence they have is of more substance than the mere presence of 25 disks of downloaded information on explosives. If that were ever to become a definition of crime in and of itself, I fear every technically inclined 14 year old in the Anglosphere would soon be imprisoned.

The defendant was living not far from a neighborhood controlled by Protestant Paramilitaries, most likely due to the presence of cheap housing.

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James Waterton takes a look at the Middle East and comes up with some conclusions that you may or may not agree with, but all of which are certainly worth examining

It is arguable that securing energy supplies is the most important single challenge within the international security agenda. Entire foreign policies are based around this aim, and nations are constantly jostling to cut deals – in all sorts of ways and often at the expense of others – with energy suppliers, private and governmental. It is hardly surprising, for energy drives our modern economies and is an indivisible component of economic and social growth. The recent war in Iraq and the continuing upheaval in that country is a prime example of an attempt to secure energy supplies. Certainly, stating that Iraq was a "war for oil" is a gross simplification. However, the Middle East is strategic primarily for its energy reserves, and thus it is certainly in the world’s interest to promote a stable Middle East. Such an aim has been a central plank of the foreign policy of every major world power for decades. Of late, however, the developed world has become increasingly engaged in the Middle East – with the overarching aim of securing energy supplies. This has inflamed cultural and often geopolitical tensions, arguably culminating in the current "War on Terror" scenario. I will examine some of the forces at play in the Middle East relevant to global energy supply, and attempt to provide a solution to the energy supply challenges faced today. The West must play the leading role in this envisaged solution, not just because it is most able to; it has the most to gain by determining the solution to the world’s energy supply problems. It can secure its comfortable, energy-reliant way of life into the distant future, as well as making for more peaceful global relations.

Western involvement in the Middle East stretches back long before the existence of the concept of "The West" itself. Obviously, this history impacts on events today, however plenty has been written about that and I don't want to dwell on it here. In the place of historical analysis, I will state the obvious and highlight the Middle East’s current strategic importance. At the end of 2003, it contained well over half of the world’s known reserves of crude oil. Crude oil is humankind’s most important, widely used and versatile energy source, and it is the largest selling commodity in the world by value of sales. Saudi Arabia, the nation with the largest reserves of crude oil in the world, sits on approximately a quarter of known reserves. Following Saudi Arabia (in descending order of size of reserves) is Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. These four nations contain approximately 40% of the world’s known reserves of crude oil between them.

I briefly mentioned the conflict in Iraq above. Whilst it is too soon to say the Coalition’s mission there has failed, it is surely safe to assert that events are not unfolding in a way the architects of this war had hoped. The predominantly American occupation of Iraq could conceivably still "win the peace", however it seems less and less likely that the post-Saddam Iraq will resemble the model the United States was hoping for. When the Iraqi occupation ends, Iraq is supposed to be a democratic, liberal, Western-friendly, human rights respecting nation that will hopefully spread these values to its neighbours. It is supposed to be a pacifying keystone in the Middle East. The removal of Saddam Hussein was supposed to defuse much of the tension in the region. None of these objectives have been achieved yet. A hideous tyrant who oppressed the majority in his country to keep cultural tensions at bay and shore up his regime has been toppled.

However, the removal of his iron fist has caused an explosion of ethnic-based insurgency. This may yet be quelled, however the salient fact is that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq is taking place at phenomenally vast expense – borne by the American taxpayer, mainly. As of this moment, the American government had spent over US$200 billion on the war and occupation, and much more is required. The question must be asked; is it worth the cost? The Iraqi lesson is providing the answer, and that is almost certainly no. The military might of the United States could undoubtedly conquer all the armies of the entire Middle East if the US desired, but the Coalition of the Willing is struggling to administer one Arab nation. Even after all the blood that has been spilled and the money that has been spent, it is still possible that a post-occupation Iraq will become a more dangerous entity than the pre-occupation Iraq.

The Western world’s need for crude oil has required it to act amorally to ensure supply. It has, over the years, acquired some strange and ugly bedfellows to ensure this goal. The West’s shameful partners include the House of Sa’ud, which most notably enforces dark-age levels of freedom on half its population, amongst other abominable human rights breaches; Saddam Hussein, who was arguably the most brutal dictator of the last three decades; and the Shah of Iran, who was not particularly far behind Mr Hussein. There is a moral imperative for Western democracies to stop supporting regimes of these flavours. However, the experiment in direct intervention to bring about change in the Middle East has failed on economic grounds, despite the fact that it is too soon to call the mission itself a failure. A tactical shift is required.

The solution is clear – the Western democracies must disengage from the Middle East – militarily, politically, economically. This means that the West needs to wean itself off the Middle East’s trump card; its crude oil. This is obviously a transitional process that would take some years, but it is necessary that the process commences soon. Obviously, we need to get our energy from somewhere. Alternatives must be developed, however we need to be clear-headed about the nature of these alternatives. Realistically, it must be expected that in the medium term our reliance on fossil fuels will continue. However, governments need to encourage development of fossil fuel alternatives to Middle Eastern crude, and development in the long term of more sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels in general. A two-pronged strategy is required that would use strategic total tax breaks on certain types of research and development efforts, as well as on investment to create production and distribution of the new sources of energy.

The first prong in the strategy involves developing alternative fossil fuel sources. Tax breaks should be introduced to cover exploration for crude in Western countries and countries friendly to the West. Also, tax breaks should extend to funding development of huge alternative fossil fuel deposits such as the Canadian tar sands. The Canadian tar sands hold a phenomenal amount of recoverable tar that can be converted into synthetic crude, and thus other petroleum products. The University of Alberta claims that there are 1.7 trillion barrels of oil locked up in the sands. Using current technology, it is claimed that 265.5 billion barrels of oil (To put that figure into perspective, Saudi Arabia at the end of 2003 held 262.7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves) is accessible. Currently, the process is more expensive than, and not as clean as, oil extraction in the Middle East. However, research and development into harvesting a greater percentage of the tar sands more efficiently and cleanly should narrow the gap. Research and development into crude oil extraction has developed new techniques that have made previously exhausted oil wells produce again and previously inaccessible oil fields viable, so expecting that more research and development into mining the tar sands will lead to more effective exploitation is hardly a flight of fancy. Harvesting tar sands is a technique that is still in relative infancy, and producing synthetic crude from them is becoming cheaper and cleaner. This process needs to be sped up by the strategic application of tax breaks, which should also apply to money invested in large scale production and distribution infrastructure to markets around the world. The second prong in the strategy involves a longer timeframe.

In my opinion, the most plausible sustainable alternatives rest on technology we already possess – nuclear energy for fixed energy consumers and hydrogen fuel for mobile appliances such as automobiles. Hydrogen 'fuel cell' technology (pdf document) is in a relatively advanced stage of development, however rolling out the comprehensive infrastructure to transport and store hydrogen at all places where automobiles venture will take a great deal of time, and this is the major challenge. Converting water to hydrogen is also quite an energy intensive process, and further research and development is required to reduce the cost of this. However, emission-free nuclear energy can be utilised for this purpose. Australia and Canada already have enormous reserves of radioactive commodities, and we have barely started exploration for radioactive elements like uranium in earnest – due to a relative lack of demand. Uranium is a very common commodity.

Disengaging from the Middle East could potentially solve a great many problems for the Western world. Disengaging is one matter, however it would be unfair – and possibly counterproductive - for the West to quarantine the Middle East. Disengagement should result from a campaign of incentives to reduce demand for Middle Eastern oil, rather than coercive measures to stifle Western economic activity in the Middle East and vice versa. The West should still trade with the Middle East if parties from both regions are consenting. However, oil would not be required by us. The West becoming more self-reliant in energy would conceivably lower prices. If, for example, the Western world started relying on its own fields and alternative fossil fuel sources like the Canadian tar sands, the power of the OPEC cartel would dissolve. OPEC has constantly put upward pressure on the price of crude oil since its inception. It is estimated that over the last three decades since the energy crisis of 1973, OPEC has artificially diverted 7 trillion dollars from American oil consumers to oil producers through its quota programmes. Also, it is worth considering that prices are also influenced by perceptions of supply, not just supply itself. If consumers, traders and speculators alike believed there was a strong programme afoot to bring the oil age to a close, this expectation would put downward pressure on the oil price. The economic boon of lower energy prices is not the only drawcard of disengagement. Many of the so-called "root causes" of Islamic extremism – as laid out by extremists and various commentators in the West – would disappear, for example. Islamic extremists have made it clear that they do not appreciate the presence of Westerners or Western icons in their homelands. A Western exit from the Middle East should placate many who seethe at the thought of infidels in the holy lands.

There are complications here – such as whether those willing to resort to terror to achieve their sometimes ambiguous aims – will "move the goalposts" and discover new objectives. It may well redefine the War on Terror. If we do withdraw from the lands of the terrorists and terrorism ceases to be an issue, then great. They can go their way, and we ours. If, as I suspect, the terror organisations simply change their demands, their true objections will hove into view. It will be impossible to assert (sanely) that we are not facing an implacable enemy whose target is our way of life. It will be a sign that we need to get serious in our struggle against those who wish to construct the international caliphate - the Clash of Civilisations is real. It will also mean that the endgame is in sight.

Israel is another complication - it is only useful to the West whilst the Middle East is strategic, yet we have a duty to protect it. Having said that, there is no reason why we should continue to prop it up with aid and treat it as a special case diplomatically if the Middle East stops being an energy source. Perhaps the USA could simply mention that Israel falls under its nuclear umbrella. That should be enough to deter any would-be aggressors, in the event that Israel's own nuclear deterrent is not sufficient. Anyway, the chance of Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists driving Israelis into the sea seems incredibly far fetched, given the above scenario. An Arabia bereft of petrodollars is hardly going to be in a position to wage effective war on a military tour de force like Israel, which - despite its current reliance on American aid - could easily stand on its own two feet economically.

An organised disengagement from the Middle East makes sense to me. I am trying to determine whose interests run against such a plan. Not big oil - most Middle Eastern oil is pumped by state owned juggernauts like Saudi's Aramco - surely the biggest company in the world by any measure. Big oil should love tax breaks on exploration. The major losers are clearly the Middle Eastern states with their undiversified economies. Most would, in a few years of no oil revenue, be plumbing the depths of penury alongside Africa. Perhaps the military industrial complex might have objections? Any ideas?

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I have no idea how events in Iraq will eventually play out. I fervently hope that this tortured country can move to a more peaceful direction but the current violence and mayhem makes such a prospect seem pretty distant. One thing that has always struck me is how Saddam has never gotten sufficient blame for bringing the current mayhem on to his own country. So it is interesting to read this smart passage by Russell Roberts over at the Cafe Hayek blog:

I don't understand how the failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes the war unjustified. It's not like Bush made up the idea of WMD. Saddam Hussein is the guy you ought to be mad at. Saddam Hussein acted as if he had or was working on nuclear capability. He's the guy who employed nuclear scientists. He's the guy who convinced the UN that he wanted nukes. He's the guy who resisted weapons inspections. He's the guy who said you can look over here but not over there. Why did he do all these things? Either because he actually had nuclear capability or was close to it, or because he wanted to fool people into thinking he was more important than he was. He managed to fool Bill Clinton, the United Nations, George Bush and Israel into thinking he had a desire for WMD. It appears now to have been something of a ruse. Probably. Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don't think so. That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama. His talk wasn't cheap.

Exactly. 20/20 hindsight is all very well, but it is not much use in making credible foreign policy.

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So the Iranian government is assisting insurgent to attack British troops in Iraq. No real surprise there, methinks.

However Tony Blair 'warning' the Iranians with remarks like...

I want to be very, very clear about this - the British forces are in Iraq under a United Nations mandate. There is no justification for Iran or any other country to interfere in Iraq.

... exactly what sort of response from Iran, other than a blanket denial, does he expect? Sack your advisers Tony and try something along the lines of:

Dear Mr. Ahmadinezhad,

I assume it has not escaped your notice but there are quite a few people in your country who hate you and we don't much care for you either. Lots of Iranians want a secular government and seeing as how you are peeing on our parade in Iraq, one good turn deserves another. We will be sending SAS teams to train, assist and supply pretty much anyone in Iran who wants to oppose you. If you want to reach an accomodation with us before one of your fellow countrymen puts a bomb, that we supplied, under your car, well, you know where to find us.

Tony

The trick here is not to do it covertly but to be quite open about it and why it is being done. I rather doubt he has the stones for such an approach, but hey, Blair has surprised me in the past.

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Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:

Alas, the United Kingdom's descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and "pig-related items" will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee's box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?

I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed - key qualification - to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker's coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don't demand that people remove expressions such as "For God's Sake" or "Heaven Help Us" from their vocabulary.

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Some of Britain's problems right now in Basra are a consequence of the absurdity of Muqtada al Sadr still walking around when killing him last year would have been clearly legitimate and just a damn good idea. At the very least he should be sitting in a prison cell. This is not an election campaign, it is an insurgency and the US missed a big opportunity to 'retire' Sadr when his militia previously fought against the allied armies.

When I called for 'no pussyfooting around', I was just suggesting that when an Iraqi faction shoots at British soldiers or throws petrol bombs at them, the respsonce should not be to just 'contain' it or to 'negotiate' with the faction responsible (at least not until much later after it has been suitably knocked down to size), no, it should be to use all the force at their disposal to try and cut that faction to pieces. Moreover, it should result in significent reinforcements being sent to give UK forces more options.

People like Sadr will use violence only if they think using violence will gain them a political advantage at a tolerable cost... so the trick is to make the cost intolerable. It is crazy to give such people a 'second chance' during an active insurgency as clearly all Sadr has done is use the time since he last took on the occupying powers to rebuild his power base. No, just treat the guy like the Islamo-fascist he is, put a bullet through his head and make it clear that hard line Islamists militias will not be tolerated in the Iraq.

So if local administration in Basra were truly considering handing British soldiers over to Sadr's militia, then they need to be dragged into the nearest HQ and told if they plan on growing old, that sort of behaviour is a very bad idea. Far from giving them an apology that those undercover SAS man were free by force, they should be told to 'get stuffed' and expect more of the same if they prove by their actions that they are the enemy.

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If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further... by the British army.

Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.

If Britain's government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail... or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?

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According to the SMCCDI, the Iranian government is strengthening gender apartheid in that country.

The Islamic republic regime is to apply more discriminatory measures against Iranian women in days ahead. Based on some official reports, the Gender Apartheid policy is to be strengthen and Sexual Segregation to increase in Iran.

The theocratic regime is basing the application of such policy on the strict interpretation of Islamic rules which are dating from 14 centuries ago in the tribal Saudi Arabia which became the cradle of Islam.

Already since three weeks ago, clerics have increased their anti-woman speeches and are using the Fridays' collective prayers in order to mobilize their followers in what has been qualified as "making respect the values of Islam and morality". Members of the brutal Bassij paramilitary force and the feared Islamist Moral Squad have been deployed beside the regular police force and reports of harassment of women, sometimes brutally, are increasing.

It is also apparent many Iranian women will put their lives on the line before accepting their Mullah designated social role as bare-foot and pregnant pleasure machines.

Many Iranian women have burned their mandatory veils in some demos in order to attract the world's attention to their case. They're believed to be the force that will bring down, a day, the Islamic regime and would impact the entire Middle-east.

When the excrement finally does impact the Iranian rotational air moving appliance, I expect the lasses will ensure these 'religious' authority figures wear their testicles about their windpipes rather than their original lower coordinates.

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The fact that the leaders of the Sunni minority oppose a federal structure for Iraq, and have the ability to torpedo the new constitution, does not change the reality on the ground that Iraq is already in effect three nations.

The Kurds in particular have both an effective local administration and by far the best militias to call on if needed. The Kurdish situation is also helped by the fact that it was really the Peshmega who moved into the vacuum and liberated the Kurdish region whilst US and British forces smashed Saddam's armies in the south.

Eventually if the Kurds do not get the autonomy they desire, it is just a matter of time before they simply secede and I rather doubt the US had either the stomach or the inclination to use force to prevent what is a purely internal matter for the Iraqis and Kurds. Any in any case, so what if Iraq breaks up? The obsession with 'stability' and countering Iran is what lead the West to unwisely back Saddam Hussain for so many years and look where that got everyone in the end.

An independent Kurdish Northern Iraq may give the Turks cause to fret (unfortunate but them's the breaks) and give Iran acute dyspepsia (which has to be a good thing) because Kurdish success in Iraq will no doubt give the Kurdish minorities elsewhere ideas above their station. However I fail to see how thwarting long standing Kurdish aspirations is in the interests of the US and UK, particularly as the Kurds have been quite amenable to US interests as of late and have shown themselves to be the sharpest operators.

Of course the prospect of a Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Southern Iraq is not very agreeable but it at least has the virtue of allowing more tailored pressures to be put on the three constituent parts of 'Iraq' rather than a probably futile one-size-fits-all constitution which in any case may fall apart as soon as western forces pull out.

An Iraq of highly autonomous cantons is probably the best that Iraq's Sunni politicos have any right to expect because the alternative is never going to be a return to the 'good old days' of Sunni dominance and centralised rule from Baghdad, it is going to be splitting the county in three independent parts. And there is something to be said for that anyway. To hell with 'nation building'... sometimes the cause of liberty (and probably long term stability too) may be served by a bit of 'nation wrecking'.

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I had never heard the word blogger until May 25 . But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media.
- Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist.

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I am sure many of you have heard the joke: An Arab meets one of the screenwriters from Star Trek and says "Hey, how come there are no Muslims on the Starship Enterprise?" The screenwriter replies "Because the story is set in the future."

But many of the most puritanical and intolerant Muslims have their eyes very much on the future. Over on the Social Affairs Unit's blog, William Ridgeway has writen an interesting piece called "Those Drunken, Whoring Saudis: Desert Islam's problem with women":

Encroaching modernity has resulted in an increase in the place and power of Desert Islam in everyday society. Contrary to widespread Western beliefs about the trajectory of the Middle East as a hesitant but inevitable climb to liberal democracy, the region is actually going the other way – fast. Academics call this "Islamicisation", the spread of radical Shi'a and Wahhabi beliefs and practices throughout the region. Because of this trend, the Middle East one sees nowadays is nothing like it was, say, fifty years ago. Around the 1950s, about the time oil was being discovered in the Gulf, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal by today's standards. Alcohol flowed freely, women went uncovered and there was lively public debate about "Ataturk's way", the separation of Islam and state, modernisation, and dialogue with the West. The Middle East seemed to be going in the right direction.

Saudi oil changed all that.

I still think in the long run secular western civilisation will crush radical Islam under its sheer weight but it is an interesting article. Read the whole thing.

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The Independent (or 'Al-Independent' as some of us like to call that bastion of Islamo-fascist apologists) has an article predicting nothing less than a full blown domestic Islamic insurgency in Britain.

Whilst clearly we have a problem, I really do not buy The Independent's scenario as presented, implying that the 100,000 or so "totally militarised" Muslims in Britain from various hotspots are just raring and ready to make large parts of the country into no-go areas. However I guess we will know who is correct soon enough.

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Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic.

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Robert Alderson writes about what Islam really needs and has an interesting idea how to nudge things along

In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand - just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible.

I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the 'Arab Street' The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them.

The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions - straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago.

The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion.

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Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:

Senior Muslims have warned the Government that it needed to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to the violence. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq. He described the July 7 bombings and the attempted attacks in London on Thursday as "horrifying" but said it was not enough to simply unite in condemnation of the bombers.

People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an 'anti', make no mistake, what these 'senior Muslims' are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up.

And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:

we know this wasn't a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it's urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.

He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the 'underlying factor' that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of 'moderate' Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word 'but...'). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period.

Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

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A figure from the youth wing of the Tory Party, no less, claims that the powers that be need to talk to Muslim extremists in order to bring them into the mainstream political process, otherwise the poor diddums, obviously so sensitive about their plight, might go beserk again and start interrupting our peaceful existence as happened on July 7.

You have got to hand it to the Conservatives. We tend to think of the party as being the party of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Peel. It is also, as this moron demonstrates, the party of Neville Chamberlain.

As I said in a rather angry comment the other day: Britain is a country, not a hotel.

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The Mirror may not be the most august of newspapers but if half of what they are saying is true, this could be very interesting indeed and puts the whole psychological makeup of the 'suicide' bombers in question. Maybe it was not suicide at all!

The evidence is compelling: The terrorists bought return rail tickets, and pay and display car park tickets, before boarding _ a train at Luton for London. None of the men was heard to cry "Allah Akhbar!" - "God is great" - usually screamed by suicide bombers as they detonate their bomb.

Their devices were in large rucksacks which could be easily dumped instead of being strapped to their bodies. They carried wallets containing their driving licences, bank cards and other personal items. Suicide bombers normally strip themselves of identifying material.

So perhaps it was all done with timers and those little terrorist shits were told a porky about exactly when they were going to blow up. If this is true then the more widely this is known, the less likely it will be that non-suicidal Muslim terrorist supporters might not be quite so willing to act as couriers or bomb planters for 'the cause'. Maybe the whole deranged 'Shaheed' thing has rather less resonance with the UK Islamic fringe than we thought. If the facts are correct, it is a pretty compelling interpretation.

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Whilst watching the BBC news' report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi'ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:

Ominously, there are increasing calls for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.

Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as... ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC.

It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves?

Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq 'top down' (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go.

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Sky News and its sister television channel Fox is reporting, along with Channel 4 News, that the bombers last Thursday may heve been killed in the act of detonation. I am watching a police press conference as I write. A number of police raids are going on in Yorkshire, northern England.

I don't believe in the existence of Hell, but if there is such a place, may the mass murderers of last Thursday spend much time in it.

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Charles Moore is one of the finest essayists around, in my view, and hits the mark with one of the sanest, clearest and most honest appraisals of Islam and the United Kingdom I have read for ages.

Go and read the whole thing, like they say.

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Recovering as we still are from Thursday's mass murders in central London, a few questions start to arise. For starters, it seems to me that if, as we are, at war, then the members of Parliament need to be on the same page as far as the defence of this realm is concerned. It does not mean, of course, that MPs should not criticise the conduct of the government's military operations or anything else, but it does mean that MPs should not actively support groups determined to do us harm.

Which brings us to George Galloway. His support for the Iraqi "resistance" (ie, the mixture of Baathist dead-enders and assorted jihadists) is a matter of shameful public record. While not - yet - conclusively proven - there remain serious allegations relating to his financial connections to Saddam Hussein and the Oil For Food Programme. And within hours of the bombings in London, this thug sought to deflect blame from the killings from the monsters who carried them out to the UK government for its overthrow of the Taliban and Hussein.

I am an ardent believer in free speech and I would be the first to defend Galloway's right to say what he wants, no matter how thick or unpleasant. That is a non-negotiable issue for me. It is pretty clear, however, that in the current heightened threat to our national security, that Galloway should be removed from Parliament immediately.

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I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator).

So where did the reference to the "Dick Durbin slanders our boys" come from? Seriously, I'd like to know.

I posted similar thoughts over here.

It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn't overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech.

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Hospital patients here in the UK are occasionally known to get rather tetchy about the waiting times and the bureaucracy. But, thus far at least, none of them has seen fit to take their complaints this far:

Israel says a Palestinian woman arrested carrying explosives at a Gaza checkpoint planned to blow herself up in an Israeli hospital.

Wafa al-Bis, 21, was stopped on her way to receive treatment for burns at the Beersheba hospital which Israel says was her intended target...

In an interview shown on Israeli television, Ms Bis said her "dream was to be a martyr".

Call me old-fashioned but I reckon that even in this crazy, mixed-up world most people making a trip to the hospital dream about leaving it alive.

Still, I am sure things will return to normal the very moment the Palestinians get their own state.

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I am watching the BBC Ten o'clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo.

The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had "achieved neither", she admitted.

"Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people," she said.

The BBC's Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were "immensely risky".

Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush's speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.)

As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which "hate America". As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever.

Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see.

President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month.

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As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam's nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force.

In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam's massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning.

Israel's bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid.

What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog.

But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real.

The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:

Although the alternatives are considerably more costly, deterrence is the riskiest of all the policy options available to the United States. We would be betting that we could deter a man who has proven to be hard (at times impossible) to deter and who seems to believe that if he possessed nuclear weapons, it is the United States that would be deterred... The use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world would be terrible. Their use on the Persian Gulf oil fields; against Tel Aviv, Ankara, Riyadh, or another regional city; or against U.S. military forces in the region is unimaginable... Beyond this, Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons has the potential to push the world into a second Great Depression while killing millions of people.
The Threatening Storm, 2002

The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam's threat was not imminent - though possibly inevitable - there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences.

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The AUT boycott of the Haifa University and the Bar-Ilan University has been joined by many British Universities.

From Harry's Place, who is calling on the dissenting members of AUT not to tear their membership cards but act to reverse the decision:

Haifa University is to be boycotted because Ilan Pappe, who is an anti-Zionist academic there, says that he has come under attack from the university which has thereby infringed his academic freedom. The story is long, involved and complex. But Pappe remains in his job, in spite of the fact that his views are extremely unpopular in Israeli society. Let us hope that the university continues to respect his tenure, as it is now doing.

Bar-Ilan University is to be boycotted because it gives legitimacy to the 'College of Judea and Samaria', which is a settler college in the West Bank.

The Hebrew University is under threat of boycott because it has built a new dorm block on a disputed piece of land.

It is clear that these stories relating to these three universities are excuses for the boycott rather than reasons - the pro-boycotters actually want to boycott all of Israeli academia and are not actually concerned with these particular incidents.

The AUT decision has aroused tremendous opposition, both in Israel and in England. Members of AUT said opponents of the boycott were not permitted to speak at the discussion, and the decision was taken without requesting the universities' response. In addition, doubts were raised about the legality of the decision.

Clive Davis has forwarded me one such sign of the opposition by Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi of St Anthony's College, Oxford, who wrote an open letter to Sally Hunt, the Secretary General of the AUT and bcc'ed to the Guardian, the FT, the NYT and the Jewish Chronicle.

From: Emanuele Ottolenghi
To: sally.hunt@aut.org.uk
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 1:02 PM
Subject: AUT boycott

Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi
The Middle East Centre
St Antony's College
Oxford University
Email: emanuele.ottolenghi@sant.ox.ac.uk

The Foreign Ministry has dissociated itself from the AUT boycott stating:

The fact that the AUT chose to deal with Israel, the only state in the Middle East where there is complete academic freedom for all segments of the population and political streams, is a scandal.

Well said.

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Michael Totten has been putting some rather compelling articles up on his blog from Lebanon. That Michael, who is clearly a 'glow in the dark American', should wander into the 'Hezbollahland' section of Beirut with a camera suggests to me that he has some serious stones.

Make the strangely named 'Spirit of America' Lebanon blog part of your daily bloggage because it is extremely interesting stuff reported from the sharp end... and maybe even drop a dime or two into the plate to help him out.

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A Guardian headline spotted today:

The complete story is here.

Basically, and especially in recent months, things are improving.

The story ends thus:

Six months ago Bradt Travel Guides published what was probably the first postwar guidebook for Baghdad. If you do not enjoy Iraq's capital, at least appreciate the residents, it said.

"They are a justifiably proud people, whose city was the capital of the world when London was an overgrown village and Columbus several centuries away from America.

"War has not destroyed this and western condescension is met with the scorn it deserves."

So, whatever happens, the West is still wrong. It would not be the Guardian if there was no defeat to snatch from the jaws of the victory they dreaded, but are now having to concede.

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Like many others I have been watching events in the Middle East, hoping of the best, and remembering that it could still all turn very nasty, and hoping that the White House has that possibility at the front of its collective mind. So far so obvious, and I for one little to add to such responses as these.

But, it does occur to me that, what with all the agonising about, e.g., what the Syrians will do next, and what with all the pro-warriors crowing about how they must not crow, and the anti-warriors trying to talk their way out of giving President Bush any credit for what is happening, there is one significant consequence of these events which may have escaped immediate and widespread attention.

9/11 was bad, but almost worse was the amount of celebrating about it that seemed to be going on, and presumably was going on, in the Muslim world, and among Muslims generally.

These latest demonstrations have, surely, changed the idea that will from now on be held in the West of popular opinion in the Middle East. For the first time since 9/11, these people no longer look like "these people", that is to say, utterly foreign and barbaric, all either exulting in the deaths of the innocent, or else silently acquiescing to such exultation, out of fear or out of semi-barbarism.

It is not that millions of people of the Middle East have spent the last month marching about with signs saying: "Sorry – We Were Wrong About 9/11 – It Was Horrible And We Should Not Have Celebrated It". It is merely that a whole lot of different people are now getting their faces into our camera lenses and onto our front pages and magazine covers, with messages that we in the West can thoroughly relate to, like: "Let Us Govern Ourselves Intelligently". My particular favourite in this connection was the one that went: "Let Muslims and Christians Unite Against The Syrian Occupier". That sounds very Western to me.

Clearly, "these people" are not all barbarians, and from now on, any Westerners who persist in believing that they are will be in a small minority.

It may well be that this new message is almost as misleading and un-nuanced as the previous one. But it is very different. And in many ways, the big point here is as much the desire to communicate this new and dramatically more West-friendly message as the matter of whether the message itself is completely accurate.

The long term consequences of this different message now emerging from the Middle East are surely huge.

And talking of Muslims and Christians uniting against those damned Syrians, let us also notice that we are surely witnessing a come-back of a kind, and a rather interesting kind, for Arab nationalism.

The problem with Arab nationalism in the past was not so much the nationalism itself, as all the fascistic rubbish that went with it. Now, that same nationalism may soon be seen as having made one vital and positive contribution to the emerging Middle Eastern scene.

Democracy only works well if there is widespread, and preferably almost unanimous, agreement about the boundaries of the democratic entity being argued about. When great chunks of voters would rather be living in a different country, voting about exactly how to govern the one they are currently stuck with has far less appeal. All they will vote for is to get out. Well, the Middle East, thanks to the casualness of a long dead generation of imperialists, was said to be cursed with just such pseudo-nations. Yet for all their recentness and arbitrariness, the boundaries of these states do now seem to mean something to most (definitely not all I do agree) of the people now living in between them. They do seem content to let the boundaries stay as they are, and vote about how each national entity shall be governed, rather than quarrel endlessly about moving the boundaries. Quoth Glenn Reynolds, in the piece linked to above:

Protesters have largely eschewed political or religious divisions, uniting behind the notion of Lebanon as a nation . …

On a more pessimistic note, I think I detected – in a hard copy of The Times which I bought on Monday, to read on the bus – the next mainstream media Iraq meta-story, to replace those damned voters with their inky fingers, to which all regular stories will be subordinated for the next few weeks, months or years, until the next one comes along.

Times links are dodgy and not liked here, so big quote:

SIX weeks ago, full of hope and apprehension, Abdullah Hussein stepped out into the street, braving the threat of bombs, bullets and mortars, to cast his vote in Iraq’s first free election. Now he is wondering what it was all for.

"We risked our lives and we put our families in danger to vote because we believed in a government that could bring us a better future," said the 26-year-old car mechanic, wringing his hands in despair. "But all we've ended up with is a bunch of people fighting over who will get what, just like kids fighting for sweets. Maybe we shouldn't have voted for these people. Maybe we shouldn't have voted at all."

One month after the results of the election were announced, an agreement on a government is yet to be reached and the people who took their lives in their hands to vote are growing disillusioned with their new leaders even before they have had the chance to take power.

Yep, democracy is messy and slow. All that taking-into-account-everyone's-opinions-and-interests crap. Expect a lot more disappointments of democracy reportage of this kind.

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According to the New York Sun, most if not all of the Iranian exile organizations have come together at a Los Angeles meeting.

"After 20 years, this is the first time all Iranians are together," said Sirus Sharafshahi, the owner of a Farsi-language daily newspaper for Iranian expatriates, Sobh Iran (Iran Morning). "We want to tell the administration of the United States, all Iran is together. If you want to change the government, come to us."

Some of the delegates feel the current US diplomatic carrot and stick approach to Iran and its nuclear program are a mistake:

Several attendees at yesterday's meeting of Iranian dissidents said Mr. Bush's decision to back the European approach of offering concessions to Iran was a mistake. A leader of the Iranian Freedom Front, Dariush Hashempour, gave a PowerPoint presentation yesterday that highlighted Mr. Bush's pro-reform remarks in his State of the Union address last month. In an interview, Mr. Hashempour said he was startled by the president's new stance.

"All of a sudden he just flip-flopped and was willing to work with Iran," Mr. Hashempour said. Asked if it was a mistake to try the carrot-and-stick technique the Europeans have advocated, he answered, "Definitely, for any period, even for 10 seconds. ... Their approach not only didn't help, it was a disaster for the last 20 years."

This meeting and sense of co-operation is an important development for pro-freedom Iranians. The words of Benjamin Franklin, "We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately", are as applicable to Iranian Patriots's today as they were to the signers of America's Declaration of Independence two and a quarter hundred years ago.

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Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing me to this horrid little tale:

Reformists Ali al-Demaini, Abdullah al-Hamed and Matruk al-Faleh are also accused of "using Western terminology" in demanding political reforms. They also allegedly questioned the king's role as head of the judiciary.

There is more to it. Much more. The Saudi's have changed trial dates to keep reporters out; they have arrested the defense attorney... read the linked article above for more of the long litany of stupidity.

I really wonder how long these people can survive in the modern world. A friend and sometimes co-worker of mine, a member of the old Hashemite line, does not think the Saud's are among the brightest lights in the Muslim Times Square. This ham-fisted approach to democracy activists seems to show the truth of his belief.

As Glenn and others suggested several years ago, we would all be better off if the cultured and educated Hashemites were once again in charge of Mecca.

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According to a number of articles sent out by the SMCCDI, government forces have touched off riots in a number of locations. Rather than give you news third hand, I will just let you read for yourself:

Violent clashes rock Oshnovieh

Workers peaceful protest turns into clash with security forces

Iranian Teachers Protest Again

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Taylor passed this article about the falling dominoes of the Middle East on to me late last night his time and in the wee hours Zulu here on the right bank of the pond. Articles by Taylor appear here from time to time as well as in a few other publications like WSJ. - ed

Last year I was having a drink with a space guy from the Pentagon and we started talking about the Middle East, Iraq etc etc. He made some comment about the need to 'stabilize the region'. He is a great guy and definitely on the side of the angels but I had to tell him. The strategy is the opposite. Bush wants to destabilize the area. It is the only way there will be change. Stability is what brought us 9/11.

With what has been happening, with elections in the PA, in Iraq, and now in the instability in Lebanon; with the governments of Egypt and Syria floundering about and grasping at straws, the US strategy is beginning to work. It is going to be a long hard slog as our Rummy put it, but there is a sense that the corner has been turned.

You have to give Bush and the neocons credit, after the attack my first instinct was to say that these people deserved to have self government taken away from them. The administration chose the opposite path, they were going to try and inflict real self government on the Muslim and Arab world.

It is an imperfect and messy process and democracy by itself is not necessarily a friend of liberal human rights. Over time, if they keep it up they will soon find themselves practicing some form of grown up politics. That process will eventually dry up the pond of paranoia and rage which the terrorist scum have thrived on for the last three or four decades.

We, less than perfect human beings, make progress in the oddest and least likely ways. The bombs in Tel Aviv and Hilla are not going to stop this process. For the moment give Wolfowitz and the neocons credit, they did not let their anger after the attack blind them to the essential humanity of the Arab and Muslim people. Reagan used to hammer home the idea that Americans and Russian wanted pretty much the same thing, the giant Communist stone was in the way of the Russian people getting it.

The realist move would have been to get even deeper into bed with the Arab and Muslim despots: instead they chose to take a big chance and bet on democracy and on the people. For a while it looked like they would over reached and gone too far. They certainly have got a long ways to go. Today however they deserve a pat on the back.

Bravo Zulu.

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I reckon we ought to be a part of (better somewhat belated than never) this:

An online protest Tuesday of Iran's crackdown against bloggers made an impact – even on Iranian officials.

So says a leader of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the group that organized the effort to decry the jailings of Iranian bloggers Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad.

Reuters on Tuesday reported that Sigarchi was jailed for 14 years on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country's leaders, a move probably linked in part to the timing of the protest, said Curt Hopkins, the committee's director. "I think there's got to be some connection," Hopkins said.

A message left with the Iranian mission to the United Nations was not immediately returned.

Hopkins' group – whose deputy director is Ellen Simonetti, the former Delta Air Lines flight attendant fired over photos of herself in uniform that she posted on her blog – asked those who maintain Web logs to call attention Tuesday to the plight of Iranian bloggers through posting banner ads and contacting government officials.

Some notable members of the blogging community took up the cause. They included Jeff Jarvis, who runs the BuzzMachine site, and Glenn Reynolds, who's behind Instapundit.

Hopkins said the response was just as impressive around the world. Hits on the committee site jumped from a daily average of about 500 to about 3,000 just during the Asian daytime hours. "It's been going like gangbusters," he said. "We've had people from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, and Japan and Russia."

Notice how, what with this being from News.com (www address: news.com.com, which I rather like), it is full of links. Old Media stuff which has merely been shoved online but without links, even to things mentioned in the text with .com in them, or to bloggers that they deign to name, are starting to look, even to a www latecomer like me, very dated.

As for Iran, my understanding of Iran now is that it is rapidly moving towards being a very sensible country, and that a little pressure from outside, of the sort described in this posting, will be all that is required. It only needs for the priests to stop getting above themselves and go back to being priests, and to let politics be done by politicians, with plenty of overlap between these two trades, but nevertheless a distinct separation of realms also.

Any attempt at military conquest from outside is, or at least should be, out of the question. Mind you, it does help that the country next to Iran has been conquered. When that happens, and you then say things like "... out of the question ...", it still causes flutters, even if, like me, you absolutely mean it. They do not know that, is the point. Without the Iraq invasion, the Iranian government would not be nearly so bothered about all this blog chatter. Anyway, it all looks like a situation well worth watching.

I would love to be able to say that I saw this kind of thing coming before Iraq was even invaded, and, looking back to then, I reckon I did. Many of the comments on that posting also look even cleverer now.

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The first Iraqi election, which I gather was to elect delegates to their constitutional convention, went off better than expected, and plenty good enough to go forward. The number being bandied about for turnout nationwide is 60% - higher in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south, lower in the Sunni triangle. This would make it higher than in any US election in recent memory.

At first, I thought the practice of requiring voters to be indelibly marked with purple ink was a major error, as it would target them for terrorist retaliation. As it happened, though, the purple finger has become a symbol of defiance against the killers and hope for the future. The illusion that the various terrorist gangs that roam a few neighborhoods in Iraq have the power to influence the course of this nation may have taken a mortal wound. Terrorism in Iraq has always lacked a popular base to speak of, existing mostly on foreign lifelines from Iran, Syria, and the Western media, but now the isolation of the terrorists from the Iraqis has been vividly displayed.

We don't know who won, of course, but the fact that the Iraqis turned out to elect delegates to a constitutional convention is an enormous positive. Now, I know some find it fashionable to affect a certain ennui toward such bourgeois artifacts as elections and written constitutions, but I regard elections as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a free society, and a written constitution as damn useful sand in the gears of the seemingly inevitable expansion of the state. The Iraqis have taken their first step down the road. Lets hope they make it all the way.

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Iraqis are going to the polls. I hope the whole process goes well. I came across this link here which gives all kinds of information about the election and the participants. Cynics may dismiss the whole process and of course the problems of that tortured country will remain for a long time. As an uncertain supporter of the war to topple Saddam, my main reason for deposing the vile Baathist regime was that its removal was in my view the least-bad option, but the chance of sowing the seeds of liberal democracy in the Middle East was a key bonus. I hope that the citizens of Iraq can start to look forward to a better future.

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And by that question I do not mean 'might they give nukes to Al-Qaeda' or sundry other Islamic loonies, but rather is the claim that they would promptly nuke Israel as fast as they could strap a warhead onto a missile actually credible?

The author of the linked article, Edward Luttwak, is a good but uneven commentator and analyst. His book Coup d'Etat: a practical handbook is probably the definitive 'how to do it' book on the subject... however his prediction on the outcome of the western attacks on Iraq were embarrassingly off-target. Luttwak says that Iranian government figures said:

Some members of the government have even boasted how they would use them: to destroy Israel. "Islam could survive the retaliation," they insist, "but Israel would be gone forever." The thought of ayatollahs with nuclear bombs should terrify everyone – especially in Europe, because the Iranians could soon put those bombs on the top of rockets that could reach European capitals.

And whilst I feel it is entirely possible they said exactly that, given the nature of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, I do not think I can just take Luttwak's word for it. Oh how I look forward to the day when newspapers do what blogs do: always always always link to a supporting source when you say "they said this".

Can anyone helpfully provide links to other reports where Iranian government figures have actually said such things? Forming a sensible view on how to react to the Iranian state is far too serious a matter and the more sources of information that can be gathered, the better we can form theories about what would be the best course of action and what sort of policies should be supported by whom.

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Seamus Heffernan takes Richard Gere to task.

It has become the unfortunate reality of all things political: celebrities love to chip in with their insights and opinions on the Big Events of our time. Following Yasser Arafat's death, this weekend the Palestinians are holding elections. As a result, they have been treated to this television ad in an attempt to rouse them into voting, which starts with:

Hi, I'm Richard Gere and I'm speaking for the entire world.

Excuse me?

We're with you during this election time. It's really important. Get out and vote.

Wait - the entire world?

What is about being left-leaning and famous that makes most people so grossly overestimate not only their intelligence, but also their relevance? Does Gere really think that there are hordes of Palestinian girls out there getting all weepy over An Officer and a Gentleman?

Indeed, most Palestinians greeted the ad with a shrug.

But many voters, already struggling with the labyrinthine politics of the West Bank and Gaza, say they have never heard of the actor.

"I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters.

It is too bad that Manar is not more familiar with the Gere canon. Surely he and his fellow Palestinians would just love to take political advice from an actor perhaps most famous for his role as a degenerate, imperialistic tool of American capitalism who falls in love with a prostitute. Or perhaps he would be more interested in hearing the views of Gere's co-stars in the ad, one of whom has gone on record as saying:

[T]he Jews are destined to be persecuted, humiliated and tortured forever, and it is a Muslim duty to see to it that they reap their due. No petty arguments must be allowed to divide us. Where Hitler failed, we must succeed.

Nice work, Rich - the Dalai Lama would be proud.

(Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.)

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Iran has apparently won a 'victory' over the National Geographic Society by pressuring them into dropping references to the 'Arabian Gulf' and stucking with the admittedly more usual 'Persian Gulf' on its maps.

During the map row, the Iranian government warned that it "will act against any media" using the term "Arabian Gulf."

It seems that the mullahs had banned National Geographic magazone and excluded anyone working for the society due to their choice of terminology in their publications and on-line (and also pointing out that Iran's control of several islands is contested). I have no idea if National Geographic changed its policy because of Iranian pressure or just because 'Persian Gulf' is in fact the more common description for the body of water in question.

This is a fine demonstration of the absurdity to which nationalism drived people generally and the sheer banal immaturity of the men in preposterous hats running Iran. It is as if the British government banned anyone working any French publication using the term 'La Manche' rather than 'English Channel'. Do these people really not have anything more pressing to worry about?

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The media lads are quick to jump on their own planted questions, but I doubt they will pick up on this rather incisive remark from a soldier when Rumsfeld spoke in Mosul yesterday:

Q: Sir, how do we win the war in the media? It seems like that is the place where we're getting beat up more than anybody else? I've been here - this is my third tour over here and we've done some amazing things. And it seems like the enemy's Web sites and everything else, they're all over the media and they love it. But the thing is everything we did good, no matter if it's helping a little kid or building a new school, the public affairs sends out the message, but the media doesn't pick up on it. How do we win the propaganda war?

It is not really the job of the DOD to win an internal propaganda war. Mr. Rumsfeld indicated his understanding of this in his answer. The press has a right to do what it is doing and nothing can or should be done about that side of the equation. On the other hand, every Yin must have its Yang. The one-sided nothingness of the old media universe begat the blogosphere in a balance restoring reaction.

Here on Samizdata, terrorists are named the enemy and coalition forces are our people. We make no bones about it, make no false pretentions of neutrality. I consult in Manhattan (I will be on that side of the Atlantic much of January) and DC; I grew up in small town Western Pennsylvania(*); people I know work or have worked in the Pentagon at low levels. Perry worked in the World Trade Center during one phase of his life. For us, neutrality is not an option. We and people we know and love are in the enemy's crosshairs.

This does not mean we will give the State a pass on much of anything. You will find us solidly against most of the civil liberty undermining machinations in Congress. We do not believe in winning a war by turning America (or the UK here) into a prison camp. We believe in winning it by going out and killing the enemy.

* However I was born in Florida and most of the family is in the Carolinas. I therefore claim red-blooded American status. Besides which, the Western Pennsylvania towns and countryside where I grew up are pretty solidly Jacksonian.

EDITOR: For those who may be interested, here is the transcript of the original DOD Town Hall Meeting at which a soldier passed on a question for an embedded reporter. It has been much reported on since so I will not bore you with a rehash. Other DOD transcripts following the aforementioned cover the up-armouring issue in excruciating detail.

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This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.

Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America's modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the 'perfect' military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.

I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.

As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt's defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower's head on a stick by now.

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It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam.

One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly 'closed down', though 're-branded' would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these 'moderates' insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these 'moderates' prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little 'problem' or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight?

Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread 'moderate' support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam's savage excesses, then 'Islamophobia' (literally 'a fear of Islam') is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim).

Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves.

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This is a very odd piece of reportage, from Spiegel Online:

Finally some news out of Holland that doesn't have to do with the religious violence that has gripped the country for the last 10 days: The Dutch cabinet has decided on a March 2005 withdrawal of the country's 1,350 troops in Iraq. Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp made the announcement on Friday afternoon.

What, not anything to do with it? Surely the Dutch cabinet at least hopes that Dutch Muslims will be slightly less angry about everything now, even if the actual decision to bring the boys home was made either before all the domestic rowing, or during it but for genuinely unrelated reasons.

And some will certainly argue that there is a connection, so there is your connection right there.

I do not say that the religious violence was the sole cause of the withdrawal, merely that these are definitely inter-woven news stories.

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Alaa of the Messopotamian has some choice words about the hellspawn of Fallujah and how our troops should deal with them:

For the valiant soldiers doing battle in Falujah today: like the medieval knights, you have engraved on your shields severed heads of kidnapped victims, murdered children, the hundreds of thousands of the dwellers of mass graves. You are the instruments of the Lord’s retribution. Have no mercy on this vermin, they do not deserve any.

God bless you and protect you for you are doing his work.

It seems the enemy forces are turning more and more to Saddam's old tried and true methods: threatening and killing children, the elderly and even pregnant women. Iraqi's would like to see the lot of them off to a very deep location with an exceedingly tropical climate.

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Reports from Paris indicate that there has been a marked improvement in the condition of Yasser Arafat.

He's dead.

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I well recall how, on the first day of the serious, large scale, televised bit of Gulf War 2, I watched, in Cracow (in Poland), the unfolding story on BBC News 24 and on nothing else. At first I was uncomfortable, as the allied forces were sucked forwards from catastrophe to catastrophe into the beckoning quagmire, like horror film extras emerging from their graves. It took me an hour or more to work out that what the pictures were actually showing (as opposed to what the BBC said they were showing) was an astonishingly rapid and almost completely casualty free (on the allied side) advance on Baghdad. The allied soldiers were not being made fools of by the ever-so-cunning Iraqi army; it was simply that the BBC were making fools of themselves.

But although the quagmire that the BBC prophesied, a cunning ambush in the streets of Baghdad, did not materialise, there was enough of a different sort of quagmire to keep BBC spirits up, in the form of lots of suicide bombings and rebellions and ructions.

At least this time it is being acknowledge that the USA is doing whatever it is that it is doing in Iraq just now on purpose. However, this time the anti-USA spin is that a significant proportion of the fighters who were supposed to be holed up in the place the Americans are taking possession of have already slipped away, and are causing mayhem elsewhere. Plus, of course, civilians are getting it in the neck too. Both claims make sense to me. But how true are they? I will be interested to see what, if anything, the Belmont Club says about this. They are covering the set-piece battle with enthusiasm. What, I wonder, will they say about the bigger picture, as the Independent is now describing it?

And if there is now a particular burst of mayhem, how long will it last? What I know about insurgency and counter-insurgency would fit snugly into one of these postings (without any MORE involved), but it is my understanding that insurgency is harder if you do not have a nice safe base, and the USA is now engaged in overrunning just such a base. So even if people are getting away and causing mayhem, it will be harder for mayhemmers to operate in the future. Yes? Or maybe: yes, but they will still find a way.

One other thing puzzles me which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. There seems to be no agreement about how to spell the focal point of all this drama. Should we spell it Falluja or Falujah?

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According to recent reports, Yasser Arafat is in a state of superposition. Palestinian and French sources state he is dead and alive at present. If true, this represents the greatest breakthrough in applied quantum physics of the still youthful 21st century.

Professor Unzer N.T. Katz, a Quantum Mechanic, told reporters: "This is the most amazing event in the history of Quantum Mechanics! We experimentalists have managed to superpose an electron here and there, or perhaps a few measly atoms... but to superpose an entire human being! The implications are staggering! They are beyond imagining!"

French doctors were unavailable for comment.

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The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.

There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.

You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.

I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.

PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by... good luck and good hunting.

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Iraq The Model has translated comments of Iraqi's about the US election that were posted to the BBCArabic site. You can read them all
here

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Over on Fox News website:

LATEST HEADLINES

- Official: Arafat in Coma
- Arafat Congratulates Bush

Food for thought.

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I do not depend on the 'main stream media' world for my news. I expect that is true of most Samizdata readers as well. There is just the tiniest bit of self-selection effect at work here: you are applying your eyeball time to us rather than elsewhere. That given, I hope you are perusing the Iraqi blogs and papers for their take on the US election. There are many fine Iraqi blogs, but my current favorite is The Messopotamian. Here is his take on yesterday's events:

Congratulations to all American people and to our Iraqi people for this great outcome of the American Elections. This was a great statement by the American people; a statement showing the quality and backbone of this people and affirming their worth and qualification as world leaders. Now that this matter has been settled in satisfactory manner, in my humble opinion; we should emphasize that this is no time for division and rancor. Senator Kerry has acted in very dignified manner when he did not allow the matter to drag, and has shown his patriotism and sense of responsibility and awareness that the interests of the country at these times require national unity and putting this election campaign behind our backs to concentrate on the momentous tasks ahead. Yes at times of war and conflict, the unity of the nation and putting higher interests above partisan considerations is the mark of a great people.

Read the whole thing. Then keep reading: it is well worth the time.

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Unless it turns out to be an artful fake, it seems that contrary to my long held views, Osama bin Laden may indeed still be alive.

Quite why it has taken this long for a video of him saying something timely is hard to fathom, but then many of the things the likes of bin Laden do defies rational analysis. I am astonished by this turn of events.

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Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D'Afrique under General D'Allonville).

The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade's commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped "Here goes the last of the Brudenells", his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).

Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.

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If Moses had turned right instead of left, the Jews could have had the oil, and the Arabs would have got the oranges.
- Harry Hutton

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The Mesopotamian writes about the US Presidential Election. This quote is also quoted by Alice in Texas (also of Samizdata). It is, you might say, another letter to voters in America (see immediately below)..

So, I have been, personally very attentive to the debates and positions of both candidates, and I have some thoughts which I would like to share with you, my American friends. To start with, Senator Kerry may be a very good man and quite patriotic. Also we have to respect the almost 50% of the American people who lean towards the democrats. I don't know much about domestic issues in the States so naturally, as might be expected, the position of any Iraqi would be mainly influenced by the issue that most concerns him. Thus, regardless of all the arguments of both candidates the main problem is that President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact, that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost, are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections. That is not to say that they like the democrats, but that they will take such an outcome as retreat by the American people, and will consequently be greatly encouraged to intensify their assault. The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence, in the belief, rightly or wrongly, by the enemy, that the new leadership is more likely to "cut and run" to use the phrase frequently used by some of my readers. And they would try to inflict as heavy casualties as possible on the American forces to bring about a retreat and withdrawal. It is crucial for them to remove this insurmountable obstacle which stands in their way. They fully realize that with continued American and allies' commitment, they have no hope of achieving anything.

On the other hand if President Bush is reelected, this will prove to them that the American people are not intimidated despite all their brutality, and that their cause is quite futile. Yes there is little doubt that an election victory by President Bush would be a severe blow and a great disappointment for all the terrorists in the World and all the enemies of America.

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In today's Telegraph, there is a story about Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, all about how very strange and mysterious and unfair it was for him to be refused entry into the USA.

A spokesman for the US Department for Homeland Security said that Islam had been placed on a "watch list", compiled to combat terrorism, "because of his recent activities" - he was only allowed to board the plane to Washington because of a misspelling of his name at Heathrow.

Yes, I guess that "Yusuf" bit might be slightly confusing.

It was not his first brush with immigration: he was deported from Israel in 2000 after claims that he had given money to the Palestinian group Hamas 12 years earlier, though he has always vehemently denied the claim: "I have never knowingly supported any terrorist group, past, present or future," he stated.

But in yesterday's Sunday Times, there was a piece at the front of the News Review section by Sarah Baxter, called I'm a Democrat for Bush. Ms. Baxter now lives in the USA and used to work for the New Statesman. In her piece, she mentions Yusuf(Cat) Islam(Stevens) in passing (page 3), and what she says throws a somewhat different light on the matter of the US Government not wanting him in the USA.

Timesonline stuff does not last for non-Brits, so I quote at some length:

I also had a formative experience in 1989. I was a cub reporter at the London magazine Time Out when I covered the campaign by Yusuf Islam – Cat Stevens – to gain state funding for his Islamia school in Brent, north London. I was ambitious to seek out foreign stories as a freelance and had heard that an obscure group called Hamas was becoming a force to be reckoned with in the occupied territories.

I was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and wanted to know more about these upstart challengers to Israel and the PLO. But how could I possibly gain access to Hamas? I rang my contacts at the Islamia school and bingo! I was immediately put in touch with their leaders in Gaza, whom Cat Stevens was flying off to see that very month.

I took two weeks' holiday from Time Out and set off for the occupied territories with a black chiffon scarf over my head. On arrival in Gaza I was disturbed that the Hamas leaders I met would never look me in the eye. To them, it was indecent even to glance at a member of the inferior sex. All their answers were directed at my boyfriend, who was taking pictures. But they were co-operative and eager for publicity.

We were taken upstairs in a mosque and, to my shock, were introduced to a dozen or more would-be suicide bombers in their mid-teens, who declared their fervent wish to martyr themselves for their cause.

At the time, there had been no suicide bombs in Israel. Some Hezbollah members in Lebanon had blown themselves up, but they were Shi'ite Muslims: Palestinian Sunnis were not supposed to go in for that sort of thing. Yet here I was, looking at a bunch of boys with kaffirs masking their faces, brandishing knives and practising karate in a place of worship. These weren’t boy scouts in a church hall; they were being trained to become fanatical killers by their religious elders.

When I heard the other week that Cat Stevens had been refused entry to America, I thought good riddance.

In short, if Ysuf Islam did not know who and what he was dealing with back then, he was a very, very stupid and very, very unobservant person.

I suppose it all depends on exactly how much "support" he gave to all this stuff. He met Hamas, but how much did he help them? And if he helped them at first, but then decided to stop helping them, was that so very wicked? Should he now be shunned from polite society because of what he once did and said and supported? Surely what matters is what he is now doing and now saying and now supporting.

The trouble is, it is now damnably hard to distinguish between Good Islam and Bad Islam. If you teach impeccably Good Islam, as Yusuf protests that he has been doing for years and is doing now, but if there is a distinct tendency for excitable and impressionable adolescents to reach Bad Islam conclusions from Good Islam, as there definitely seems to be these days, then does spreading Good Islam among impressionable adolescents amount to support for Bad Islam? It surely increases the likelihood of Bad Islam erupting, especially if you do not teach them much else.

Ever since 9/11, I have found that whenever I read sixteenth and seventeenth century English history, as I like to from time to time, I do it with a whole new level of understanding. This priest, for instance. Turbulent, yes, but how turbulent exactly? In those days, they took religion seriously, and agonised about what would be the political and terroristic consequences of it being taught, this way or that way. Bizarre. And now, again, so do we.

All of which is quite beside the point about whether, in claiming now to be spreading and supporting only Good Islam, Yusuf Islam is telling the truth.

Just what, I wonder, were those "recent activities" that the US Department of Homeland Security says are the reason for his exclusion from the USA.

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It will probably now be a widely accepted view that Saddam Hussein had no active weapons programme and was some way off from creating one. But that he intended to create one given a moment's opportunity, is beyond doubt, and one reason why, given the increasingly porous nature of the sanctions regime, Saddam's risk-taking behaviour and the corrupt oil-for-food programme of the UN, I felt war was the least-bad option.

Uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan linked this week to a Reuters story about how mothballed nuclear facilities were stripped and spirited out of the country after the Coalition successfully invaded Iraq.

It is one of the most serious charges one can level at George W. Bush that he bungled the aftermath of the war and that the Coalition forces failed to secure sites such as nuclear facilities. It was, after all, supposed to be a central justification for the war that we were securing such sites and preventing weapons getting into the hands of terrorists. Stuff like this makes me wonder whether Bush and Co. really had a clue about what they were doing.

But it is also interesting to note that a Reuters story (that big fat commie news service) implicitly conceded that Saddam did have a nuclear programme. And if it were not for the bravery and brilliance of the Israeli airforce in 1981, he would have had one up and running some time ago.

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The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States spurred calls for the Saudi royal family to modernize the country's political landscape. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in September 11 were Saudis.

Which is obviously why the Saudi political landscape has changed so radically that women... um, still are not allowed to vote. Or drive. Or talk to men in public. Or go out of doors without a big black cloak on.

They would be voting though, if it weren't for a few major administrative problems that the government can not possibly be expected to solve. Oh yes.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there are not enough women to run women's-only registration centers and polling stations, and that only a fraction of the country's women have the photo identity cards that would have been needed to vote.

Well, obviously. Not to mention that:

Many women in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, have balked at getting the ID cards -- introduced three years ago -- because the photographs would show their faces unveiled.

Right. And anyone who says this only illustrates the extent to which they have had the s*** scared out of them is just a Bush-loving Zionist neo-con. They should be glad that the ban on women voting, "[eases] fears among conservatives that the kingdom is moving too fast on reforms". Because, moving too fast on reforms would be terrible, obviously. So, hang onto those abayas for a little while longer, girls. You will be needing them.

Overall, it is good to see how things are improving in the kingdom now. Islamism can seem a little off-putting from time to time, but Saudi hotels are super, and the government is surely well-intentioned. And the women are not in any way oppressed: they may have "limited freedoms," but then again, don't we all?

Thank gooodness CNN is there to tell it like it is. They even took the trouble to interview women against the idea of votes for women, just to provide a clear and balanced picture of events.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers involved in September 11 were Saudis.

Did I mention that already? Please excuse me.

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Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.

The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.

So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)

Quote:

Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he's a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.

By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that's the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say "I'll show you how an Englishman dies", and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, "enough". A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.

That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.

Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.

It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets 'published' anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.

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Where do political ideas end and terrorist acts begin? Is every destructive behaviour in the name of any political ideology just dandy, fine and justified, or are some societies distinguishable from others precisely because they employ civilised means of political expression and government (voting, debate, free speech) as opposed to ruling and arguing by violent threat and patently, deliberately, terrorising violence?

Call me a pro-life extremist but in my view, organisations cease to be mere political debating circles as soon as they reject real opportunities for reasonable discussion in favour of blowing people's heads off.

The United Nations does not agree. Peter Hansen, the UN relief agency chief in Gaza, says:

Hamas as a political organisation does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another.

Israel begs to differ:

Israel's ambassador to the UN criticised Mr Hansen's comments. "The very idea that individuals with clear links to the Hamas terrorist network may be on the Unwra payroll is totally unacceptable and should be properly investigated," Dan Gillerman said.

Now, I may be wrong about this, but I was under the vague impression that Hamas had actually committed acts of violence that represent a widening of the 'political' arena beyond reasonable limits, into, for example, murdering innocent people to further their aim of destroying Israel. Little clues like Hamas' own words seemed to point that way:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it

If I was an Israeli, and Hamas was trying to obliterate me, and the UN was employing members of Hamas and their method of guaranteeing that they would not abuse their privileges in order to further their cause was this...

We demand of our staff, whatever their political persuasion is, that they behave in accordance with UN standards and norms for neutrality

... I would not be feeling particularly secure. I might even be inclined to think that Hamas/UN members were even capable of using ambulances to transport rockets instead of just sick people.

On the other hand, maybe I just missed the part of the Hamas declaration that says,

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, but of course we will behave in an entirely neutral fashion should we happen to lay our hands on any United Nations marked ambulances.

Both Hamas and the UN think they are above politics. One rejects it by engaging in terrorism, the other sniffily 'demands' neutrality and rejects 'political vetting'. Meanwhile, the people who actually govern countries, trying to maintain citizens' very basic freedom not to have their children blown to pieces, are obliged to deal with both. Perhaps one day they will no longer need to lower themselves so far.

(hat tip for both links and story: Not a Fish)

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The other day, I snapped the following photo, in the London Underground. I tried as hard as I could to get the entire thing in my picture. Had I stepped back any further I would have been (a) electrocuted and then shortly after that (b) run over by a train.

I have not read this book, which is by Jason Burke. But: Naom Chomsky? "Rumsfeld and his clique"? Something tells me that whatever the nuances of the truth here revealed, America will get the blame for it all and Islam hardly any.

William Dalrymple should not be confused with Theodore Dalrymple. Read what Theodore has to say about William (no relation), in this article, this sentence being the one that seems to me to matter most:

... Dalrymple comes perilously close to condoning what he is trying to explain...

I did an earlier posting about William Dalrymple, and the comments there are also well worth looking at to learn more about the man and his views.

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The Telegraph reports that an Iraqi-born gunman with a British passport, Mohammed Kasim, talked to an Iraqi translator in Fallujah about the latest video of Mr Bigley where he was shown shackled in a cage. Mr Kasim claimed that this had been staged to "terrify" the British public. There was no way of verifying the claim, particularly in a country awash with rumour and conspiracy theories.

The claims that the British hostage was free to roam his kidnappers' home in Iraq and was "caged" only for terrorist videos coincide with a raid by Dutch intelligence officers of the home of Paul Bigley, Kenneth Bigley's brother last, who lives in Amsterdam. He is accused of contact with the Tawhid and Jihad group, which yesterday claimed responsibility for Thursday's killing of at least 35 children in Baghdad. Mr Bigley has been an outspoken critic of the Government's handling of his brother's case and has established his own contacts in the Middle East but denies being in direct contact with the kidnappers.

From yesterday news, Italy's adoration of the "two Simonas" (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta), the women aid workers abducted in Iraq, began to sour yesterday, as the extent of their sympathy for the Iraqi fight against the allied occupation became clear.

After they were taken hostage on Sept 7, the two Simonas achieved iconic status in Italy and the conservative government and the opposition put aside their differences to work together for the women's release.

But as the Turin newspaper La Stampa said yesterday, national unity has been short lived since their arrival home, wearing kaftans and thanking their captors in Arabic for their release before the cameras of the Al-Jazeera stellite television network.

There have been reports of a $1 million ransom... No matter, the girls are well versed in international law:

If you ask me about terrorism, I'll tell you that there is terrorism and there is resistance. The resistance struggle of people against an occupying force is guaranteed by international law.

They have obviously become experts on the local situation - upon their return they gave their backing to insurgents opposing the allied forces. Alas, they did not seem to know about other hostages:

We didn't know there were any other hostages. No one told us about the British prisoner, nor about the Americans who were beheaded.

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An acquaintance sent me a link to an article about the future of Europe and asked me for my opinions in response. As someone with a reputation for having an opinion (usually a fairly inflammatory one) about everything, I find myself untypically, and perhaps rather annoyingly, equivocal. But this is entirely due to the fact that I am unsure whether or not this kind of thing can or should be taken seriously:

How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."

Or maybe sooner.

I have heard such sweeping assessments before, courtesy (mostly) of some of the more intemperate conservative blogs and websites. But is there any substance to the claim?

On the face of it, it appears both alarmist and far-fetched. Just taking the EU countries alone, I believe that there are, at most, some 20 million Muslim people out of a total population in the region of 470 million. Less than 5%.

But, let us suppose that some profound demographic shifts over the next few decades result in Muslims outnumbering non-Muslims. Does it automatically follow that Europe will then be 'Islamic'? And, if so, what type of Islamic? Are we talking about the arid, monochromatic, repressive Saudi 'Wahabbi' version or the more secular and easy-going Turkish variety? Or could it be some newly-manifest and unique 'European' version of Islam?

Also, and given much of Europe's descent into post-modernist torpor, would any of these scenarios (assuming they came to pass) necessarily be a bad thing?

So many questions with no answers. Or no satisfactory answers at any rate. My own inclination is to regard the article with a high degree of skepticism. Human affairs are sufficiently fluid to make predictions about the next week seem foolhardy, let alone the next century. However, it is worth bearing in mind that North Africa (the Maghreb) was once as European as France or Italy is now and that fully two-thirds of what was once the Roman Empire is now a part of the Islamic world.

But the past is not necessarily a guide to the future, so that just leaves me back where I started. In short, I just do not know and I am hesitant to venture any sort of opinion more definite than that.

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On this anniversary of the attacks in America by Al Qaeda, Ayman Zawahiri has produced a video taunting the USA that an article in the Daily Telegraph rightly describes as sounding desperate:

Things may not be rosy for America, particularly in Iraq. But coming from the leader of an organisation that has lost its operational base in Afghanistan, and whose members are hunted and arrested by the intelligence agencies of scores of countries around the world, Zawahiri's analysis had a ring of desperation about it.

Reaction from 'on high' to the tape is also interesting:

Intelligence agencies will be scrutinising the video for evidence of hidden messages and clues to Zawahiri's whereabouts. But it raises other questions, not least the fate of Osama bin Laden, who has been heard, but not seen for many months.

"He is not popping up on television and he is not showing himself in a way that he can be captured," Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said last night, "I believe he is still alive, but I can't prove that. He clearly is in hiding and he is on the run."

It seems to me that the notion Bin Laden is still alive becomes more preposterous by the month. If Zawahiri, who is debatably the 'chairman of the board' of Al Qaeda, can make a video for propaganda purposes, then so can the biggest fish of all, Osama Bin Laden. For Bin Laden to produce such a video would yield a veritable propaganda blockbuster which would rally the faithful and infuriate his enemies at a time when it is hard to see how anyone could reasonably claim that things are going well for the bad guys.

So unless we see Bin Laden's ugly face on our screens wagging his finger at us infidels sometime before the Presidential elections in the USA, I will stick to my firmly held assertion that he is rotting in a collapsed tunnel somewhere in Afghanistan and continue with my Elvis analogues when people claim the contrary. And like Elvis, no doubt we will get sighting of him for the next 30 years as both sides have a vested interest in claiming he is alive (one to make him a Robin Hood figure, the other to disarm arguments against whatever 'needs to be done').

Yup, I will believe them when Elvis himself walks into a studio in Nashville and does a 'muezzin remix' of 'Blue Suede Shoes'. Bin Laden is dead and may he not rest in peace.

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Say "9/11", and we all know what you mean. "Bali": ditto. Now add "Beslan" to that mass murder list.

I remember thinking, when I saw those children on my TV a week ago, running hither and thither in nothing but their underwear, that this was another of those strategic shooting-in-foot blunders that Islamists seem to have such a genius for perpetrating. 9/11 finally concentrated the minds of the white West on Islamist terrorism. Now Beslan has got even Muslims thinking – and, miracle of miracles, even Muslims of the sort who make public pronouncements saying - that maybe something is seriously amiss with their (for the time being) accursed religion, with no 'but'.

This from a recent New York Times piece:

The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has touched off an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.

About time too.

And today, Arts & Letters Daily links to this New Statesman piece by Ziauddin Sardar, which is just about the most encouraging thing I have read about Islam since 9/11:

The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small 'r'. From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations.

Much of the attention is focused on reformulating the sharia, the centuries-old body of Islamic law deeply embedded in a medieval psychology. The sharia is state law in many Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and the Sudan. For many conservative and radical Muslims, the sharia is Islam: it cannot be changed, and must be imposed in exactly the shape it was first formulated in the ninth century. Since 9/11, there has been a seismic shift in this perception. More and more Muslims now perceive Islamic law to be dangerously obsolete. And these include the ulema, the religious scholars and clerics, who have a tremendous hold on the minds of the Muslim masses.

I know exactly what a lot of you are now thinking. You are thinking: bollocks. Or, more politely: window dressing.

To that I would reply with these three further observations.

First: what do you think the most bigoted and suicidal Islamists think about claims like this? Would such reports not make their hearts sink and their brains hurt? The idea that their own actions may be having the opposite result to the one they want must cause at least the less completely idiotic among them to pause in their idiot tracks. Their plan is to make Islam purely and uncompromisingly idiotic, and to turn the West into an Islamicist bigot-hole. Instead, their actions, while having no very profound effects on the West other than a wave of belligerence and anti-bigot measures, may instead be provoking the exact sort of softening of Islamic bigotry within Islam that the idiots spend half their lives cursing. Remember, 9/11 etc. is at least as much about yanking Islam back to true-faith-total-idiocy as it is about imposing such idiocy on the West. Yet instead, what happens? Bloody Islam turns sensible. The idiot-bigots do not give a damn about the damned infidels! But these turncoats are Muslim's, for God's sake! – or at least pretending to be, the swine. That some of Islam even claims to be turning sensible must be, for your Islamicist bigot, a scary thing.

Maybe Allah has plans for the world that are other than they had at first seemed.

Second: do not knock window dressing. How else can this process get started? One of the standard techniques of propaganda of any kind is to announce that the thought processes and legal changes which you merely hope for are in fact under way, in a more substantial way than a dispassionate look at the facts really reveals. That way, the people you are trying to influence (basically the next couple of generations) feel in their own minds that they are being asked to join a movement which already counts for something and which will give them psychological support ("Wow I thought I was the only one who thought like that!") friends, drinks parties, boyfriends, girlfriends, careers, etc.

Third: if you want to observe a particular historical case of window dressing taking over the shop, look no further than the disintegration of the old USSR and the end of the Cold War, no less. Clearly, and just like these reformist tendencies within Islam, the collapse of Soviet Communism had a lot of causes and quite a few key triggering events. But one of the big contributory factors was that the Soviet bosses, thinking that they were being oh-so-clever, tried to install a reformist-communist style system in the Eastern European bit of their empire, with the idea that the underlying system wouldn't then be so hated and despised, and would thus be able to stagger on for a few more decades, and even maybe make further advances. Perhaps you think that this is the motive behind much of this Muslim 'reform', to soften up the West, lull it into a false sense of security, tell it that it has already won, blah blah blah, and maybe for many 'reformers' that is the plan, just as it was for those clever Soviet bosses, and just as many of the gloomier pro-Westerners pointed out at the time. But the Eastern Europe example shows that, to put it mildly, such schemes can go badly, badly wrong.

Personally, I do not now see the West dropping its guard, either physically or intellectually. On the contrary, and especially intellectually, the West is only just beginning to get into tits stride when it comes to dealing with Islam. That Arabs (especially) are prone to duplicity and that Islam as a whole is a slab of primitiveness and foolishness are memes far too completely embedded in the West now to be forgotten overnight. Similarly, by the nineteen eighties, Soviets-equals-shits was a far too well established notion in the West for the West to walk off the Cold War pitch, snatching a draw from the jaws of Cold War victory, and it was the USSR which crumbled.

Unlike many of its more pessimistic and belligerent defenders, I actually have profound faith in the power of the West to win this thing, just as the West always does win these things. There are huge differences between The West v. Soviet Communism and The West v. Islam, most importantly that 'winning against' Islam cannot mean destroying Islam, but instead must mean provoking its intellectual and moral redemption. (Soviet Communism stank through and through, and more to the point, everyone important knew it. Therefore the damned thing could be binned. Islam is not, er, quite like that. Many people actually believe in it.) But when it comes to how well the West will do, I believe the result will be similarly pleasing.

And the events described in this New Statesman article, together with the obvious desire among lots of Muslims to believe that such descriptions are approximately accurate, is, I believe, all part of that process.

We, the West, plus the millions of good Muslims who just want to get along with us in peace and prosperity, are starting to win.

Beslan was not a victory. But I believe that history may reckon that it was the end of the beginning.

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Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He's back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.

If there is one mistake I think we've made in fighting this war, it's been the way we've soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.

Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.

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There is an interesting article in The Telegraph, which is a translated reprint of an article which appeared in the pan-Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. The author is Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al- Arabiya news channel and he gives a cri de coeur about the state of the Muslim world:

Those responsible for the attacks on residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar were Muslims. The two women who crashed two airliners last week were also Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim. The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim. What a pathetic record. What an abominable "achievement". Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?

[...]

We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds. These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image.

We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.

I can only hope this sort of discussion sweeps across the Islamic world. Western civilisation has so much introspection going on that some commentators regularly vanish up their own arses during absurd Sartre-esque displays of posturing left wing 'analysis' of bourgeois capitalism or the 'root causes' of why some people actually set out to slaughter other people's children. What we really need is muslims doing a great deal more public soul searching with frank discussions of modern terrorism: without recourse to the word 'but'...

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I am attending a wedding tomorrow, of the daughter of a school friend (the other daughter is my god daughter), and this got me thinking about Muslims and Muslim weddings, which are, or so I have been persuasively told, not like our weddings.

When we marry, we marry outside our family, and our weddings are thus gatherings involving and uniting two families, and what is more two families who probably had nothing to do with one another until the bride from one and the groom from the other brought them together. Our marriage customs are, in the patois of the anthropologists, "exogamous". We marry outside the clan.

Muslims, on the other hand, by custom, marry within their own clans, and a Muslim wedding is thus a gathering of and a celebration of just the one family, together with its various friends and hangers-on. Arab marriage customs are "endogamous".

As one of my favourite intellectuals – a French anthropologist called Emmanuel Todd, known to the Anglo-Internet mostly for his bizarre opinion that the Euro-economy is racing ahead of the US economy, but better than that at anthropology, trust me – puts it, in his brilliant book (which fully lives up to its amazingly confident title) The Explanation of Ideology:

From Morocco to Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, a single family form dominates, its unique trait being preferential marriage between paternal parallel-cousins. Typical of the Muslim world and not simply of the Arab one, this characteristic can be observed in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and among Berbers of Algerian or of Morocco. …

This does not apply to all Muslim societies, because Islam conquered some non-endogamous societies on its perimeter in its early time of military supremacy. But it does apply to the Muslim heartland.

Here in the West, alliances and cooperative ventures that go beyond mere clan membership are commonplace. You may not like, for example, the Labour Party, but at least its upper echelons are not confined to people who are all related to one another. Yet Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take one particularly famous example, was ruled by a clan all of whom lived in one town, and old habits die hard.

One result (among many) of this peculiar fact is a society in which them and us remain permanently divided. Islam, in Islamic minds, is irreconcilably divided from the rest of us, and similar them/us divisions afflict Muslim society itself. We in the West indulge in plenty of themming and ussing, so to speak. I am, after all, doing it in this posting. But the Islamic version of this habit is now, I think it is fair to say, far more absolute.

This could have been a very, very long posting, but I will keep it short and just say that I think this explains a lot.

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Since Hollywood studio bosses are famously averse to 'downbeat endings' for their movies, perhaps it was their clandestine intervention that resulted in this script change:

Kidnappers in Iraq have handed two French journalists to another group said to be prepared to free them, one of the men's editors told the BBC.

The second group, said to be from the Iraqi opposition, is "in favour of releasing them", Charles Lambroschini, Le Figaro deputy editor, told BBC News.

France's foreign minister said earlier that both men were alive and well.

The kidnappers had linked the men's fate to France's move to ban Islamic headscarves from schools.

No, probably not the handywork of Hollywood executives but a rather surprise 'ending' nonetheless given the grisly fate that has been meted out to just about every other hostage in Iraq.

If (as it appears) these two men are to be sent back home to their families in one piece, then I am very pleased. There are plenty of people in this world to whom I bear an extraordinary degree of ill-will but these two French hacks are not among them. However, I find myself unable to dismiss the question of whether there ever really was any risk that they would end up six inches shorter.

When Hamas, Hezbollah and a bevy of otherwise insanely violent Caliphascists are falling over themselves to denounce the kidnappers and call for the hostages release, you know that this is not business as usual. There could be any number of explanations, but the sudden materialisation of a 'caring, sharing' side is, I submit, the least likely of them.

Events may overtake this and I may yet be forced to recant, although that is hardly an important matter. But, until then, the impression I have formed is that this was not so much a hostage crisis as an elaborate pantomime.

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Perhaps it is merely a case of grabbing whoever is conveniently to hand. Or perhaps not:

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro....

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

A group calling itself The Islamic Army in Iraq says it is holding the two men - Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed a video on Monday in which both men, speaking in English, called for the law banning headscarves to be overturned - and for French people to demonstrate for its repeal.

Of course, the only way to prevent this kind of thing happening again is for the French to change their misguided and interventionist domestic policies.

[P.S. Why were they speaking in English, I wonder?]

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A smart and thought-provoking blogger I have recently come across, Perry Metzger, who seems to hail from the anarcho-capitalist bit of the libertarian intellectual universe, does not like the way this blog has supported the military ouster of Saddam Hussein. Now, of course another certain Perry (de Havilland) of this parish thinks rather differently.

Metzger asks how it is that folk who are so ardently opposed to the State can possibly countenance the use of force, including appropriation of wealth via taxation, to topple another regime deemed to be dangerous. Well, it is actually quite easy to answer that question in my view. First of all, not all libertarians believe a free society can exist without a minimal state, including one with the ability to provide external and internal security, which may include the need to take out violent and hostile foreign regimes.

Second, the supposedly sacred libertarian principle that thou shalt not initiate force against another is not very useful when it comes to judging whether regime X or Y poses your country a particular threat or not, and whether action of a Bush-style pre-emptive sort is justified and perhaps even more important, whether it is prudent. Good people will and do differ a lot about that.

Such disagreements cannot in my view be arbitrated solely by referring to abstract moral principles - although principles are of course crucial - but have to be also judged on events, by weighing up the possible consequences of an action or taking no action. In fact, taking no action and adopting a purely reactive approach to defence will also have consequences, not all of them necessarily good ones. There is no easy way to say which approach will always be better. So even two ardent libertarians who read a situation in the Middle East, say, could differ on fine points and end up having precisely the sort of heated debates we get in the comments sections.

I have changed my mind on so many aspects of the current war in Iraq that my head will probably explode at some point. At one point I felt the whole affair was a dumb mistake and we would have been better off leaving Saddam in his palaces and let things run on awhile. But regardless of what I thought about facts on the ground and the news reports I read, I honestly do not feel that appeals to higher tenets of libertarian theory really ever decisively swayed my mind about the particulars one way or the other.

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It appears that Sadr and his Islamo-fascist militia will be allowed to slip away from the Mosque of Ali in Najaf without further harm. Even if they are indeed disarmed (yeah, right) before they withdraw, the fact their organisational infrastructure will be left intact calls into question the whole point of opposing him in the first place.

It seems to me that there are really only two sensible ways to see this:

Either conclude that following a policy of using force to confront Islamic extremism is too bloody to stomach, leading inevitably to adopting a policy of withdrawal from wherever Islamic terrorism threatens modern global civilisation...

...or conclude that once a decision to use force is taken, it will be followed through robustly and ruthlessly with the intention of killing fundamentalists leaders like Sadr and ideally as many of his hardcore supporters as is practical as well.

In reality I expect neither clear conclusion will be reached in the corridors of power in Washington DC (and do not get me going about the buffoons who run the Foreign Office) and a middle-way fudge that is already being offered up in the established media will be the perceived wisdom as key elements of the political classes work to keep the world safe for Sharia, legally enforced burquas, clitoridectomy and judicial amputations.

Surely the best way to ensure the survival of a tolerable regime in Iraq is to fill the graveyards with as many Islamic extremists as possible. If that policy is not acceptable, then surely one has no business using force to begin with as it seems perverse to kill people unless you are willing to do so for a damn good reason... either fight a war or do not, the middle way just gets you the worst of both worlds: you are hated for the people you kill and held in contempt for the people you would not kill.

The opportunity was there to turn the mosque of Ali into a funeral pyre of Islamic political aspirations. Today was the very last chance to do exactly that but it looks like the opportunity will drift away by this evening.

What a pity.

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Looks like the US is playing hardball and refusing to compromise with the Islamists in Iraq. All to the good, I suspect.

The best chance for a reasonable long term political settlement in Iraq will come when Moqtada al-Sadr and as many of his supporters as possible are dead. Getting there will require resolve in the ongoing attrition battle but if the casualty numbers are even close to accurate, then things are going as well as can be reasonably expected in such a grim business.

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The fighting in Iraq has flared up again and most of the people getting killed appear to be Islamists, which is just fine by me. I cannot but wonder if the Islamists thought that if they just kept on slugging away, the Brits and US would just fold up and slink off, leaving them to impose an theocratic 'paradise' on Iraq. The fact that Moqtada al-Sadr is offering a return to a truce is both a good sign and an excellent reason to do nothing of the sort but rather escalate efforts to kill him and his supporters.

I suspect that is indeed what is going to happens and moreover I think that the US and UK governments will stay the course regardless of who wins the elections in the USA. Seeing Iraq 'go Islamic' would be too much even for the dismal Kerry to want to have happen on his watch. Likewise for the Tory party in Britain, should they somehow miraculously contrive to defeat Blair at some point in the future. Come to think of it, that is yet another reason not to bother voting next time: the hard decisions have already been made and the course is now set. The politics become even easier if another Al-Qaeda 'leaker' like September 11th gets through on either side of the North Atlantic.

The equally dismal Bush already did the heavy lifting in Afghanistan and Iraq and now it is just a case of taking on targets of opportunity. As for the Brits, I doubt any future Tory government would be any better or worse regarding the on-going hollowing out of Britain's fading military capabilities, so no real choices are on offer there either.

The West, well the Anglosphere bits at least, will continue to oppose Islamists like Al-Qaeda for the foreseeable future regardless of the supine predilections of the Guardian, Independent and New York Times reading classes and it does not much matter whose face is on the portraits in the US and UK embassies.

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Although not in the mainstream news as much as the story deserves, the thus far peaceful (from the student side at least) Iranian intifada is alive and well. Unfortunately the same can not be said for some of its members. The Mullahcracy continues to visit violence and imprisonment upon such supporters of liberty.

In response, some of the imprisoned are carrying out a hunger strike to gain international attention for their plight.

Several alarmed European MPs, such as, Andre Berry, Paolo Kazaka and Helmut Markoff have expressed their public support and expressed concerns on the fate of the strikers and the persistent rights abuses in Iran. Mr. Berry has written a public letter for the attention of the German FM by asking him to intervene due to his close relationship with the ruling mullahs.

My cynical side wonders if one who has a 'close relationship with the ruling mullahs' would help the students for reasons other than a belief in democracy and human rights.

Nah. These are civilized and nuanced European leaders.

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How many of you grew up playing 'RISK'? Yes, I see a bunch of hands up... no less than I would expect from a bunch of Samizdata readers. So... with everyone's mind now in the proper context, I give you the before and after maps of the middle east and central asia created by American Digest.

Many of us have had this image in our minds as we wrote on the current world war over the last few years, but many in the general public have failed to put this together. This is not their fault. It is in the nature of headline news to lose connectedness betwixt events separated in time and space. Afganistan is one story, now fading; Iraq is another story; the war on terrorism is yet another story. Except they are not.

Let us imagine for a moment we are military attache's from Epsilon Eridani. We know nothing about human politics. We have not evolved for religious belief. But... we do know our warfare. We know our tactical and strategical levels.

Now look at the map from before. Look at the map afterwards. Can anyone imagine a better move to more thoroughly disrupt one's enemy?

I certainly can not.

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The Government of the Philippines, like the Spanish government before it, has stared into the face of evil... and capitulated.

They are pulling their troops out of Iraq to appease terrorists and keep head on shoulders of one of their citizens. One can make many arguments pro and con about the decision they, as a sovereign nation, have made. I am not going to fight those one way or the other. I merely wish to point to consequences which will almost certainly follow hard on the heels of their decision.

Unlike Spain, the Philippines have not bought even a temporary respite by their action. They have a local flock of Islamist nutcases to worry about in Mindanao: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The MILF operate far to the south of Manila perhaps... but perhaps not far enough. This home team watches television, reads newspapers and follows the internet just like every other revolutionary group on this planet.

MILF leaders will already be pondering tactical changes. How much might they accomplish by kidnapping a few high profile persons? Would al Jazeera be willing to send a camera crew that distance for a beheading? How far will the government cave in? The government in Manila has made its choice. Now they must live it.

Actions have consequences.

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I suddenly find myself writing more and more about the Middle East.

Kidnappers demand less corruption.

Only in Palestine...

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You may remember this sad incident in the opening days of the Iraq Campaign: a US Patriot battery engaged and shot down a returning British Tornado. The official report on the incident is finally out:

IFF failure led to destruction of RAF Tornado

A Royal Air Force (RAF) Board of Inquiry investigating the destruction of an RAF Tornado GR.4A by a US Army Patriot missile during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has concluded that the aircraft's identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system had failed. However, it also criticised the missile-classification criteria used by the Patriot system, and the US Army's Patriot rules of engagement, firing doctrine and crew training. [Jane's Missiles and Rockets - 28 June 2004]

If any of our readers has a link to a pdf of the original report - if such exists - I would be happy to include it here.

Editor: Kudos to Julian Taylor for the link to the MoD pdf file.

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News of large scale arrests of criminals in Baghdad carried out by Iraqi police are welcome, provided there is due process and it is not simply a trawling operation. It does however demonstrate the differing priorities of an army of occupation versus a police force.

The International Herald Tribune article taken from the New York Times also mentions a drop in 'spectacular' terrorist attacks over the past three weeks. Those of us who consider that terrorist groups usually prosper in a climate of lawlessness will ponder the Iraqi situation and reflect on Northern Ireland.

There is little doubt that massive police activity will uncover some terrorist networks and disrupt potential attacks: for example raiding the home of a criminal can turn up equipment intended for terrorist actions.

In Northern Ireland all sorts of crimes, from welfare benefit fraud, fraudulent elections, fire insurance scams, drug dealing, protection rackets, unlicensed gambling and alcohol premises, contract killings and woundings, are tolerated on the grounds that the 'peace process' must be kept going.

For the first time in months, I get the sense that Iraq may be going in the right direction. I wish this were the case of Londonderry and Belfast. I have felt for a long time that the violence in Northern Ireland should be considered a law-enforcement problem, separate from politics.

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At last. George W. Bush starts telling it like it is, instead of issuing defensive justifications that only reinforce the petty slights and slanders that give rise to them.

We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.

This is exactly what some of us have been saying for a long time. Finding WMDs was never the point. We knew Saddam had the capability, otherwise he could not have done this. We knew he could not be trusted on WMDs because he kept doing this. We knew he sensed no moral obligation to stay on his own ground because he did this. And we knew Bin Laden had declared war on the West, and we knew Saddam was sympathetic to that cause because... well,

Bin Laden: Any chance you could help out with this next big attack on the States I was thinking about, Mr Saddam?
Saddam: Certainly not! What you are suggesting is immoral! Live and let live, that's my philosophy!

As if.

So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.

The only reason the game of Hunt-the-WMDs got so much publicity was that America used it in their attempt to appease the United Nations; Saddam's non-compliance with weapons inspections was supposed to be the legitimate (ie UN-friendly) reason for launching war, therefore, finding WMDs after the event would have "justified" the invasion with hard evidence.

Bad idea. The UN is evil too. It issues terrorism-encouraging statements that inspire people to blow up public-transport users. The UN would not have approved war on Iraq if Saddam had invited the UN and Bin Laden round together for chicken a-la-king, raspberry pavlova and an after-dinner game of launch-the-nuke. It would have suggested waiting a bit longer in case the decimation of California was a mistake rather than a precedent.

No more Mr Nice Guy, please, Mr Bush. The UN is not our friend.

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Chris Goodman revisits Waller R. Newell important 2001 article Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left and looks at from where the Islamists really draw their inspiration

It is noticeable that when followers of Osama bin Laden film themselves cutting off the heads of non-combatants, they seek to extinguish the still small voice of their conscience by shouting out the name of God ['Allah']. Either they believe Allah to be Satan or they do not believe that God – in the sense of objective goodness - exists. An act of moral goodness does not require you to blank out your conscience.

You could argue that they exist in such a primitive state of mind that they view the taking of life as worship. Indeed you do not have to go back very far in European history before you find people being burnt as offerings, and it is possible that they view exploding a bomb in a crowded night club, market, or bank as an act of devotion, possible but unlikely.

The people who decided to murder over 3,000 citizens of the world in New York came from the most educated strata of their societies. To seek to comprehend their actions with reference to a medieval religion is to neglect the extent to which they are a product of modernity.

The ideology that motivates the followers of Osama bin Laden is derived more from European Romantic Nihilism than it is in Islamic conceptions of God. I think that Waller R. Newell explains it well in an article that is available on the internet called Post-Modern Jihad: What Osama Bin Laden learnt from the Left which I have just read.

Waller R. Newell claims that to understand Osama Bin Laden we ought to remind ourselves of the work of Heidegger, a Nazi who inspired several generations of European leftists. Heidegger is part of a tradition of nihilistic romanticism that can be trace via Nietzsche and Marx and Fichte all the way back to Rousseau. A key theme is the total destruction of existing bourgeois societies and their replacement by a new authentic social order. Heidegger influenced French post-war Left apologists for Stalin and Mao such as Sartre, and via the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon whose book on the Third World The Wretched of the Earth (1961) it influenced Middle Eastern radicals.

Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. The Sorbonne educated Ali Shari'at – who many consider to be the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution - translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness into Persian." Inspired by Fanon, such figures as Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by non-Western peoples. Violence exposes the egoism and hedonism of bourgeois societies, and facilitates the creation of a new world based upon collective self-sacrifice. By destroying existing power structures they will regain the dignity lost due to Western oppression and materialism, selfishness, and immorality.

Many elements in the ideology of al Qaeda – see the 1996 Declaration of War Against America by Bin Laden – rely upon the same analysis. While Pol Pot sought to return Cambodia back to Year Zero, Osama bin Laden dreams of returning to the supposed purity of Seventh Century Islam.

Osama bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state. Many, such as Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, a key figure in Islamic fundamentalism, were executed. His followers compared the coming Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions. The influence of Sayyid Qutb's Signposts on the Road (1964) is clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad. The tract by Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah The Revolution and Violence, the Road to Victory has been called "a selective précis of 'The Wretched of the Earth.'

While Al Fatah still used the language of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it blended Fanon with the revolutionary desire to impose an Islamic social order. While Qutb sought internal revolutions, the focus shifted to attacking the external American 'hegemony'. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985) "that we are a nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic land."

Waller R. Newell notes that some French intellectuals have been inspired by Islamic terrorists, because they have sought to realise the longed for revolution against American 'hegemony'. He cites the example of Foucault and Derrida, two leading avatars of post-modernism.

Michael Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist 'hegemony'.

For Foucault as for Fanon, Hezbollah, and Osama bin Laden, the purpose of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. It is exalted by Foucault as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice."

Derrida reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the economically oppressed, a new alliance of “the dispossessed and the marginalized" would unite to combat American led globalization.

Newell notes that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their recent potboiler Empire depict an American dominated global order as the contemporary version of the bourgeoisie, with Islamist terrorism the spearhead of "the post-modern revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why? Because of "its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."

What the terrorists have in common with that strand of European nihilism, whose consequences in Europe in the C20th were millions of deaths, is belief in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by any existing moral teachings. This is the reason why Al Qaeda finds it easy to ignore the teachings of mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of non-combatants; they not only hate their [former] selves, they not only hate the [contemporary] world, their religion is based upon hatred of God.

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So the UN says that Israel's wall is illegal, and demands they take it down.

That would be the same UN that Jacques Chirac is so fond of- the same Jacques Chirac who lately told off President Bush for having opinions about how other parts of the world should run themselves. That would be the President Bush who led the invasion of Iraq which the UN apparently did not approve of very much.

Oh well. Evidently they regard wall-building as a more serious humanitarian issue than Kurd-gassing, children's prisons or helping out organisations that openly state their ambition to be the total destruction of civilisation and all who sail in it.

The court ruling said the barrier could become tantamount to an annexation of Palestinian land, and impeded the Palestinian right to self-rule.

Oh, the horror. Not to mention that-

...some of it juts into the West Bank, cutting Palestinians off from their farmland and dividing some villages.

Whereas, removing the barrier would only redouble terrorist attacks nine times over, thereby impeding the right of four year olds not to have their arms and legs blown off, etc. Which is irrelevant, because it's just a vain claim unsupported by factual evidence;

[Israeli officials] argued it has already saved hundreds of lives since building work began.

Well, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs invents statistics for bombings that never really happened, obviously. No doubt they pay actors to lie around in the road covered with blood so there are pictures for the TV screens, too.

Still, could be worse.

At least nobody who works at The Hague has to live in Israel, right?

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The official Iranian delegation to the "Crans Montana Forum" in Switzerland were rather surprised by the special appearance of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran. His speech on the "Risks of Doing Business with the Islamic Republic" are available in their entirety on the SMCCDI website.

This small sample will give you some idea how blunt the Prince was in his takedown of the mullahcracy:

Second, my message to Western governments is to demonstrate their unity against the Islamic Republic's policies in a less mistakable and much more pointed manner. Diluted signals are likely to lead to the nuclearization of the world's foremost terrorist state. I fear that, at some point, a limited military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities may become inevitable, giving the regime an excuse to fan a nationalist reaction. Considering the fact that Iranians, particularly the young generation, favor the West more than anywhere else in the Islamic world, the military option will be the most unfortunate. It will damage the popular base and natural anchor of an increasingly connected globe in the Islamic world, an outcome that serves no one's interest but the Islamic Republic."

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Many of the DOD press conference transcripts are yawn inducing... but not this one. On June 16th, Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, Commander Multi-National Forces-Corp Iraq gave one of the most candid and informative presentations I have yet seen.

This is good stuff. Read and enjoy.

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I am still catching up with my email backlog after a week in which my server was 'under attack' by a storm of spam. High on my 'must read' list are the transcripts of the various DOD press briefings. I found a gem in this briefing from Saturday, given by Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director for Coalition Operations; and Dan Senor, Senior Adviser, CPA. In the words of Dan Senor:

"And if you look at where we are now, unemployment is about a third of where it was when we arrived. There's an unbelievably liberalized economy here, free trade, no -- outside of natural resources, no limits on foreign investment, tax rates capped, personal income tax and corporate income tax rates capped at 15 percent provides in the long run a very foreign investment friendly environment for Iraq, which is good, while we are in the midst of deploying some $18 billion just from the United States alone, not to include other commitments of the international community. Independent central bank."

Virtually anyone who reads Samizdata would understand tax rates this low necessarily lead to economic growth and the betterment of all citizens.

Could we perhaps borrow Paul Bremer for a year or two? I believe he may be in need of a job...

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This has been on Fox News for a few days now, but it made me laugh: the individual behind the first WTC bombing, now under lock and key, is going on health-strike:

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence, has reportedly stopped taking his insulin medicine and started eating M&Ms to make his diabetes worse. The blind cleric has apparently been upset about not getting the specific brand of tea he likes in prison.

Abdel-Rahman is a highly regarded spiritual leader among his militant followers, and there is still concern that should his health decline, those followers would retaliate against the United States.

Still, things could be worse- at least the Sheik is not expecting retalliation about other, more significant wrongs. Being forced to drink Tetley's rather than Twining's is one thing, but not being able to leave the building in order to blow up places is another thing altogether. Really quite a serious constraint, when you think about it.

I suppose if he was angry about bigger things than tea, Abdel-Rahman would be beating himself up even worse than by eating M&Ms. A few dozen Krispy Kremes, perhaps? The ones with lemon-custard inside are especially good. Then again, so are the raspberry jam ones. Tough call.

Perhaps this sort of thing could become a trend as more major terrorists get arrested. On the one hand, we could be seeing suicide-bombers all over the place blasting people to smithereens because some mad old cleric wanted the central heating turned up a couple of degrees. On the other hand, there might be a drastic reduction in the costs of keeping said evil lunatics alive, if they all manage to kill themselves by refusing their blood-pressure medication and overdosing on tubs of lard.

Coming soon: Saddam gets angry about being tried for murdering all those people, and shaves off his beard to incite retaliation against the US. While eating M&Ms and refusing to take aspirin for his headaches.

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Paul Bremer has left the country... Two days earlier than was expected, he handed the administration over to the Iraqi government under Iyad Allawi. More than 100,000 foreign troops will remain as well as the funds voted for by the American Congress to finance the work of reconstruction.

John Keegan offers a 'meta-contextual perspective' on what is "rotten in the state of Iraq" (and in Washington) with regard to the aftermath of probably the most successful war ever fought between a democracy and a dictatorship. The entourage of highly opinionated advisers, that have become known as "neo-conservatives" may be at the root of the problem with the ill-conceived nation-building in Iraq:

A more accurate way of describing them would be as "post-Marxists", in that, like many 20th-century intellectuals, their thinking was formed in reaction to the Soviet system, whether originally for or against. In the world in which they matured, it was impossible not to perceive politics as the supreme and dominant human activity. Their perception had distorting after-effects.

The new conservatives who had rejected Left-wing solutions to the world's problems were nevertheless left with the conviction that any solution would be political. Confronted by the residue of tyranny, as in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, they expected democracy to take its place. Inside any people's democracy, they might have said, there is a real democracy struggling to get out. In the case of eastern Europe, they were genuinely right.

Although the journey to freedom and democracy in the former communist bloc has not been straightforward, the assumption that those who opposed the communist tyranny saw democracy as the natural alternative, was certainly correct.

The neo-conservatives' mistake was to suppose that, wherever tyranny ruled, democracy was its natural alternative. So, when planning for the government of post-war Iraq, the lead agency, the Pentagon, dominated by neo-conservatives, jumps to the conclusion that, as soon as Saddam's tyranny was destroyed, Iraqi democrats would emerge to assume governmental responsibility from the liberating coalition and a pro-Western regime would evolve seamlessly from the flawed past.

To think in such a way was to reveal a dangerously post-Marxist cast of mind. Marxists can think only in political terms. They accept, even if they despise, liberal and conservative opposition. What they cannot accept is that their opponents may be motivated by beliefs which are not political in any way at all.

John Keegan concludes that the real opposition force is religion. There are others opposing the American presence, such as the survivors of the Ba'ath Party, a strictly secular organisation, however, religion is the only force that can provide an 'alternative', however flawed, to the current state of affairs. He admonished the Americans for dissolving the Iraqi army or police or civil administration, regardless of the number of Ba'ath Party members they contained.

Perhaps the current security problems in Iraq prove him right. I do not know whether using ex-Ba'athists in the post-Saddam Iraq would have prevented the deterioration of security in Iraq we have witnessed. I do, however, have a problem with moral implications of not purging the society of those who propped an oppressive regime. One man cannot sustain a totalitarian regime alone, it is the thousands of 'little' authoritarians that help to maintain the regime's grip on its victims and destroy its opponents. I believe it was wrong (morally and politically) for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe not conduct a thorough 'de-communisation' of their political systems and societies. Similarly, I believe de-Ba'athification is desirable for the Iraqi society to find its footing.

However, I also find it hard to disagree with Keegan's parting shot:

Looking back, better a Ba'athist Iraq than an Islamic one. Let us hope that it is not too late.

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And now for something completely different. Matthew Maly writes in with a fascinating and challenging essay about Islam, civil society, Iraq, Western Civilisation, American politics, Jennifer Lopez, the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, strange Shiite self-flagellation, tribesman with no clothes... well, about all those things and much, much more. Whether you agree with the general thrust of it or not, it is very interesting stuff

Having bombed some mosques, George W. Bush has built a Protestant mosque at Abu-Ghraib prison. Here, the Iraqi Moslems are taught that pork may be good for them and that the teachings of the Holy Koran are supposed to be subordinated to the teachings of Democracy, as represented by handpicked Iraqi exiles protected by American armor.

As many people before him with a gleam in their eye and fervor in their speeches, George W. Bush wanted to do good. As many revolutionaries before him he fell victim to technology, too awesome to reveal its implications.

Technology as the main cause of revolutions

Martin Luther, George W. Bush’s intellectual predecessor, correctly sensed that thanks to improved manufacturing processes, people were becoming economically independent. They no longer wished to be led blindly, to be told to behave “just so” without being given a reason that they could intellectually accept. People were becoming literate, able to read the Bible by themselves, and to think about their lives in a more rational way. The Germans, British, and Dutch did not speak a Romance language, and now they wanted church services in their own language since they simply did not understand Latin. Suddenly, they had become mature enough to want their Mass to be more meaningful, that is, understandable, to them. And when the language of the Mass became an issue, there were other matters to discuss. The Catholic Church failed to account for the social change that manufacturing brought about, and Germanic peoples turned Protestant as a result. The French, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese remained Catholic, since a Latin Mass was understandable to them. Thus the Protestant revolution reflected the fact that manufacturing technology had made people more self-sufficient, able to read and to think for themselves.

The twentieth century saw several totalitarian revolutions, precipitated by an incorrect understanding of industrial technology. God of the Bible created everything to be unique: a Man, a Woman, the Sun, and the Earth. Ford created a Model T, and these cars were leaving the factory gates all exactly the same, 60 an hour, all painted black. The only inefficient and unpredictable part of the assembly line was the human.

Russia and Germany lost WWI, and thus had a reason to believe that the God of the Bible had failed them. But there was a new god: the Machine Tool. This new god created everything that constituted the world of a twentieth century European. A modern man no longer sees a starry sky: he sees the roof of his car, as he is completely surrounded by Machine Tool products. Shoes and shirts, tanks and bombs – everything is produced by the Machine Tool, and the shared virtues of all of these products are sameness and predictability. Moreover, these products are all inanimate. A Machine Tool, great and miraculous as it is, does not create cats. But if the world produced by the Machine Tool is inanimate, where does it leave humans?

If you worship the Machine Tool, it is logical to see humans as woefully imperfect, a product that needs to be recalled and recast, but to do that to all people is impractical. Thus, some types of people need to be proclaimed as being better than others, imperfect, but closer to the ideal. Hitler thought that the Aryans were the best, and there was a very convincing reason: some of them were proclaimed to have a 'proportional' skull, clearly a step in the right direction, especially if you think like a primitive, early 20th century machine tool. Since a curved nose was harder to manufacture, a good human had to have a straight nose; and the rest of his head was covered best by a steel helmet. Non-Aryan humans, thought Hitler, were only good to make soap or lampshades out of. Stalin was of a slightly different opinion. He thought that workers were best because they served the Holy Machine Tool, and capitalists were worst because they clamed to own It, blasphemously putting themselves above the Holy Mechanical Creator.

Hitler’s idea was, let us just say 'purely theoretical' because there were no Aryans and skull proportions had nothing to do with anything. Hitler himself certainly was not an 'Aryan' type. Stalin's idea was purely theoretical as well. While claiming that workers were valuable and had advanced knowledge in the form of a revolutionary theory, Stalin very much liked to clean minefields by making thousands of workers run over them.

What we have here is technology incorrectly understood. Yes, a Machine Tool can make products fast and efficiently, but it is not God the Creator. God is a Spiritual Being, and since every Human has a soul, each Human is infinitely valuable.

Hitler and Stalin thought that they were on the forefront of progress, that their actions were dictated by modern scientific and technical knowledge, and yet, the reality was exactly the opposite: they were guilty of unprecedented barbarity. And in their barbarity, they were indeed helped by technology, as Auschwitz was much more efficient in killing than a medieval three-day rampage in a sacked city.

Millions of people whose lives were touched by industrial technology followed the teachings of Hitler or Stalin and saw them as progressive simply because these people also misunderstood the implications of industrial technology.

Thus, we should always keep in mind that technology may have its dangers. If you see Iraq on TV a few times and suddenly feel that you understand the Iraqis, technology has let you down. And this does not mean that a TV in itself is bad: it simply means that it has not been given a proper place in your decision-making process and in your worldview.

Technology comes into our lives as a neat plaything, and then has a tendency to surreptitiously cause major negative results in unexpected places. A Machine Tool is much better in producing household goods than a medieval manufacturer. But that does not mean that people need to be 'recast' (to use a communist expression) or sent to Auschwitz.

When television was invented, it was not immediately clear that the entire nation would grow obese and stupid glued to the 24 hour sports channel and that the President would decide to invade a very distant and a very dissimilar country after having seen it on TV. When airplanes were not available we had much more respect for distant places, but now we can unwrap a piece of chewing gum, push a launch button, and a missile will obliterate a city while the gum is still sweet in our mouth. That’s too fast.

But it was not the TV that caused our President to make a hasty decision. The technology that misled him is far more basic and far more powerful: it is the social technology of win/win, a supreme and uniquely American invention.

Win/win vs. lose/lose

People have always thought that resources are scarce, and that therefore there is a need to fight over them. Every transaction had a winner and a loser, and there were such prohibitive transaction costs that, in the long term, both sides of the transaction were losers. If we determine, after a bloody fight, who is the slave and who is the master, we see that a slave loses because he does not get a fair payment for his labor, while the master loses in terms of productivity and personal security in comparison with the situation when a hired laborer gets compensated fairly.

America was built on a win/win principle of liberty and justice for all, and slowly but surely incorporated under this principle those groups that had been placed outside win/win. And it was done not out of the goodness of anyone’s heart, but because win/win really is what it claims to be, i.e. profitable for all. America is a country where everybody could come and become a citizen, where everyone could own land, where every race and every creed was eventually incorporated – and this is the source of America’s great strength.

By comparison, today 10% of French citizens are Muslim, and yet no national politician and not one Mayor is Muslim. Since Rwanda is populated by two major tribes, it is natural for Rwandans to think that this is one tribe too many, an idea that caused a million deaths during a period of three months. The world is moving towards win/win, but it is not there yet.

The problem with George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq is that he assumed that the idea of win/win has been accepted everywhere and that people strive to build a win/win society. But it is not true. Yanomami people, hunters-gatherers who live in the Amazon rain forest, wear no clothes, and yet, it does not mean that they want a Brooks Brothers suit. This is not to say, I hasten to clarify, that a Brooks Brothers suit is bad, it simply means that the Yanomami do not want it. And it is wrong to assume that the word 'Yanomami' stands for "have not got a credit card", "nudist" or "I'd rather dress casually", as it actually means human being. An important lesson here: no suit, and yet people still consider themselves human beings, with a clear idea as to how they should live and what to wear. It is likely that Yanomami will offer strong resistance to the idea of wearing a suit, no matter how good it is.

Does it mean that America should abandon the rest of the world to its own devices? No, it does not mean that. But American intervention should be gradual, respectful, cooperative, and clearly beneficial.

The last condition is the most important one, because the win/win system that we are trying to impose is very threatening and disruptive. Look, since there are no losers under a win/win interaction, it follows that there are no winners as well (a winner being someone who won over someone else); and if there are no winners it follows that all participants in a win/win interaction are losers. So, by offering a win/win system we are in fact offering to turn everyone into a loser, and people do not want that! Since I know I may have caused your head to spin, let me try again. Who is the winner in a win/win interaction? One party of the interaction has improved his situation over what it was before, that is, he is a winner over himself as he was prior to the interaction. And so are the other participants: they used to be worse off, now they are better off, so they are winners.

But this is not how the world defines a win! For a winner to be declared there needs to be a bloodied loser, or else it is not a win. A winner is defined as someone who defeated some other person.

America says, "Today you ran a hundred meter dash faster than yesterday, so you are a winner. You combated your inner resistance and won over yourself". The rest of the world says. "You are not a winner unless you run faster than others. Tie their legs, steal their running shoes, poison them, scare them so that they won't run!"

Win/win thus is a great challenge. There is nothing harder than to overcome yourself, and if you fail, you have nobody else to blame. Also, there is nobody to lord over and nobody’s suffering to see; here the question is, "If so, from what do you derive pleasure?" Win/win is a dictatorship of opportunity (which is limitless) over ability (which is limited, if not severely limited). Win/win is a cruel society that recognizes talent, and thus exists for the benefit of (a few) talented people, causing great suffering to the rest of us, should (and this is very important) we choose to become envious.

Take Jennifer Lopez as an example. She poses in a bikini, she sings, she has a thriving career and earns millions. What an affront to those who cannot pose in a bikini and can’t sing! Jennifer should wear a long black robe that hides the forms, cover her face, she should not talk unless spoken to, and spend her days serving tea to her husband. Now, that would be a boon to the millions of women whose bodies are not that shapely, so lose/lose has a point here.

Lose/lose gives the people the right they cherish most: the right to blame others for their own failure, and people are willing to fight and die for this right. Take the profession of composing music. There once was a Mozart, and now the challenge is to write something that Mozart would approve of. Shostakovich is one of very few composers who accomplished that. It is the same with poetry. There once was a Shakespeare, so now you need Anne Sexton or Robert Frost. But who could rise to such heights? Very few people. Lose/lose offers a solution. Get a set of drums, find a rhyme to the word "motherfucka" – and a rapper is born. Why take the profession of musician away from the masses?

We see that win/win is actually a dictatorship of those who can over those who cannot. Scarier still, it is a dictatorship of who I should be over who I am. When you are on a tennis court with Venus Williams, you know you have no chance of winning. But lose/lose is a democracy: when you wrap women head to toe, all of them are equally attractive.

Now, what does America try to impose on the Iraqis? Does America want to grant the Iraqis new opportunities (that they may not be ready to take advantage of) or does America want to take away their cherished excuse for failing to succeed?

It is a beautiful day in Iraq, and Shiites are gathering to honor their Prophet. They march down the street beating themselves with bunches of bicycle chains, pounding their chests, screaming. And then an American soldier comes up to them saying, "Why are you flagellating yourselves? Look, your backs are black and blue, you are bleeding. How will you go to work tomorrow? Let’s go watch some baseball, listen to music, try to meet girls in a bar." There is a huge miscommunication here.

Americans live their lives hoping that things will get better, but people in the Third World live their lives hoping things will not get worse. America has good intentions, but for the Iraqis it would take a total change in perception to recognize them as such.

George W. Bush's America is too good for the world, but unfortunately we cannot live elsewhere, so the situation calls for some tactical display of modesty, or else the world will conclude that Americans are too stupid to see the rest of the world for what it is.

Matthew Maly

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The occasional refrain here at Samizdata is that we are relentlessly pessimistic. Even though the recent series on Burt Rutan's space adventure was anything but, our political writings rarely highlight good news. Alrighty then, two items that should brighten your long-term outlook for liberty:

First, Mark Steyn reviews recent history in Latin America and notes how it might apply to the Middle East.

If you think the democratization of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratization of Latin America. But it happened.

Second, the Iraqis are showing more spine than most, maintaining confidence in their pending government in hte face of terrorist brutality.

The first survey since the new government was announced by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi about three weeks ago showed that 68 percent of Iraqis have confidence in their new leaders. The numbers are in stark contrast to widespread disillusionment with the previous Iraqi Governing Council, which was made up of 25 members picked by the United States and which served as the Iraqi partner to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Connect the dots.

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In Saudi Arabia the government's response to attacks on foreign workers is to allow them to carry firearms. Any chance of that happening in London? I can get a foreign passport if necessary.

However, foreign contractors for the Saudi government will not be allowed to carry weapons because they are under the protection of the State. Good luck to them.

On balance, I think I would swap the British Home Secretary for his Saudi counterpart: less fascism, less victim disarmament, more effective law enforcement, and slightly less political correctness.

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The eight British sailors arrested by Iran have been paraded on television and forced to make public confessions. It just occurred to me that these are both violations of the Geneva Convention, which I believe applies in this case because the British sailors were in uniform, etc.

So why have I not heard any screams of outrage from the Usual Suspects? There are, after all, interest groups out there so enamored of the Convention that they want it followed in cases (illegal combatants, nonstate actors, etc.) where its provisions clearly do not apply. You would think they would be double-extra hot to have it followed where its provisions do apply, but apparently not. I guess we can file their complaints under Outrage, Manufactured Selective Partisan, Discount and Dispose of Soonest.

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The seizure of eight British sailors and their small patrol boats by Iranian forces means it is time for the British government to show that unless a swift accommodation is reached, the consequences will be severe for the Iranian state. If the UK forces did indeed stray into Iranian waters, nothing more than a curt apology is due the Iranian state, and only that if they return the British sailors and their equipment without delay. The Iranian state is a vile tyranny and the sooner they are put under real pressure the better.

Of course I would like to see as much instability as possible within Iran regardless of the incident with the sailors. There is no shortage of people in Iran who would love to see the end of theocratic Islamic rule and now would be a good time to start taking advantage of the fact UK and US forces control the Iraqi side of the border. Surely there must be some fairly large stockpiles of weapons from Saddam's army that have not been blown up and are just sitting around in Iraq...

But if the Iranians want to turn this into a hostage crisis however, the only response should be to use whatever force is required to resolve the situation, not just via anti-regime dissidents but directly by Britain against the Iranian state, and as soon as it is practical. If the theocrats want to engage in brinkmanship, I hope the UK and US will be prepared to not just go to the brink but to step straight over it very forcefully indeed. A nice opening move to the 'negotiations' would be to redeploy a division right up to the Iranian border.

Update: Hopefully this will all be over by tomorrow (Thursday). Perhaps the Iranian state decided it was unwise to push things too far. It will be interesting to see if there is any long term fall out from this incident.

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For those who insist that the lack of an Al-Qaeda/Iraq link means Saddam should have been left to mass murder his own people unmolested, Melanie Philips has some measured words for you.

The excitement was over a preliminary assessment of evidence about al-Qa'eda by the US commission investigating September 11. The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue. The report does not rule out links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda. On the contrary, as the commission's chairman, Thomas Kean, confirmed: "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there." As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those who make the (illogical) claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see.

[...]

Bill Clinton's administration was absolutely certain that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qa'eda. It was a given. That is surely why, after September 11, Pentagon officials were obsessed with Iraq. Whether Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was irrelevant; if he was aiding al-Qa'eda's terror, he had to be stopped. But this has been obliterated from the collective memory in order to place the most malign interpretation possible on the motives of the Bush administration.

Nothing new and from my point of view, so what... that Saddam was a tyrant was enough of a reason for me... but seeing as how people keep repeating 'there was no link' (I was highly sceptical myself at first), continue to oppose the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime if you like but please find another approach because 'that dawg don't hunt no more'.

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We noted that Our Man in Basra, spurred to action by some less than informed commenter(s), to put it mildly, in the comments section of our post expressing outrage that the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces in Iraq. As he has so courageously by-passed his 'handler' and put much interesting information in a comment, I shall give you the full juicy goodness of Our Man in Basra (perhaps I should take this opportunity to rename him to Our Man in British Army), herewith:

As I notice I am being referred to, under my pseudonym "Our Man In Basra" (not I am no longer working, I should say) I thought I would throw my two-pence worth in.

Do UK troops need more equipment? Absolutely, enough personal radios, body armour, working Land Rovers - I could go on for hours. (In fairness, where I was the food was excellent). Some more helicopters would be hugely useful, but beyond fantasy as a hope.

However, more troops - abso-bloody-lutely. I cannot comment in detail for reasons that I take to be obvious, but to give generic examples of why more troops would be useful in a counter-insurgency

1. More patrols, at more frequent intervals, so you can dominate the ground, throw uncertainty into your enemy, and essentially take the initiative. As all the military experts commenting above must know, having the initiative is the key to winning any kind of military confrontation. And if all your troops are tied up guarding your bases and vulnerable points, you cannot do anything to get the initiative. You cannot reduce the number of bases (much) or vulnerable points, so you need extra troops. QED.
2. More (reliable) troops to guard the vital infrastructure, i.e. the electricity and oil lines. Not necessarily by sitting on them, but by frequent unpredictable patrols.
3. Troops to act as dedicated QRF (Quick Reaction Forces), so that you can react rapidly to any enemy action- so that eventually he learns that any attack by him gets a very rapid response, thereby reducing the scale and effectiveness of what he can try.
4. More guards for your own installations - not necessarily to boost the number on guard, but so you can rotate them more regularly, and keep them fresher/more alert.
5. Crowd control. One man with a machine-gun can shoot a loot of people. But if you need to control a large angry crowd with sticks and stones, and you do not want to shoot - well then you need a lot of hard men with batons. Crowd in Iraq are in the 100s and up. That means you need a lot of troops - crowd control is labour-intensive. Unless you want to take the capital-intensive solution, and start shooting.

I am sure readers can think of plenty of other tactical uses for extra troops. At the higher level, the more troops you have, the better you can rotate them and manage their morale, thereby avoiding the kind of cynicism and depression. Soldiers thinking I hate this hole, I've been here 9 months, I'm exhausted and I'm not leaving for another 6 months. Who gives a shit what happens to the Iraqis? undermines the basis of counter-insurgency, hearts and minds. The British rotate our troops far more frequently than the Americans (average 4 months versus over a year), which IMHO is one reason for our relative success at hearts and minds.

The idea is not to carpet the country with troops, Boer War-style - although it may be worth noting that such an approach would actually work if we had enough troops. No, the idea is to have enough troops to do what we are doing now effectively.

To address some 'issues' raised by a particular commenter that goes by name Charlie who says: But if there were more soldiers, that would mean more opportunities for opportunistic attacks and therefore more casualties.

So, if there were no troops, there would be no opportunity for opportunistic attacks? True, but the point is not just to minimise casualties, or else why go there? The mission (should) come first, followed very closely by what our American cousins call "Force Protection". And that means you need enough troops to do the job.

In this case, the job is not protecting our troops, it is protecting the poor average Iraqi from all those who seek to prey on them, from ex-Saddamites to gangsters to religious fanatics (or at least those who claim religious backing for their own grab for power).

There is an amount required to do the job. At present it might be thought that a great deal of what we are doing is being driven by a desire to minimise our troops numbers and expense, rather than to actually do what is best for Iraqis (and in the long term for us).

Of course, one way to make do with fewer troops is to use what are known as "force-multipliers", anything that increases the effectiveness of your troop numbers. A good example is the helicopter, because it enables you to dominate larger areas of ground with fewer troops. But the UK has nowhere near the helicopter numbers of the US, because of far smaller funding. Another potential force multiplier would be reliable British Arabic translators. But to have lots of those ready to go would require more funding for Defence languages. You get the idea.

Also, in this type of operation in particular, the distinction between "combat" and "non-combat" troops is spurious. The RMP [ed. Royal Military Police] took a lot of casualties, I do not think they would appreciate being told they are not needed to fight. They, and many other supporting troops, are in great demand to, for example, run PW camps, which I would suggest is better than giving the job to reservists, as well as all kinds of other tasks - from advising the infantry on how to effect arrests while on patrol, to helping to train the Iraqi Police Forces.

That said, more infantry would be good as it would avoid the need to use other troops, such as RMP or Artillery, to perform patrolling functions, in which the Infantry are the specialists. As another commenter, Jacob, actually correctly points out, you can always use more soldiers in any kind of fighting situation. This point was made quite simply by Field Marshal Slim, one of the greatest military minds in history. I highly recommend his book "Defeat into Victory", I think mentioned on Samizdata before. The more you use, the fewer you lose.

Unfortunately, having said all the above, there simply are not that many soldiers left in the Army [ed. British Army], and there are still many commitments elsewhere - from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, not to mention Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, etc etc. The "Harmony Guidelines" which said that for the sake of their families soldiers should get at least 18 months at their home base between operations are already a poor joke. We might need to send more soldiers, but unless we cancel everyone's leave, we haven't got them.

Sorry, rather longer than I planned, but I thought it was worth saying.

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It has been reported that the 700 strong 1st battalion of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment has been in contact with the enemy every day for the past six weeks, racking up 250 seperate combat incidents.

Capt Justin Barry, a military spokesman, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph:

The fighters engaged were basically terrorists and gangsters - people who are out to destabilise the area, drive out the Coalition and suck as much out of Iraq as they can. But at the end of the day, we got the better of them. The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment were engaged in very heavy hand-to-hand fighting and bayonets were fixed. There's a great sense of satisfaction among the men with the way this turned out.

Indeed, but no thanks to Tony Blair. The fact the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces is nothing short of a national scandal.

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Whoever came up with all this tosh about the world being a 'global village'? Seems to me that different parts of the world have a very different way of going about things.

In Saudi Arabia, a BBC reporter gets gunned down and lies bleeding in the street:

Police said Mr Gardner tried to get bystanders to help him as he lay wounded in the street by crying out that he was a Muslim.

Now I like to think that here in dear old Blighty, we would rush to the aid of a badly wounded human being regardless of his religion.

Oh, unless the police are around to stop us:

A police force was accused yesterday of waiting too long to act after a shooting at a family barbecue left two sisters dead. One witness claimed that their lives could have been saved.

Roy Gibson, 70, said he spent an hour waiting for help to arrive as he tried to save one of the women. Paramedics were prevented from entering until Thames Valley Police had completed a one-hour assessment of any further risk to life.

By which time, there was definitely no risk to life because the victims were no longer alive.

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The storm over the revelations of prisoners' abuse in Iraq may have subsided a bit, however, the events have prompted Our Man in Basra to come out and offer his personal comments. His perspective comes from working and talking to people who deal with Amnesty International (AI) and International Red Cross Commitee (ICRC) in Iraq and elsewhere and from knowing their reputation in the Army.

I actually support the concept of an independent civilian organisation that moderates us [ed. armed forces]. There are often unconscious pressures to slip into "abuse", and they are most effective because of "socialisation", the process by which you take your cue for acceptable behaviour from those around you - that is why it is easy when standards slip for all to gradually slide down. Armed forces are designed to reinforce this process, and if the standard is not set from the top (as military hierarchy is designed to ensure it is) then they can slip down quickly.

That is exactly what happened in Abu Ghraib. There is therefore a need for an independent organisations such as Amnesty International or ICRC monitoring Army (and civilian) activity. They are a separate group, not subject to same socialisation, and so can act as a brake and ensure standards are maintained even if military's own system fails.

This relates to a more general point about Anglosphere intuitions being less corrupt in general and more effective. This is not because of better people, but better systems. This is why the United States as a country works so well with so many non-Anglo-Saxon people. In this context, one could think of Amnesty International checks as a sort of moral separation of powers.

However, Amnesty International and International Committee of the Red Cross have completely lost perspective, which in the long run is a pity for all of us. These organisations rely upon their moral authority, and in the past their most important and influential supporters have been people in the west with a strong moral sense and anti-despotic beliefs - whose faith in the ICRC and AI will be undermined once details of some current claims come out. As an anecdotal example that know of from a man working on the reports AI compile on us: They complained that Iraqis in Umm Qasr (British/US administered detention facility in the South) where being degraded because their food was handed out in plastic bags rather than delivered on some kind of trolley or plate. The Iraqis were not bothered, the food was perfectly good, but this was thought to be "degrading". This is an important point - when one of these reports comes out and accuses anyone of "degrading" or "humiliating" behaviour, etc, it is essential to dig deeper and see exactly what they mean.

The interesting question is why has this happened? I think there are a whole host of reasons feeding off each other:

1. Ignorance. The AI and ICRC are not monolithic, they have different people reporting in different places. It is a fair bet that the overwhelming majority people reporting on Iraq were not there before the war, because Saddam sure as hell would not let them. The same applies to every other Arab country. The investigators are therefore every bit as ignorant as the average journalist reporting on the country, with whom they share a lot in common, such as probably the same general meta-context and the same belief (with rather more justification) that they are there to uphold their view of civilisation. Not the local one.



2. The investigators are civilians (as they must be) but therefore often poorly equipped to put things in to relevant tactical perspective. These are not weasel words - to give a concrete example, suppose an Iraqi man has been "beaten up" by British troops; a clear case of abuse? This depends upon the circumstances. There is a world of difference between beating up a helpless prisoner once back in camp (this is clearly abuse), and, for example, using physical force to subdue a struggling looter, or an armed rioter. The whole purpose of Armies is to use violence, which cannot be defined as abuse every time they do without rendering the term pointless. It is moral infantilism to say that the context does not affect the morality of the act, and it is not clear that all of the reports or accusations take this in to account.



3. The above is essential to the most important point - Iraqis lie. This is not at all a criticism of Iraqis in a racial sense - being born Iraqi does not make you a liar. But lying reflexively to strangers is an entirely rational, indeed inevitable, response to living your entire life under a brutal and intrusive police state, in which the only efficient institution were the secret police forces. Therefore Iraqis have a neutral attitude to truth at best - they feel no automatic inclination to tell it the way westerners do.

   In addition most Iraqis have a strong sense of pride that prevents them from admitting ignorance. They will consistently claim knowledge they do not have, rather than admit that they do not know something. It is a matter of face, especially for the more important Iraqis. This was and is a constant source of frustration for anyone trying to gather information from them. They have lived their whole lives by exploiting any small opportunities the state bureaucracy may have given them.

   Most importantly, there is no punishment for lying to an investigator - what are we going to do, sue them for libel? Bear in mind as well that the vast majority of detainees were either looters, rioters, criminals of some kind (as the military, against its wishes, was stuck with running basic law and order) or actual ex-Ba'athists or terrorists. This does not give the slightest justification for abusing them, but it does suggest that they are not the most objective or reliable of witnesses.

   Now consider the following scenario:

   AI (or ICRC) investigator: We are investigating claims of brutality by British soldiers. We are deeply ashamed of such things, and want to assure you that we are not like the last regime; we will investigate any complaints, and we will compensate anyone who was unjustly harmed; do you know of any such incidents?

   Iraqi ex-prisoner (or even not): Why, yes I do I was beaten up, and so was my brother, and my cousin, and my father was shot, and all my family, and how much did you say the compensation was?

   It is an entirely rational economic act if you feel no obligation to the truth, a no-brainer gamble - money if you are believed, no cost if you are not.




4. All this is not helped by the seeming automatic tendency of the AI and ICRC to disbelieve anything the soldiers or military tell them but to believe anything an Iraqi tells them. I do not really object to their scepticism towards the military, wearying as it is - after all, in a sense that is their job. But to do a good job they should apply the same standards of proof and scepticism to both sides, not just one. If anything, the benefit of the doubt should belong to the military, who have a better record of honesty. Abu Ghraib, in the US military response actually demonstrates this. It was an entirely US military internal investigation that uncovered and closed down the Abu Ghraib abuses, not an AI or ICRC one.



5. Abu Ghraib has not helped, as it enables the AI, ICRC and everyone else to say "Look, these abuses have happened here, they could happen elsewhere, and the possibility must be investigated". Although it is fair to say that most of the reports currently in the press were prepared before Abu Ghraib became public knowledge. I have no problem with that conclusion - we are all appalled by Abu Ghraib, the military probably more than most.

   However, that is not the same as assuming that these things did happen elsewhere. Let's see proof, or at least strong evidence, before accusations are taken as smearing the whole military. Note to the media: Could we please distinguish between reservists, often great people but basically civilians with minimal training in uniform and who seem to have been almost solely responsible for Abu Ghraib, and the professional regular military? And if, as I suspect, poorly trained reservists are found to be involved in any other cases of abuse, can we consider how that reflects on the moral responsibility of politicians who try to cut corners on the armed forces by sending out civilians to do their job?




6. In conclusion, accusations must be investigated, but they are not proper evidence, let alone proof in themselves. They should be investigated by people with some understanding of the relevant factors, i.e. culture, situation at time of event, tactical realities, medical knowledge, etc; and with at least some parity of scepticism between the locals and the military.

In this case, they are so keen to be, and to be seen to be, impartial between different governments and people, and between Arabs and the 'West' that they seem to feel they must give equal reports of abuses by both sides, when in fact there is no remote comparison of treatment. Such reports are a disservice to objective truth by giving the false impression of a broad comparability of moral standing. Shades of the Cold War anyone?

I said at the start of this post, the current state of affairs is regrettable, because in the long run it will undermine the most important resource of both AI and ICRC, their credibility. And there may be times when we will still need them.

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As the recent attacks against civilians in Saudi Arabia have shown, Al Qaeda does not kill civilians as collateral damage during strikes on military targets, non-muslim civilians are the target and will always be the target. People say we should 'understand the root causes of their anger' and I agree. And so, after understanding, that should help us to resolve to kill as many Islamists as is needed to make their cause collapse in ruin.

Of course the usual paleo-libertarians and paleo-conservatives will take this to mean I think we should use carpet bombing in cities or nuclear weapons just to make sure we got 'em all. Yeah, yeah, whatever. But a commenter on Samizdata.net said the other day in a succinctly manner I really cannot improve on:

I just propose that the only rational way to fight a war is to fight a war, and that means using whatever force is needed to defeat your enemy. This is not exactly a revolutionary concept in most military circles. In the case of Iraq, this just means using the usual range of weapons and tactics and applying them with resolution. There is nothing about Iraq that is at all unusual or outside historical experience to suggest this need be more than a footnote in military history.

And the same applies to Al Qaeda and its confreres wherever they can be found. You find them and then you kill them by whatever means it takes. What you do not do is talk to them or negotiate with them, unless of course it is just a tactic for getting them to stand still for juuuuuust a moment.

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Mark Steyn describes an incident that confirms my impression that the politicians are botching up Iraq.

During the Falklands War, a bayonet charge on enemy positions would have been publicly applauded by the Prime Minister, honours and medals would have been discussed and the British public would have been in doubt that the government and the military knew exactly what they were doing. We could agree or disagree with the objective or the means, but not the operational competence or the political will.

Where Iraq is going wrong is not that the military are incapable (unless they run out of ammunition, boots, flak-jackets etc). It is that military action will be undermined by political 'arse-covering'. The resolution shown by troops is frittered away by Colin Powell and his cronies in the US, and by the Labour government in the UK. Powell looks more and more like his caricature in the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! played by Paul Winfield.

My view on Vietnam is that it would have been better if the US had not got involved after the French pull-out, given that they were going to do so eventually anyway, or that the US should have fought to win. I take a Barry Goldwater position rather than a Eugene McCarthy one.

It used to be Colin Powell's position too.

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Good luck to Iyad Allawi, the man who will, inshallah, be Iraq's next Prime Minister.

Hopefully he will be given the external support he needs to stabilise the security situation sufficiently to allow more internal solutions to develop. Although it would be difficult to underestimate the struggle ahead, the situation is far from the hopeless one often portrayed by people with axes to grind which have very littloe to do with Iraq.

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It is by now a familiar statement from anti-war folk that Saddam had no real links to Islamic terror groups of any consequence. The idea, dear boy, is totally incredible. The man, who after all was a "secular ruler" (conjuring up the image of the old bastard reading Voltaire of an evening). had a positive revulsion of Islamic religious extremism. To suggest a link is to fall prey to the fantasies of the great neoconservative/Zionist/whatever conspiracy now trying to rule the world. Right?

Well, no, actually. The Wall Street Journal has an article today setting out what it believes is rather a big lump of evidence pointing to terror links before and after 9/11:

One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.

Okay, I know what the responses will be. It's the Wall Street Journal! You can't believe these guys! etc, etc.

But stepping aside from this specific article, consider this following general scenario: you have a military dictator who loves taking his nation to the brink even at great cost; his military forces are seriously damaged from two devastating wars and a sanctions regime; he craves revenge and enjoys humiliating his foes. To whom does he turn to help hurt his great enemy, the United States?

Exactly. Why is it so crazy, so bonkers, to think that terror links probably did exist, and that, if it were possible, it was vital for the intelligence services of the Western powers to check those possibilities?

You may say, why does this really matter now? Well, to be frank, the argument that we need to "reshape the Middle East" always struck me as dangerously ambitious, and the costs of such a venture struck me as potentially prohibitive. That is one part of the isolationist position I have some sympathy for, a fact which might surprise some. ("Johnathan Pearce has gone wobbly!") For me, though, what counted was the potentially deadly nexus of terror groups, mass weapons, and rogue states able and willing to offer harbour and support to such terror groups. My conscience is troubled at the thought that we might have attacked a nation of no serious threat to us. Well, if the latest stories turn out to be even half-true, then the evidence of Saddam's malignity just got a lot, lot harder.

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I took some rather hot flak when I opposed international gun control as an excuse for invading Iraq (if Iraq's nukes are "bad", are France's and China's nukes "good"?). I have also taken some sharp criticism for saying that invading a country in order to make friends is an odd strategy (worthy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau "We will force you to be free!").

From Wires blog:

As we were leaving Baghdad, taking a ‘short cut’ through Fallujah and Ramadi, we passed a US Tank involved in ‘Stop and Search’. It had ASSAULT AND BATTERY written on it’s barrel.

Nice Peace – Keeping.

Now I do not take everything fiona says as Gospel, although her first act in Iraq was to try out an AK-47 so she can't be all bad!

It is clear however that there is no abatement of the resistance to foreign occupation of Iraq. It does not really matter whether the fault is that the occupying forces are too forceful, or failing to keep the peace because of politcally correct instructions, or a row between the US State Department and the Department of Defense. Either way it has all the potential for Vietnam II.

The only worthwhile achievement of invasion was the removal of Saddam Hussein. He has gone, it is time to leave also.

The only worthwhile debate now is whether to recognise an independent Kurdistan or not before the troops pull out and allow Iraqis to sort out their civil affairs.

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What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 2001

The Multiple Identities of the Middle East
Bernard Lewis
Schocken Books, 2001

In Goodbye to All That (pub. 1929), Robert Graves reports witnessing an encounter between Lawrence of Arabia and an American oil financier who had come over from the United States to ask him a single question: Did Middle-Eastern conditions justify him putting any money in South Arabian oil? Lawrence, without rising, simply answered: No. That was all the man wanted to know, and he left. At that time, the US produced almost three-quarters of the world's oil, Iran less than three percent, while its presence in the Arabian pensinsula, if suspected, was unknown.

This exchange, some time in the nineteen twenties, though not alluded to by Bernard Lewis, is a reminder that in the absence of oil the whole region, from the Mediterranean to Iran, now detached from the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, might have been expected to slumber on as it had already done for centuries. Britain was burdened with the administration of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq and the Gulf States, but its only real interest was in safeguarding the route to India via the Suez Canal. It might feel responsible to do rather more for the region than merely keep the peace, a valuable enough favour to the inhabitants, but, in the way of active development, there would be little it could do. One of Lewis's more surprising statements quotes a World Bank estimate that "the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants (p. 52)." Admittedly there is perhaps little need to export anything else, indicative of the lack of any incentive to do so which has stimulated countries without much in the way of natural resources, but this merely leads us by another route to the question posed by the author: why has the Arab world remained stagnant for something like a thousand years?

To recapitulate its history: the Arabs, inspired by the new religion Islam, erupted out of the Arabian peninsula after the death of their prophet Mohammed in 632 and within a century had conquered an enormous stretch of territory from the Atlantic to the borders of India. Strictly Arab rule, centred in Baghdad, lasted for more than two centuries over the heart of this area, making Islam the dominant religion and Arabic the dominant language. This was when Islam assimilated classical culture, almost entirely medical, mathematical, astronomical, and philosophical. It would be just as interesting to check what was not assimilated - Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Arrian (and possibly still extant contemporary accounts of Alexander, such as Ptolemy's), or any other historian, and the great dramatists. However, after three centuries had passed, Arab dominance was in decline, to be replaced by that of the Seljuk Turks. Fortunately for Islam, these and all subsequent invaders, ending with the Ottoman Turks, either were or became Muslims, with the exception of the Crusaders, who were
successfully ejected - though not by the Arabs.

Bernard Lewis is the author of more than two dozen books, less than half of which, dealing with the Muslim Near and Middle East, are listed in either of the titles here. In What Went Wrong? his remit is the problem of its inadequate response to the challenge of the modern world, i.e., all the advances in technology and the attitude of mind that goes with it, from, say 1500 AD if not before. By that time the dominant Muslim power was the Ottoman Empire, which was approaching its zenith. It was still growing, conquering Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt in 1517, overrunning Hungary by 1541 and expanding its rule to the Persian Gulf, the Arabian and much of the North Africa coastline by 1566, when the great Sultan, Suleyman the Magificent, died. What, he and his subjects might well have asked, was there to learn from his Christian enemies, who spent more time fighting each other than resisting him – and unsuccessfully at that? In fact, they had learnt some things, particularly about firearms, while some were aware that Europeans were making advances in shipbuilding.

Any intellectual exchange was minimal and undoubtedly to the disadvantage of the Muslims. They were reluctant travellers to the West, nor were they welcome there; far more Christians (and Jews) went East, some to become Muslims. Any innovation from an infidel source met clerical resistance for religious reasons. Printing was not introduced until 1729, and was discontinued 13 years later after only 17 books had been printed; it was was only at the end of the century that it got going again. Mechanical clocks and watches were another rarity; in the mid sixteenth century the ambassador of the Emperor Charles V was so irritated by the inability of the leaders of the caravan in which he was travelling to judge the time for it to start the day's journey, that he persuaded them to leave the matter to him, "for I had clocks which never failed me." This situation was not much improved a century later, while even in the early nineteenth century, standard weights and measures did not seem to exist. Wheeled traffic,
present in antiquity, had died out, to be reintroduced from the West in the nineteenth century.

Lewis concentrates his historical examination on the last three centuries, when the Turks, in decline, first became aware of their lagging position and finally made attempts to catch up. Although he does not mention it, an almost exactly parallel state of affairs was taking place in Mughal India, which went into rapid decline after the death of Aurungzeb in 1706. The corresponding turning point for the Ottomans was 1699, when by the Treaty of Carlowitz they lost Hungary to Austria.

Since the Ottomans perceived the French Revolution as anti-Christian, it was at first regarded with some favour, but soon understood to be equally anti-Islamic, particularly after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. The Sultan issued a strong condemnation: "The French nation (may God devastate their dwellings and abase their banners) are rebellious infidels and dissident evil-doers," continuing with a list of theological reasons why (p. 146). Another negative, from the Sultan's point of view, was that the Revolutionary notions of freedom and equality awoke or provoked national feelings amongst some of the Empire's minorities.

The situation of minorities - in this context religious minorities - provides a contrast in their treatment in the Islamic and the Christian worlds. In the enormous territories conquered in the first Arab headlong onset, imposition of Islam by the comparatively small army of invaders must have seemed impossible, and the believers in other organized religions were consigned to the position of second class citizens (dhimmi), burdened with a number of disabilities, such as paying higher taxes, described and discussed in The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, Ch. 8, "Aliens and Infidels". This became the accepted policy wherever Islam advanced by conquest. Such toleration is often contrasted unfavourably with the religious uniformity imposed by Church and State in Christian Europe, which was largely successful until the Reformation. However, it must be remembered that religious toleration was regarded as an expedient, not a virtue, for some hundred years following this event. In view of the fact that both Islam and Christianity held that unbelievers were destined for hell, it can be argued that Christians have taken their responsibilities more seriously, responding to the Biblical injunction "Compel them to come in (Luke 14, 23)". Also Islamic toleration does not extend to allowing a Muslim to change his faith; for that the penalty is death. Lewis points out that Christian toleration, secured the hard way by more than a century of persecutions and wars, has actually brought about the division between politics and religion, church and state, that Islam so badly needs. It probably also has encouraged a reluctance to consign people to hell purely on a basis of their beliefs.

Lewis emphasises that Islam as a religion is intertwined with society in a way quite different from how Christianity has developed. Development, in the sense of change, is for Islam an alien and inadmissable concept and a Muslim, contemplating where it has brought Christianity, attenuating its beliefs, undermining its morals and depleting its numbers, would be justified in having misgivings in giving it a try. The political solutions in vogue during the last century, communism, socialism and nationalism, all intellectual imports from outside, have worked as badly in the Islamic world as they have elsewhere. All these ideologies favoured centralised, state-run economies, resulting in dictatorships or, at best, single-party governments with little democratic input and strong tendencies to corruption. Although the successful economies of Eastern Asia plainly signpost the capitalist road, there is little indication that Islamic countries are willing to take it. Most governments fear that any advance, even via the capitalist route, towards democracy will merely result in a disillusioned electorate lapsing into xenophobic Islamic fundamentalism, as was the case with Algeria a decade or so ago. For, with the exception of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the late Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, states with Muslim majorities still have a secular political structure, which their politicians would not want otherwise.

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There is some interesting new information about the 155mm Sarin shell on Blaster's Blog:

Iraq never declared any binary 155mm artillery shells. In fact, they never claimed any filled with sarin at all in the UNSCOM Final report (Find on "Munitions declared by Iraq as remaining"). Not declared as existing at the end of the Gulf War, not having been destroyed in the Gulf War, not having been destroyed unilaterally. The only binary munitions claimed by the Iraqis were aerial bombs and missile warheads. Not in an artillery shell.

I was just thinking about this as I returned from breakfast. One of our commentariat pointed out the missing shells were of a smaller size and were of a type with a fairly short shelf life. Suddenly this single shell becomes even more troubling.

This is a very different story now. Is there a whole class of large binary munitions no one was even aware of?

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Despite the best efforts of the Negatroid Hordes to convince us otherwise, much in Iraq is going very well.

DEMOCRACY TAKES ROOT: Democracy is spreading - from the ground up, as it should: "In the province of Dhi Qar, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad and a backwater even by Iraq's standards, residents voting as families will have elected city councils in 16 of the 20 biggest cities by next month."

Read the whole article and then ask yourself where the journalists have been. No, not just their heads. We know where those are.

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I picked up this story from James Taranto's daily email newsletter:

A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.

"A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said.

Interesting. Our enemies are attacking us with those nasty nonexistant weapons.

I will be watching the network News tonight to see if something as inconsequential as the use of nerve gas against American troops gets mentioned. There are, after all, really important stories running: like the life story of a young American dominatrix and how she found fame in an Iraqi prison...

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Members of the Iranian student dissident organization, SMCCDI, protested at a May 15th UCLA talk by Shirin Ebadi. According to their press release (no URL supplied):

Tens of Iranian activists protested, yesterday, against Shirin Ebadi's presence at the UCLA and her controversial stands in line with the Islamic regime's so-called "reformist" faction and foreign policy.

Protesters distributed templates and tracts while shouting slogans against Ebadi and in condemnation of the Islamic regime's persistent rights abuses outside the conference room. In addition, several of them were able to introduced themselves in the closed door meeting and to shout slogans and questions to which an embarrassed and interrupted Ebadi did not respond. These questions were mainly focused on the evil nature of the Islamic regime and it's repressive policies or asking from Ebadi to respond clearly if she's rejecting the rights abuse in Iran.

Each time the security forces rushed to oust out the protesters and also those who deployed tissue banners denouncing the Islamic republic's crimes. Several opponents were brutalized by young naive Iranians supporting Ebadi and who are blinded by her Iranian adjective. An Iranian woman activist was reported as agressed by Kazem Alamdari, one of the speech organizers who does frequent travel to Iran and who has obtained the authorization from the repressive Islamic regime to publish his books in Iran. The latter and his wife Nayere Tohidi, both UCLA professors, were in their younger age part of a Marxist guerilla group involved in several murders and which contributed to the victory of the Islamic revolution.

If a member of SMCCDI could supply me with a URL for the full press release, I would be happy to link to it.

Jeannie Fiona Macauley reports the information can be found here.

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British troops have been closing to bayonet range in fights against company sized units of Islamist militiamen in Iraq:

Scottish troops fixed bayonets and fought hand to hand with a Shi'ite militia in southern Iraq in one of their fiercest clashes since the war was declared more than a year ago, it was reported last night. Soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders mounted what were described as "classic infantry assaults" on firing and mortar positions held by more than 100 fighters loyal to the outlawed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, according to military sources.

And in support of Britian's soldiers, some Members of Parliament have called not for rapid reinforcement to be sent but rather for a vote to decide if the Blair government should send any additional troops at all.

It is one thing to oppose British involvement in Iraq in its entirety, it is quite another for politicos to take positions which places UK forces in danger by denying them support without having the courage to just come out and say that Britain forces should just be ordered back to the UK in order to allow Tony Blair to be deposed by more suitably leftward statists. It is unedifying to see the likes of Robin Cook playing political games in Westminster when people are fixing bayonets in Basra and calling for support.

Either support and reinforce the army or (bizarrely) declare defeat and withdraw them.

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Once upon a time, I read an article in the Financial Times, which used the slightly peculiar phrase "resigned voluntarily" about six times in the article. Essentially, some CEO had in fact actually decided to leave his job in order to spend more time with his family genuinely of his own accord, and this was such a remarkable thing that the FT felt the need to explain over and over that he had not "resigned" in the usual way (ie been sacked).

A case in point today. Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, ceased to be the editor of the Daily Mirror. The Sun reports that he "resigned" upon the photographs that the Mirror had published purporting to show abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers being proved to be forged. The Mirror itself reports that Morgan "resigned". The media section of the Guardian reports the truth: that Morgan refused to apologise in any way to anybody, and upon making this refusal clear to Trinity Mirror's chief executive, Sly Bailey, he was escorted out of the building by security. Given the dreadful way in which the Queen's Lancashire Regiment and the British army in general have been libeled in these circumstances, it would have been nice to have been there to cheer the security guards on yesterday. In any event, some of the Samizdatistas did get a certain amount of pleasure out of it later.

I particularly like the way the Mirror has the words "Newspaper of the Year" above the banner headline.

And as another observation, the Chairman and Director-General of the BBC and the editor of the Mirror have now all lost their jobs due to their organisations essentially lying in order to make their case of opposition to the Iraq war. It really is not impressive on their part.

A shame we can't get the editor of the Guardian as well though.

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With all the coverage and uproar about the images of American troops, there is probably not much attention spared for the pictures of British troops also accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners/captured. The difference is that the British ones were faked and the saga that started with their appearance in the Daily Mirror with headline 'Vile' has come to a climax with the sacking of the editor of the strongly 'anti-war' newspaper, Piers Morgan.

The Army has made a forceful rebuttal of the accusations and demonstrated why it was convinced that the Daily Mirror photographs were fakes. The arguments focused on four items - the weapons the soldiers were carrying while 'abusing' the Iraqi prisoner, the vehicle in which the alleged assault was supposed to happen, the soldiers' appearance in the photos i.e. wrong hat, no watch and no tan and the t-shirt worn by the captured.

Our own source listed the 'things wrong with the photos' before the published Army rebuttal. It pretty much covers the same points plus a few incidental details I thought you might find interesting.

1. The most importanty reasons - it's too clean. Everything in Iraq was covered in dust and shit. Everything in these pictures is clean- the soldiers, the 'prisoner', the truck itself. The uniforms look freshly pressed, let alone washed (after being on patrol..?) Same for the 'prisoners'. Squaddies have been patrolling the streets, climbed in the back of this truck, and there's not a mark of dust or mud anywhere? Or was the truck specially cleaned so they would have clean enviroment to beat someone up in? Impossible.
2. No one's sweating. It's 40+ degrees, the soldiers are beating a guy up, he's being beaten up, and no one is sweating. Impossible.
3. This guy is being beaten almost to death. There's not a single mark on him. Impossible.
4. The truck is a Bedford. We had very few DAF's in Iraq and all were used by the stores department. Troops on patrol used Saxon APC's or Landrovers. Try to drive a 8 ft wide truck down the back alleys of Basra catching looters. No way.
5. Those photos are way too good. There are enough photo nuts at Samizdata they should know that. [ed. no need to abuse our contributors...] Squaddies in the back of a truck taking crystal clear pictures, with no bad shadaw or anything else? Compare to the US photos that are grainy and blurred in places.
6. There's not a single identifying mark on teh soldiers. No tattoos, no watches, no rings, nothing. And nothing to identify their Regiment or unit either. What's the point of a 'trophy photo' if you can't prove your in it? You might hide your face, but you would wear something you can point at to prove to your mates that it is you. They won't believe you otherwise.
7. There's no movemnet. There's no blurring, so unless they are using expensive, super high speedcameras (on patrol? In Basra?) there is no movement. And if the guy in the floor is being hit, or has been hit, I'm Dutch [ed. no he isn't Dutch, we can vouch for that.]. I have been hit - you automatically curl up and away and try to protect your head, you just do no lie there stretched out.
8. Since when do sqauddies take happy snaps in black and white?
9. The rifles. No slings on them (no way do yoiu take your sling off in Basra- someone might grab your rifle) and where did they put them? They look like A1s, though hard to tell. The Mirror's source claims they were A3s, which will come as news to the manufacturer, let alone to everyone else.
10. The kit. They aren't in proper patrol order, the pouches are not only undone they look mostly empty, and there is no sign of body armour, helmets, or the "platypus" water bags everyone carried. Nor is anyone wearing sweat rags, shamaghs, or anything else. Never saw a squaddy look like that on patrol.
11. The hats. Guys did have soft hats like that, were not supposed to wear them on patrol, it was berets or helmets according to the threat. But even suppose they were wearing the hats - they are wearing the hats whilst beating a guy up?! Put on a soft hat, then start moving furniture around your house. See how long you leave the hat on. But very convenient, if you need to wear non-unit specific but obvious "desert" clothes for a nice picture for the Mirror...
12. The T-shirt. There were guys wearing T-shirts like that, but not many - it would have been a bit sensitive. It could have been worn by a looter - but mostly bloody convenient, only if you want to show a picture of an 'Iraqi being beaten up'.

Red Herrings:

• The way the boots are laced. It is wrong, but maybe that guy just laced his different, no one cared that much as we had bigger fish to fry.
• Iraqi looks pale. Many do under their clothes.
• Hessian hoods. Those hoods were used to blindfold prisoners on capture, and to prevent them escaping - though not normally for looters but for higher importance/risk deliberate captures.

The really big point here is what the hell happened to Innocent until Proven Guilty? The Mirror is arguing it is up to us to prove the pictures are false.

Quite. Fortunately, the Army did conclusively prove the pictures were faked, the Mirror admitted they were a hoax, fired the editor and apologised (not unreservedly though). However, the damage done to the morale and reputation of the soldiers and the regiment subjected to such horrendous accusations cannot be easily undone...

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I just found out about the latest Al-Qaeda beheading. I haven't seen the video. Probably I never will.

I thought of Daniel Pearl. I wondered how and when the murdered man's family learned of the manner of their son's death. I wondered if he himself knew what was about to happen, as Fabrizio Quattrocchi did.

And such is the unalterably tactical nature of the human mind that mixed in with all that I thought:

Thanks for the reminder, Hellspawn. No thanks for the killing; we've had enough of that, but thanks for the reminder. In all this agonized talk about what we are, we were beginning to forget what you are. What you stand for.

What your pictures show.

Andrew Sullivan thought the same way, evidently:

And they [Al-Qaeda] are as stupid as they are evil. Iraqis now have contrasting images. Do they want to be run by people who cut innocent people's throats at will or by people who have removed a dictator and are investigating unethical abuse of prison inmates? Zarqawi has now done something for our morale as well as his. He has reminded us of the real enemy; and he has reminded the Iraqis. One simple question: will CNN now show these video stills?

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Belatedly, but no less relevantly, I was directed to the following Letter to Editor published in the Daily Telegraph last Saturday. It is from a British Army officer who was (still is?) in Basra. Its content was heartily approved by the Samizdata's own Our Man in Basra - his quotable comment was I could have written every word myself...

Sir, I am a serving Army officer. Publication of photographs that are faked - as appears to be the growing consensus - does not assist our soldiers on the ground but, while such abuse is intolerable to us, brutalised Iraqi opinion differs from ours. Most Iraqis are baffled as to why we do not employ such methods.

Suggestions I have encountered while working with Iraqi governance institutions in Basrah include: crushing looters' hands, wiring pylon saboteurs to the national grid and hanging rioters by the neck and beating them to death.

In Iraqi eyes, it is not through torture that we have failed Iraq. One year on from liberation, improvements have not materialised. We still seek military solutions to problems caused by policy. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) inherited and perpetuated a Soviet-style centralised bureaucracy without the clear central direction or the threats to back it up that made the Ba'athist system work.

Poor salary decisions mean that operating budgets cannot be paid, so, while there are new police cars, they have no fuel and Iraqi jails lack money for food.

On March 13, after nine months of operations, the Rapid Regional Response Programme, the CPA's principal project fund for improving Iraqi life had, in the South, identified almost $42 million (£23.5 million) of projects but, owing to excessively bureaucratic contracting, completed only a shameful $627,671 worth. Emergency Infrastructure Project funding achieved more, but millions of dollars worth of projects will not be completed when the June deadline expires.

Yet many Iraqis will endure all this for freedom and democracy. In terms of freedom, Iraqis are still arrested, held indefinitely without trial and, apparently, tortured. In terms of democracy, the CPA, fearing calls for national elections in which Islamic parties may succeed, has banned direct, democratic elections in favour of caucus-style selections derided as undemocratic by most Iraqis.

Meanwhile, those such as Moqtada al-Sadr, the rogue cleric regarded by most Iraqis as a foolish upstart whose lack of support would be revealed by polling, terrorise the country with armed militias. Next month, the CPA will hand over sovereignty and responsibility to an Iraqi nation singularly unequipped to cope.

Iraqis I have spoken to confirm that ousting Saddam was the right thing to do, but if overturning unpleasant regimes is to become a regular feature of foreign policy, we should ensure we have something better to replace them with.

In short, cherchez le politicien.

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Here is the answer to my question in the final paragraph of my earlier post about the treatement of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison:

On 31 January 2004, the Commander, CFLCC, appointed MG Antonio M. Taguba, Deputy Commanding General Support, CFLCC, to conduct this investigation. MG Taguba was directed to conduct an informal investigation under AR 15-6 into the 800th MP Brigade's detention and internment operations. Specifically, MG Taguba was tasked to:

a. (U)Inquire into all the facts and circumstances surrounding recent allegations of detainee abuse, specifically allegations of maltreatment at the Abu Ghraib Prison (Baghdad Central Confinement Facility (BCCF)); b. (U) Inquire into detainee escapes and accountability lapses as reported by CJTF-7, specifically allegations concerning these events at the Abu Ghraib Prison; c. (U) Investigate the training, standards, employment, command policies, internal procedures, and command climate in the 800th MP Brigade, as appropriate; d. (U) Make specific findings of fact concerning all aspects of the investigation, and make any recommendations for corrective action, as appropriate. (ANNEX 4)

These were the findings:

(U) The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), led by COL Jerry Mocello, and a team of highly trained professional agents have done a superb job of investigating several complex and extremely disturbing incidents of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib Prison. They conducted over 50 interviews of witnesses, potential criminal suspects, and detainees. They also uncovered numerous photos and videos portraying in graphic detail detainee abuse by Military Police personnel on numerous occasions from October to December 2003. Several potential suspects rendered full and complete confessions regarding their personal involvement and the involvement of fellow Soldiers in this abuse. Several potential suspects invoked their rights under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (ANNEX 25)

(S) That between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF). The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence. Due to the extremely sensitive nature of these photographs and videos, the ongoing CID investigation, and the potential for the criminal prosecution of several suspects, the photographic evidence is not included in the body of my investigation. The pictures and videos are available from the Criminal Investigative Command and the CTJF-7 prosecution team. In addition to the aforementioned crimes, there were also abuses committed by members of the 325th MI Battalion, 205th MI Brigade, and Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC). Specifically, on 24 November 2003, SPC Luciana Spencer, 205th MI Brigade, sought to degrade a detainee by having him strip and returned to cell naked. (ANNEXES 26 and 53)

1. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts: a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; i. (S) Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.(ANNEXES 25 and 26)
2. (U) These findings are amply supported by written confessions provided by several of the suspects, written statements provided by detainees, and witness statements. In reaching my findings, I have carefully considered the pre-existing statements of the following witnesses and suspects (ANNEX 26):
   a. (U) SPC Jeremy Sivits, 372nd MP Company - Suspect
   b. (U) SPC Sabrina Harman, 372nd MP Company – Suspect
   c. (U) SGT Javal S. Davis, 372nd MP Company - Suspect
   c. (U) PFC Lynndie R. England, 372nd MP Company - Suspect
   d. (U) Adel Nakhla, Civilian Translator, Titan Corp., Assigned to the 205th MI
   Brigade- Suspect
   e. (U) SPC Joseph M. Darby, 372nd MP Company
   f. (U) SGT Neil A. Wallin, 109th Area Support Medical Battalion
   g (U) SGT Samuel Jefferson Provance, 302nd MI Battalion
   h (U) Torin S. Nelson, Contractor, Titan Corp., Assigned to the 205th MI Brigade
   j. (U) CPL Matthew Scott Bolanger, 372nd MP Company
   k. (U) SPC Mathew C. Wisdom, 372nd MP Company
   l. (U) SSG Reuben R. Layton, Medic, 109th Medical Detachment
   m. (U) SPC John V. Polak, 229th MP Company
3. (U) In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses (ANNEX 26):
   a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
   b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
   c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
   d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair
   e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
   f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was
   injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
   g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
   h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
4. (U) I have carefully considered the statements provided by the following detainees, which under the circumstances I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses:
   a. (U) Amjed Isail Waleed, Detainee # 151365
   b. (U) Hiadar Saber Abed Miktub-Aboodi, Detainee # 13077
   c. (U) Huessin Mohssein Al-Zayiadi, Detainee # 19446
   d. (U) Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee # 151108
   e. (U) Mohanded Juma Juma (sic), Detainee # 152307
   f. (U) Mustafa Jassim Mustafa, Detainee # 150542
   g. (U) Shalan Said Alsharoni, Detainee, # 150422
   h. (U) Abd Alwhab Youss, Detainee # 150425
   i. (U) Asad Hamza Hanfosh, Detainee # 152529
   j. (U) Nori Samir Gunbar Al-Yasseri, Detainee # 7787
   k. (U) Thaar Salman Dawod, Detainee # 150427
   l. (U) Ameen Sa’eed Al-Sheikh, Detainee # 151362
   m. (U) Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, Detainee # 18470 (ANNEX 26)
5. (U) I find that contrary to the provision of AR 190-8, and the findings found in MG Ryder’s Report, Military Intelligence (MI) interrogators and Other US government Agency’s (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses. Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s Report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to "set the conditions" for MI interrogations. I find no direct evidence that MP personnel actually participated in those MI interrogations. (ANNEXES 19, 21, 25, and 26).

You will recognise many phrases from this report that have obviously been used by the media. This is probably the real thing and shows first hand how the US armed forces command handled the situation. In any case, judge for yourselves.

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Every time I have a chance to read the news these days, which is not often as business gets in the way, I come across more pictures of American troops abusing, humiliating and otherwise subjecting Iraqi prisoners to appalling acts. As I have even less time to read what the blogosphere has to say about that, these are mainly thoughts based on the news and conversations with those who have been closer to action that I ever will be.

What the Abu Ghraib prison guards did is despicable, inhumane and immoral. No explanations and no amount of blame-shifting can change that. They should not even try - their posing in the photos shows how they enjoyed what they did. They disgraced the US army uniform and diminished the sacrifices of all those soldiers who were fighting, patroling and reconstructing Iraq, in the eyes of the world and the very people they were trying to help.

Abu Ghraib was a notorious prison in times of Saddam's terror, where people were routinely tortured and disappeared. It probably still bears witness to the horrors that took place there. Perhaps some of the current inmates of the prisons were former guards or people who put others in it.

The prisoners were either ex-Bathists or Saddam's soldiers i.e. PoWs and/or convicted or suspected criminals. In the first case, intelligence military or other was essential for protection of both the ordinary Iraqis and the troops. In the second case, generally, Iraqi prisoners were taken to the tribal leader or a local judge who would let them off. There was (is) no deterrent for those who wished to commit crimes in post-Saddam Iraq. The power vacuum was real for everyone. Iraqis did not know how to understand the new authority, they pretty much expected the new 'masters' to hang or shoot a few people to establish order and were surprised and frustrated when this did not happen.

A common 'excuse' by the perpetrators of the vile behaviour captured in the pictures is that they were obeying orders or that interrogators 'turned the blind eye' and let them make the rules for 'softening up the prisoners to be interrogated' as they went along. I find this very hard to believe, first of all, the 'I was only obeying orders' has not worked since WWII. Secondly, any interrogator worth his salt would certainly not want a bunch of sadistic prison guards demented with drugs to do with the Abu Ghraib prisoners the things we saw in the pictures. Humiliation can be counter-productive and even if it were to be used, it would need to be done by the interrogator himself to reap the 'benefits' of such treatment in the immediate questioning. 'Shock of capture' is far more effective as confusion, disorientation and uncertainly generate the kind of fear that is more likely to make people talk than subjecting them to all kinds of humiliation. That is more likely to bread resistance and negate the effects of the capture. This obviously varies according to circumstaces but the overall objective is always to control the experiences of the captured.

As for what made those reservists commit such atrocities, there is no mystery there. Anyone who has been bullied at school or any other institution knows just how easy it is for one or two sadistic sociopaths to pull an entire group in and then 'socialise' them and the rest of the environment to their abusive behaviour. This surely is far easier to do within a very strict hierarchy such as the military where the main instigator is in the position of power. This in no way exonerates those 'pulled in' from their individual responsibility just explains how something so unacceptable can become the social norm in an enclosed environment such as a prison. The real scandal here where was the hierarchy above the power-crazed prison guards?

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I am watching the BBC current affairs Newsnight. What a truly rich feast of stuff to look at. The main item was about the U.S. government's response to the stories of atrocities by U.S. forces. Now I won't go into the specifics but one point bugged me. It was the way in which the BBC presenter endlessly went on about the 'Arab Street'.

Now, I no doubt imagine that the sort of persons who go on about the 'Arab Street' are sincere in imagining that all those who live in what is the Middle East are part of some common community, or 'street'. But what is all too rarely pointed out is that this term in fact bands together tens of millions of very different individuals under one banner. It is a form of unthinking collectivism. The truth, of course, is that there is no such thing as an 'Arab Street', any more than there is a 'Western Street', 'Asian Street', or 'North American Street'.

I hate to point out the blindingly obvious to collectivists on the Guardianista left and the isolationist right, but there are no 'streets' of this sort. The world is a tad more complex than that.

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A few weeks ago, I opined that the current troubles in Iraq could well be a decisive turning point. In favor of the good guys.

As to Fallujah, well, I am beginning to think we blew an opportunity, although Wretchard continues to keep a candle lit. We have managed to give the universal impression that we retreated from a hard fight in Fallujah. I doubt that is entirely true, but in this war, even the appearance of a retreat is a real defeat for us.

As to al Sadr, though, he is toast, because the other Shiite leaders have turned on him, as predicted.

Representatives of Iraq's most influential Shiite leaders met here on Tuesday and demanded that Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric, withdraw militia units from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, stop turning the mosques there into weapons arsenals and return power to Iraqi police and civil defense units that operate under American control.

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As Perry de Havilland mentioned earlier, British and American armed forces may have committed a grotesque crime if reports about maltreatment of Iraqis are to be believed. Having not seen all of the reports myself, I tend to defer to writers such as former British soldier Andy McNab, who made his feelings abundantly clear in the Sunday Telegraph over the weekend. And he speaks with the moral force of one who has undergone torture during the 1990-91 war.

This issue cannot be finessed, or 'put into a context', to use one of the more common euphemisms of the age. What happened, if fully proven, is a total disgrace. To say that it puts back the necessary cause of winning hearts and minds is a massive understatement. It is also no good some folk arguing that this behaviour still does not put us on a moral par with Saddam. Of course it does not, although some anti-war folk, including frequent commenters on this blog, would claim that it does. Saddam's disgusting rule (shamefully supported by the West in the 1980s, I might add) was not comparable to what has happened. But surely as armed forces of liberal, supposedly advanced civilisations, we should hold those in uniform to higher standards than those of the recent deposed Ba'athist regime? Much higher standards, in fact.

I have disagreed in a cordial fashion with noted libertarian blogger Jim Henley on the case for toppling Saddam by force, but never have I been in more agreement with him than on this issue.

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David Renwick is scornful of the 52 diplomats who signed a letter denouncing Tony Blair's Iraq policies, and is equally scornful of those who described this letter as a revolt by The Establishment:

The fact that the letter was not signed by a couple of hundred other former ambassadors, including this one, was thought scarcely worthy of mention.

So who were these signatories?

Many of the signatories were former Arabists in the Foreign Office, affectionately known as the Camel Corps. Some members of the Corps have shown a tendency over the years to develop a quite passionate attachment to the Arab world that, unfortunately, has not always been reciprocated by the Arabs. They have tended to concentrate on the crimes of the Israelis, rather than those of the Palestinians. Most of us would prefer to be more even-handed.

Stephen Pollard is even more scornful. He links to a piece by Andrew Roberts in the Times which says that whenever the Foreign Offices protests like this it tends to be wrong:

TONY BLAIR should be delighted that no fewer than 52 former diplomats have written to him to say that his Middle Eastern policy is "doomed to failure". Whenever a collective view has developed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it has been only a matter of time – and usually not long, either – before it has been proved spectacularly wrong.

So the 52 are either wrong because they aren't the majority view at the Foreign Office, or because they are. But either way, they are definitely wrong.

Pollard also links to Melanie Phillips, who is even more scornful. To her the Camel Corps is also "The Establishment".

The main personal consequence for the 52 diplomats of having put their heads above the parapet like this has been to draw attention to all the financial interests they have which predispose them towards saying what they have said.

Personally, I am not surprised that people have financial interests in alignment with their opinions. Most of us prefer to make money doing things we believe in. And if these guys believe in making friends with Arabs … For me, the question is, not: Who paid them to say this? It is: Are they right?

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It is very disappointing that some officers in the British and US military seem to have lost control over their troops in the manner that the reports in the media are highlighting. No, I am not about to join the ludicrous cat's chorus equating the Allied forces with Saddam's institutional mass murderers, but no one who actually cares about the mess in Iraq eventually ending the right way up can be anything less than dismayed.

Certainly I understand how the stresses of urban combat can lead to itchy trigger fingers but for the custodians of prisoners to have allowed this to happen is completely impossible to justify. That the perpetrators felt the need to take pictures of their criminal actions suggests that we are dealing with your common-or-garden variety of psychopath rather than people 'merely' brutalised into callous indifference or shooting first/asking questions later due to being in a combat zone.

The only way this can be salvaged is for the clear difference between the torturers of Iraq's ancien regime and the US/UK's militaries to me made starkly clear: the people responsible must be subjected to swift and decisive military justice.

And while we are on the subject of 'what the military should be doing', can anyone please explain why the Italians who were kidnapped in Iraq the other day had been disarmed by US troops at a checkpoint? Whilst the fighting against the Islamo-fascists seems to be progressing, in other ways the last few days have hardly been days to bask in the glow of a job being well done by some of 'our boys', which is a great pity indeed.

I cannot help thinking that whilst the leadership in-theatre did well during the conventional conflict, perhaps a far reaching change in local military commanders might not go amiss as it is not enough to just manage the battles in a situation like this.

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In recent weeks the governments of the West (including Britain and the United States) have been getting very friendly towards Muammar Muhammed al-Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya.

Whilst I must stress that there is no plan to sell weapons to the dictator (and I do not believe that the United States, at least, will ever do this), in every other way Western governments are now seen as being supportive of the dictator of Libya.

Since he came to power in 1969 the dictator has followed a policy of socialism and his interpretation of Islam at home (with all the terror one would expect) and aggression and the support of terrorism abroad (in Africa, Asia and Europe). In his speech at the EU centre only a day or so ago, the dictator reserved his right to finance terrorism in future and expressed moral support for the terrorism being practiced in the Middle East today.

Can we now expect an apology for the claims that the war in Iraq was motivated by a desire to spread support for 'human rights' and freedom in general? I doubt that there will be such an apology - after all there has still been no apology for the claims about 'weapons of mass destruction'.

The above being said, we are at war in Iraq now and (whatever lies were told to get us into war) the war must be won. It is just that the recent events concerning the dictator of Libya have left my tolerance for all the hypocrisy and general nonsense at a low ebb.

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The Al Qaeda attacks in Syria may be good news... whilst I am far from calling for significantly making common cause with the ghastly (& Ba'athist) regime in Damascus, there is much to be said for dealing with the bad guys one at a time and also for getting sundry vile ideologies to shoot it out with each other on their own time and dime.

And to that effect, if the Syrian state sees stamping on Al Qaeda and other Islamists as a 'survival issue', then that can only be a good thing. It needs to be remembered that whilst Syria is a primary threat to Israel, it is far from looming that large on the list of Things To Be Dealt With for the US, Britain or the Western World generally. Their time will come but that need not be right now.

So let us encourage as many people of whatever cloth as possible to stomp on the Islamists, and once that problem recedes to manageable proportions, well, no need to shed too many tears if Ba'athism's last outpost comes in for a bit of serious stick from the US, Israel or whoever, as it is not like we need mistake them for being in any way admirable just because we might have once shared a common enemy.

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I have only just noticed this. But I agree with it, and I think the point is good enough to last way longer than a fortnight. It is from our own Natalie Solent on what to do about hostage taking:

Iraqi gunmen of the Mujahideen Brigades, a previously unknown group, have taken three Japanese citizens captive and say that Japan must pull out its troops or the prisoners will be burned alive.

Well, it worked in Spain. It worked in Somalia. The question is, do we keep it working?

I say, no. Kill the Muhajideen brigades. God willing the hostages might be saved, but if they are killed too, better a bullet than being burned alive and better a world where they die thus than one where the tactic of threatening hostages with death by torture works. As I said in January when Israel more-than-foolishly released many terrorists in exchange for an Israeli hostage, "Yes, of course I'd feel and speak very differently if it was my relative held hostage. Do you think I'm made of stone? But what is that to the purpose?" Think not only of the hostage we see now but of the next, and the next, and the next - because unless war is waged and won on this tactic, that is what there will be.

Whenever I line up next to, or myself say, things like this, I recall Saki's phrase about the reckless courage of the non-combatant. As Natalie asks, what if a relative of hers were a hostage? What if she was? What if I was?

Nevertheless, I truly believe that she is right, and there is no future in giving in to these people, and not too abysmal a hope of a present for any hostages if the captors and their fortress are stormed rather than negotiated with.

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A French-based imam who preached polygamy, the right of husbands to beat their wives, the stoning of adulterous women, and the eventual conversion of the whole planet to Islam was bundled on a flight to Algeria at 9.20 this morning (European Summer Time). Abdelkader Bouziane, a father of 16 children who hold French citizenship was arrested at Lyon airport on Tuesday.

The expulsion was justified by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkhozy (since moved to the Finance Ministry) in a ministerial decree dated 26 February 2004 on the grounds of incitement of violence, especially against women, as well as because the imam was allegedly "an apologist for terrorism", a charge disputed by Mr Bouziane's lawyers.

A complaint had been submitted to the French government by the Deputy Mayor of Lyon following remarks published in a local paper, which are the subject of dispute.

In unrelated news, official unemployment figures in France suggest that unemployment reached 2,707,000 in December or 9.9 per cent of the workforce. Meanwhile a proposed law - which would prohibit the wearing of the Islamic veil and other visible religious symbols in state schools - now proposes that bandanas would be exempt if worn as a fashion accessory but banned if worn as a religious statement.

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The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
- Mao Tse Tung

The recent offer of truces by both Al Quaeda and Muqtada al Sadr's followers in Iraq suggests an incompetence for guerrilla warfare, or that they are losing.

There are two dangers in the weeks ahead. The first is that since the 1960s, a different sort of guerrilla warfare has emerged, which consists of sacrificing cannon-fodder until your opponent can no longer morally take it.

The first historical case of this that I can find comes from the First World War, on the second day of the Battle of Loos. It was an accident. Ten thousand British troops were lined up in ten ranks and marched slowly across muddy open terrain with range markers placed by the Germans. The German machine gunners simply mowed down rank after rank of the British, without taking any casualties themselves. The British came up to the barbed wire that was supposed to have been cut by the artillery bombardment, only it had not been. None of the British troops was equipped with wire cutters (this bit has not changed). So groups of British soldiers ran up and down the barbed wire looking for a way through. The result was virtually 100 per cent casualties on the British side.

Now it is not true that this battle left the Germans unscathed. About a dozen German machine gunners were so traumatised by the massacre that they suffered nervous breakdowns and needed to be hospitalized (the British would have shot them for cowardice).

Since the Vietnam War, it has become a deliberate tactic of the weaker combattant to make a point of losing hundreds or thousands of casualties in the belief that the West does not have the stomach for slaughtering poorly armed enemies. To return to the Mao quote, now is the time to press even more firmly with military force: "enemy tires, we attack". Failure to do so merely confuses by-standers who consider compassion to be effeminate weakness, and encourages the enemy.

The second threat is the 'compromise' with the UN. Letting the UN organise the hand-over of power to an Iraqi government (which will surely be different from the one the US wants) is rather like inviting the USSR to decide who governs Germany and Japan in 1945. Except that the USSR was an ally.

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Here is what Sullivan says, in today's Sunday Times:

Bin Laden offered a truce. Who offers truces? People who are losing the battle.

Just what I was thinking.

I can not find anything else along similar lines here.

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We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?

There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.

It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens' Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.

Quote:

The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.

The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.

Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country's elite private schools. "We want these children to compete with our own children," says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.

I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.

This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.

In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.

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They need some stickers which say: "Warning: heading up Hamas can seriously damage your health":

The head of the Hamas militant Islamic movement in Gaza, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, has been killed in a targeted Israeli missile strike on his car.

Mr Rantissi's death came 26 days after the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in another "targeted killing" by the Israeli military.

Next candidate, please.

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As Antoine is fond of pointing out here, the French are not totally supine in the face of radical Islamism:

Yahia Cherif, who preached in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, was deported to Algiers after being found guilty of "proselytism in favour of radical Islam" and "active relations with a national or international Islamic movement linked to organisations promoting terrorist acts".

He was also found to have incited violence and hatred against people due to their origin. During the hearing, a lawyer representing the interior ministry cited evidence supplied by French intelligence to accuse Cherif of calling for a jihad during a sermon on March 19. The call represented a threat to national security, he said.

Cherif had also asked his followers for active support of Jamal Zougam, the prime suspect held in connection with the Madrid bombings, in which 191 people died.

Here is the case against deporting Cherif:

His lawyer argued that he did not promote terrorism but had been a victim of it, since he had witnessed his own father's murder in Algeria. He said he feared for Cherif's safety at the hands of Algeria's military authorities.

I know that there is an argument that people like this just, you know, giving sermons, is just them exercising their right to free speech, but meanwhile, this man was clearly breaking French law as it actually is, and from the sound of it he certainly intended his words to give rise to actions. So my immediate reaction to this story is, in the words of the Sergeant Major with the moustache played by Windsor Davies in It Ain't Half Hot Mum: "Oh dear. How tragic."

As was this. Not.

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Much as I respect the analytical abilities of the CIA, surely I am not the only one who thinks the audio tape of 'Osama bin Laden' offering the hand of peace to Europe, provided Europe withdraws its troops from Muslim lands, is completely bogus.

Are we to believe that the head of that nasty global franchise called Al Qaeda cannot afford to purchase a cheap camcorder in a medina somewhere in Pakistan to reproduce the distressingly effective spectacle of Osama waving his finger at the USA and going "Nah nah, you can't get me"? The notion he is hiding what he looks like after radical plastic surgery is, I suspect, the product of watching too many Hollywood movies.

Sorry, but I do not buy it. If I was a betting man, I would wager that Osama bin Laden died in Afghanistan years ago either when that group of people was attacked by US aircraft and 'an unusually tall man was with them' (can anyone point me at a link to that story?) or he was buried in a collapsed tunnel after one of a number of heavy US air attacks.

Only time will tell for sure but although Al Qaeda lives, I very much doubt Osama bin Laden does.

 

Both still dead

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Arts & Letters Daily links to two articles, both protesting against the absurdities and cruelties of political correctness.

David Mamet writes in the Guardian in connection with the forthcoming London production of his play Oleanna, the central character of which is a young woman who falsely accuses a man of raping her:

The play's first audience was a group of undergraduates from Brown University. They came to a dress rehearsal. The play ended and I asked the folks what they thought. "Don't you think it's politically questionable," one said, "to have the girl make a false accusation of rape?"

I, in my ignorance, was stunned. I didn't realise it was my job to be politically acceptable. I'd always thought society employed me to be dramatic; further, I wondered what force had so perverted the young that they would think that increasing political enfranchisement of a group rendered a member of that group incapable of error - in effect, rendered her other-than-human. For if the subject of art is not our maculate, fragile and often pathetic humanity, what is the point of the exercise? And if the writer is capable, why enquire, let alone obsess about his sex? No one ever said of a comedy, "I laughed myself sick until I discovered the sex of the writer."

But as Theodore Dalrymple makes clear, there are limits to the notion that a woman can do no wrong. If the wrong is done to her by her own ethnic minority, and even in particular by a male member of it (her father), then it is all her fault.

… One father prevented his daughter, highly intelligent and ambitious to be a journalist, from attending school, precisely to ensure her lack of Westernization and economic independence. He then took her, aged 16, to Pakistan for the traditional forced marriage (silence, or a lack of open objection, amounts to consent in these circumstances, according to Islamic law) to a first cousin whom she disliked from the first and who forced his attentions on her. Granted a visa to come to Britain, as if the marriage were a bona fide one – the British authorities having turned a cowardly blind eye to the real nature of such marriages in order to avoid the charge of racial discrimination – he was violent toward her.

She had two children in quick succession, both of whom were so severely handicapped that they would be bedridden for the rest of their short lives and would require nursing 24 hours a day. (For fear of giving offense, the press almost never alludes to the extremely high rate of genetic illnesses among the offspring of consanguineous marriages.) Her husband, deciding that the blame for the illnesses was entirely hers, and not wishing to devote himself to looking after such useless creatures, left her, divorcing her after Islamic custom. Her family ostracized her, having concluded that a woman whose husband had left her must have been to blame and was the next thing to a whore. She threw herself off a cliff, but was saved by a ledge.

I’ve heard a hundred variations of her emblematic story. Here, for once, are instances of unadulterated female victimhood, yet the silence of the feminists is deafening. Where two pieties – feminism and multiculturalism – come into conflict, the only way of preserving both is an indecent silence.

The silence cannot be preserved. Something has to give. And it is giving.

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It is not often I quote Nikita Khrushchev in any context, but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God. An economically successful western civilisation underpinned by severalty and free intellectual enquiry is caustic to a civilisation based on the submission to non-rational ideas which are propagated by force. To put it bluntly, we will enervate them and eventually destroy them by gradual assimilation.

The best and brightest muslims are already hard pressed to not see the glaring practical and intellectual flaws in their societies and want better for themselves, and as a result there is already a small but fairly well integrated middle class of secularized American and Euro-Muslims who can be observed in the markets, cinemas, offices, pubs and bars of the west. But far more dangerous to the broader Islamist project is the example not of western thought but of western affluence and the ease and secular self-direction it yields.

The sheer material wealth of the more advanced west is almost guaranteed to subvert the broad masses who come in contact with it. The current difficulties in assimilating the lower parts of the socio-economic western muslim population should not blind us to the fact that western culture's corrosive effects on the Islamic world view really counts far more when they are felt in Peshawar, Ankara and Cairo than in Marseilles, London and Chicago. In that theatre of the war of civilisations our truly effective weapons are not the gunship helicopters, laser guided bombs and 5.56mm small arms being used in Iraq right now, but rather our cheap DVD players, Internet connections, music/porn/action videos and smorgasbord of good, accessible but inexpensive Tex-Mex, Thai, Italian and Lebanese foods that globalisation has brought us, etc. etc. I have made this point before but as we concentrate on the more local and violent issues being resolved in the streets of Iraq, it does not hurt to put it all in the broader context within which our enemies certainly see things.

It is the horror of this viral characteristic of western consumer culture which really lies at the heart of the antipathy of the Islamists to the west: as secular society and severalty is the true heart of our civilisation, by our very nature we cannot and will not just 'leave them alone'. It is not a matter of what western governments want to do, because western businesses and cultural influences will go wherever there are receptive markets and audiences. It is not a western 'conspiracy' to subvert Islam, merely the very nature of western civilisation at work. Short of turning the entire Islamic world into a hermit empire like North Korea writ large, the mullahs and ayatollahs cannot avoid their flocks hearing our siren songs.

Our weapons are varied and effective

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I can only hope that the Americans keep their nerve and use the wide scale of the uprising to not just decapitate the more florid Islamist leadership but also place clear 'markers' as to what the response will be to armed uprisings during the de facto 'protectorate' phase of Iraq's post-Ba'athist reconstruction.

As things are developing day by day, it is pointless for me to just reiterate the reports filling the news media as to the current state of the cut and thrust on the ground, but there may indeed be an analogue with the Vietnam war here... and it ain't a 'quagmire'... the Tet offensive may have been a political disaster for the USA but it was a military triumph and more or less wiped out the Vietcong as a significant military and political force. If the US can do the same to not just Muqtada al Sadr's Islamo-fascist militia but also to any the militias of any who make the mistake of supporting him, it will have profoundly useful effects long after the fighting fades into history and the US and UK forces have gone home.

Translation: Follow my finger and shoot... here

Although Ali Sistani is, in the overall scheme of things, someone that the occupying powers can probably do business with (though that remains to be seen), it can only be helpful to his education if Muqtada al Sadr, that heir to the 'Mad Mahdi', can be seen to come to a fairly public and messy end surrounded by as many of his supporters as possible. Notions of putting this man on trial are to say the least 'unhelpful'.

If a successful confederated Iraqi republic is going to come out of this without falling into a democratically sanctified 'popular Islamic' tyranny like that which so many in Iran are trying hard to throw off with their own efforts right now, it is going to take some serious stick, and not just carrot, to make things come out more or less the right way. That is, alas, the way the real world works and hopefully the US and UK have the fortitude to see it through to its conclusion without cutting and running prematurely. So far the signs are reasonably good as only the usual suspects are bleating for political defeat to be plucked from the jaws of eventual military victory.

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I believe the events of the past few weeks will be seen, in time, as a major turning point for the better in Iraq. When the dust has all settled, two of the major threats to a peaceful, prosperous, and free(er) Iraq were beaten back.

First, the Baathist bitter-enders invested heavily in Fallujah, where they tried to recreate Mogadishu and failed utterly. Fallujah is over for all practical purposes, and was a complete and crushing victory for the US Marines, and a humiliating and very costly defeat for the Baathists and their Sunni allies. Marine casualties were low (less than 20 killed, I believe), Baathist casualties were extraordinarily high (their body count is likely well into the mid-hundreds so far), plus the Iraqis have been treated to the sight of women and children fleeing from the Sunni/Baathist stronghold into the American-held safe zone, where they will be fed, housed, and not used as hostages or human shields.

What many of the handwringers in the media and elsewhere fail to realize is that the exodus from Fallujah means that the Americans have won there. The Americans have been trying to get non-combatants out of Fallujah all along, as the noncombatants were in Fallujah primarily as hostages and human shields. The fact that they are now fleeing means either (a) their neighborhood has been taken by the Americans or (b) the Baathists have been so weakened that they can no longer stop them from leaving.

No military or real PR gains were won in Fallujah by the bad guys, and they lost men, material, and credibility they cannot afford to lose. For a better handle on the scope of the victory in Fallujah, go read Wretchard. Scroll down and note, in particular, how prescient he was concerning the strategy employed by the Marines. Wretchard never fails to impress, and in a few paragraphs generally delivers more high quality information about the war with the Islamists than any print or broadcast analyst.

Sadr's attempted Shiite uprising also may be fizzling, although it is showing more staying power than I had initially thought. The key thing to understand about Sadr is that he is Iran's catspaw in the proxy war that Iran is fighting with the US in Iraq. As the first engagement in this proxy war, the Sadr uprising was the main event, really, and it serves to illustrate two of my favorite conflict management maxims.

First, whoever controls the pace and timing of the conflict controls its outcome and will ultimately prevail. Sadr was forced out of the weeds by American pressure on his political/propaganda arm and/or by the impending June 30 "handover" date. His emergence into the open as an opponent of the Americans was very premature. The Iranians would probably have been much better off if they had waited for a diminished American presence in Iraq. The Iranians have been fairly successful at subverting Iraqis; however, when nut-cutting time comes, they face the Americans, who can butcher their proxies at will. Thus, the Americans forced the timing of this confrontation.

Then, Sadr's Plan A came a cropper. He was hoping for a telegenic showdown at the Golden Mosque. The Americans declined their invitation to pose for the TV cameras against this background, and so he fled the Mosque. Again, American control of the timing and pace presage American victory.

Second, always look at the field from your opponent's point of view. Sadr is playing primarily for the role of boss Shiite in Iraq. However, this brings him into opposition to Sistani, arguably the most influential single Iraqi these days. Sistani is having none of it, and is telling Shiites to sit out the uprising. Thus, it has not become nearly as widespread as the Iranians, Sadr, and many elements of the press would like to see happen, and would like to have you believe.

From Sistani's point of view, Sadr and the Iranians have emerged as his enemies because they are trying to usurp his power base. This does not bode well for the Iranian strategy, unless they manage to assassinate him, which in turn might just harden Shiite opinion against them. Allah only knows how these internal Shiite politics will play out, but the initial set of the board places the Iranians in a hard position. They are fighting against not only the historical animosity of the Iraqis toward Iran, but have now maneuvered themselves more particularly into opposition to the leadership of their "natural" Shiite allies. This in turn will push moderate/mainstream Shiites even closer to the American side of the board.

As far as the more general "uprising" goes, it happened more on the American timetable than the Iranian timetable, and (perhaps as a result) it played out in local politics in ways that the Americans should be able to turn to their advantage.

Disclaimer: as with all political prognostication, this one has an expiration date of yesterday. Events will drive, but I think recent events, far from portending collapse in the American strategy for Iraq, may in the proper historical perspective be seen as essential to its success. For this to be true, of course, the current uprising will have to die down and its leaders killed (please, no arrest and trial - this is a war). That's a pretty big if, but I (and I believe most Iraqis) are betting on it coming to pass.

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Salam Pax has this to say about the al-Sadir militia.

Remember the days when every time you hear an Iraqi talk on TV you had to remember that they are talking with a Mukhabarat minder looking at them noting every word? We are back to that place.

You have to be careful about what you say about al-Sadir. Their hands reach every where and you don't want to be on their shit list. Every body, even the GC is very careful how they formulate their sentences and how they describe Sadir's Militias. They are thugs, thugs thugs. There you have it.

I was listening to a representative of al-sadir on TV saying that the officers at police stations come to offer their help and swear allegiance. Habibi, if they don't they will get killed and their police station "liberated". Have we forgotten the threat al-Sadir issued that Iraqi security forces should not attack their revolutionary brothers, or they will have to suffer the consequences.

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The Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society. Principal among them are Marx, Freud, Durkheim and the Jew Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sayid Qutb, former leader Muslim Brotherhood, quoted by Barbara Amiel.

Well I disagree with the conclusion, but I must admit that the pantheon of evil is pretty exhaustive.

Marx: the inspiration for all the best serial killers
Freud: the apologist for all the best serial killers
Durkheim: serial killer of brain cells
Sartre: creep

Hmm...

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What seems to be developing into an open revolt in Iraq by Shi'a Islamists could be a Godsend to the coalition and secular elements of Iraqi society in the long run... in openly taking up arms against the coalition and its Iraqi supporters, radical leader Muqtadar al-Sadr has changed the equation: what could have been a long term intractable political problem has been turned onto a military problem with a fairly obvious and direct solution.

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French TV is running a story about explosives found along the high-speed railway link between Madrid and Seville today.

The explosives with copper wiring similar to that used in the 11 March attacks on Madrid appear to have been abandoned when a routine track patrol was made near Toledo.

N.B. Toledo was the site of two decisive battles: the first confirmed the Moorish conquest of Spain in 712, and the second was the launchpad of the Spanish Reconquistada with the Moorish defeat there in 1212. If this is the work of an Islamist cell, we have an answer to the question: "Did voting for the PSOE appease Al-Qaeda?"

The report adds that the new (Socialist) Interior Minister - responsible for law enforcement and internal security - is having a meeting today with the outgoing (conservative) Defence Minister. Bi-partisanship in Spain is about as frequent as Bible rallies in Riyadh. Nice one!

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The Australian is a national broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd, and in terms of quality and direction is fairly similar to the British Times. I suppose. Like any paper it makes the odd mistake, and has to publish a correction. On Tuesday it published the following.

A story headlined 'Syria seeks our help to woo US' in Saturday's Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: "Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years" but should have read "Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years." The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.

Personally I think that if anyone is embarrassed by this, there is absolutely no need for regret whatsoever. But that may be just me.

(Thanks to crikey.com.au for pointing this out).

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Many people, Samizdatistas included, have wondered just where all of those billions of dollars of UN Oil for Food money went. It was rather apparent food and medicine were among the last things for which they were used.

Someone has finally decided to audit the accounts. According to Senior CPA Advisor Dan Senor:

In response to allegations of the former regime's misconduct in the administration of the oil-for-food program, Ambassador Bremer has issued a directive to interim Iraqi ministers, CPA senior advisors and regional governance coordinators to safeguard all information related to the oil-for-food program. This includes contracts, amendments and annexes to contracts and supporting materials. The directive stated that documents should be inventoried and recorded and inventories provided to CPA as soon as possible. Irregularities, including any evidence of bribes, kickbacks or corruption, should be noted. CPA officials will review submitted inventories and may seek access to any or all records associated with the oil-for-food program. These documents will be made available to investigations, some of which are being conducted by the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and Iraqi officials. The coalition is also assisting interim Iraqi ministers in identifying any current ministry officials who may have knowledge of misconduct arising from the administration of the oil-for-food program.

I can hardly wait to find out which bureaucracy embezzled more: the United Nations or Saddam's Baathists.

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But what is this? A former Archbishop of Canterbury daring to criticise Islam?

Muslims claim a former Archbishop of Canterbury who criticised Islamic culture is "recycling" prejudice.

Speaking in Rome, Lord Carey said Islamic regimes were authoritarian and committed to power and privilege.

Lord Carey said not enough moderate Muslim leaders had condemned suicide bombers "clearly and unconditionally", the Daily Telegraph reported.

But Muslim Council of Britain secretary general Iqbal Sacranie said: "One is dismayed by Lord Carey's comments."

I just bet one is.

I cannot find the original Telegraph piece that this BBC report refers to, but I did come across this, from 2001, when Carey actually was the Archbishop. Which is interestingly different from what he is now saying.

The BBC report continues:

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said Lord Carey's speech had probably been more balanced than the impression given by the newspaper.

(Not that the BBC ever gives an unbalanced impression of anything.)

"One of the things that underlines his concern is the growth of Wahhabism – a very radical part of Islam – which is becoming quite dominant in the developing world," he told Radio 4's Today programme.

"There was also a sense when Lord Carey was archbishop, that he was growing increasingly frustrated by the problem in Islam, as he saw it, of there being something of a lack of a hierarchy where leaders could say authoritative things which could in some sense be morally binding for Muslims in general."

Which would be why President Bush doesn't rely on "diplomacy" (that is to say, mere promises of future good behaviour from those in no position to keep them), but concentrates instead on hunting the terrorists down in their own back yards, and uses diplomacy merely to pressurise those who get in the way of that process.

The West is learning.

ADDENDUM: In the hilarious first draft of this, I attributed the paragraph about Bush chasing terrorists, as well as the paragraphs above that, to the BBC. The mother of all misplaced html commands, I think you will agree. I do not apologise, because this was too much of a laugh, and laughs are good.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, courtesy of the Guardian, the Ahmed Yassin we barely knew:

In truth, neither Arafat nor Yassin had Mandela's special greatness. But of the two, it was Yassin, the founder-leader of the militant Islamist organisation Hamas, who came closer.

Yassin the wise, Yassin the benevolent, Yassin the humanitarian. He was a gift to mankind. It was said of Yassin that he could light up a room, though he generally preferred lighting up buses and cafes.

Yassin had personal glory largely thrust upon him.

Which 'personal glory' was so tragically snuffed out by an Israeli missile that was very largely thrust upon him.

Meanwhile, in the shadow of his formal career, he was laying the foundations of his future eminence as both a religious and political seer. He founded al-Mujamma' al-Islami, the Islamic Centre, which soon came to control virtually all religious organisations - including the Islamic University - in Gaza.

What a wellspring of entrepreneurial endeavour. Yassin the man, the wit, the raconteur and the bon vivant will be sadly missed by his army of adoring fans (at the Guardian).

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Finally, no tour of the wartime blogsphere would be complete without a visit to Wretchard at Belmont Club. His offering today examines the implications of Hamas founder Sheik Yassin catching an Israeli missile (thus rendering the deceased Sheik truly the spiritual leader of Hamas, as one wag at Tim Blair's blog pointed out).

Before diving into excerpts and discussion, let me take a moment here for a big round of applause. Sheik Yassin was long overdue to take a dirt nap; the world is a better place without him, and his absence will only increase the prospects for a long-term and stable peace in the Mideast.

Wretchard makes a series of related points:

The first is that the traditional multipolar Franco/UN approach to foreign policy, honed during the Cold War, won't work in the current war because the current war is a fight to the finish. Playing both ends against the middle is a no-win strategy when both ends are engaged in mortal combat.

With each passing moment the odds lengthen that the EU or the UN can broker a negotiated settlement between Israel, India, Russia and USA on the one hand, and the Jihadis on the other. There will be no Congress of Vienna at which French palaver can work its wonders, only unconditional surrender by one side or the other. A zero-sum conflict guarantees that Europe will not be on the winning side. Whoever the victor, Europe will be despised and whether America or Jihadistan triumphs, Europe will have played the wrong hand.

His related point is that George Bush, by bringing down Saddam Hussein, seized control of the war and ashcanned the Islamists' favored strategy. That strategy, honed in years of terrorism against Israel, was to alternate terror attack with hudna (the Mohammedan truce, entered into for purposes of preparing the next blow).

War was Osama Bin Laden's goal in attacking the United States on September 11. He hoped to force America into fruitless but ineffectual reprisals against the Islamic world, then offer a hudna at intervals while he prepared his next blow. George Bush's counterstroke, which history will either judge as an act of supreme folly or genius, was to go beyond Afghanistan into Iraq. In a worthy riposte to Osama's, he escalated the struggle to the point where it was mutually mortal. If the fall of the Twin Towers was a gauntlet in America's face, the fall of Baghdad was a glove shoved down the Islamist's throat. Both Bin Laden and Bush have made compromise impossible. If the jihadis believed they could control the tempo of the conflict they were misinformed; American forces in the Arab heartland have forced a zugzwang [from chess, forcing the opponent to make a move he does not want to make] to compel the game to the bitter end.

Euro pressure and brokering were critical for the hudna to take hold and protect the terrorists, whether from Israel or the US. The UN, prodded by the French, fell into their old familiar pattern, attempting to hold the US schwerpunkt [the main thrust of a military action] against Hussein hostage to the familiar UN-sponsored (and terrorist-protecting) de facto truce. Bush and the US proved to be unresponsive to such pressure, and by going into Baghdad made it impossible for Islamists to even propose a hudna. A military, rather than a diplomatic/law enforcement, schwerpunkt fatally disrupted the preferred strategy of the Islamists by making their preferred cycle of bombing and hudna impossible and delivering control of the operational tempo of the war to the US.

As someone who has studied conflict for years, whether at a global strategic level, the business negotiation level, or at the personal combat level (via martial arts), I believe that it is impossible to prevail without controlling the tempo of events. The terrorists attacking Israel, with the collusion of their European and UN allies, have been in control of the tempo of their war with Israel through the punctuated terrorism described above. So long as the bombing/hudna cycle continued, Israel was losing. If the US had fallen into the trap of allowing the UN to control the tempo of its war, it would have doomed itself to failure as well.

By finally delivering a missile (Express Airmail, Monday morning delivery) to Sheik Yassin, Israel may have finally taken control of the operational tempo of its war.

By striking at so senior a terrorist target, the Jihadis will be in no mood for negotiations. They themselves will cast away the Peace Process and sheer fury will make them forswear their favorite tactic, the faux hudna -- thereby granting Israel a meeting on the battlefield. For this is Israel's mortal challenge to Hamas which has often said it would kill the last Jew. The message, now ringing in their ears, is that the Jew will kill the last terrorist, beginning at the top.

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For a good look at what pissed-off Middle America is thinking, check out the invaluable James Lilek's bleat (actually, more of a screed) today.

Immediately below the picture of the protestor with the sign saying "I (heart) New York even more without the World Trade Center,"* Lileks cuts to the heart of the matter:

That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a traitor. He may be an idiot, a maroon, a 33rd degree moonbat, but he's still a traitor. That is a man who celebrates the death of Americans (and others) and supports the people who killed them. Oh, sure, he's nuts. But he fits right in. So what were all these people against, exactly?

A free press in Iraq. Freedom to own a satellite dish. Freedom to vote. A new Constitution that might actually be worth the paper on which it’s printed. Oil revenues going to the people instead of Saddam, or French oligopolies. Freedom to leave the country. Freedom to demonstrate against the people who made it possible for you to demonstrate.

Freedom. More freedom now than before, and yes it comes with peril; it always does, at first. But freedom is either in retreat, or on the advance. These people marched to protest the premature bestowal of freedom by exterior forces. Better the Iraqi people live under the boot for 20 years, and rise up and get slaughtered and rise up again and slaughter those who killed their kin, then have Bush push the FF button and get it over with now. Better they suffer for the right reasons than live better for the wrong ones.

As the man says, read the whole thing.

The major obstacle faced by many opponents of the war in Iraq is that already, a year later, Iraq is demonstrably better off in almost every way than it was under Hussein. Even the worst feature of the current scene, the terror attacks, pose less of a threat to most Iraqis than Saddam's regime did. It is very difficult to argue against a war that has been so immediately and obviously beneficial; that is why opponents so often have to resort to abstractions and platitudes about the UN and lack of international cooperation. Underneath it all, it is more important to the committed Left and its new Islamist allies that the US lose than that a nation of millions be given a decent shot at freedom and prosperity.

*= I believe this sign to be genuine, and not a photoshop job. If you believe otherwise, well, comments are open.

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In the wake of the massacre in Madrid, and the subsequent election result, it has become the conventional wisdom that the election went according to al-Qaeda's design. Robert Clayton Dean expressed this view concisely here at Samizdata a few days ago:

Spanish voters reacted to the election eve bombings by doing exactly what the bombers undoubtedly wanted: elect a Socialist who will take a soft line in the war on terror.

However, there is in fact little direct evidence that such was the goal of al-Qaeda. It does sound rather logical, of course, but there may well be other factors at work. And it is not clear that logic is a useful tool in analysing the methods and aims of this enemy.

What follows is a purely speculative guess to make the case that the political goal of al-Qaeda was in fact the direct opposite- their goal may well have been to ensure the re-election of the Popular Party.

al-Qaeda as an organisation has been going through a rough couple of years, and it has not achieved much in terms of murder and mayhem in the West. If we consider al-Qaeda as a company, it would aim to market itself as the organisation of choice to the Islamic Fundamentalist section of the Islamic marketplace.

However to gather revenue and recruits, it needs to demonstrate that it is still alive and kicking after having its Afghan strongholds destroyed by the US and it's allies in the wake of the September 11 attack. No Saudi princeling is going to waste his oil money on a spent force. And no disaffected Muslim intellectual with a personality disorder is going to join an outfit that doesn't actually create murder and mayhem.

Joining al-Qaeda requires a willingness to risk facing very hostile treatment from enraged law enforcement operatives and prison warders; and indeed, other prisoners.

Of course, al-Qaeda has been creating murder and mayhem, but over the last couple of years, that has taken place in the less developed and Muslim parts of the world. This does not really impress people in its target market very much - to get noticed, al-Qaeda needs to be seen to be active in the West.

One other point to take note of was that no terrorist blew himself up in the Madrid attack. This could indicate that the Moroccan suspected of doing this deed lacked the zeal of the September 11 maniacs, but it could also reflect an instruction from al-Qaeda bosses to avoid martyrdom operations, due to a shortage of operatives.

It takes more then that though for al-Qaeda to thrive as an organization. It's goal in life is to take the battle up to the West and bring about some Muslim utopia. However, it needs the West to give battle, as it were. al-Qaeda wants the West to fight back, so it can present the West as a 'threat' to the Islamic world. This allows it to play on the paranoia evident in many Muslim societies, again with the aim of gaining funding and recruits.

To get the West to fight back, it needs to stir things up. The massacre in Madrid was expected to cause support to rally to the government - that was the view of bloggers in the West, as evidenced by the surprise at the victory of the Socialist Party. The enormous rally that Spanish people flocked to in their millions, surely, pointed that way; to the anger of the people, and a desire to strike back. However they voted for the Socialists.

Let us not give too much credit to the enemy; they scorn democracy, so let us not assume that they understand it. If bloggers who study politics all the time didn't see this coming (and I certainly did not) then why should we credit al-Qaeda with such skills. No, I think that they calculated that the bombing would help the Popular Party win the election, and intensify the war on Terror.

Why would they do this? By presenting forceful countermeasures against terrorism as a 'threat' to Islam, they can gather for themselves more funding and recruits. If this doesn't make sense to you, then consider this-

al-Qaeda think they can win the war on Terror.

That is not to say that al-Qaeda will not make gains from the Spanish elections. I think the election results will generate more election time terror (and some key players have elections in 2004, Australia, the US, India, Indonesia, all of which will have repercussions on the war.)

But I do not think al-Qaeda foresaw this.

I think their goal in the Madrid Massacre was, first, to kill as many people as possible, second, to promote the al-Qaeda organisation to Saudi fundraisers, and to assist in recruiting, and then only to influence the Spanish elections. And I think they wanted to see the Popular Party re-elected.

By electing the Socialists, the Spanish people have chosen a government that will take a soft line on terrorists. We ca not assume that is what the enemy wanted. They might have wanted to intensify the war; the political aim of the Madrid Massacre might have been to provoke the Spanish government into direct military action.

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Michael Barone has an excellent antidote to the unending stream of nattering negativity on the Iraqi reconstruction.

What is remarkable about our occupation of Iraq is not that it has gone badly but that it has gone so well. Last week, crude oil production was above target level, the central bank signed up for the payment system used by central banks internationally, and 140,000 Iraqi police and law enforcement officers were on duty. A new Iraqi currency is circulating, and schools are open. Wages are rising, interest rates are falling, businesses are opening and hiring. Millions of Iraqis are buying cellphones, TVs, and satellite dishes. Attacks on Americans have greatly diminished, and attacks on Iraqis are likely to turn them against terrorists rather than against us.

Just so. The opponents of American intervention of Iraq have consistently played the expectations card. Rather than measure results of the war and reconstruction against any realistic yardsticks, they instead set impossibly high standards, and then carp when they aren't met, or move the goalposts whenever the good guys achieve the nearly impossible.

The war itself was a stunning victory, unparalleled in the history of the world in the speed and precision of the coalition campaign, but throughout the fighting the Save Saddam types which populate the Democrat Party in the US, the BBC, and most establishment media, would have had us believe the coalition was on the brink of disaster and quagmire.

The reconstruction is following a similar pattern. Miracles are being accomplished on the ground in Iraq, but you won't see any of it acknowledged by the anti-Americans in the establishment media or political opposition.

My advice? Study history. Don't fall into the expectations game. Think about what needs to be done, and you will marvel at the speed and effectiveness with which it is being done.

Sure, the reconstruction hasn't been perfect, but nothing in this world ever is. What is certain is that the Iraqis are much better off today because Bush and his coalition have forged ahead. Just remember, if the opponents of the Bush policy had their way, Saddam would still be ruling Iraq, Iraqis would still be subject to rape, murder, and torture, and Iraqi oil money would still be flowing to terrorists and their sympathizers. That, not some paradisical utopia, is the true benchmark for evaluating the Iraqi situation.

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Some of those opposed to the military ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, such as libertarian isolationists like Jim Henley, for instance, have repeatedly maintained that there was little or no regular and operational contact between the unlamented dictator and operatives of al-Qaeda and other radical islamist forces. The lack of a clear link remains a central plank of opposition to George W. Bush's doctrine of going after regimes which sponsor terror. At most, such critics contend that the Iraq links were no more than low-level and no justification for military action. Of course, much of the evidence for a link prior to 9/11 was circumstantial at best.

Well, if it were the case that no link existed, why did the statement purporting to be from al-Qaeda after the Madrid atrocities make such a big deal of Spain's involvement in the Iraq liberation, when, according to the naysayers, Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda? In fact, the Islamo-fascists seem more convinced of a common cause with the fate of Saddam and his regime than antiwar types seem to do. Curious.

Of course, it may be that the islamists are opportunists, perceiving that anything that can sow discord between European nations and between Europe and the US is a good thing. It may also be the case that the islamists believe that any incursion by western, secular forces into a region they deem off-limits is a dishonour to them, and hence justification for retaliation. They obviously do not extend their islamic embrace to Shiite muslims, whom they have massacred in the hundreds.

Even so, the very fact that the Iraq and Afghan operations were mentioned as 'justifications' for the Madrid massacres ought to give pause to those who claim that those countries' regimes had had no direct connection to islamist forces. Ousting the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were two major blows against fundamentalist terror. The terrorists know this better than anyone, which is why the message coming out of Spanish politics today is so troubling.

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While the terrorists were busy in Spain, the 'militants' have been at work in Israel:

A double suicide bombing in the southern Israeli port area of Ashdod has killed at least 11 people.

A Palestinian militant had entered the port and asked for water - and the moment he was shown where there was a tap "he blew up" - an employee of the port quoted one of his injured colleagues as saying.

Well, there is no reason why the work of terrorists should disrupt the busy schedule of 'militants' is there? Mind you, these trade unionists agitating for better working conditions have got a very strange way of going about it.

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The oil-for-food scandal keeps bringing up some interesting although by no means surprising evidence that the program was corrupt.

A letter has come to The Wall Street Journal supporting allegations that among those favored by Saddam with gifts of oil was Benon Sevan, director of the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food Program. As detailed on this page on Feb. 9, Mr. Sevan's name appears on a list of individuals, companies and organizations that allegedly received oil allocations or vouchers from Saddam that could then be sold via middlemen for a significant markup. The list, compiled in Arabic from documents uncovered in Iraq's oil ministry, included many of Saddam's nearest and dearest from some 50 countries, including the PLO, pro-Saddam British MP George Galloway, and French politician Charles Pasqua. (Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua have denied receiving anything from Saddam.) According to the list, first published by the Iraqi daily Al Mada in January, Mr. Sevan was another beneficiary, via a company in Panama known as Africa Middle East Petroleum, Co. Ltd. (AMEP), about which we have learned quite a bit.

There is more and the evidence is mounting. As Claudia Rosett puts it in her NRO guest comment:

U.N. officials have denied that this tidal wave of graft in any way seeped into their own shop, or that they even had time to notice it was out there. They were too busy making the world a better place.

Read the whole thing as they say. It appears that there is a positive side to totalitarian regimes... they are sticklers for bureaucracy and record-keeping.

Via Instapundit.

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Iraq's US appointed 'governing council' has produced a deal on a new national constitution which was described by a Kurdish delegate as one of the most liberal and progressive documents of its kind to have been produced in the Middle East

A coalition official said the charter sets a goal, not a quota, to have at least 25% of the national assembly made up of women. It also includes protections for free speech, religious expression, freedom of assembly and due process.

Free speech and religious expression? Due process? No quotas? At this rate Iraq may end up with a more (classically) liberal constitution that several quota addicted regulatory western nations I would mention. No, not really, as the whole 'Islamic dimension' rather precludes that.

There is a long way to go and the devil is not just in the details but the implementation. Nevertheless, this is a very big step in the right direction.

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After reading this article you will no doubt sense a bit of hostility towards Senator Kerry from young Iranians:

We have read how you refer to the theocratic regime in Iran as a 'democracy' we have heard how, if elected, as the president of the United States you intend to 'engage' this barbaric regime; this very terrorist regime that your own State Department lists as the most active 'State Sponsor of Terrorism'.

Why is it, Senator, in all your statements, you don't, even once, mention the oppressed and suffering masses of Iran? Obviously, as long as there is such preoccupation with appeasing the regime the people of Iran don't even enter your equation!

These are among the less heated statements about Kerry's plans to work closely with terrorists or 'engage' them if you will. I really would be interested in knowing what new set of american values he intends to institute. Like the Iranian students, I cannot see how any existing ones would apply.

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I can think of all manner of intriguing discussions could be sparked off by this report in the UK Sunday Times:

MORE than 14,000 white Britons have converted to Islam after becoming disillusioned with western values, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.

Some of Britain’s top landowners, celebrities and the offspring of senior Establishment figures have embraced the strict tenets of the Muslim faith.

The trend is being encouraged by Muslim leaders who are convinced that the conversion of prominent society figures will help protect a community stigmatised by terrorism and fundamentalism.

The new study by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, son of Lord Birt, former director-general of the BBC, provides the first reliable data on the sensitive subject of the movement of Christians into Islam. He uses a breakdown of the latest census figures to conclude that there are now 14,200 white converts in Britain.

Speaking publicly for the first time about his faith this weekend, Birt, whose doctorate at Oxford University is on young British Muslims, argued that an inspirational figure, similar to the American convert Malcolm X for Afro-Caribbeans, would first have to emerge if the next stage, a mass conversion among white Britons, were to happen.

The faith has made inroads into the Establishment. It emerged this weekend that the great-granddaughter of a British prime minister has converted. Emma Clark, whose ancestor, the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, took Britain into the first world war, said: "We’re all the rage, I hope it’s not a passing fashion."

I rather hope it is but my ambitions are irrelevant. The question is whether this is just a conversion du jour among people with a God-shaped hole in them or whether this is the start of Islam making serious inroads into native British society. If it is the latter then it certainly has some way to go. Out of a population of some 59 million or so, I don't think a mere 14,200 could be called statistically significant.

The more interesting question for me is not in the number of conversions but the type and class of the converts. Assuming the article is accurate, the overwhelming majority of the converts are among (for want of a better term) the 'rich and famous'. Now why is that, I wonder?

And just how different from the history of Christianity in these Islands which took hold in Roman Britain as very much a working-class movement and which filtered up to the ruling elites.

The article contains a tantalising clue:

Many converts have been inspired by the writings of Charles Le Gai Eaton, a former Foreign Office diplomat. Eaton, author of Islam and the Destiny of Man, said: "I have received letters from people who are put off by the wishy-washy standards of contemporary Christianity and they are looking for a religion which does not compromise too much with the modern world."

This makes it sound as if these people are seeking a refuge. Perhaps this growing interest in the Islamic faith is more a variation on the post-modern/anti-progress/green politics which appear to be popular among the the very same people. Who knows?

Having said all that, I think it reasonable to at least postulate that the collpase of the Church of England has got something to do with this. From being the bedrock of national faith and the morally certain religion of empire, the CofE has shrivelled into a comically ludicrous NGO presided over by an Arch-Hippy. In other words, it has gone and shot all its own credibility in the head and is no longer in any position to offer anything to people for whom DVD players and all-night shopping are not enough.

Because of this decline, a lot of people rather assume that Britain is a post-religious country that has abandoned faith and embraced secularism as the national doctrine. But maybe that is not so. Maybe the ruination of the Church of England has simply left a vacuum waiting to be filled and a great spiritual thirst needing to be slaked.

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The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom.
- A text message circulating on Iranian mobile1 phones yesterday

1 = US: cell phone

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This news has been around bits of the blogosphere but it is still shocking enough to write about a week later.

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.

She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:

"It's about time they got a taste of what they've been giving the Middle East."

It gets worse.

When Edmonds reported the incident and other breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues she was fired "without specified cause". Edmonds’s supervisor, "a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut" reportedly told his employees to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained.

The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11. Edmonds is said to have detailed these allegations further in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. Edmonds wrote Justice's Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter.

I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department.

I do not know whether these allegations are true, but I have no reason to doubt their validity. I have no problem believing that a government agency swamped with bureaucracy and with departmental biases can foster such shocking behaviour within its ranks. An allegded shortage of arabic translators seems to have opened floodgates to greedy and hostile behaviour of the Middle Eastern linguists in residence whose allegiances cannot be doubted.

Any chance of a more appropriate 'sensitivity training'? Once more, without feeling...

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It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.

Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba'athist hardcore.

Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy's views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.

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Sections of a seventeen page letter likely written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants, have been published in the New York Times. Terrorist leader al-Zarqawi bemoans the lack of support in Iraq:

"Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," according to the document. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house."

Other quotes show how he sees more difficulty in the future:

"The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance," the document says. "When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region."

"We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases."

"America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

"By God, this is suffocation!"

More ominously, he talks of his desire to incite sectarian warfare. He would see tens of thousands of Iraqi's die for his macabre politico-religious goals:

"So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle," the writer of the document said. "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of Shiites.

"You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad, we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did," the writer says. "So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command."

There is just too much of value in this story to convey without redoing the entire article. It is well worth the time to read the entire thing.

I have also intentionally left out a few very interesting admissions...

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Amidst the voluminous analysis and comment about the Middle East, the part it played in the Cold War seems seldom mentioned of late. But, from the 1950's right through to the end of the 1980's, the Israeli-Arab conflict was, at least in part, an important Cold War battlefront, fought out between two proxy antagonists.

But, everything old is new again:

The primary goal of the EU is the internationalisation of the conflict in order to underline the need for its own mediating role. Here is the prevailing European view: The longer the conflict continues and the deeper it gets, the more evident is the incapability of the US to moderate a peace process. The EU thus concludes that both sides are in need of - ironically speaking - the good uncle from Europe to resolve this conflict with European democratic and ecological values, its welfare state and civil society. How good for both sides that there is Europe and how bad for the world that one side, and this is Israel, is affording a wild west type of policy in the style of the US.

The need for a solution only exists as long as the war continues. This is why the EU does not want the conflict to end before it gains a major role. And this is why the EU does not wish the PA to give up too early and why the EU is strengthening the PA. The EU is getting up to the cynicism of stirring up a conflict that it supposedly wants to see resolved by financing one side. This is the inherently inhuman purpose of EU humanitarian aid in the region. The Palestinians are playing the ugly role of being the cannon fodder for Europe's hidden war against the US. It can be noted on the sidethat this is not considered an anti-Arab policy by those who otherwise easily use this word.

This is an excerpt from a longish but thoroughly fascinating article written by German Green MEP, Ilke Schroder. If she is correct (and I must say that the facts on the ground do somewhat bear her out) then it appears as if the European Union has stepped into the role once played by the old Soviet Union.

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MommaBear links to several recent articles on the increasingly revolutionary situation in Iran.

A mouthpiece for the ruling Mullahs has stated resigning members of government will be treated as criminals under Islamic law. With large numbers of popular leaders now out of government the next election looks to be a very weak and sad affair of limited public credibility. After the election? The deluge perhaps.

They have tied the steam relief valve shut. There is nowhere for dissent in Iran to go now. Pressure can only build until it explodes onto the streets of Tehran. The question is whether the Mullahs will begin 'the Terror' before or after the explosion.

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The nuclear disarmament of Libya is moving more quickly than I would have imagined. According to Jane's Defence Weekly on 30 January 2004:

Libya ships nuclear weapon material to US
The process of removing weapons of mass distruction (WMD) from Libya has begun, with 55,000 lbs (25,000kg) of "critical materials related to Libya's nuclear weapons programme and ballistic missile capabilities" now held on US soil, according to White House spokesperson Scott McClellan.

Adding this to today's revelations by Dr. Kahn in Pakistan makes three down and three to go of the potential sources of weapons grade fissionables. Well... plus an extra half to account for the thriving Russian black market.

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Salam Pax, who I have always rather enjoyed reading, has some quite interesting observations on how listening to American Armed Forces radio in Iraq strikes him. Having listened to American Armed Forces radio when I was in the Balkans, it does make me smirk in that kind of "I hear you, Bro..." sort of way.

For me this sort of thing is what makes blogs so compelling... insights on how things effect people that no amount of watching CNN will give you.

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Yes, you read it correctly. Congressional leaders have met and shaken the hands of the very people who imprisoned American Embassy staff in 1979-80. I am sure you remember the evening news from that time: Day 120: America Held Hostage or the like, each day for the better part of a year.

According to SMCCDI, an Iranian student group, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and Mr. Mohammed Javad Zarif met with Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-OH) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and others. SMCCDI claims these two men were among the students who took the entire US Embassy staff hostage.

I hope you find it as appalling as I do. The only reason we should want to meet with these people is to hear a public apology. Afterwards we might consider talking to them... about a transition from Mullahcracy to Democracy.

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I have not run across this elsewhere, but I have not been looking either. If the mad mullahs of Iran are executing officers who are war heroes, it is a worrisome sign of what they are planning for the population. If it was just a matter of tightening control over the Army, they could just 'retire' the offending officers. Executions mean they want to remove any possibility forthcoming orders are not followed or troops switch sides in a showdown. I am worried they are preparing for a major pogrom with an end result of yet another set of unrecorded mass graves in the deserts of Central Asia.

I have been getting conflicting information on what might happen if it comes to a confrontation ala Eastern Europe. An Arab friend feels that the majority of the country is not of the urban middle class and the country folk are absolutely loyal to their tribal leaders and very fundamentalist. A physicist friend with urban contacts tells me the balance is not so clear cut and during the previous Iranian Revolution the liberals simply got double-crossed by the fanatical mullahs with whom they had a temporary common cause.

Perhaps members of our commentariat or some Arab friends could lend insight into what might happen if push really does come to shove in Tehran.

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While reading some DOD press briefing transcripts tonight I was struck by the total dehumanization inherent in a person choosing to be a suicide bomber. At the instant they strap on the explosive belt or seat themselves in a car bomb they cease being a person. They become nothing but an expendable munition, bombs in a deceptively human form.

I suggest a new name for them: SPM's.

Self Portable Munitions.

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Almost everyone has heard about the list of persons and organizations purportedly bribed with oil by Saddam Hussein. You can find the partial list here at MEMRI.

Enjoy!

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This looks interesting, from today's Independent:

Claims that dozens of politicians, including some from prominent anti-war countries such as France, had taken bribes to support Saddam Hussein are to be investigated by the Iraqi authorities. The US-backed Iraqi Governing Council decided to check after an independent Baghdad newspaper, al-Mada, published a list which it said was based on oil ministry documents.

The 46 individuals, companies and organisations inside and outside Iraq were given millions of barrels of oil, the documents show. Thousands of papers were looted from the State Oil Marketing Organisation after Baghdad fell to US forces on 9 April.

"I think the list is true," Naseer Chaderji, a Governing Council member, said. "I will demand an investigation. These people must be prosecuted." Rumours had circulated for months that documents implicating senior French individuals were about to surface. Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac staked out the moral high ground in opposing the invasion.

I don't remember Chirac staking out any moral high ground, just that some people thought he had, perhaps including him. But I do recall learning, although I forget how, that Saddam had a bribery network that covered the whole Middle East, and I recall thinking that it probably did not stop there. Of course, it is hardly news that France is riddled with corruption. The news is that a semi-major newspaper is saying it, today, again.

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British Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge, has been publicly displaying her licensed copy of 'Root Causes Version 2.0':

"I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from," Dr Tonge told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

She was speaking to a pro-Palestinian lobby when she said of Palestinian suicide bombers: "If I had to live in that situation - and I say that advisedly - I might just consider becoming one myself."

Well, if Mrs Tonge feels that she really must blow herself to smithereens, then so be it. But before she turns herself into an abstract art installation, I hope someone takes the trouble to ask her for an explanation of this:

With the identification of two suicide bombers in Israel as British subjects, Britain faced suggestions Thursday that young British Muslims, previously associated with militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere had now shifted focus to terrorism in the Middle East.

The identification as British citizens of Asif Hanif, 21, who died in a bomb attack that killed three people in a Tel Aviv nightclub Wednesday, and an accomplice, Omar Sharif, 27, also represented the first known instance in recent years of Britons prepared to kill themselves launching a terror attack. The news seemed to leave British officials stunned. "We think that the terrorists had British passports, which is something especially sad," said Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's ambassador in Israel.

As on previous occasions when British Muslims were found to have been fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan or planning alleged terrorism in Britain, the suspected terrorists seemed to have grown up in innocuous, middle-class or blue-collar environments far from the conflicts they came to espouse as their own. That seemed to differentiate them from the more usual image of suicide bombers molded by the hardships of Gaza or the West Bank.

Small wonder that people like Mrs Tonge have conveniently chosen to forget this particular case of 'desperation'.

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French state schools, unlike the British or American varieties, were founded explicitly to oppose clerical power. They are the most visible and enduring bastions of secularism in France. Originally, the prohibition of religious symbols in schools was aimed against Catholics. Many of the supporters of secularism in the 19th century in France were non-conformist or atheist: often Protestant or Jewish. The antisemistism of such groups as Action Française from the 1890s onwards is in turn a reaction against the French radical assault on Catholic society. In the early 20th century a deal was worked out that allowed religious schools to operate alongside the secular system.

The Islamist campaign against secularism is what the headscarf law is about. In some schools, violence has been threatened against girls who refused to wear scarves. Apologists for fundamentalists (ususally socialists hoping to play the race card) condoned the violence and have allowed a climate of terror in French schools.

As a libertarian, I oppose state schools. But also as a libertarian, I also support the prohibition of Islamic fundamentalist intimidation. If Islamic schools really allowed freedom to exit, I could back Moslem campaigns for lifting any restrictions the French government might have against their own schools.

When I visit a mosque, I take off my shoes, I do not interfere with the religious devotions of the worshippers, and I do not demonstrate my own devotions to eating pork and drinking beer. The person who chooses a turban ahead of an education has got "I'm a loser!" stamped all over him. But the people who organise the headscarf campaigns do not want freedom of choice: they want a licence to coerce.

This is not a campaign for religious freedom: Moslems are free to set up their own schools. It is a campaign to separate the public and the private sphere: in the school each pupil's religious affiliation is a private and not a public matter.

Far be it from me to condone the criminal régime of Chirac. But, this is the same fight as the Turkish Army's fight to defend a secular state against the fundmentalist tyranny. It is a small corner of the War on Terror, and compared with the some of the antics of the Department of "Homeland Defense" a.k.a. Minipax, one worth fighting.

It is also a campaign against obscurantism. French people often mock those parts of the USA where it is illegal to teach Darwin, or where Creationist theories have to be accorded equal credibilty in the classroom.

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The cover article of the latest New Statesman is by William Dalrymple, and is called simply Islamophobia. The value of the piece for me is that it puts the case against the current trend of US (and UK) policy as strongly as I have ever read it. War is the health of the state, and it will bring ID cards and tougher searches at airports, blah blah. Maybe so, but that hardly amounts to the collapse of civilisation as we know it. This (this being the concluding paragraphs of Dalrymple's piece), on the other hand, just might:

Meanwhile, Tony Blair's neoconservative chums in Washington, immune to the justifiable fears of the Muslim world, talk blithely of moving on from Iraq next year to attack Iran and Syria. They have also invited Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, to be the official speaker at the Pentagon's annual service - and this immediately prior to his departure for Iraq to attempt to convert the people of Baghdad to Christianity.

All the while, the paranoia and bottled-up rage in the Muslim world grows more uncontrollable, and the attacks by Islamic militants gather pace, gaining ever wider global reach and sophistication. As long as British Muslims remain at the receiving end of our rampant Islamophobia, and remain excluded from the mainstream of British life, we can expect only still greater numbers of disenfranchised Muslims in the UK to turn their back on Britain and rally to the extremists.

As Jason Burke points out at the end of his excellent book Al-Qaeda, "The greatest weapon in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and integrity of the vast proportion of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. It is this that is restricting the spread of al-Qaeda, not the activities of counter-terrorism experts. Without it, we are lost. There is indeed a battle between the west and men like Bin Laden. But it is not a battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it is a battle that we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are currently losing."

This month's upsurge of rampant Islamophobia in Britain, widely reported in Muslim countries, is the last thing we need in such a desperately volatile climate.

That "upsurge" is the Kilroy-Silk affair, and the surge of support that K-S received, in particular, from the readers of the Daily Express, together with the increasing number of attacks of British mosques there have been lately.

The point is this. More airport searches for us, or for that matter even that military 'quagmire' that the opponents of military action in Iraq have been earnestly predicting and for which some may even have been hoping, is as nothing – nothing – when set beside the danger that Dalrymple is describing. What he fears is a massive influx of intelligent, educated (much of it scientifically educated) talent into the ranks of the terrorists, as a result of the thrust of Western policy towards Islam in general, and in particular as a result of the inability of anti-Islamists to make any distinction between mere Muslims, and outright terrorists. Give a dog a bad name, in other words.

I don't like Islam one little bit, because I consider its central tenets to be untrue, and I dislike untruth. (God does not exist. Muhammed is not his prophet. Etc.) I feel similarly about Christianity. (God does not exist. God did not send his son anywhere.) I further dislike Islam because so many Muslims these days, unlike most of the Christians I have much to do with, seem to take their religion really seriously and really to believe it to be true, which I find frightening. Who knows what the hell these people will deduce from their false axioms? It only takes a tiny few. (In the past it only took a tiny few Christians to set the tone of entire centuries.) So, yes, despite the fact that I am well aware of the fact – which of course it is – that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are entirely peaceable and decent and morally blameless people, and in millions upon millions of cases I dare say a lot better people than I am, I am "Islamophobic". So, am I helping to push the world into a pit of barbarity, just by saying such things as I do earlier in this paragraph?

Setting aside entirely the moral rights and wrongs of the matter (i.e. am I entitled to put what I put in the previous paragraph?) is current US policy (and the attitudes of people like me that accompany it), as a matter of fact, having the effect on the overwhelming majority of hitherto non-terroristic Muslims that Dalrymple describes? Is George W. Bush making Al-Qaeda recruitment harder or easier than it would otherwise have been? Is GWB frightening the Muslim world into abjuring terrorism, or enraging it into taking it up big time? In short, are we winning the War on Terrorism, or losing it?

If people want to comment on that by veering off into the realms of the related but utterly distinct matter of whether we are morally or intellectually or politically entitled to be rude to Muslims, or whether they started it, or which is worse, our Islamophobia or their anti-Semitism and anti-Great-Satanism – they should obviously feel free. I can't stop such comments. But the great strategic question is surely: whether, as a matter of fact, people like William Dalrymple are right or wrong.

My tentative opinion has always been – i.e. since 9/11 – that whereas some Muslims are no doubt being enraged into terrorism by US policy, many more are being scared away from it. But am I right?

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Mark Steyn's has something to say about the Kilroy-Silk affair in the Telegraph today. True to his 'notorious' style he does not mince words. Enjoy.

Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.

But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.

The situation starts looking serious with the concluding paragraph:

And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying "Censorship!" if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don't know about you, but this "multicultural Britain" business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.

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I missed this article in the Telegraph yesterday. It was written by Ibrahim Nawar, an Egyptian, who is the Head of the Board of Management of Arab Press Freedom Watch, a non-profit organisation based in London that works to promote freedom of expression in the Arab world.

I fully support Robert Kilroy-Silk and salute him as an advocate of freedom of expression. I would like to voice my solidarity with him and with all those who face the censorship of such a basic human right.

I agree with much of what he says about Arab regimes. There is a very long history of oppression in the Arab world, particularly in the states he mentions: Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, as well as in Sudan and Tunisia. These regimes are not based on democracy and their legitimacy comes from military dicatorships or inherited systems. The basic right of an individual to voice his or her opinion is not granted in any kind of form in the Arab world.

It is worth remembering, however, that there are individual Arabs who do work hard to defend human rights and one cannot make a blanket generalisation about Arab people. We support Mr Kilroy-Silk's comments specifically in reference to Arab regimes because we are against the oppressive policies supported by rulers in the Arab world.

As already expressed here on Samizdata.net, we do not agree with the contents of Kilroy-Silk's article in its 'totality', as Tony Blair would say. But we do agree with some of the points, namely the ones about oppressive Arab regimes. These are echoed by Mr Nawar and I am particularly fond of his last paragraph though.

I condemn the decision to axe his programme and call for the BBC to reinstate him forthwith. Indeed, the treatment of Mr Kilroy-Silk is very worrying because it indicates that censorship is now taking place in liberal, Western countries like the United Kingdom. These countries should instead be setting an example to the oppressive Arab regimes that violate freedom of expression on a daily basis.

Yes, but it was the BBC, after all.

Update: Mr Nawar does have stronger words for Mr Kilroy-Silk in an article on the Arab Press Freedom watch website. And his defense of freedom of speech is pertinent as ever.

Those who are calling for a swift action against Kilroy-Silk through the administrative route will not be able in the future to defend any victim dealt with in the same way. Moreover, it is not in the interest of advocates of freedom of expression in the Arab world or in Muslim countries to resort to the state in order to punish someone they may differ with.

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Glenn Reynolds blogs about a happy ending to the story of imprisoned Iranian blogger Sina Motallebi. This is very good news. The icing on the cake (the cake being release from prison) is that he credits blogs for playing key role in the events.

OJR [The Online Journalism Review]: So why do you think they let you go?

Motallebi: They didn't expect the pressure from Webloggers and foreign media in my case. They think I'm an individual [freelance] journalist and not affiliated with any political party, I'm not an insider. So they think that when they arrested me, there wouldn't be strong pressure to release me... I think they found the cost of arresting me more than they thought before.

There will probably be much written and made of this (quite rightly). What caught my attention was this bit from the 'post-release' interview with Sina Motallebi.

At newspapers, an editor can change your article. They're [ed. Iranian authorities] afraid of Weblogs because in Iran we don't have the experience of an [open] society. We have a [closed] society. Weblogs are a good experience, where everyone can explain their ideas. And the government is very afraid of them.

...

Socially in Iran, we haven't experienced a [free] society where everyone can express their ideas. We don't experience the freedom of expression that much. But Weblogs give the opportunity to Iranians to speak freely and share their ideas, their views, and even the details of their personal lives.

Freedom of expression was also important for people talking about their personal life, especially for girls and women. That's the reason you see many Iranian females blogging now. Under Islamic rules, many things are prohibited for young people. Each week many Iranian youngsters are arrested only for going to a party or walking with a friend of the opposite sex. So normally, they can't even talk about their personal life. But online with their fake names, or in some cases their real names, they can mention their personal lives and experience freedom of speech.

The Bloggers of the World Unite!

Aargh! Typing this almost hurt and the instinctive reaction is one of: Over my dead body...but you get the drift.

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I had a small bit of free time this morning, so I have counted the December numbers for Coalition deaths. Without further ado, here is this month's plot:

Copyright Dale Amon. All rights reserved. May be used with attribution to Samizdata

Most significant, of course, is the large drop. One could hypothesize the opposition threw everything they had into a 'Tet Offensive'. Like the Viet-Cong before them, they lost; unlike the Viet-Cong there is no regular army from a neighboring country, armed and funded by a super-power, to take their place.

This is only a supposition; one cannot state this with any confidence of being correct until there are a few more months of data to back it up. One could alternatively hypothesize the enemy is quietly regrouping after their offensive. I do not believe this, but it is certainly possible.

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There's a curious use of a word to be found here, or there is now, as I concoct this, at about 4.40 pm on Sunday afternoon, London time. Maybe it will change soon. I refer to the little heading which leads to this story. The story itself is headed "Blair praises UK troops in Basra" and I have no problem with that. But the bit at the main website that leads to this story says, on the left, just under where it says "NEWS":

Blair rallies UK troops in Basra.

Rallies. Yes, you read that right. Evidently some twit at the BBC thinks that Britain's army has just suffered some sort of defeat.

Please understand that I am not in any way blaming Blair for this absurd word, merely the fool who put it up at the BBC website, and as I say it may soon vanish.

These people are starting seriously to believe their own bullshit.

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Iraqis are not just depending on government to protect their new liberty. According to this report from the Coalition Provisional Authority, they are armed and dangerous... to terrorists:

Elsewhere in Baghdad, individuals inside a white Opel fired small arms at ICDC personnel at the Al-Amil gas station. The Civil Defense Corps soldiers returned fire, and Iraqi customers waiting for fuel also fired at the Opel. The assailants broke contact, and a search of the area met with negative results.

Is it just me or does this paragraph sound like something out of an L Neil Smith novel?

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Oh how I wish I had the presence of mind to have taken a picture of her to illustrate the point of this post, not that I ever need much excuse to publish a picture of an attractive young woman... my camera was on my belt as usual but alas my brain was not in gear and moments later she was lost in the swirling post-Christmas sales crowds.

She was in her late teens or maybe early twenties, obviously from a fairly well off family, very stylish in a 'Mayfair London' manner (though I saw her in Kensington), beautiful in a 'could be a model' sort of way, dusky complexion, long legs made to look even longer by expensive looking high heeled shoes and a very short form fitting 'little black dress'... and wearing an Iranian style hijab.

Although I can only speculate as I do not know the young woman who caught my eye, it is not hard to see the 'domestic compromise' at work here... her family insisting she wear the hijab whilst she insisted on dressing to kill in the manner of her adopted western culture and friends.

This little drama must get played out a million times a year across Europe and North America amongst the Muslim diaspora and in the long run, it is not hard to see which cultural force is going to win. I suspect that one of the reasons that small pockets of western Muslims have become radicalized is that it is they who are most starkly confronted with what happens in the majority of cases when the old ways are confronted by western secular individualism. No civilization based on submission to arbitrary edicts from the Dark Ages can survive contact with a civilization that essentially encourages you to find your own way and do what you will.

I suspect within one hundred years, maybe less, Islam will have about as much relevance to the life of most 'Muslims' as the Anglican Church does to most British 'Christians'... something you might or might not encounter when getting married or buried and not much else.

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We've commented very little here about the Iran earthquake of December 26th, which could obviously be an earthquake in more ways than one. For several days now, I've been wanting to do a piece called something like "Now wait for the political tremors". But hello, what's this?

Here's how this Economist piece concludes:

… the catastrophe may have one benign effect: a lessening of the Islamic republic’s distrust of foreigners. That distrust was evident in 1990, when the Iranians turned down many offers of outside help in the aftermath of a previous catastrophic quake and officials denounced sniffer dogs as “unclean”. Mr Khatami, in recent days, has showed no such qualms, appealing for help from all bar Israel. Some people in Bam were rescued thanks to the once-reviled canines.

Mr Khatami’s conservative rivals have mixed feelings about foreign help. During his trip to the area, the supreme leader did not deign to mention the mainly western countries that had rushed to Iran’s aid, let alone thank the rescuers in person. That is not untypical of Iran’s stand-offish conservatives. Last Friday, while survivors of the disaster surveyed the wreckage of their lives, Mr Khamenei found time to extol at length the merits of making the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Yes, but setting aside how the conservative bit of the Iranian elite feels what is the Iranian elite as a whole doing that is any different?

This UPI piece is somewhat more informative on that score:

On the issue of a diplomatic thaw, Rashid Khalikov, a U.N. official, praised Iran's quick call for help and opening of its borders. "They immediately opened up their airports for foreign flights, opened their consulates all over the world to issue visas for aid workers as fast as they could and have often waived them," Khalikov said at a Monday news conference in Geneva.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in interview with the Washington Post, "There are things happening, and therefore we should keep open the possibility of a dialogue at an appropriate point in the future."

The story seems to be that there are two kinds of attitude that are contending for supremacy in Iran, the one that says that Allah will see to everything provided only that we grovel to him in the precisely correct manner while wailing the precisely correct noises, and the one that says that if Allah wants this mess (and all the other messes around here) sorted, the way he'll do it is by us sorting it on his behalf, by making use of such things as dogs, foreigners, etc. The former tendency wants the West to drop dead. The latter tendency wants Iran to come alive.

And this earthquake, paradoxically, plays right into the hands of the Come Alive party, because it shines a big public torch on which attitude saves lives and which one does not. For never forget that the key to how many people die in disasters is not just how many die in that first horrible few minutes, but how many more die of boring things like malnutrition, the cold, infection caused by lack of sanitation, infection of untended wounds, etc., during the days that follow. And that latter figure is determined by the attitude of those in power who are able to do something, and who either do that something or do not.

Personally I don't think it makes much sense to moan about whether buildings were or were not earthquake proofed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but is no help in clearing up a mess right now. That stuff comes later.

But a ruling elite that sits on its prayer mats in the immediate aftermath of disaster but otherwise does nothing is definitely moan-worthy. Mr Khamenei and his ilk will surely not be looking good in the eyes of their fellow countrymen right now.

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An earthquake has struck Iran causing thousands of fatalities.

But we all know who is responsible:

I've heard tectonic weapons tossed around but what if that evil dummy prayed for the quake???

I wouldn't put anything past George 'Hitler' Bush.

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An acquaintance of mine, of impeccably liberal (translation for Brits - socialist) views was recently making snide remarks about the impending trial of Saddam Hussein. Funny, I did not notice such folk getting all upset when Spanish authorities attempted to put, say, Chile's former dictator General Pinochet on trial.

But then I guess I forget the universal rule of thumb - if X is advocated by the United States, particularly when it is led by a Republican, then X must be wrong. How silly of me to have forgotten.

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Belmont Club has a couple of fascinating entries that mesh well with my last post on the tranzi menace. Collect the set!

I was particularly struck by the Club's take on the immediate post-9/11 tranzi reaction:

The curious antipathy of the Germany and France towards unilateral American action following September 11 was driven not by a sudden revulsion for American culture, but by the loss of something they deeply coveted: the means to exercise supranational police power under the aegis of international treaties. In the days following Osama Bin Laden's attack on New York, hopes ran high in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, that America in her grief would deposit her strength in the hands of the "international community" who, thus armed, promised to put a stop to terrorism and uproot its causes. To provide the violins, the capitals of Europe expressed the utmost sympathy for the American loss and deluged embassies with flowers and letters of support. "We are all Americans now". For a moment, matters hung on edge, the most critical instant in modern history. Then the haze passed, and America shook the expectant, extended hand and said "I'll take care of it myself". The response was immediate and incandescent. The internationalists rounded on America with as much hatred as the sympathy they had professed mere moments before.

As always, Belmont Club's full analysis of the prospects for the future shape of international order are worth pondering. The Club posits a bottom-up New World Order founded on common law that contrasts sharply with the top-down command-and-control vision of the transnational progressives.

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The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq
Kenneth M. Pollack
Random House, 2002

The author, a (presumably ex-) CIA operative, has written this book, published in the Autumn of 2002, as an advocate of "regime change" in Iraq, listing the various alternative options, five in all: Containment, Deterrence, Covert Action, The Afghan Approach" and (the preferred one) Invasion (p. xxix and Part III, pp. 211-386).

Iraq's History and Relations with the US to Gulf War I

Part I (pp. 1-108) Iraq and the United States, following a 30 page Introduction, gives a concise summary of Iraq's history and relations with US, with greater concentration after the fall of the Shah turned Iran from a Western bulwark to Islamic menace. From someone regarded with repugnance, Saddam became the "man we can do business with", which meant tolerating some ghastly atrocities in the chemical warfare line against rebel Kurds and Iran, which Saddam had rashly taken on after its armed forces had been purged by the mullahs and sabotaged by departing US and dissident technicians. If the US rescued Iraq by supplying weapons, others - China, Russia (still the USSR), France, Germany and Britain - followed suit, many selling the ingredients for the nuclear, chemical and biological programs that have subsequently given so much trouble (p. 19). Officially Saddam could claim a victory and emerged from the 1980-88 war with a large well-armed army, but with 200,000 dead, terribly in debt and his economy badly degraded. His decision to attack and occupy Kuwait for its wealth, in gold, goods and oil, was fortified by his mistaken belief that his army could defeat an American riposte, and not unassisted by misguided pacific overtures and reports by the US ambassador, Susan Glaspie - and what has happened to her, I wonder?

Gulf War I, 1991

Kuwait was invaded and occupied on August 1st, 1990. Nearly 6 months later, following a month's bombing of Iraq and its forces in Kuwait, on Sunday, February 24th, 1991 US and other forces attacked and, by the end of the week, had ejected the Iraqis and defeated them soundly enough to stop fighting. It is always, in retrospect, surprising how long it actually takes, compared with how immediate it seems viewed historically, for this kind of series of events to happen. I think everyone forgets the hesitations, negotiations and wobbles. Pollack leaves me in little doubt that the situation after the fighting had ceased (on our part) was badly mismanaged, basically because the US government (on whom everything depended) thought a) Saddam would be replaced by his own military and b) Iraq might otherwise fragment and a counterpoise to Iran be lost. Horrendous massacres of Shi ite rebels and Kurds were the result. Saddam rebuilt his strength and spent the next twelve years evading the conditions imposed by the UN. At first, especially when Saddam attempted to initiate another threat to Kuwait, there was consistent international consensus that he should be kept under pressure, and it became obvious from time to time, from information from defectors, that the UN weapons' inspectors (UNSCOM) were being hoodwinked.

Saddam Survives ...

After the first general disappointment that Saddam had not been removed by an internal coup, a number of efforts were made by the CIA to support one, but these, together with a Kurdish attack in March 1995 to promote Iraqi army defections, all failed. At the same time, however, the plight of the Iraqi people promoted international sympathy, the blame, with typical injustice, being laid at the US door. It was not until early 1996 that Saddam accepted the conditions for the "oil-for-food" (plus medicines &c, so, later "oil for stuff", p. 100) program, not long after world opinion had hardened when a major defector revealed to what extent UNSCOM had been cheated (p. 77). However, during 1996 things improved for Saddam. He took advantage of the divisions amongst the Kurds to inflict a major defeat on one faction, after backing another. Then he uncovered a CIA-backed plot and destroyed the conspirators, his two defected sons-in-law inexplicably returned to Iraq and were killed in a shoot-out, and the resolution of the weapons' inspectors weakened and they were systematically frustrated.

... and International Interest Weakens

The world was getting tired of the problem; to signal the way they were going, France, Russia and China abstained from a resolution rather weakly supporting the inspectors and when the US and UK started to get tough, almost immediately Arab and European governments began to distance themselves from Washington and London (p. 88)." Saddam had succeeded in splitting the Security Council and continued to be obstructive to the weapons inspectors who finally withdrew as a result. Four days of heavy US and UK bombing at the end of 1998 had some impact and stimulated a near-revolt in the Shi ah area, but Pollack obviously thinks it wasn't persistent enough (p. 94). Also the amount of bombing it took to bring Milosevic to reason over Kosovo made the Clinton administration realise that bombing wouldn't be enough to bring about regime change in Iraq, though this was announced as policy by Clinton himself (p. 94).

Pollack himself had by now been recruited to try to work out various methods to bring about regime change without invasion, but the external "Iraqi opposition was a mess (p. 96)" and at odds with their only US backers. Kosovo put regime change on the back burner in favour of containment. This relaxation benefited Saddam and sanction-breaking became blatant which Washington was virtually powerless to stop, while the Iraqi opposition fell apart. Clinton was busy trying to leave office with an Israeli-Palestinian accord to his credit but failed. The Palestinian intifadah that followed also aided Saddam by moving Arab sentiment onto his side. There was even a chance that Iraq and Syria might have attacked Israel and it is not clear which of them backed down (p. 104). When Bush II took office in 2001, he continued the containment policy, and got a resolution for "smart sanctions" through the UN, though this had little effect on smuggling. Sept. 11th changed the attitude of the American public into a more hawkish one. Although the immediate result was action against Taliban Afghanistan, it also made military action against Iraq more feasible.

The Iraq Situation in 2002

Part II (pp. 111-181) Iraq Today [i.e., 2002] starts with an account of the organisation of Saddam's tyranny. "Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine. The fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks (p. 122)." reported John Sweeney of the BBC on June 22nd, 2002. A couple of pages elaborate on the regime's methods of ensuring this. Then there is the post Gulf War I misery, occasioned by Saddam's response to the UN sanctions set up in 1990. "It never seems to have occurred to anyone at the time that the regime would simply choose to allow its people to perish (p. 126)." and "It is important to remember that Saddam and his cronies were the most important element in Iraq's humanitarian disaster ... Saddam always had it in his power ... to give up his WMD programs (p. 133)." Although there seems to have been enough food, the infrastructure, particularly sanitation and hospitals, went downhill, as did the economy in general, at least resulting in a decline in defence expenditure. Sanctions even helped the regime to increase its grip by its control of the rationing system. Because, aimed at manipulating world opinion, Iraqi statistics exaggerated the child death rate, no one can really know how many deaths sanctions actually caused. Pollack attacks critics that blame the US for this state of affairs, excusing Saddam "for his cruelty the way we could excuse a wolf for killing sheep," but all the same, "there is a kernel of truth to this perverse argument ... if you hand an ax to an ax murderer, can you consider yourself blameless when he plants it in someone's back (p. 140)?" I can see how this leads to direct intervention, though this is not stated.

The Shi'ah and the Kurds are discussed; the Kurds (though disunited) are definitely more separatist; the Shi'ah fought for Iraq against Iran (though a Shi'ah state) and have no wish for independence; the Kurds do and under US protection have such de facto; virtually a normal existence and hope to stay that way. Pollack continues by outlining the threat that Iraq under Saddam posed (the tense applies to post Gulf War II) to its neighbours, the US, Israel and the world in general, emphasising that this is long rather than short term, in Iraq's pre Gulf War II weakened state. I can see that while this is a perfect reason for pre-emptive action, it collides with what has become the UN "last resort" stance.

"Weapons of Mass Destruction": Saddam Sacrifices $130-$180 billion to get them

"Saddam has given up anywhere from $130 billion to $180 billion worth of oil revenues to hang on to his WMD programs ... [and] demonstrated for more than a decade that his WMD arsenal is more important to him than Iraq's oil wealth, its people, its economy, or even its conventional military power (p. 175)." His goal was to lead the "Arab nation" to become a new superpower, comparable with China, the US and USSR (p. 150). This would involve control of all Middle East oil, to be used entirely for political, rather than economic purposes. In terms of conventional warfare, the Iraqi army had some strengths, in defence, movement and supply, but was poor in coordination and initiative and after Gulf War I it deteriorated from lack of money for maintenance. The airforce was next to useless. Pollack believes that since his conventional forces had become unable to face the US, Saddam had to concentrate his hopes on WMD (p. 168). Of all these, the nuclear is the most important: "if he has a nuclear weapon the world will have to treat him differently (p. 178)". Pollack claims: "Just to be clear about this: in 1990, Iraq built a workable nuclear weapon. All it lacked was the fissile material (p. 174)." Given time and opportunity, Iraq could continue and complete its nuclear weapons program (p. 175).

Terrorism - Saddam Not Guilty (so far)

As for terrorism, this "is the least of the threats to ... the United States ... well below Iran, Syria, Pakistan and others" the main reason being that Saddam had distanced himself in 1982 from terrorist organizations because it needed US help against Iran (p. 154). After 1991 and Gulf War I the situation changed but Iraq had had no terrorist allies and its own terrorist management was amateurish. But would Saddam give WMD to terrorists? Pollack concludes this to be unlikely. It is one of several things Saddam might, in Pollack's opinion, do if he got desperate - but which we have seen he didn't do.

The Problem of Arab "Help"

In Ch. 6, "The Regional Perspective", Pollack points out that the US need for Arab allies to help oust Saddam (minimally, to supply bases) conflicts with the universal Arab hatred for Israel, believed to be kept in existence by the US, while anti-British feeling goes back to Suez in 1956. Every Arab-Israeli crisis has exacerbated anti-US feeling, expressed in rioting &c, while the Arab "street" (shorthand for ill-informed public opinion, inflamed by the Internet and satellite TV) intimidates the mostly undemocratic regimes of the region. Also, the US had kept up the pressure on Iraq to such an extent that the surrounding Arab regimes saw Saddam as so little a threat that they could afford to resent the US presence. As a symptom of this, there was even a "mock rapprochment" between Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq at the Arab Summit in Beirut in March 2002. The attitude of Saudi Arabia is thoroughly ambivalent: it would have loved Saddam to be got rid of, but saw no other way than by direct US military intervention, with no mucking about with limited means, or "covert action" – "Countless Saudi princes, officials and businessmen have asked me, 'Why don't you just invade?' (p. 189)" However, Saudi Arabia was not going to cause itself any trouble by doing anything to help the US, as Gulf War II amply demonstrated. The Kuwaitis are naturally more pro-US: only US protection will save them from annexation by even a weak Iraq. Other Gulf States feel less threatened by Iraq and are consequently more anti-US. The Jordanian predicament is succinctly put (pp. 194-5); also Syria's economic dependence on an Iraq despite or even because crippled by sanctions.

Turkey, Israel and Iran

When the book was written Pollack thought that Turkey, despite its misgivings about the possibility of Kurdish independence, could be brought to support a US invasion. In fact, though its government might have cooperated, it was prevented by its democratic institutions from doing so. Egypt's government's minimal cooperation, despite the generally anti-US popular feeling, is all the US needs or desires. Israel would have preferred the US to have dealt with Iran first, then Iraq: both are threats, but Iran provides most of the funds and intelligence to the Hizbollah. Iran - or at least the government there - hates Saddam for the enormous damage he inflicted on the country (400,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq War) and the US for the usual inadequate reasons. Although it would feel surrounded if Iraq were occupied, it may well feel now that the US has its hands sufficiently full and unlikely to do much about Iran.

The UN - Allies and Opponents of the US against Saddam

Pollack also gives a round-up of potential US allies and opponents in the UN, though his forecasts have sometimes proved incorrect. The UK is the US prime ally; Pollack states that "Its continued support is critical to any new policy of containment (p. 203)." He also says, giving a reference in both The Guardian (7/4/02) and The Washington Times (11/3/02), that "Tony Blair's own remarks have made it clear that [he] would be willing to support a US-led invasion of Iraq to change the regime once and for all (p. 204)." He stresses, however, that the UK would very much like to have a clear green light from the UN" and is much more a stickler for international legality than the US is, an insight certainly borne out by events. France is characterised as "one of Iraq's chief advocates" with sound economic reasons for being so. Pollack believes that the French realise that it is the US that will ultimately have to deal with Saddam if he obtains nuclear weapons, "and they are perfectly comfortable with that arrangement." Pollack has been proved incorrect in saying that "if France becomes convinced that the US is absolutely determined to remove Saddam ... they will likely flip and become supporters of the operation." He generalises too much in having the Mediterranean countries line up with France and the Northern with the US. Russia also "has quite a bit at stake with Saddam Hussein's regime" and "hates to see the US throw its weight around (p. 205)." But it would not do anything to save him (quite right there). He makes no mention of their common fear of Muslim terrorism. China also hates the US throwing its weight around. In all, Pollack seemed to have overestimated potential support for and underestimated international disaffection with the US, perhaps because Bush arouses greater antipathy amongst media opinion-formers than Clinton did.

Dealing with Saddam: The Five Options

Part III deals with the "The Options" - Containment, Deterrence, Covert Action, The Afghan" Approach, and Invasion. Each is analysed in detail, with the conclusion that only the last can bring about the desired result.

1. Containment

"For many years after the Gulf War, containment [by sanctions and inspections] did meet Washington's minimal requirements. ... It also had the huge advantage of being the policy of the UN ... [and] benefited everyone except the Iraqi people." But by the time of writing, it no longer worked and to set it up again would be extremely expensive, financially and politically. After the Weapons Inspectors had left in 1998 sanctions were being dismantled in effect, by France, Russia and China, who would see to it that they were not reinvigorated. The US would either have to compensate neutral sufferers or apply sanctions against the active sanction-breakers. Sanctions had already put the control of trade into Saddam's hands and he used all his powers to favour sanction-breakers, ration-control his own people &c. In fact there was no chance of improving the sanctions regime (on, say the notional lines on pp. 222-4) because There is no meaningful support [for sanctions]. The vast majority of countries simply want the problem to go away (p. 225)." Nor can the US impose sanctions unilaterally, involving as it would penalising the evaders. No inspection regime will do any good; the new regime UNMOVIC (= Monitoring & Verification Commission) set up by the UN Resolution 1284 was even weaker than the already weakened UNSCOM (= Special Commission for the Disarmament of Iraq). Even if the US toughened the inspection regime by threatening to invade (as it did) we cannot hold a gun at Saddam's head for as long as it would take to actually disarm Iraq," something Saddam fully appreciated, for the US cannot keep an invasion force in the Gulf region for more than about six months (p. 247)." That the US should stop dithering and get on (with the invasion) or get out was the universal wish of the governments of the Gulf States, including Saudi Arabia. What their people would have liked was a different matter, but a major reason for that wish.

2. Deterrence

If containment was impracticable, what about simple deterrence, which, after all, has worked up till now with a number of nuclear-armed and mutually hostile states? Pollack argues that with Saddam, such a policy would have been extremely risky, since Saddam was an ill-informed, over-optimistic pathological gambler, as instanced by his behaviour after his invasion of Kuwait, evidence reinforced by the testimony of the Russian PM Primakov who tried to make him see sense. He simply did not believe that the US and its allies would do what they did - Pollack does not mention the usual wavering and havering at the UN, to say nothing of the same in the US Congress, that may have supported Saddam in his view.

3. Covert Action

Covert Action - i.e., trying to get rid of Saddam either by direct assassination or by supporting internal Iraqi plots was also a non-starter. Pollack makes it clear that Saddam's security was so efficient that the chances were less than 10% that any plot could succeed - the wider the plot, the more likely it was to be betrayed - and that though under normal conditions this sort of initiative might ultimately work, the longer it went on for the more uncooperative the surrounding, potentially allied states would become (as with the containment option) and the CIA didn't have a high rate of success with instigated plots anyway - nor did the KGB and nor did Mossad.

4. The "Afghan Approach"

After the rout of the Taleban, the so-called "Afghan Approach" seemed attractive to many because of its economy in US lives. Briefly, an organised indigenous fighting force of sufficient strength had defeated, in open terrain, with US logistical and air assistance, a fairly small, heterogeneous enemy, albeit with a fanatical core. Pollack had strongly backed this method for Afghanistan, but refutes its possible use in Iraq by carefully distinguishing the reasons for its success in Afghanistan, compared with its failure when attempted in Kosovo, about which he is especially scathing. Furthermore, there was nothing comparable in Iraq to the Afghan Northern Alliance and the Iraq Republican Guard showed itself quite competent to deal with what resistance there was among the Kurds and Shi'ah, even after defeat by US Marines, following heavy bombing. Bombardment of men and vehicles from the air is far less destructive than people would like to think, though it may have a catastrophic effect on units with poor training and hence low morale. Once again, the allied states, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of the other neighbours, would not favour the "Afghan Approach" and certainly wouldn't help. As for the Kurds, they didn't like the idea since they would certainly be crushed by Saddam if they participated and maybe if they didn't; also "we should expect the Turks to be apoplectic (p. 322)" if the Kurds were used in any way. This is an option which the US would be seen to be participating in halfheartedly and regime change "is not the kind of operation in which we should be trying to cut corners (p. 334)."

5. Invasion

"It is the inadequacy of all other options towards Iraq that leads us to the last resort of a full-scale invasion," Pollack begins. Every time I say or write this, I find myself wondering whether it is truly necessary. ... [but] we need to recognize that we have run out of alternatives." This is a "war as a last resort" position, obviously not persuasive to those who the author thinks hope that if we just think hard enough an unforeseen solution will materialise that will relieve us of the need to make the hard choice." Admittedly Pollack has already rejected the UN solution of muddling along with Saddam indefinitely. In fact, the UN, despite figuring significantly in the book's Index, merits little consideration in its text, and the potential of the Security Council to make trouble not envisaged. It may well be that Pollack did not see the need, let alone the advisability of having the UN sanction the invasion, but rather the collecting of allies the most important measure, even to worrying about the permission the Gulf States might withold. Yet he by no means chooses to ignore International Law, though his interpretion of it is generous, if commonsensical – "Indeed, if international law cannot condone the invasion of Iraq to remove from power one of the most odious, aggressive, dangerous and bloody dictators since Joseph Stalin, then there is something wrong with international law (p. 370)". This is, however, in addition to more specific arguments. It seems probable that the cry "The war is illegal" would have surprised him, though he might have dismissed it as the protest of those who could give no better reason for their opposition.

The Campaign: Recommendations and Predictions

Pollack gets down to how the campaign should be run, and it is interesting to contrast his predictions, worst and best, with what actually happened. He opts for rather larger forces than were actually used: 200,000 to 300,000, favouring the higher figure, about twice as many as participated. He does not favour a prolonged bombing campaign; in the event the bombing and the invasion were more or less simultaneous. But his most optimistic forecast was something like what actually happened, though he does not give figures. What he does forecast as "the most likely case, [a campaign of] four to eight weeks [and] 500 to 1000 combat deaths, [with it] more likely that the error would be positive (a faster campaign with fewer casualties) than negative (p. 351)". His worst-case forecast was 10,000 deaths, in a campaign of four to six months. He foresaw the likelihood of urban warfare, especially in Baghdad, and the possibility of chemical warfare, neither of which happened. He tends to disbelieve that the Arab "street" has any real threat behind it, but interestingly, however, finding it more destabilising after a US victory than before (p. 361).

And Afterwards: The Alternatives ...

Rebuilding Iraq has a chapter to itself, preceding Conclusion. Pollack has few illusions about the mixed reception with which US liberation would be received. Interestingly, one of the attitudes he discovered amongst Iraqis is puzzlement as to why the US has inflicted so much misery by means of sanctions, when it is "omniscient and all-powerful" and could liberate them if it wanted to (p. 382). Though Pollack rightly emphasises the importance of rebuilding Iraq, he tends to question US will rather than US power; also "our allies might actually be better at this part than we are (p. 363)". However, since this would preferably mean getting "the Europeans" on board before hostilities, this option must be regarded as more difficult now. He was clearly unable to see the sheer messiness of the aftermath, the looting, sabotage, random killing, religious hysteria, gut xenophobia and mutual distrust - all the irrational behaviour that is so much against everyone's best interests that it tends to be discounted by someone trying to plot the options for an occupying force.

... The "Pragmatic" –

After a quick exit, with minimum political or economic reconstruction, or expenditure of US effort and money to aid the same, the result, in Pollack's view "would inevitably be a form of warlordism", similar, but worse, to what has happened in Afghanistan. Although the Kurds would have no wish to do anything but keep themselves to themselves, the other sections or fractions, Sunni and Shi'ah would probably start a civil war to gain overall control - much of the oil is in the Kurdish area, the rest in the Shi'ah, while the most aggressive, and till now dominant section has been Sunni. "At best it would produce ... more of the 'bad old Middle East.' It would leave in place all of the autocracy that has alienated populations, the corruption and cronyism that has impoverished them, and the sectarianism and intrastate animosities that destabilised them (p. 392)." Pollack does not add, "and whatever happened the US would get all the blame," but of course it would. In short, he roundly rejects the "pragmatic solution".

... and The Reconstruction Approach

The need for this arises simply because, as Pollack believes, "the current Iraqi political and social framework cannot produce a government that is stable and legitimate (p. 392)". It goes almost without saying that since instability has been a feature since independence in 1932, the emergence of a stable and legitimate government will take some time. Convening a consititutional convention could take place within six to twelve months after the end of combat operations, with legislative and executive elections a year to two years later (p. 407), a leisurely programme compared with what seems in fact to be happening. An alternative would be to start locally, at the bottom, as it were, with Iraqis gaining experience of the democratic process before national elections took place. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq had been a relatively prosperous and well-developed country until Saddam's aggressions against Iran, the Kurds and Kuwait. Its abundant oil should make physical reconstruction relatively easy.

Conclusion

In his final chapter, Pollack reiterates the message of his book, the need for the immediate invasion of Iraq, and the arguments for it. It is the only route for long-term safety and must be done before Saddam obtains nuclear weapons, for no one can know the limits he will put to their use, or to what extent he can be deterred by threats of retaliation. Pollack makes much of the potential for Middle East stability of a regenerated, prosperous, democratic Iraq. He may be over-optimistic, but the alternative of inaction is the product of a quiet despair. His analyses tend to be over-rational; in his discussions on the attitudes of other countries and the role of the UN regarding Pre-war, Wartime and Post-war Iraq, there is no apprehension of the extreme hostility manifested by large sections of the public in the democratic "natural" allies of the US. Pollack perhaps discounts, as one formerly working for the Clinton administration might, the irrational hatred that the predominantly left-wing intellectuals who are well-ensconced in the media in Europe, Britain and the US itself, have for US Republicans and for Bush personally. Also missing is any real questioning of the extent of what might be called the stamina of US public morale, for the strength of which opinion polls provide little confidence.

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The transnational progressives have a new power grab underway - their attempt to seize control of the trial of Saddam Hussein and move it to the ICC or some other "international court." I think it would be a very serious mistake to indulge the tranzis on this issue, as it would serve to validate and legitimize the most noxious pillar of their ideology.

The transnational progressive movement has a consistent theme: that governments should be answerable primarily to some overarching international authority, rather than to their own citizens. The pernicious (and unstated) part of this theme is that last phrase - the tranzis never state, and may not even recognize, that as governments become more accountable to outside authorities, they become less accountable to their own citizens.

The EU project is certainly an attempt to implement this ideal, as was last year's attempt by the UN to control US foreign policy and military apparatus in the Iraqi, campaign. Readers will, I'm sure, be able to multiply examples, as the tranzis are nothing if not consistent in their top-down approach to accountability and control.

For the tranzis, the problem of rogue or abusive governments is not that such governments are too powerful and/or insufficiently accountable to their own citizen/subjects. After all, the source of legitimacy for this lot is not the consent of the governed; rather legitimacy can apparently only be conferred from above. Thus, the creation, from whole cloth, of international institutions such as the UN or International Criminal Court, so that there is a higher, transnational, authority to judge and confer legitimacy on the doings of national governments.

Of course, being made answerable to the "international community" (read: other governments) comes at the cost of being accountable to your own citizenry. This is the reason that the whole tranzi project is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting. In my book, consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy. Period. Discussion over. Turn out the lights as you leave. The tranzi project is corrosive of the consent of the governed, because it substitutes the consent of other governments for the consent of the governed.

The whole meme/dynamic is on full display in Iraq right now. The tranzis and their project are the long-term enemies of liberty, my friends, as much as or more so than your penny-ante domestic politician.

Many thanks to Tacitus for his rather more brutal assessment of the tranzi attempt to shove the Iraqis out of the way and seize control Saddam's fate, which got the juices flowing this morning.

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GREETINGS!

LET ME START BY INTRODUCING MYSELF PROPERLY. MY NAME IS ALI KAMAL BISHARA AND I AM A SENIOR OFFICIAL IN THE IRAQI FINANCE MINISTRY. I WAS ALSO CHIEF ADVISER TO FORMER PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, SADDAM HUSSEIN WHO IS NOW IN THE AMERICAN CAPTIVITY.

WE ARE CONTACT YOU FOR TO ESTABLISH VERY URGENTLY A BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP BUT ONLY WITH A FOREIGN PERSON OF MOST HIGH RELIABLENESS AND REPUTATION FOR WHICH INVOLVES THE TRANSFER OF A HUGE SUM OF MONEY TO A FOREIGN ACCOUNT REQUIRING MAXIMUM CONFIDENCE.

LET ME EXPLAIN: BEFORE HIS DETENTION THE PRESIDENT HUSSEIN DEPOSITED THE SUM OF $28,500,000 IN A SECRET BANK ACCOUNT IN A SAFE COUNTRY. THIS MONEY WAS OIL REVENUE WHICH I HAVE PERSONALLY CHECKED AND FOUND AS AN ACCURATE FIGURE.

NOW THE FORMER PRESIDENT HUSSEIN CAN NO LONGER ACCESS THIS MONEY WHICH IS MUCH NEEDED BY MY COUNTRY FOR DISBURSEMENT TO CHILDREN AND HOSPITALS. IF THIS MONEY IS NOT CLAIMED IT WILL BE TAKEN BY AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.

SO HUMBLY WE BEG AN HONEST AND DILIGENT PERSON TO WHO THE UNDISCLOSED BANK WILL TRANSFER THIS MONEY AS TRUSTEE. IN RETURN FOR THIS SERVICE YOU WILL KEEP 30% OF THE SUM AND REMIT TO US THE 70% REMAINING. IN ORDER THAT WE MAY COMPLETE THIS MOST SECRET TRANSACTION YOU MUST SEND TO US YOUR DETAILS BUT MOSTLY YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER AND ADDRESS SO THAT WE CAN ARRANGE THE SUBSTANTIAL MONEY TRANSFER TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

YOU MUST REPLY QUICKLY WITH FULL DETAILS FOR US TO BE CONVICTED THAT YOU ARE GENUINE AND SINCERE.

YOURS MOST HUMBLY IN GOOD BUSINESS FAITH.

ALI KAMAL BISHARA.

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Interesting argument by noted libertarian and Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra about the capture of Saddam. He argues that because Saddam clearly was determined to survive rather than die in a blaze of glory, this proves he was amenable to force, and therefore deterrable. In short, that we could have deterred Saddam from his monstrous ambitions and did not need to invade Iraq to foil him.

Hmmmm, as they say when confronted with arguments like this. I truly do not know. Is it really the case that a man who defied a hatful of UN resolutions, invaded Iran and Kuwait, consorted with known terrorists, and who threatened to destroy Israel was the sort of guy who could be deterred in the manner of the Soviets during the Cold War? (And by the way, recall how close to disaster we got in the Cuban missile crisis).

I honestly do not know with certainty and I very much suspect that Chris Sciabarra does not know this for sure, either. Deterrence as a foreign policy option has been the mainstay of the isolationist libertarian case since 9/11, as seen here over at Jim Henley's blog. But the Middle East always struck me as being the place where mutually assured destruction could go horribly, horribly wrong.

And of course if deterrence did work, that still leaves the small issue of whether we could, and should have let Saddam stay in power had we been able to prove clear links between him and terror groups possibly implicated in 9/11.

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John Keegan has an excellent column in the Telegraph today on the legal problem of what to do with a deposed sovereign. One suspects that Mr. Keegan wrote this column months ago, in the sure knowledge that sooner or later it would become topical when Saddam was winkled out of his hole. The column provides a nice historical overview of "sovereign immunity."

How to dispose of a fallen dictator is a problem of immense complexity for victor states. Dictators have been sovereigns, as Saddam was, de facto if not de jure. Sovereign states shrink from disposing peremptorily of sovereign rulers. The process, whichever is chosen, always threatens to set inconvenient precedents. Since 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia created the principle that sovereign states, and therefore their sovereign heads, are both legally and morally absolute, there has been no legal basis for proceeding against such a person, however heinous the crimes he is known to have committed.

[Brief discussion of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, various Axis dictators, which should not be missed.]

None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen - and that Saddam unquestionably is - for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country.

I back into being a supporter of sovereignity, on the theory that a multitude of sovereign states limits the damage that any one of them can do, and that liberty arises in part from competition among dispersed authorities and powers. Solving the sovereign immunity problem by placing sovereign states under the jurisdiction of an overarching power seems to me to be a cure worse than the disease, because it creates a qui custodiet ipsos custodes problem, and because the supranational authority would be largely immune to democratic accountability. However, I see no reason why government officials should be immune from judicial accountability to their own citizens, which is precisely the solution that seems to be in the offing in Iraq.

On a bit of a tangent, Mr. Keegan makes the astonishing assertion at the end of the column that "at present there is no death penalty in Iraq. . . ." I would not dream of questioning the eminent Mr. Keegan on a point of fact such as this, but how can it possibly be true? I cannot believe that Saddam did not have the death penalty on the books (could all of those hundreds of thousands of executions have been extrajudicial?), and I cannot imagine that the Iraqi death penalty has been revoked in the last 6 months. Input from the commentariat would be appreciated - I sense a fine bit of obscure knowledge here, just out of reach, begging to be retailed to impressionable young things at cocktail parties.

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Some cynical commenter I cannot remember who or where said that this weekend our naughty Labour government would choose now to bury some bad news which it would like out there but ignored. Sunday is a bad day for such trickery, but maybe there was something along these lines today.

However, my inclination is to suspect that the real Story That Just Got Buried, at any rate in Britain (Instapundit was all over it from the start, just before the Saddam Captured story broke, i.e just after he was actually captured), so far, is this, in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. Okay, not buried exactly. The Sunday Telegraph is not buried. Shall we say: temporarily drowned out, by which I mean ignored, for the time being, by the British electronic media.

Anyway, buried or not, it is a huge story, if true:

A document discovered by Iraq's interim government details a meeting between the man behind the September 11 attacks and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, at his Baghdad training camp. Con Coughlin reports.

For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.

So, ergo, it cannot be true. Right? Too good.

But what if it is true? I know, politicians – Tony Blair even – telling the truth, whatever next? But suppose, just suppose, that the Powers That Be have known all along and for absolute sure that Saddam and Al Qaeda were totally in bed with each other, but that they could not reveal how they knew because had they revealed their evidence that would have jeopardised, you know, ongoing operations, i.e. their source(s) close to Saddam? But could it be that this has now changed, what with SH now being safely in the bag? That makes the most sense of everything to me, not least the curious behaviour of our Prime Minister, apparently so willing to hang himself out to dry over this war, but actually sucking his critics into what a spin doctoral friend of mine calls a "killing ground"? "I told you to trust me. You should have." I can hear it now.

I do not have time to comment at any more length as I am now off to an impromptu Samizdata social, but Melanie Phillips, to whom my thanks for reminding me that I had read this story yesterday and like her been very struck by it, does comment some more. So go read her.

Written in a rush. So apologies for misprints and/or contorted prose, which I reserve the right to clean up later.