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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'...