TigerHawk

Ann Althouse celebrates the New Year by selecting her favorite post from each month of the year. She links back to the post that "represents what I consider to be the essence of what I'm trying to do here." Professor Althouse apparently has a far greater blog-awareness than I do, since I wouldn't have a clue what the "essence" of this blog is. However, that doesn't make it any less a good idea. Herewith, my favorite posts of the year, and begging your forgiveness in advance for picking more than one post per month. [OK, it turned out to be more like five posts per month...]

I'll put up a month or two of links at a time this evening (watching the Bears play a terrible game against the Packers) and tomorrow, so check back here for updates.

January

Sex in Suburbia (Cassandra)

The ethics of journalism: A proposal for reform

Sam Alito, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and the Class of 1957's 25th reunion

All my left thoughts

The Pakistan strike and the defeatist joy of left wing blogs

February

The garbage plate (Charlottesvillain)

Reconciling rights and identity politics: What do Denmark, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Northwestern University have in common?

The Gorebot: attacking America from the fountainhead of jihad

Realigning tolerance: Our options in the collision between free speech and Islam

March

The political and geopolitical significance of 'foreign fighters' in Iraq

India and Pakistan - The War That Did Not Happen (Cardinalpark)

Regarding Mohammed and the prospects for "respect"

The Muslims of Invention

George P. Shultz and the origins of the Bush Doctrine

The Iran Crisis: A "roundtable" discussion at Princeton University

April

Flag waiving, political speech, and the censorship of violence

My great-grandfather's alleged subtext

The FDA, the Tysabri conundrum, and our cultural incapacity for single payer healthcare

Comedy Central and the violence veto

Gasoline remains a great value

Madeleine Albright speaks at Princeton: Fourteen Points about democratization

May

Louis Rukeyser, RIP (Charlottesvillain)

Civil War? (Cardinalpark)

America (Cardinalpark)

John Edwards and the Democrats' plague of lawyers

June

The idiocy of virginity pledges

Azerbaijan, the Clinton administration, the non-fortunes of Exxon stockholders, and the dangerous myth that America wants to "grab the oil"

Pessimism, Quagmires and a Microphone (Cardinalpark)

Europe and Muslims: The shrinking pool of neutrals

Annotating the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey

Selective human rights outrage and asymmetrical warfare (Cassandra)

The Giant Panda Post

July

Woe for Roe (Charlottesvillain)

Wither the "democratization strategy"?

War reductionism

Splitting Syria from Iran and the strategy deficit

How "proportionality" destroys the best chance for peace

Backward culpability and radical chic

August

Human Rights Watch and false moral equivalence

The curse of high expectations (Cardinalpark)

The NSA case: What ought to be done to discover the dots?

Our system, or Sweden's?

September

John Dean on Donald Rumsfeld: Trust Nixon!

Khatami vs. Ahmadinejad

Managing Global Images

Cracking down on skinny people

Infantalizing Muslim "rage"

Feigning a blind eye: Categorizing proxy wars and legitimizing the counterattack

October

2007 in Iraq (Cardinalpark)

George W. Bush's "admission" and the Tet analogy

Pictures from Princeton-Harvard weekend

Book Review: America Alone

Prince Turki al-Faisal on American "standing"

November

The annual Garcia y Vega cigar

Iran: Plus ça change

What would an American nationalized healthcare system look like?

Unexploded ordnance found in London (Charlottesvillain)

The New York Times and driving regulation

The crock that is "shareholder democracy"

December

"Realism" and the containment of Iran

Ethics in journalism: Taking the Columbia J-School challenge

A short note on "Big Pharma" and popular resentment

Prospects for peace around Israel and the role of the United States

Adirondack Light: Christmas Eve edition

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Long-standing readers know that I take an occasional foray into anti-American foreign blogs. One of the better ones -- defining "better" to mean that the blog is objectively well-executed -- is run by Haitham Sabbah, a Palestinian Arab living in Bahrain. I have read Sabbah much less since the Second Lebanon War, because he has gotten so angry at the United States, probably as a result of the fighting in the summer, that he is tough to read even for an open-minded fellow like me.

With that said, I thought that his recent post on the American companies that were the preferred targets of the anti-Israel boycott was quite interesting, more for what it did not say than what it did say. The allegedly "pro-Zionist" companies include the flower and the chivalry of corporate America:

• General Electric: all GE appliances


• CATerpillar: all CAT branded products


• The Home Depot: includes all Home Depot retail stores, EXPO Design Centers, Villager’s Hardware stores, Apex Supply Company, Georgia Lighting, Maintenance Warehouse, National Blinds & Wallpaper


• The Limited: all Intimate Brands such as Bath & Body Works, White Barn Candle Company, Victoria’s Secret. Express stores, The Limited stores, Lerner New York stores, Structure stores, New York and Company stores, Mast Industries - apparel manufacturer, Henri Bendel, Hollinger Publishing


• Starbucks ...: Starbucks Coffee Stores, Starbucks coffee, chocolates, biscuits & ice-cream products. Seattle Coffee Company in the United Kingdom, Pasqua Inc., Hear Music, Tazo®, Hyatt Hotels, Marriott Hotels, Starwood Hotels (Sheraton), Canadian bookstore Chapters Inc, Barnes & Noble, Inc bookstores, Albertson’s Supermarkets, Drugstore.com, eBay Inc., and last but not least DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc.


• McDonald’s (need I say more?)


• Marks & Spencer (need I say more?)


• Estée Lauder : Estée Lauder cosmetics. Aramis, Clinique, DKNY, Prescriptives, Origins Natural Resources, MAC Cosmetics, La Mer, Bobbi Brown Essentials, Tommy Hilfiger Toiletries, Jane, Donna Karan Cosmetics, Aveda, Stila Cosmetics, Jo Malone, Bumble & Bumble, Kate Spade.


• L’OREAL: LaRoche – Posay Pharmaceuticals, Maybelline, Ralph Lauren, Helena Rubinstein, Redken 5th Avenue NYC, Giorgio Armani Perfumes, Lancome Paris.


• Sara Lee: Sara Lee Bakery. Meat (Hillshire Farm, Jimmy Dean, Bryan, Ball Park Aoste), Coffee and coffee systems (Superior Coffee, Douwe Egberts, Maison Café, Pilao). Tea (Pickwick). Body care (Sanex, Body Mist, Brylcreem, Aqua Velva, Radox). Shoe care (Kiwi). Air fresheners (Ambi Pur). Hanes – Intimate apparel, hosiery, socks, knitwear, work wear, casual wear. Playtex – Intimate apparel. Champion – Men’s and women’s athletic apparel and men’s underwear. L’eggs – Hosiery. Dim – Intimate apparel, hosiery. Bali – Intimate apparel. Just My Size – Intimate apparel. Lovable – Intimate apparel, men’s underwear, socks. Outer Banks – T-shirts, sport shirts. Wonder bra – Intimate apparel. Gossard – Intimate apparel.


• Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola (incl. Cherry Coke), Fanta, Fresca, Frescolita, Sprite, Tab. Bacardi Mixers, Hi-C, Fruitopia. Dasani Water. Minute Maid, Five Alive, Sun Valley. Nescafé, Nestea, Tasters Choice.


• Intel: Processors – Celeron, Pentium, Itanium, etc. Motherboards, Chipsets, Adapters, Controllers, Network Products, Wireless components, Embedded Products, Software Development Tools.

It seems to me that two things might be said that Sabbah obviously did not mention. First, it seems to me that a boycott should be fought with countervailing pressure. Supporters of Israel might want to direct their business specifically to these companies. Indeed, just thinking about it that way makes me happier about our family's massive annual Starbucks budget.

Second, I own the shares of several of these companies, and I wonder what effect the Arab boycott is having on their profitability. It raises the stark and ferociously un-PC question, would the average profit-maximizing business prefer to have the support of the world's 15,000,000 or so Jews, or its more than 400,000,000 Arabs (recognizing, of course, that a business's first choice would be to work with Arab and Jew alike)? I bet there isn't a lot of grant money available to figure out the answer to that question, or professors willing to do the work even if there were.
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Will Franklin exploits differences in business regulation and tax rates among the states to illustrate graphically how economic freedom leads to more economic growth and faster increases in tax receipts. It is a fair bet that no actual politician in the State of New Jersey will read his fine post, but here's to wishing they would.

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Notwithstanding the books on the right sidebar, which through today at least have not changed for almost two months, I actually have been reading. Right now, I'm in the middle of Christian Alfonsi's^* very interesting Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq. The book is first and foremost a history of the first Gulf War, with tons of detail about the deliberations and diplomacy of the Bush 41 team (presumably I'll get to the "why we went back part" in the last third of the book).

Alfonsi's book does not appear from its Amazon rank to be selling well, and it is surprisingly underblogged. That is a shame, because it adds to the current debate. Perhaps it is not popular because publisher is lame. More likely, it is because it is sufficiently balanced that it is not useful to readers who are looking to reinforce their preconceptions.

The Washington Post reviewer wrote that the book suffers from "presentism," which is to see the past through contemporary assumptions. Fair enough, but that very tendency drove Alfonsi to include all sorts of great flip-flops from history. First, Mr. Waffle himself:

Perhaps the most bewildering set of views contained in the dossier [a collection of Democratic statements about Iraq assembled by Republicans during spring of 1991] were those of the Massachusetts senator John Kerry, who was quoted making three different statements before Desert Storm:

• A response to a letter from a constituent, saying Kerry voted "against giving the President immediate authority to go to war against Iraq to force it out of Kuwait, warning that a decision to go to war was rolling the dice with our future";
• A response to a second constituent letter the same week, saying Kerry "strongly and unequivocably supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Gulf";
• And third, a terse statement from Kerry blaming a computer in his office for the inconsistency.

It will be a great shame when the next presidential election rolls around, but not for all the reasons you might suspect. No, by then there will be another Democratic nominee, and then even I will tire of mocking John Kerry.

Then there was the brutal aftermath of the war, when Saddam's government brutalized the Shia and the Kurds, who rose up against him in part because they misread encouragement we were actually directing at the Ba'athists who ran Saddam's military-intelligence complex (the administration expected and perhaps desired that Saddam be overthrown by coup, rather than popular revolution). The Bush 41 administration quite famously did not rush to the aid of the Kurds and the Shia until Saddam had killed thousands of them and public opinion in the West began to demand it. Why? Because we did not want to get involved in Iraq's internal affairs. Dick Cheney was quite eloquent on the point:

On Sunday morning, April 7 [1991], Cheney appeared on the ABC News program This Week with David Brinkley. In his characteristic blunt-spoken style, Brinkley asked the secretary of defense, "Why didn't we go to Baghdad and clean it up when we had the chance?"

"Well, just as it's important, I think, for a president to know when to commit U.S. forces to combat, it's also important to know when not to commit U.S. forces to combat," Cheney replied. "I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire."

He then proceeded to ask a rapid-fire series of half a dozen questions, all of which had presumably been discussed already by the secretary and his colleagues. It was a distinctive rhetorical technique that Cheney had used throughout his political career, designed to preempt criticism by demonstrating to potential critics that they had not thought through an issue as thoroughly as Cheney and his staff had, but if they did, then any reasonable person would arrive at the same conclusion.

"Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? Wht kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba'ath party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic?

"I do not think the United States want to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq," Cheney concluded. "I think it makes no sense at all."

All questions that remain, tragically, germane.

There is much more to embarrass just about everybody, which is probably why you haven't heard politicians or journalists citing to Alfonsi's book.
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*Yes, "Alfonsi" -- pronounced, presumably, Al-Fonzi -- does sound suspiciously like "The Fonz" in Arabic. Fortunately, the word "whoa" does not appear in the book.
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Preparing, as they are, for the "symbolic stoning of the devil," Muslim pilgrims are allegedly "outraged" at the hanging of Saddam on the eve of an important holiday. No doubt. However, by recent standards the intensity of the outrage seems almost muted. In an age when a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper or a couple of lines from the Pope at an academic conference can set the Arab "street" ablaze, mere "outrage" doesn't really seem to warrant press coverage. You have to hand it to Reuters, though -- they always find some real fruitcake and hand him their global megaphone:

But many Arabs said if anyone should be put on trial it was the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government that backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which overthrew Saddam.

"They are American collaborators, those in Iraq. They should be executed, not Saddam Hussein." said Mohammad Mousa, on haj from Lebanon. "Saddam Hussein is the most honorable of all of them. He is the most honorable Arab. They will go to hell, he will go to heaven."

That's quite an idea, that Saddam Hussein is the "most honorable Arab." Since Mr. Mousa is saying this on the record for transmission around the world, he obviously does not believe either that the idea is ridiculous or that he has slandered all Arabs. Neither, apparently, does Reuters. Either that, or Reuters is mocking Mr. Mousa, or all Arabs. What could be the fourth explanation?
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It is the end of a year in which I've read and seen a great deal by my lame suburban corporate-tool standard. It is my lot in life to wrestle with the facts and opinions that come my way, and a lot of my opinions have either strengthened or weakened considerably in the last couple of years. You get the credit for some of this; we have some very smart people who comment here. Whether left or right, they are a long sight more intelligent and reasonable than most people who comment on blogs.

I thought this morning that I would begin a new occasional series, "Things I believe, but cannot prove." It is mostly for my benefit in that the writing of an idea helps to clarify it, but I hope that you join in with your own observations.

Today, regarding risk:

1. The biggest questions that democratic governments in reasonably wealthy and well-functioning countries face revolve around the management of risk, particularly to individuals. What sort of risks should the government allow individuals to take, how much should government insulate people from the consequences of a risk gone bad, and how much of the benefits of a risk gone well should the government let us keep?

2. The problem, of course, is that if you indemnify people for the adverse consequences of a risk, you also have to take away the benefits. Otherwise, you create a "moral hazard," which is the condition which prevails when you let somebody keep the benefits of a risk while sloughing off its adverse consequences. Heads I win, tails the government loses. Famous examples include the insuring of bank deposits (if insured, depositors have no incentive to prefer sound banks over speculative banks, so they deposit their money with the bank that pays the most interest), government disaster relief (people who choose to live in dangerous places -- think flood zones, tropical coasts, and fault lines -- do not buy adequate insurance because they expect the government to bail them out if the big one hits), and unlimited free health benefits.

3. So what is wrong with living in a society that takes away the benefits and the burdens of risk? Four things.

3.1 First, who wants to live in such a place? Humans love risk. That's why we gamble in casinos, start businesses, quit jobs to pursue our dreams, take mood-altering substances, fall in love, have sex with people we sholdn't, play with matches, climb mountains, commit crimes, set off illegal fireworks, ride motorcycles, drive on the Garden State Parkway, and eat donuts. You might be able to persuade a few more than half the people to eliminate any particular risk because we all have different tastes, but people will be less happy in the end. That is why I believe that countries that try to legislate away risk, whether communist or socialist, invariably have less happy and optimistic citizenry than the United States.

3.2 Second, risk is the means by which we create wealth. How do I know this? Because if wealth could be created without taking risk, everybody would do it. So if you take away the opportunities for risk, you take away the opportunities for wealth. That may be fine by you -- perhaps you don't like risk or you have enough wealth for yourself already -- but there is no doubt that is what you are doing. (Certainly some regulation of risk promotes the creation of wealth. Clear rules regarding the ownership of property and the enforcement of contracts take medieval caprice out of business, and seem to be fundamental to economic opportunity. There are a few other examples.)

3.3 Third, the imperfect mechanisms we use to transfer the burdens and benefits of risk create vast amounts of diffuse unhappiness. "Sticky" European labor markets are the example with which I am most familiar. European labor laws (especially in Germany and France) make it so difficult and expensive to fire people that employers will go to great lengths not to hire them in the first place. Yes, this is bad for the overall level of employment in the economy, but there is a much worse problem: employees all over Europe are essentially stuck in jobs they hate, and they are either unwilling to leave (because they will give up the 12-24 months of salary that they will be paid if only they can contrive to get fired) or unable (because their preferred employer is also doing everything possible not to take on new employees that he cannot easily shed if makes a hiring mistake). That creates a vast quantum of unhappiness that Europeans cannot relieve, but attempt to salve with incredibly short work weeks and six weeks vacation. Americans are far happier in their job, in no small part because they know they can leave to do something else if it doesn't work out. That gives American workers a fundamental power that all of Europe's protective legislation cannot endow. Americans do not work harder than Europeans because it is in our culture. We work harder because, in general, we have vastly greater ability to choose the work that we will do.

3.4 Fourth, real challenges, real struggles, and real risks may be quite literally essential to the future of humanity. I do not believe that it is coincidental that the societies that have done the most to eliminate risk -- communist and social democratic welfare states -- have fertility rates that put them far below the level necessary to replace their population or sustain their welfare state over the long run. The populations of most European countries and Japan are literally plunging, and will quickly reach the point that the benefits which two post-war generations have taken for granted will probably not survive. Is this apparent correlation between social "security" and infertility because (i) the state has taken over some of the supportive functions previously the province of large families, (ii) we have removed so many threats from our lives that we have unwittingly tampered with the will to reproduce, (iii) life is so fun now for people in social democratic welfare states that they do not want to interrupt the good times with children, (iv) the decline in economic opportunity that escorts the heavy regulation of risk has sucked the optimism out of the most paradisical countries on the planet, or (v) some other reason? I believe that (i)-(iv) all play a role, plus the increasing professional opportunities for women in such countries.

4. Item 3.4 assumes the answer (based on belief, as I said) to the biggest "meta question" that social democratic welfare states face today: Does the welfare state contain the seeds of its own destruction by destroying the desire of its citizenry to reproduce at rates sufficient to sustain the state's financial commitments? Unfortunately, there will be no government money available to study the question, and very few professors in our universities who are both qualified to do the study and willing to live with the social and professional fallout if the answer turned out to be "yes."

5. So why do we vote to diffuse risk away from individuals? Several reasons, I believe. First, the social democratic welfare state is a relatively new device, and we are just beginning to understand its shortcomings. For more than a generation, it seemed as though we could have fast economic growth and exciting lives and security. As the flaws in the system become more apparent, latecomers are less likely to follow. The United States will probably never adopt a single-payer healthcare scheme, having made it through the 1970s without enacting one, because most countries that have them are struggling with their internal tensions. Second, legislation and regulation occurs incrementally, so it is tough to say that any particular shifting of risk will be the tipping point that sucks the energy out of a country. Without knowing that the tipping point has been reached, it is easier for people to support a law or program that seems to reduce hardship, or spread it around.

6. In addition to the reasons in Item 5, we support protective social welfare legislation because of an unfortunate bias in our measurement of social progress. We tend to look at the elimination of problems as the best indicators for the health of the society. Is the illiteracy rating declining? What about malnourishment, childhood disease, injuries in the workplace, unemployment, infant mortality, unemployment? You get the idea. Supporters of an expanded welfare and regulatory state cite these figures and compare the United States unfavorably to the allegedly more enlightened democracies of Western Europe (how many times have we heard the claim that we are the "only" rich country that does not guarantee health care to all its residents, as if that were a priori proof that we are immoral because we do not).

If we had the tools, we might do well to measure other things that could be indicators of social optimism and economic and individual energy. Is the fertility rate rising, or declining? Is the true rate of new business formation rising or falling? Were it possible to calculate a "rate of innovation," is it accelerating or decelerating? How much are individuals spending on education for themselves and their children? Do people think the future will be better, or worse? Do people say they enjoy their work? Do people say they expect to have a second career, or a third? Are employees looking for a better job, or even just a different one? Do people say that change scares them, or motivates them? When people save and invest their money, what motivates them to do so? How frequently do people move from one income "decile" to another, whether up or down? Do young people want to build things more often than they want to protest against things?

I'm sure there are many more such indicators which may well serve as better measures of social and economic vitality. The point is, in our natural tendency to track and monitor and alleviate specific problems, we are, perhaps, failing to think about the energy of our civilization, and whether the solutions to the specific problems are cumulatively destroying the challenges that we -- freeborn humans -- need to thrive.

Flip off the safeties and fire at will.

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The Doc finally posts the picture that dumpy male blog readers (and, professionalism requires me to admit, bloggers) have been waiting for all week.

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At 10:05 p.m. EST, Fox announced that Al Arabiya television has broken the news that Saddam Hussein is dead, having been executed by the government of Iraq.

MORE: The Guardian's first three paragraphs put it rather well:

Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi despot who menaced neighbours and murdered his own people during a quarter century of wretched tyranny, died ignominiously on the gallows shortly before dawn this morning at the hands of his former enemies.

Saddam, who was convicted last month of crimes against humanity in one of many episodes of brutality laid at his door and ordered to hang on Boxing Day, was executed at around 6am (3 am GMT) at an undisclosed location, according to local television reports.

The execution removed one of the great hangovers of 20th century brutality, a dictator with more than just a physical resemblance to Stalin who ruled through fear, vengeance, cunning and terror.

Compare the clarity of the Guardian to the New York Times:

Saddam Hussein, the dictator who led Iraq through three decades of brutality, war and bombast before American forces chased him from his capital city and captured him in a filthy pit near his hometown, was hanged just before dawn Saturday during the morning call to prayer.

The final stages of Mr. Hussein’s life came with terrible swiftness after he lost the appeal, six days ago, of his death sentence for the killings of 148 men and boys in the northern town of Dujail in 1982. He had received the sentence less than two months before from a special court set up to judge his reign as the almost unchallenged dictator of Iraq.

His execution was announced on Iraqi state television and was confirmed by a senior American official in Baghdad and a Bush administration official in Crawford, Tex. No details were disclosed and Iraqi officials had said it would not be shown publicly.

Suppose you wanted to read a left-wing high-brow newspaper. Which has the more crackling prose?

There's a reason why the New York Times is losing readers.

STILL MORE: For the lefty-activist reaction, see the comments at AMERICABlog. If it weren't so harsh, it would be comedy gold.
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Little Green Footballs just gave "major kudos" to, er, Barbara Boxer. No. Really. I shit you not.

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If you can't mock Saddam's execution, whose execution can you mock?

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This, I think, explains why the Left fought so hard to defeat Joe Lieberman.

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Glenn Reynolds describes the relationship between the United States and the Palestinian Arabs exactly, I think:

ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION, I've suggested that the United States should not be trying to serve as an "honest broker" for a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the grounds that the Palestinians are our enemies, and thus we can't and shouldn't be neutral about them.

That we -- meaning the American public -- now know that Yasser Arafat was the actual "mastermind" of the murder of American diplomats is but the last bad fact in a very long list. As I have written before, the Palestinian Arabs have been our enemies, or the enemy of our allies, for almost 100 years. Never mind their war against Israel or their repeated terrorism against Western targets. The Palestinian Arabs sided with the Ottomon Turks against our allies -- the United Kingdom, France, and Australia -- during World War I. The Palestinian Arabs worked with the Nazis during World War II. They sided with the Soviets during the Cold War, Iraq during the Gulf War, and the Palestinian "street" acted for all the world as though it supported Al Qaeda after September 11. Of course, Palestinian Arabs supported Saddam in 2003, and probably still do support him on the eve of his execution.

The truth is, the Palestinian Arabs have had many opportunities to support the United States, and had they seized those opportunities they might have a moral case that the United States should be even-handed in its dealings in the region. But they didn't take the chances they had, and instead supported our enemies. Why should any American ever care about the Palestinian Arabs, except perhaps in the most cynical sense? Sure, if we have to suck up to them as part of a broader strategy to coerce and cajole Arab states to help us in the war on Al Qaeda or to contain Iran, fine, but let's not confuse ourselves that it's the moral thing to do. The State Department's persistent covering up of the depredations of the Palestinians certainly goes a long way to explain why conservatives do not trust Foggy Bottom.
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Yep, in 1961 I generated a very welcome tax deduction for the TigerHawk 'rents.

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Little Green Footballs is soliciting votes for the "Oriana Fallaci Award" for Anti-Idiotarian of the Year, 2006.

I couldn't help myself. From a field of extremely worthy candidates, I voted for Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

You can also vote for a "Fiskie," the Robert Fisk Idiotarian of the Year Award here. I held my nose and voted for John Murtha, although on reflection the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists is the obvious best choice.

I should say that I am quite disappointed that neither Human Rights Watch (for its arrestingly one-sided reports on Israel's actions during the Hezbollah War) nor Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the cut. Now you might say that Ahmadinejad is a bona fide enemy, and that the essence of Idiotarianism is cravenly apologizing for, "understanding," or sucking up to actual enemies, and that therefore the category by definition must exclude the real thing. Then, however, one might legitimately ask why Hugo Chavez is a nominee.

Just sayin'.

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Regular blog readers know that there has been an extraordinary amount of controversy regarding the conduct of Durham (NC) District Attorney Mike Nifong in the prosecution of members of the Duke lacrosse team for rape and other heinous crimes. Well, the North Carolina bar filed ethics charges against Nifong today "accusing him of saying misleading or inflammatory things to the news media about the athletes under suspicion." Good. Prosecutors everywhere need to know there are some lines that they must not cross. John Hinderaker:

Our criminal justice system reposes a tremendous amount of discretion in prosecutors. When prosecutors are corrupt, like Nifong or Ronnie Earle of Travis County, Texas, who ruined Tom DeLay's public career, the consequences can be devastating.

There is one reform that I think would push prosecutors substantially in the direction of the responsible: We should bar all prosecutors -- state, federal, attorneys general -- from running for any non-prosecutorial public or judicial office for a period of five years after leaving the prosecutor's office.
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Stratfor reported the following in a "Sitrep" last night:

Ethiopia's envoy to Somalia said Dec. 27 that Ethiopian and Somalian government troops will lay siege to Somalia's capital of Mogadishu until Islamist forces there surrender, regardless of the potential for civilian casualties.

Ethiopia, it seems, didn't get the memo about "post-heroic war." In any case, its declared war against the "Islamic Courts" faction in Somalia is proceeding apace. The Islamists have apparently already withdrawn from the capital.

I will confess that I do not entirely understand what is happening here, and neither does the media, at least according to Hugh Hewitt. He has a link-rich round-up.

It is possible to describe Ethiopia as an American proxy under deep cover. The State Department's summary of Ethiopia notes that the United States has been training that country's army:

The Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) numbers about 200,000 personnel, which makes it one of the largest militaries in Africa. During the 1998-2000 border war with Eritrea, the ENDF mobilized strength reached approximately 350,000. Since the end of the war, some 150,000 soldiers have been demobilized. The ENDF continues a transition from its roots as a guerrilla army to an all-volunteer professional military organization with the aid of the U.S. and other countries. Training in peacekeeping operations, professional military education, military training management, counter-terrorism operations, and military medicine are among the major programs sponsored by the United States. Ethiopia now has two peacekeeping contingents in Burundi and Liberia.

StrategyPage reports that we have, in fact, been providing help behind the scenes:

The U.S. was apparently providing the Ethiopians with satellite and aircraft photos of Islamic Courts positions. The U.S. has a large counter-terror force to the north, in Djibouti. The U.S. may be supplying Ethiopia with cash (to pay for all the gas the Ethiopians are burning in their operations). For years, the U.S. has been training Ethiopian troops for operations like this.

Meanwhile, the UNSC is actually lining up 14-1 in support of the American position, which is that a ceasefire should not require an immediate withdrawal by Ethiopia.

The one thing I do know is that Ethiopia's war in Somalia appears for all the world like a significant battle in the war on Islamist jihad. Perhaps Somalia won't turn into al Qaeda's next base of operations after all.

Your more erudite comments are more than welcome.
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Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club has applied his considerable analytical powers to the blogosphere itself, considering its nature, its operation, its boundaries and its impact. Richard's essay is, not surprisingly, of more original tone and timbre than any I have read on the subject, because it drives toward the question, "how to optimize the blogosphere for informational warfare?" It is long, so print off "The Blogosphere At War" and read it over lunch.

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Link.

In other bald eagle news, there is a nesting pair building a huge nest in the tree growing out of our front porch. I'll try to snap some shots tomorrow.

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I'm sure Saddam won't be looking at his hanging quite this way:

Iraq was preparing for the rapid execution of former dictator Saddam Hussein, with the US-backed government eager to bring his chapter in the country's bloody history to an end.

Justice Minister Hashem al-Shibli said Wednesday the sentence for crimes against humanity -- upheld by am Iraqi appeal court on Tuesday -- would be sent to the presidency for approval while the prison service prepares to hang him.

The process will get underway rapidly, he said, but the formality of executing the ousted dictator could be delayed by the onset of the four-day Eid al-Adha holiday, which is due to start at the end of the week.

MORE: A sharp-eyed commenter spots anti-Israeli bias engineered into into the linked article's online marketing.
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Check out this very cool trailer. Silver Surfer fans, your long wait is nearly over!

I guess we'll need to wait to see whether Galactus will be making an appearance.
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After reading this, I almost - almost - feel sorry for the guy. Ouch. OUCH!!!

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The stock market has been on a huge tear the last couple of days. As of the moment of this blog post, every single one of the 32 stocks I follow on my Yahoo! screen are showing green. That doesn't happen very often.

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It was with some sadness that I read of the passing of musical icon James Brown yesterday. It was with gladness that I read today that his body will lie in state at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, site of Brown's coming out party and the recording of his famous Live at the Apollo album.

James Brown leaves a huge legacy as an innovator of soul music and the inventor of funk, which in turn spawned disco and hip-hop music, a huge amount of which is recorded directly over James Brown samples. There is so much being written on JB right now that I don't have a lot more to add (having already blogged on the JB legacy in the 2005 blog post Papa don't take no mess). As usual, Scott over at Powerline has a nice tribute, which includes a great video of the Godfather in action.
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President Gerald R. Ford, born on July 14, 1913 as Leslie King, has died. He lived one month longer than Ronald Reagan did, and became the longest-lived former President of the United States.

Ford was the first president whose innauguration I remember as a current event. Indeed, my political awareness (at age 12) really began with Nixon's resignation, which I watched from a barber's chair in Tupper Lake, New York, less than five miles from where I write this today. After that, I began reading the newspaper, watching the evening news, and arguing about politics with my friends. A blogger was born with Gerald Ford's move to the Oval Office, we just didn't know it at the time.

Ford was a remarkable man, as the wire service obituary reminds us. Even as the country mocked him for his clumsiness -- the press conveniently forgetting that he was perhaps the most accomplished athlete ever to occupy the White House -- and derided him for his pardon of Richard Nixon, he led with a decency and competence that I think most Americans of the left and right wish we could conjure up today. He did this at a time when the country was extraordinarily difficult to govern, and he almost paid for it with his life. In September 1975, two separate Californians tried to assassinate him only 17 days apart.

The country threw Ford overboard for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and historians will long debate whether the electorate did the right thing. Right now, Jimmy Carter is in favor among professional historians, but that is because most of them were voters in 1976 and remember the choice they made. If, as I have argued elsewhere, it takes 50 years for the interpretation of an American presidency to settle into consensus, we should not expect the first good history of the Ford and Carter years to be written until the 2020s. At a minimum, Jimmy Carter will also have to die.

There is much to compare in the two men, who as ex-Presidents had a cordial and even productive relationship. For instance, they both tried to rescue Americans held hostage. Measured by the disgraceful cost-benefit calculations recently favored by the press, the Mayaguez rescue was a failure -- 40 American servicemen died rescuing 39 sailors. Geopolitically and morally, though, Mayaguez was a manifest victory at a great cost, and it sustained America's commitment to defend its own when that guarantee was looking extremely tattered. If only subsequent presidents had handled hostage crises so well. History should not forget that Jimmy Carter attacked Ford for the Mayaguez rescue during his 1980 campaign, presumably to distract voters from the disaster at Desert One, in which eight Americans died rescuing exactly nobody in a defeat for the United States that still reverberates today.

With only the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford was and remains the most honorable man to serve as President since Eisenhower. The appointment of Ford was one of Richard Nixon's wisest acts, even if it was borne of political desperation. The Democrats were also wise, because they confirmed his nomination knowing that he was by the standards of the day quite conservative. They did not hold out for Nixon to appoint a Democrat, or even a liberal Republican. The Democratic leadership confirmed Ford because they knew he was a good man. Looking back more than thirty years, both Richard Nixon and the Democrats acted more wisely than we would expect their counterparts to behave today. Who knows, though? Perhaps in a time of genuine national crisis -- as opposed to the manufactured and, frankly, trivial divisions that concern us today -- George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi would rise to the occasion.

It was, however, a different time. We were more concerned with propriety than we are today, and Jerry Ford reflected that. I was struck by this bit from the A.P.'s obituary:

In office, Ford's living tastes were modest. When he became vice president, he chose to remain in the same Alexandria, Va., home — unpretentious except for a swimming pool — that he shared with his family as a congressman.

After leaving the White House, however, he took up residence in the desert resort of Rancho Mirage, picked up $1 million for his memoir and another $1 million in a five-year NBC television contract, and served on a number of corporate boards. By 1987, he was on eight such boards, at fees up to $30,000 a year, and was consulting for others, at fees up to $100,000. After criticism, he cut back on such activity.

Even adjusting for inflation, Ford's post-office income was a tiny fraction of Bill Clinton's, yet there has been almost no criticism of Clinton and he certainly has not "cut back" in response to such criticism that there has been.

It is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the 1970s.
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Captain Ed notes that the government's supposedly "illegal" NSA surveillance program -- the one exposed by the New York Times -- has been litigated in front of 18 federal judges. Seventeen of those judges have upheld the program or otherwise found against the plaintiffs. One, Anna Diggs Taylor, struck down the program. Ed is fascinated by the disparity in news coverage:

I find it fascinating that Taylor's decision drew so much attention, but that the 17 decisions that went the other way have barely cracked the national press. One might suppose that these cases are also under appeal, but we have heard nothing about their existence nor their progress.

I wish I could be "fascinated." I would have been "fascinated" if it had been otherwise.

The truth is, a ruling that humiliates the mainstream media is not interesting. One that vindicates them warrants extended press coverage. Now matter how asinine the opinion.
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Andy McCarthy, one of the handful of Americans ever to convict an Islamist terrorist, has examined the United Nations "sanctions" against Iran -- I use the scare quotes advisedly -- and he does not like what he sees. Rarely have fewer words been minced. In fact, I'm thinking that it must have been quite a Christmas over at the McCarthy household ("Yes, dear, we know that the sanctions are a complete joke and that the State Department has quite predictably gone soft again, but you'll feel better if you have some more pie...").

BONUS: Newshounds know that we captured "senior Iranian military officials" in Iraq conspiring to wage war against that country and the United States. By historical standards, the United States would have casus belli (as if we did not already). Michael Ledeen imagines that Hadley and Rice will wimp out. Again.

The question is, what should we do?

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Does the United States support Israel because of a vast conspiracy, or because of the financial power of "Jewish interests," or because evangelical Christians have hijacked our government, or because of its vast oil resources it is the only remotely competent society in the entire region? Or is it because American leaders from William Bradford to John Adams to Abraham Lincoln believed in the dream of Zion long before the world heard of Theodore Herzl? According to Michael Oren (the learned author of the engrossing history of the '67 war, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, the best military history I've read in the last two years), the roots of America's interest in Israel's good fortune extend deeply into our national psyche, no matter how much James Baker or Jimmy Carter or John Mearsheimer wish otherwise.

Oren does not make the point in his essay, but I think that the Islamist terrorists understand this at a visceral level, even if not as students of American history. That is, perhaps, another reason why radical Islamists of both the Sunni and Shiite persuasion single out the United States (along with Israel) as their principal enemy, and another reason why it would be insane for our government to sell Israel down the river in exchange for pie crust promises from regimes that, deep down, understand that American ideas are a mortal threat.

Oren, by the way, is about to publish a new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. If it is as interesting and as gracefully written as Six Days of War, it is well worth buying (as I have done, having an itchy trigger finger when it comes to the buying of books).

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I certainly appreciate that the press finally understands that there is a geopolitical relationship between the war in Iraq and the war on al Qaeda, but that does not make this headline any less asinine. Or offensive.

And to think that some people still wonder why the mainstream media has so little credibility.

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There are all sorts of strange places in the world. Surely one of them is Spitsbergen in the Arctic Svalbard Islands, where Russians and Norwegians have lived cheek-by-jowl for more than 80 years.

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The photograph and official wire service caption below are additional evidence that India is the "natural" ally of the United States in the war against radical Islam. Also, it's really cool:

Students join sand sculpture artists to create a 30-meter-long (100-foot-long) Santa Claus sculpture on the Puri golden beach, in the Indian state of Orissa on the eve of Christmas, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2006. Though Hindus and Muslims comprise the majority of the population in India, Christmas is celebrated with much fanfare.

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Greetings of the season.

We are celebrating Christmas eve with a family viewing of the greatest -- and gayest -- Christmas movie ever made, The Lion In Winter. With that extended bit of couch time, I've laboriously uploaded a huge pile of pictures from the day's activities, which included, inter alia, a stroll down the road to cut a "sincere" tree from the wild and the climbing of nearby Mt. Arab with my cousin Sally and three very friendly dogs. As usual, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

And please do have a merry Christmas.

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It snowed a bit this morning, and I stuck my camera out the roof of my car as I drove back from town with the donuts. I thought the effect of the flash on the snowflakes was quite something (as always, click to enlarge):

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I've been traveling so much I missed this bit of comedy gold:

Al Qaeda has sent a message to leaders of the Democratic party that credit for the defeat of congressional Republicans belongs to the terrorists.

In a portion of the tape from al Qaeda No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri, made available only today, Zawahri says he has two messages for American Democrats.

“The first is that you aren’t the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen — the Muslim Ummah’s vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq — are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost,” Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News.

Zawahri calls on the Democrats to negotiate with him and Osama bin Laden, not others in the Islamic world who Zawahri says cannot help.

I hunted around on Google this morning -- 36 hours after ABC reported this story -- looking for mainstream media pickup, and could not find a single example. Either ABC News is wrong, or nobody else out there wants you to know that al Qaeda sides with the Democrats.

Now, before all our "reality-based" friends go bezerk, I am not arguing that Democrats support al Qaeda, or are treasonous, or anything like that. I do, however, speculate that if al Qaeda had expressed deep bitterness at the result of the November election rather than transporting joy, the New York Times might have covered it on the front page. Or at least on the editorial page.

In any case, I'm not an advocate of guilt-by-association political argument. Just as I think it is asinine when Democratic activists and lefty blogs (or random liberal Princetonians) cite the latest idiocy from Pat Robertson as a reason not to vote for Republicans, it would be equally silly -- perhaps more so -- to imply that the endorsement of al Qaeda is a reason, in and of itself, not to vote for Democrats (even when they mimic Democratic talking points). It is, however, legitimate to notice that the leftier Democrats are arguing for a policy that al Qaeda considers to be in its best interests. Now, you might say that al Qaeda is lying, or wrong, or that the alignment between the lefty Democratic prescription and al Qaeda's objectives is purely coincidental, and all of those possibilities should of course be taken into account when considering the benefits of withdrawal from Iraq. Ultimately, though, you have to wonder: Is it wise to ignore the clear statements of our enemies?
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We have come up to our family place in the Adirondacks (Christmas 2004 picture at right, back before global warming took hold), where we will remain until next Thursday. Having spent most of the day either packing the car or driving up here or drinking wine with my cousin, blogging has been so light as to be diaphanous. However, I just plugged in my new Verizon broadband air card, and it is really fast by the usual standards of Tupper Lake, especially compared to the slow and intermittant Cingular service that I was using last summer. For you, that should mean a very bloggy Christmas.
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The official wire service caption to this picture reads, in pertinent part, "A passenger waits for a delayed flight at Heathrow airport's terminal four in London August 12, 2006."

I'm sure that any person who is this fat is tragically burdened by it. It does create problems for innocent unrelated people, not least of all on crowded aircraft. If the person in the picture attempts to occupy only one seat, he or she will displace a great deal of space that has actually been rented by the unhappy traveler in the adjacent seat. If the large person is to occupy two seats, should he or she buy the extra seat, or should the airline provide it without charge? Put differently, as between the airline, the fat person, and the innocent adjacent traveler, who should bear the cost of the fat passenger's requirement for more than the usual amount of room?

Undoubtedly, the answer depends where you sit.

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A friend sent me the following list of neologisms, which are alleged to have been the winning entries in a contest sponsored by The Washington Post. I'm sure I'm just about the last person in the world to see them (this seems to have been floating around for a couple of years), but perhaps they are also new to you.

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), the state of being appalled over how much weight you have gained

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp

8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists

13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), the belief that when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and just sits there in plain sight

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

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Not if it doesn't reconsider its immigration policies.

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A friendly reminder that if you support peace on Earth, be sure to have sex today. Indeed, if you don't already have a partner and need a good pick-up line, "we need to have sex to end war" might do the job. Or not. It has been a long time since I needed a good pick-up line, and I'm sure I wouldn't know one if it punched me in the nose.

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Sorry about the light blogging yesterday -- couldn't be helped. I got up at 3:45 for a 6:20 am flight to Florida, spent the day in some very interesting meetings, and then returned last night. When I got back it was all I could do to watch an episode of Heroes on iTunes with my son.

Heroes, by the way, is excellent, but you have to watch it from the beginning. I had not done that, even though a friend of mine pointed out that you can download all the episodes from iTunes for a couple dollars each and watch them on your computer. I didn't do that, either. However, earlier this week I noticed that the download speeds in our house had decreased considerably. Investigation revealed that my son had spent a couple of days downloading every episode of Heroes. His penalty is that I am making him watch the entire series from the beginning with me, hunched over his computer. It's a lot of fun.

However, you won't miss much if you miss the movie Eragon. It is poorly directed -- the actors are very wooden -- and the story is a bit dumb. The dragon and related effects are very well done, but not worth the two hours out of your life. Yes, I am open to the charge that I did not like it only because I am the only member of the household not to have read the book, but the readers were outraged because the movie was insufficiently true to the novel. So if you've read the book you will be disappointed, and if you haven't the movie will hardly motivate you correct that personal defect. My recommendation: ignore Eragon entirely.

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This could be big news.

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

Of course you have to love the gratuitous dig at Bush (apparently an essential component of any Times article, as specified in the NYT style guide):

Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.

Uh, what scholars? Ward Churchill maybe?

Anyway, according to the article, many of the thousands of documents pertain to cold war related issues, and it certainly will be interesting to see what comes forth, but all that could be small potatoes if we finally learn the truth about Roswell!
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Every few months, former Clinton administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is back in the news, and every few months we are reminded of the same mystery: why did he swipe classified documents from the National Archives, why did he destroy them, and why did the Bush administration's Justice Department let him off the hook with a slap on the wrist? Now we have reason to believe that he obstructed justice, too:

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger removed classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 and hid them under a construction trailer, the Archives inspector general reported Wednesday.

The report was issued more than a year after Berger pleaded guilty and received a criminal sentence for removal of the documents.

Inspector General Paul Brachfeld reported that when Berger was confronted by Archives officials about the missing documents, he said it was possible he threw them in his office trash.

It is also possible that all the oxygen molecules in a room will randomly travel to one side, but that doesn't make it believable even to the stupidest reporter in the Washington press corps.

Ordinarily, such disrespect for law enforcement would merit a charge of obstruction of justice. Berger, however, seems to have gotten off with essentially no punishment. Recall that for all of this Berger was fined $50,000 -- which is probably his standard honorarium for one speech -- sentenced to 100 hours of community service, and barred from access to classified material for three years, during all of which the Republicans were in the White House anyway. He will be free to handle classified material in the next Democratic administration, whenever that may be.

The question is, why is the government treating Sandy Berger -- who stole classified documents that the 9/11 Commission needed to see, hid them under a trailer, retrieved them, destroyed them, and was at least careless with the truth -- with such kid gloves? The answer can only be that he knows something that (i) reflects very poorly on the Bush administration or (ii) would damage national security if revealed, and he threatened to reveal it unless he got an unbelievably good deal. Given all that has already been revealed about both the Bush administration and our counterterrorism operations, Berger must be sitting on some pretty amazing secret to have cowed a Republican Justice Department into such a light sentence.

As I've written before, if you are an ambitious investigative reporter in the Washington press corps, it really does smell as though there is a huge story here that remains to be told. One thing is obvious, though: If, say, Henry Kissinger had done a similar thing during the Carter years or James Baker had stolen classified documents during the Clinton administration, there is exactly no possibility that the national media wouldn't be all over the story like bugs on a bumper.
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Yesterday I wrote about the University of Michigan Law School's holiday flash movie for alumni, which I consider to be the "lamest university propaganda in the history of the universe." This morning, Princeton sent me the link to its holiday alumni movie (broadband only), which celebrates the tragically rare "bonfire" celebrating the Tigers' gridiron victories over Harvard and Yale. Recognizing that the point is to get alumni to contribute, Princeton is obviously far more adept at it than the University of Michigan (which, bizarrely, squandered an opportunity to blast "Hail to the Victors" through thousands of law firm computers throughout the land, not to mention Hugh Hewitt's laptop). There is no comparison.

Let's have some fun with this. Please submit the flash movie from your own alma mater in the comments. Assuming that your school knows where you live, I guarantee that if you root around in your "inbox" you will find the link.

MORE: I did some hunting around and came up with some more videos. They are actually easier to find on YouTube than on university web sites, which says something, I suppose, about the power of YouTube.

The University of Iowa Alumni Association appreciation video (it is incredibly "Iowa," which you will only appreciate if you have lived there). I don't think this is an official propaganda film, though.

This, on the other hand, is a great reason to go to Iowa. This is pretty good, too, at least if you're a Hawkeye jazz lover...

The University of Virginia puts up regular "week in photos" and an annual "year in photos" slideshow. It is a great way to remember that campus, which is surely one of the most beautiful universities in the world.

Notre Dame University (nice, probably amateur production on YouTube).

The University of Dallas promo video is pretty good.

Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Any claim that it is "easy Rider" is totally unfair.

Appalachian State University's "hot hot hot" video is jaunty, but entirely implausible.

John Paul the Great Catholic University (in San Diego) has a very slick promotional video.

Are you a Purdue Boilermaker?

Oklahoma Wesleyan ("a university where Jesus is Lord").

The Arizona State University basketball promo is pretty good.

Eureka College, including some footage of its most famous alumnus.

And something of a spoof of college promo videos, featuring Clemson. Heh.

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My father, who was in the history trade, said that it took forty or fifty years for the interpretation of any American presidency or epoch to stabilize. People have to die, documents have to be declassified, and -- most importantly -- we need historians who were not politically aware at the time the events in question happened. By my father's reasoning, the first decent history of the Bush 43 years will be written in roughly 2050 by a great historian who today is in the fourth grade.

Historians are revising the history of the Vietnam war right on schedule. Power Line has an interview of Mark Moyar, a graduate of Harvard and Cambridge and presently a professor at Marine Corps University. Professor Moyar is the author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, published by Cambridge University Press. John Hinderaker wrote that to say that the book "is revisionist would be putting it mildly." Naturally, I ordered a copy.

Mark Moyar was born in 1971, so my father would have considered him to be just about the perfect age to revise the history of the Vietnam War.

One need not be quite that young to have a view of Vietnam that departs from the version that dominates the histories written and retold by journalists and historians who were old enough to remember the climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, has an essay (sub. req.) in the current issue of Foreign Affairs on American foreign policy that is well-worth reading for many reasons, and which includes this judgment about Vietnam:

The reason I am so focused on the Middle East is that my first close interaction with the United States grew out of the country's involvement in a previous painful struggle, that in Vietnam. Between 1966 and 1971, American leaders used to stop by Singapore after visiting South Vietnam to discuss the regional situation with me. Washington had sent in some 500,000 troops without sufficient knowledge of the history of the Vietnamese people and paid a huge price in blood, treasure, prestige, and confidence as a result.

Conventional wisdom in the 1970s saw the war in Vietnam as an unmitigated disaster. But that has been proved wrong. The war had collateral benefits, buying the time and creating the conditions that enabled noncommunist East Asia to follow Japan's path and develop into the four dragons (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) and, later, the four tigers (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand). Time brought about the split between Moscow and Beijing and then a split between Beijing and Hanoi. The influence of the four dragons and the four tigers, in turn, changed both communist China and communist Vietnam into open, free-market economies and made their societies freer.

It may yet emerge, as the Vietnam generation settles into its sunset years, that the veterans of that war in fact accomplished as much in the defense of liberty than any American soldiers of the 20th century. Unfortunately, we will need a new generation of professors before that version is taught in our great universities.

For those of you who do not have access to Foreign Affairs, I'll try to write more later on Lee Kuan Yew's essay, most of which bears on Iraq.
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With the recent trend of wholesome snack foods reaching "truly ridiculous proportions," Frito-Lay announced Monday that it would, against its better judgment, roll out a new line of healthy fruit-and-vegetable-based chips next February.

"Here," said Frito-Lay CEO Al Carey as he disgustedly tossed a bag of the company's new Flat Earth-brand snack crisps onto the lectern during a meeting with shareholders and members of the press. "Here's some shit that's made from beets. I hope you're all happy now that you have your precious beet chips with the recommended daily serving of fruit, or vegetables, or whatever the hell a 'beet' is."

"Mmm, dehydrated bulb things," Carey added. "Sounds delicious."

Bwahahaha!
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France beats a retreat
PARIS -- France is to withdraw its 200-strong special forces from Afghanistan, all of its ground troops engaged in the U.S anti-terror operation there, authorities announced Sunday.

The decision to pull the elite troops, based in the southeastern city of Jalalabad, comes as the Taliban militia are gaining strength despite the strong engagement -- some 32,800 troops -- of NATO's International Security Assistance Force. France has balked at sending its 1,100-strong NATO contingent outside the relatively safe Afghan capital, Kabul.

Not exactly a "man bites dog" headline, is it?

This story naturally brings to mind the famous spoof "Soldier of Surrender" that circulated some years back.

There are plenty of reasons to like the French, among them their fine cuisine and wine. Their status as curators of so many of the world's cultural treasures is a wonderful service to Western civilization (which I hope continues to endure for a long long time). I've been to France each of the last three years and look forward to my next visit there next June. I don't even find Parisians particularly rude.

But as military allies they are worse than worthless. The fact that France only had 200 troops in harms way in Afganistan is the travesty here. Stay tuned for similar news out of Lebanon, where there presence is likely to ensure continued strife and conflict.
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As an alumnus or other affiliate of various institutions of higher learning, I am blessed to receive no end of holiday collegiate propaganda. Some of it can be very evocative -- Princeton produces an annual video that can loosen even the tightest of alumni wallets. However, this video from the University of Michigan Law School is, I'm sorry to say, the single lamest piece of university propaganda in the history of the universe.

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Something's happening in and around Israel, but I'm not smart enough to figure out what it is.

This morning, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a surprise visit to Jordan, purportedly to confer with King Abdullah II "on ways to revive Mideast peacemaking." Since the king emerged from the meeting nattering away about a two-state solution and offering to broker a deal among the Palestinians who are presently fighting a non-civil war, we trust that somebody has a new sense of urgency.

Meanwhile, Stratfor (sub. req.) reported last night that Syria had reached out to Israel, via Germany:

Syrian President Bashar al Assad sent a message to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert via Germany pledging to crack down on Hamas and Hezbollah in exchange for a return to peace talks, Israel Radio reported Dec. 19, citing Al Arabiya satellite news. Olmert's office has denied the report.

All of this is happening as it is becoming increasingly clear that there is nobody on the Palestinian side who can deliver security to Israel (much less the West Bank) regardless of the Jewish state's concessions.

There is nothing obviously unusual in any of this news, but it feels as though something significant might be happening.

If our imagination is correct -- that something is happening -- it is happening without any obviously public pressure from the United States, notwithstanding the bleating of the Iraq Study Group and the New York Times (both of which have joined the international received wisdom that "peace" between Israel, Syria and the Palestinians will somehow help the situation in Iraq, and that only the United States can bring about that peace). The question is whether the new diplomatic movement is the product of threatened action by the United States, continued inaction by the United States, or substantially independent of anything that the United States has done. As discussed below, I speculate that if there is progress made between Israel and its near enemies, it will be because of American inaction, rather than in spite of it.

Lest there be any doubt, I'm as in favor of legal peace between Israel and its various neighbors as anybody. Less killing and more economic vitality in Palestine would be a great thing, no doubt about it. I just don't think that it would accomplish much in the wider region, including particularly inside Iraq or in our confrontation with Iran. Indeed, Israel and the Jews would remain a favorite whipping boy of the corrupt kings and brutal fascists who dominate the Arab world regardless of formal diplomatic recognition. Either that, or those regimes -- which need a "far enemy" to justify their sorry existence -- will just find another sore to pick (probably the United States). The most persuasive exposition of this idea is by former Princeton professor Michael Scott Doran, who now sits on the National Security Council. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration has not spent its little remaining capital trying to force a result that eluded every American president since the 1970s. Ironically, that superficial indifference may be forcing Israel and its neighbors into a "dialogue" of sorts.

Why? Well, the argument is similar to the claim of some Democrats and other critics of the Bush administration that Iraqis are more likely to make peace if the United States stops trying to impose it on them. Reliance on and deference to the United States creates a sort of moral hazard -- people can take extreme positions if they know or anticipate that the United States will bail them out and thereby indemnify them for the consequences of their own stupidity.

In the case of Israel and its hostile neighbors, the prospect of American intervention creates several moral hazards. First, there is the obvious problem that if everybody believes that peace requires action from the United States, nothing will happen until the United States takes action. More significantly, if Israel's "near enemies" believe that the United States believes that peace in Palestine is essential to the mission in Iraq or the containment in Iran or some other much more significant geopolitical objective, they will overestimate the leverage that they have in their negotiations with Israel. The United States therefore weakens the hand of Israel's near enemies (and thereby increases the chances that they will make useful concessions) if it persuades the world that it does not believe that peace in Palestine will contribute significantly to America's wider geopolitical advantage.

Of course, there are obvious advantages to American intervention, including that we may gain some "soft power" credits from Arabs and Europeans for having pressured Israel visibly and that Israel's "near enemies" may be more inclined to enter into negotiations in the first place if they think that the United States will extract concessions for them. The question is not whether these obvious advantages exist, but whether they are worth the attendant moral hazard.

Drop your comment bombs on their targets at the link below.
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This week saw the passing of one of the great 20th century contributors to popular culture with the death of Joseph Barbera at age 95. Working with his partner William Hannah, Barbera developed and produced one ground breaking animated series after another. Any American born between 1940 and 1980 has spent hours and hours watching his creations, and Hannah-Barbera characters have left an indelible imprint on our culture.

Not sure you agree? I can only say Yabba Dabba Do and then point you here for the whole story.

The pair's first collaboration at MGM was entitled "Puss Gets the Boot," which led to the creation of the immortal Tom and Jerry. The duo won tremendous acclaim in the 1940s when their cartoon cat and mouse danced alongside Gene Kelly in the motion pictures "Anchors Aweigh" and "Invitation to Dance," and alongside Esther Williams in "Dangerous When Wet." Over the years, Tom and Jerry have been honored with seven Academy Awards.

Concerned by the advent of television, MGM eliminated the studio's animation department and, suddenly unemployed, Hanna and Barbera decided to make cartoons directly for the small screen. In 1957, twenty years after the birth of Tom and Jerry, Hanna-Barbera Studios opened its doors as one of the first independent animation studios to produce series television.

The fledgling studio's first production was "Ruff and Reddy" followed by "The Huckleberry Hound Show" in 1958. The lovable blue canine became an immediate hit and won Hanna-Barbera its first Emmy Award, marking the first time an animated television series had been honored with an Emmy. The studio's next series, "Quick Draw McGraw," premiered in 1959 and showcased the lanky, Stetson-wearing horse on two legs, ol' Quick Draw McGraw himself. The series also introduced America to Jellystone Park's most famous bears, Yogi and Boo Boo, and the mischievous mice, Pixie and Dixie.

Breaking new ground became a tradition at the Hanna-Barbera Studios. In 1960, the team created television's first animated "family sitcom," "The Flintstones," a series marked by a number of other firsts -- the first animated series to air in primetime, the first animated series to go beyond the six or seven-minute cartoon format, and the first animated series to feature human characters. "The Flintstones" ran for six years and went on to become the top-ranking animated program in syndication history, with all original 166 episodes currently seen in more than 80 countries worldwide. Fred, Wilma, and Pebbles Flintstone, along with Betty and Barney Rubble are some of Hanna-Barbera's most celebrated classic characters and have spawned spin-off television series, specials and feature films. Hanna and Barbera served as executive producers of 1994's "The Flintstones" feature film and even made a cameo appearance. "The Flintstones" soon paved the way for other primetime cartoons including "The Jetsons," "Top Cat" and "The Adventures of Jonny Quest."

Another popular offering from Hanna-Barbera featured a cowardly Great Dane named Scooby-Doo, who eventually made his own place in television history. The popular series "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" remained in production for 17 years and maintains the title as television's longest-running animated series.

Last year I bought my two sons DVD collections of The Jetsons and Jonny Quest, and I can tell you that these great 'toons continue to stand up remarkably well with the passage of time, as does the Flintstones. (Caveat: if you've been bitten by the PC bug you won't think highly of the somewhat stereotypical portrayal of certain foreign peoples in Quest (not to mention the quantity of high calibre firepower on display in each episode) or appreciate the domesticated Jane Jetson).

The list of other notable Hannah-Barbera characters is practically endless, but some other favorites of mine include Josie and the Pusseycats, Touche Turtle, Snagglepuss, Magilla Gorilla, Space Ghost, and perhaps my all time favorite, The Herculoids.

Joe Barbera, rest in peace.
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We interrupt our usual geopolitics and partisan sturm und drang to bring you the most valuable "Technicolor yawn" in the world: ambergris, which is the polite term for putrified whale vomit.

Ambergris begins as a waxlike substance secreted in the intestines of some sperm whales, perhaps to protect the whale from the hard, indigestible “beaks” of giant squid it feeds upon. The whales expel the blobs, dark and foul-smelling, to float the ocean. After much seasoning by waves, wind, salt and sun, they may wash up as solid, fragrant chunks.

Unfortunately, sperm whales are protected as endangered, which means that it is illegal to sell even their old vomit:

After researching ambergris on the Internet, Ms. Ferreira’s neighbor, Joe Luiksic, advised, “Put it on eBay.” But endangered species legislation has made buying or selling the stuff illegal since the 1970s; a couple who found a large lump of ambergris valued at almost $300,000 on an Australian beach in January has had legal problems selling it.

When it is legal to buy it, average ambergris goes for about $10 per gram, which means that it is worth around half its weight in gold. This is not surprising, because it has all sorts of uses:

Ambergris has been a valued commodity for centuries, used in perfume because of its strangely alluring aroma as well as its ability to retain other fine-fragrance ingredients and “fix” a scent so it does not evaporate quickly. Its name is derived from the French “ambre gris,” or gray amber. During the Renaissance, ambergris was molded, dried, decorated and worn as jewelry. It has been an aphrodisiac, a restorative balm, and a spice for food and wine. Arabs used it as heart and brain medicine. The Chinese called it lung sien hiang, or “dragon’s spittle fragrance.” It has been the object of high-seas treachery and caused countries to enact maritime possession laws and laws banning whale hunting. Madame du Barry supposedly washed herself with it to make herself irresistible to Louis XV.

In “Paradise Regained,” Milton describes Satan tempting Christ with meat pastries steamed in ambergris. In “Moby-Dick,” Melville called it the “essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.”

I admit, I did not know that.
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TH has written recently on the Iranian President's Conference intended to question the history of the Holocaust - the implementation of Hitler's "Final Soluton" against Jews from roughly 1942 to 1945. In fact, the German pogrom which launched the Holocaust was entitled the "Kristallnacht"; it occurred in 1938. The pogrom accelerated into a formal policy of extermination in 1942 as WWII raged and expanded. It grew to encompass Jewish populations outside of Germany as the Reich conquered territory, accumulated the local Jewish population and exported them to extermination camps.

The Holocaust is generally accepted as the most thoroughly organized and documented genocide in history. There are those who argue it did not happen, or did not happen in the scale described; but those claims succumb to the remarkably detailed German accounts of the genocide.

So what does the Holocaust have to with with Israel?

With the passage of time and the legend that poor journalism and historical ignorance can create, Israel's formation, Zionism and its war for independence is today viewed as directly and politically linked to the Holocaust. Well, that's actually not true. Israel's legitimacy and Zionism predate the Holocaust by a large amount.

The Zionism which culminated in the formation of Israel began in the late 1880's. There were a series of immigration waves of Jews to the region which became Israel long before WWII. At the time, they were immigrating to the Turkish, or Ottoman, Empire. After WWI, this became part of the British Mandate, so called due to the British defeat of the Turks and resulting sovereignty over much of Arabia. As the British imposed their rule, they promised the locals their own deal - an Arabia for Arabs under Hashemite rule (generally) and a Jewish Homeland for the local Jews. This is the "promise" that emerged from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI. The British empire, in other words, supplanted the Turkish Empire, and promised all the locals a better deal - self-determination for Arabs and Jews. That tends to get lost in the leftist political discussion about imperialism and zionism being linked - the Jews immigrated. They were local. They bought their property. They were first ruled by the Turks and then the British. So were the Arabs. They had every right to want their own land, their own nation - having nothing to do with the Old Testament, by the way.

Eventually, as history unfolded, the Jews fought the British to expel them, feeling that the British had failed to live up to the Balfour Declaration's promise. More militant elements of the Jewish military (Menachem Begin's Irgun) bombed the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel, forever earning the enmity of the Brits in so doing. Each of the Jews, on the one hand, and the Arabs, on the other, felt the Brits favored the other unfairly. Eventually, the Brits left town, and in 1948 the Jews completed their War for Independence by soundly defeating the Arabs (by whom they were surrounded on all sides). No help from anybody. In fact, the launching point of Jewish anger at the Brits was that they attempted to limit Jewish immigration to the Mandate after WWII and the Holocaust. Gee, guys, thanks. Go read Exodus.

So there's a great deal of history underlying the formation of Israel that predates the Holocaust by quite a bit. In a funny way, I think this is where Ahmadinejad is very clever in his Holocaust denial conference. Most sentient beings would not conclude that the Holocaust was a fiction. But it is not that hard to be swayed by the next bit he argues -- even if there was a holocaust, and it was the fault of the europeans, why "punish" the Muslims with the Jewish homeland when it belongs in Europe? Shouldn't the Europeans bear this cost? Muslims didn't exterminate Jews (though they did help - ed.).

Ahmadinejad's conference isn't strictly about denying the event of the Holocaust. It's a convenient subject, because 100% of Holocaust deniers are in fact anti-semites and anti-Zionist. But in also focusing on and questioning the core legitimacy and history of the formation of Israel, Ahmadinejad's conference can resonate not just with fringe anti-semites, but it can find fellow travellers far and wide who are anti-Zionist. Jimmy Carter can contribute. James Baker can play a role. Mearsheimer and Walt can jump in. Academics can appreciate it. Think of Ahmadinejad's rhetoric as a negotiating position. Eventually, he will drop Holocaust denial, and you will have agreement on Israel's illegitimacy. Or at least its annoying-ness (to Baker or Scowcroft, for instance).

Israel derives its legitimacy, like any nation, from the fact that it was formed by its own people (in a popular war), and today is ruled by consent of the governed. It was not formed due to the Holocaust. It does not derive its legitimacy from the Holocaust. It was formally recognized by the US (under Harry Truman) and by the UN after WWII. The providers of this recognition were undoubtedly moved by the events of the Holocaust, recorded by the Germans, reviewed by the Courts at Nuremberg and witnessed by so many at the Nazi death camps. But the choice by others, in 1948, to recognize Israel did not give it legitimacy. Its own people did, and do that every day.

So the President of Iran can work terribly hard to undermine Israel's perceived legitimacy. He can work assiduously to develop the weaponry to threaten its existence. But personally, I think he's wasting his time, and the energy and resources of his people. I think it's more likely that Israel's legitimacy will be enhanced, not diminished, by his threatening posture. It is his legitimacy, and the rule of the Iranian theocracy, which can't bear scrutiny. When you stone your own people; eliminate free speech; deny the Iranian people the right to choose their own political representatives; and subordinate religions (and their practitioners) to the state established religion; then it is your nation, and your regime which lacks legitimacy.

So, President Ahmadinejad, do not ask for whom the bell tolls...
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Islamists have used the world's charity to oppress people:

When people around the world sent millions of pounds to help the stricken Indonesian province of Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, few could have imagined that their money would end up subsidising the lashing of women in public.

But militant Islamists have since imposed sharia law in Aceh and have cornered Indonesian government funds to organise a moral vigilante force that harasses women and stages frequent displays of humiliation and state-sanctioned violence.

International aid workers and Indonesian women’s organisations are now expressing dismay that the flow of foreign cash for reconstruction has allowed the government to spend scarce money on a new bureaucracy and religious police to enforce puritan laws, such as the compulsory wearing of headscarves.

Some say there are more “sharia police” than regular police on the local government payroll and that many of them are aggressive young men.

“Who are these sharia police?” demanded Nurjannah Ismail, a lecturer at Aceh’s Ar-Raniri University. “They are men who, most of the time, are trying to send the message that their position is higher than women.”

It will be interesting to see whether the West's "social change" activists muster even a fraction of the outrage over this atrocity as they did over, say, Nike's labor practices. I'm not betting on it.

The more challenging question is whether Western aid organizations will change what they do as a result of this. It seems to me that in the giving of aid there are three possibilities. First, one might exert tight control over the disposition of the aid, even at the risk of being accused of "imperialism" or simply being resented for it. Second, one might give the aid with few controls and openly acknowledge the possibility that the aid will be perverted into corrupt or violent consequences. Third, one might decide that the net consequences of the granting of financial aid are too difficult to estimate in advance, so it should not be done at all.

Finally, there is the fourth, most likely option: Everybody in a position to influence decisions in Western NGOs and aid agencies will decide to ignore the adverse consequences of the aid that they granted in Aceh (and, undoubtedly, elsewhere), because it is too painful to confront any of the three possibilities in the preceding paragraph.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds and Pajamas Media.
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Richard Fernandez:

One security analyst I heard speak claimed that practically every insurgent operation in Iraq had a video camera unit attached, but until recently practically all Jihadi video was in Arabic. "Arabic is the language of the [Sunni Salafist] Jihad, and Jihadi videos were not even widely distributed in places like Indonesia or even Pakistan because they were in Arabic." But that has changed, he said, and now the videos were making their appearance in English, sometimes in American Internet forums, and that for the first time Jihadi propaganda was being produced in German. The connection with Germany was momentarily incomprehensible until the history of the 9/11 attackers came to mind. Et in arcadia ego sum. The overarching purpose of those videos was to demonstrate American mortality and the vulnerability of the West. To spread the word that it is fun and easy to hunt Americans. The American officer who had authored the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Anbar, Capt. Travis Patriquin, himself died in combat, but not before warning that the ideas which eventually killed him were leaping over borders into the wider world.

The virulence of this meme is suggested by the circumstance that, in order to charge it, an unending supply of snuff films was required. And the importance of the media, as a sphere of combat was illustrated by Patriquin's claim that the kinetic impact of insurgent operations themselves was itself subordinate to collecting the video of the operations.

Read it all, and consider how enemy propaganda might bear on domestic "anti-war" dissent.
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Glenn Reynolds links to a story about a Gartner Group report that makes various predictions for the coming year, including that blogging will "peak."

Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company's top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.

The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Plummer said. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

That's no knock on blogging. Plummer noted that this leveling-off dynamic plays out all the time, though it often comes as a bit of a surprise when it hits things that had achieved quick popularity.

While the number of bloggers may be a highly relevant number for businesses that hope to earn money catering to bloggers, the more interesting question is whether the readership of blogs written for a general audience (as opposed to a circle of family and friends) will continue to increase. Will the growth in readership of blogs continue to take share from media businesses (or, more accurately, other media businesses)? I believe that it will, for several reasons. First, blog readership is still incredibly low. Top "general audience" blogs still have a fraction of the online readership of non-blog media, and that readership is also continuing to grow quickly. There is enormous room to grow.

Second, general audience blogs have become part of the ecology of the online media world. They are the bacteria that breaks down media content into its constituent parts and reconstitutes it into material that can be turned into new mainstream media content. This will increase the occasions on which the media drive some of the traffic they receive from blogs back to blogs.

Third, the audience -- including both journalists in the mainstream media and the Great Unwashed -- has come to understand that the distributed power of the blogosphere adds enormous value to the information available through traditional sources. Bloggers add expertise and geographical dispersion. There are many examples of the former, from specialist blogs (see, e.g., Arms Control Wonk and Real Climate, among thousands) to spontaneous networks of experts (recall the rapid integration of distributed typesetting expertise during the 60 Minutes "Memogate" scandal). Examples of the latter include permanent English-language voices in places with which few Westerners personally travel (e.g., Iraq the Model and Sabbah, which are at polar opposites on many issues), and spontaneous eruptions of blogs to cover catastrophes, such as we saw during the Indian Ocean tsunami a couple of years ago.

For these reasons and more, I think that general audience blogs will continue to see traffic increase well beyond 2007, even if the growth in the total number of blogs slows dramatically.
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I know... I haven't been blogging much this weekend. Between family in town, chores, pumping out Christmas cards (which friends and family know is astonishing enough this side of, er, Christmas), driving back and forth to the George School in Newtown for various events, cleaning up the backyard and suffering through the Bears and Tampa Bay, I've been busy. Tonight, the Son is singing in a concert at school, so I'm unlikely to surface again until quite a bit later this evening.

In the meantime, I note that Italy is concerned with abusive labor practices in the rag trade. Supposedly, the model at right is too thin, at least according to the photo editor at Agence France-Presse. Do you agree? Take the Sunday afternoon TigerHawk poll:

Is she too thin, or NOT too thin?
	Too thin!
	You can never be too thin or too rich.
	You CAN be too thin, but she most definitely is not.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

My more serious thoughts on this subject are here.
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Pat Santy has linked up a barrel of monkeys for your weekend reading pleasure.

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The Islamic Republic of Iran's campaign to deny the Holocaust is rooted in the idea that the Holocaust is the moral basis for the establishment of Israel. If the moral foundation under Israel cracks, the thinking goes, war to eradicate Israel -- to "wipe it from the map" -- is suddenly justifiable. That is why Iran is holding its conference. There is no other convincing explanation.

The thing is, the road to Tehran's denial was paved by Western chattering classes, who have recently indulged in absurd invocations of the word "genocide" and casual comparisons of the Israelis to Nazis. Bret Stephens goes after them like a SA "brownshirt" on the last day of June, 1934:

"Not acceptable," says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Repulsive," say the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper. "An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews," says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when a regime that avows the future extermination of six million Jews in Israel denies the past extermination of six million Jews in Europe. But let's be frank: Global polite society has been blazing its own merry trail toward this occasion for decades.

The Australian Financial Review is not the Journal of Historical Review, the Holocaust-denying "scholarly" vehicle of some of the Tehran conferees. But in 2002 the AFR thought it fit to print the following by Joseph Wakim, at one point the country's multicultural affairs commissioner: "Sharon's war is not a war," he wrote. "Genocide would be a more accurate description." In Ireland Tom McGurk, a columnist in the very mainstream Sunday Business Post, noted that "the scenes at Jenin last week looked uncannily like the attack on the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1944." Jose Saramago, Portugal's Nobel Laureate in Literature, observed after a visit to Ramallah that the Israeli incursion into the city "is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz."

Never mind that the total number of Jews "dealt with" in the Warsaw ghetto, according to Nazi commandant Jürgen Stroop, was 56,065, whereas the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin was no more than 60. Never mind that at the time Mr. Saramago visited Ramallah a total of about 1,500 Palestinians had been killed in the Intifada, whereas Jews were murdered at Auschwitz at a rate of about 2,000 a day.

Read the whole thing.

There is something else here, a point that Stephens does not make. The Islamic Republic, which by ideology and practice believes in moral absolutes, is exploiting Western post-modernism's unwillingness to stand and defend any single truth. Even the most basic and verifiable historical truth, which is yet within the memory of thousands of witnesses still living, is attackable because Western intellectuals no longer believe in any truth. Among the complicated people who shape the considered opinion of the Western elites, it is entirely acceptable to question all interpretations of facts (with the obvious exception of facts that bear on global climate change). So in Ahmadinejad we have a man who believes absolutely that the Prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem and absolutely that Jesus Christ was not the son of God, and who at the same time holds a conference to deny the historical fact of the Holocaust, and still our foreign policy "wise men," the major newspapers, and the leaders of the Democratic party call for our president to negotiate with him. Who, actually, is confused?
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Earlier in the week I reported that our step-cousin, Welles Crowther, would be made an honorary member of the FDNY for having given his life saving lives on September 11. Here's a television report about Welles, one of the genuine sheepdogs of that day:

Special thanks to a loyal Yalie reader.

MORE: Here's a picture of the ceremony today at which the Fire Department of the City of New York admitted Welles posthumously as an honorary firefighter for his service on September 11. From left to right, Nicholas Scoppetta, Commissioner, Fire Department of the City of New York, Alison Crowther, Jeff Crowther, and Chief Salvatore J. Cassano.

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Japan's Parliament passed a law today that increases the status of its "defense agency" to a ministry for the first time since the end of World War II. It is a symbolic act in a country where symbols mean a great deal, and it is part of Prime Minister Abe's broader initiative to stir up Japanese nationalism (by, for example, mandating "patriotic education" in the schools).

Good, bad, doesn't matter, or more complicated than that?

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Qatar has dealt another blow to Iraqi national aspirations.

I'm actually sad about this, because I'm sure there are boys all over Iraq that are despondent that their country didn't win.

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Breast cancer rates have declined dramatically, perhaps because far fewer menopausal women have gone off on hormone replacement therapy. This good news, if true, might be tough evidence for Wyeth, which is struggling with litigation over Premarin and Prempro, the leading HRT drugs.

Or maybe it's just that most women have stopped carrying their cell phone in their bra.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

UPDATED: To fix an idiotic typo, which became obvious after I read the first comment. I knew what I wanted to say.

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Agence France Presse has an interesting article about how tough it is to be a Christian convert in Morocco, one of the most liberal Arab Muslim countries (admittedly, a "best hockey player in Ecuador" standard if there ever were one).

They might have Islamic names like Mohammed or Ali, but every Sunday these Moroccan converts to Christianity go discreetly to "church" -- to the ire of Islamic militants and under the suspicious eye of police.

"There are about a thousand of us in around 50 independent churches across the big cities of the kingdom," explained Abdelhalim, who coordinates these evangelical Protestant groups in Morocco.

"As we are tolerated, but not recognized (by the state) we must, for security reasons, conduct ourselves as a clandestine organisation," said the 57-year-old, who preferred to use a pseudonym.

"As soon as a church has 20 worshippers it splits in two," said Abdelhalim, a doctor who converted to Christianity 16 years ago when he was living abroad.

This is, of course, genuine oppression, as opposed to the imagined oppression claimed by those Muslims in the West -- particularly in Europe -- who want access to the economic opportunity of an open society without actually embracing its values.

CWCID: USS Neverdock.
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"Kerry Criticizes Bush in Egypt"

Bad idea. The last time somebody did that he suffered through a dozen plagues.

I have previously erupted over the subject of American politicians junketing to some dictatorship and then publicly attacking the United States or its policies. It turns my stomach. Say what you will at home in your campaign to persuade American voters, but do not stand at a podium as the honored guest of a vicious authoritarian and turn on the policies of the country you purport to serve.

UPDATE: Joe Malchow has more on this phenomenon of Democrats lending their prestige, such as it is, to dictators in order to attack the administration's policies.

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When I was in law school, there was a woman in my class with a baby with no name. Occasionally, when her babysitter fell through, the young mother would beg the indulgence of her professors and bring the baby to class, and once the mother and the baby sat next to me and the baby stuck a banana in my ear, to the fleeting pleasure of all.

The mother did not name the baby, she said, because she wanted her child to pick his own name, and that really wouldn't be possible for a couple of years.

Then, when I was a young lawyer, a friend and colleague of mine with a fair number of children (at least a couple of whom are now readers of this blog) didn't get around to giving one of his babies a name for several months. He pointed out that under Illinois law, parents did not have to name their baby until they filed the birth certificate, and that the law required that to happen only within one year of birth. So the naming of his baby was not a particularly high priority.

Who knew that both parents were in violation of Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child?

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Mish points to a thought provoking article in USA Today. It seems that the value of the metal in certain US coins now exceeds the face value of those coins, prompting legislative action:

Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny's metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint.

That has piqued concern among government officials that people will melt the coins to sell the metal, leading to potential shortages of pennies and nickels.

Under the new rules, it is illegal to melt pennies and nickels. It is also illegal to export the coins for melting. Travelers may legally carry up to $5 in 1- and 5-cent coins out of the USA or ship $100 of the coins abroad "for legitimate coinage and numismatic purposes."

Violators could spend up to five years in prison and pay as much as $10,000 in fines. Plus, the government will confiscate any coins or metal used in melting schemes.

Analysis supporting his view that the dollar is doomed to a precipitous decline in value is the central theme of Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis (a fascinating, if disconcerting daily read).

After an interesting discussion of the history of laws prohibiting the melting of US coins, and the gold confiscation in the 1930s, Mish notes

Right now, a nickel is the closest thing to "Honest Money" we have. We are in the ironic situation where the value of the dollar is falling but the value of a nickel is rising. In what time frame will the current (and probably soon to be confiscated) nickel be worth more than a dollar?

An interesting question indeed in light of recent dollar activity.
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Ezra Klein has more on Ron Wyden's radical health care proposal. I'm going to try to read some of the background material over the next day or so, and offer my initial reactions.

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Are you a moonbat? Take the quiz over at Catnaps.

A couple of highlights:

The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11/01 was caused by:
A: Mossad agents who planted bombs in the towers, then detonated them when the holographic projections of aircraft were shown striking the building, after first warning all the Jews in the towers not to show up for work (10 points).
B: CIA agents working for President Bush who planted bombs and detonated them when the aircraft hit. (8 points)
C: Aircraft piloted by special Mossad agents and loaded with explosives (5 points)
D: American commercial airliners hijacked by suicidal Moslem terrorists from the Middle East. (0 points)

The American Press is:
A: Scrupulously neutral in its treatment of issues, except for that right-wing partisan rag Fox News. (10 points)
B: Fairly good about showing what is really going on in the world, from Iraq to politics without any real bias except for the Jewish controlled newspapers (8 points)
C: A noble profession with a few notable flaws, but generally a good way to keep up on real news, not like those out-of-control bloggers (5 points)
D: A poor shadow of a formerly good institution, who has sold their integrity for instant ratings and mindless schlock, willing to accept and repeat any news that makes Bush look bad without question, but unable to report the whole truth. (0 points)

More where that came from.
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I did not know this, but it makes sense:

There is an obscure publishing doctrine known as "the small penis rule." As described in a 1998 New York Times article, it is a sly trick employed by authors who have defamed someone to discourage their targets from filing lawsuits. As libel lawyer Leon Friedman explained to the Times, "No male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, 'That's me!'"

I know that tactic would buy my silence.

Anyway, read the whole thing for a particularly harsh application of the "small penis rule."
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JetBlue has figured out how to give its passengers more leg room and make more money at the same time. Will wonders never cease?

I've never actually flown JetBlue, but bought the stock last spring anticipating that it would go up as oil prices fell. Oil prices are down more than 20% and JBLU is up 50%, so I guessed that one correctly. For once.

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I am not a big fan of international "human rights" litigation, which in recent years has become a tool of left-wing groups that want to circumscribe American power -- using German courts to sue Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes, and such. However, much as I deplore litigation as a diplomatic or political device, I can't help but find it hilarious that John Bolton and Alan Dershowitz are teaming up to sue Iran for violation of the 1948 anti-genocide treaty. As I wrote yesterday, Ahmadinejad's repeated statements that Israel will "be wiped from the map" or "disappear" may be read as either predictions or promises. The press and the Western chattering classes intently characterize them as the former, but what actually is the basis for concluding that they are not promises or even a call to arms? The world is entitled to know the answer to that question, and should call upon the Islamic Republic to explain itself.

CWCID: Pamela.

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Ezra Klein, one of the thoughtier lefty bloggers, is very excited about Ron Wyden's radical new plan for providing health insurance to the vast majority of Americans.

Here's how it would work: The Healthy Americans Act of 2007 would begin by dissolving all employer-based insurance. Instead, it would mandate that every employer who had covered his employees in 2006 convert the total they spent on insurance into salary increases creating, in one day, the single largest pay raise America has ever seen. Now, why would employers go along with that? Well, legislatively they'd have to, but, as Len Nichols explained to me, they'll also want to: Health costs are accelerating, every year costs 10 or so percent more than they ear before. By freezing the total at what employers paid in 2006, Wyden's plan would exempt them from 2007's increase.

Meanwhile, an individual mandate would be implemented, forcing every American to purchase one of the options offered by their state's newly formed Health Help Agency (HHA). The HHA's will have a menu of private insurance plans, all of which must provide coverage equal to or better than the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Plan used by Congress. All plans will be community rated by the state, meaning an end to adverse selection and preexisting condition problems. The only acceptable variables for price will be geography, family size, and smoking status. Subsidies will be offered up to 400 percent of the poverty line, will full coverage provided to those below 100 percent. Employers will contribute through a set equation related to business size and yearly profits. There's quite a bit more, but that's the basic outline.

It does, indeed, sound like a creative proposal, although I wonder if it will accomplish the extravagant claims already being made for it (total coverage for all Americans at a savings of almost $5 billion in the first year and more than a trillion dollars over the next decade). Wyden's web site has a great deal more information, which I may actually read in the next couple of days. I suspect when we peel the top off there will be something hideous underneath, such as crazy assumptions about the benefits of preventive care (for example).

There is one thing that I do not like about it already: It is silly to limit acceptable variables to "geography, family size and smoking status." These are all choices that people have made. Other such choices should also have an impact, such as a person's history of illegal drug use and obesity or absence thereof, both of which factors are huge drivers of cost in the system. Fat coke addicts should pay more, perhaps, than otherwise healthy smokers. Let the facts of one's medical history and known actuarial data drive pricing, at least to a greater degree than "geography, family size and smoking status." The Democrats, who claim to be all about accountability, should not object.

And here's a dirty little secret for you guys to chew on: About ten years ago, I actually contributed money to one of Ron Wyden's Congressional campaigns. I'm sure my motives weren't pure.
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Jimmy Carter is ever more strange, and now has some serious explaining to do. Is there a reporter out there with the stones to confront him?

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Ken McCracken has posted the mother of all "caption this!" opportunities.

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If this weren't so damned scary it would be laugh-out-loud funny:

Iran's hard-line president said Tuesday that Israel will one day be "wiped out" as the Soviet Union was. His remarks drew applause from participants at a conference called to cast doubt on the Holocaust.

Interesting idea. The Holocaust couldn't have happened, because Israel still exists. If the Holocaust had actually been effective genocide, we wouldn't have all these nettlesome Jews around.

The strange logic of the Iranian leadership is exceeded only by the desperation of the West's chattering classes to avoid any discussion of the possibility that Islamic Republic is actually working toward Israel's destruction. The curious choice of verb in USA Today's headline (screencap below) gives away the game: "Iran's president predicts end of Israel." How did USA Today's editor decide that Ahmadinejad's eruption was a prediction, rather than a promise?

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This "sitrep" from Stratfor reports some very peculiar news:

Sources within the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Saudi Ambassador to the United States Turki al-Faisal resigned unexpectedly "for personal reasons" Dec. 11. Director-general of Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Directorate for nearly 25 years, he was appointed ambassador in 2005.

Speculation alert: Al-Faisal's resignation has something to do with this op-ed piece, which was widely regarded as a deniable threat by the Saudis, but which al-Turki repudiated on "Meet the Press" on December 4. What, precisely, I do not know.

Any House of Saud experts out there should add their more considered thoughts in the comments.

MORE: Per GreenmanTim in the comments, Crossroads Arabia has a bit more.
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William "The Refrigerator" Perry buys two seats on an airplane, rather than pretending that his fat, muscle, whatever, doesn't flow over into the "airspace" of the poor guy next to him. Good for him.

When Southwest Airlines declared a few years back that particularly large people would have to buy two seats, there was no end of whining from advocacy groups and large-bodied complainers that this was "discrimination." Few people were willing to make the point that the real victim is the poor average traveller sitting next to the big person, who (i) fantasizes that he isn't taking up more space than he paid for, or (ii) does not care that he is using more space than he paid for.

My own sad story is here.

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So, there I was reading Jimmy Carter's penultimate State of the Union address -- that's the kind of guy I am -- when this passage slapped me in face:

The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.

This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened.

Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

While you're redigesting the memory that Jimmy Carter was willing to go to war with the Soviet Union over oil (an idea known to history as the "Carter Doctrine"), read the whole thing -- if you're over 40, it will amount to the most hideous flashback not induced by drugs that you will ever have. It will also remind you that we have made very little strategic progress, and that in some ways -- I'm very sorry to say -- Jimmy Carter's strategy was more complete than the Bush administration's appears to be.
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This will be deeply offensive to the remaining Bush loyalists who read this blog, but we have always maintained that political humor is a two-way street. Here's one for our loyal readers of the Left:

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The O'Quiz's author obviously had a jolly good time this week. And, there's a special one question advantage for regular TigerHawk readers....

Eight.

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My step-cousin, Welles Crowther, died saving people on September 11. For his bravery, the Fire Department of the City of New York is making him an honorary member. Seldom has such a great honor been so richly deserved. When my family remembers the fallen, we particularly remember Welles.

More about Welles here.

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[I]t occurs to me that -- while so-called "Big Pharma" may not be perfect -- drug companies have done a lot more to make my life better than their critics have. Maybe someone should point that out more often.

Indeed.

In our household, the miracle drug is called Copaxone. Not only do we owe this miracle to a pharmaceutical company, we owe it to an Israeli pharmaceutical company. Apart from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in some precincts it's tough to get more evil than that.

The pharmaceutical companies deliver extraordinary value to their customers, yet there is apparently great political advantage in bashing them. It is not obvious why this is so. Yes, we all wish the pharmaceutical industry would do certain things differently (I, for one, could easily go the rest of my life without hearing about "a strong, lasting erection" during prime time), but that is true of all industries. If I had to venture a guess, I would say that people resent paying money for drugs, no matter how much value they confer, because they feel they have no choice in the expenditure. Their doctor tells them that they need a prescription and they do not know enough to challenge the doctor's judgment. They have not budgeted for the expense because people do a bad job of planning even for known unknowns, so they also resent spending the money. The drug is not perceived as having value (even if it alleviates pain, calms the nerves, stems multiple sclerosis, thins the blood, lowers cholesterol, or ensures a strong, lasting erection), it is the thing that suddenly prevents you from paying for some less necessary thing. Never mind that the drug saved your life, or made your life worth living.

One often hears the claim that "big pharma" doesn't really do much research and development, and that the creative work is done by small companies that then license their compounds to the big drug companies. That is to a great degree true, but it misses the point: the development of a drug is vastly more complex than the discovery of an active compound. Not only must that drug be tested and trialed at an unbelievable cost that goes beyond the financial and technical means of most small "discovery" companies, but it must then be sold before any patient can take it. There is nothing more complex than the selling of any new medical technology. Why? Because the person who must be persuaded (your physician) is not the person who will benefit (the patient), not the person who will stock it (the pharmacy), and not the person who will pay for (most) of its cost (your insurer or employer). The small discovery companies are as dependent on big pharma as big pharma is on them, and all patients everywhere are dependent on the symbiosis between them.

There is also this myth that most new drugs are incrementalist and fundamentally unnecessary. Oh? If you are one of those people who believes that most new drugs are "unnecessary," honestly conduct this thought experiment: Virtually every drug invented before 1990 or so is "off-patent," and therefore available at a tiny fraction of its original cost. We could easily afford a dirt-cheap program to offer off-patent drugs to every American, but on the stipulation that they could never substitute any drug of more recent invention. While most Americans would have said in 1990 that their healthcare was pretty good, I submit that virtually all Americans would deeply resent a program that barred them from taking the new, more effective drugs that have become available since 1990. And with good reason.

The bashing of the pharmaceutical companies matches the popular dislike of the integrated oil companies. Me, I have nothing but admiration for big oil companies. I find it amazing that we can drill a hole somewhere in West Africa or the Arctic Sea or the jungles of Indonesia, pump out petroleum, ship it across the ocean, refine it into gasoline, and deliver it to my corner gas station, and pay everybody in between an adequate profit, for even $5 per gallon, much less the $2 or so that prevails at the pump as I write this. If you give the oil industry even a moment's thought, the complexity of its operations and the courage of at least some of its employees is simply astonishing. Yet politicians, who have a nose for the popular, love to bash oil companies, especially when prices are rising. Again, I think it is because people do not plan for volatility in gasoline prices, so when they have to pay more at the pump they do not acknowledge to themselves that gasoline remains such an extraordinary value that they will not do even the simplest things to use less of it.

Big oil, big pharma, and Wal-Mart. It is apparently in our nature to attack the businesses that have done the most for our standard of living.
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Ultimate frisbee!

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Football too boring this time of year? Can't stand the idea of going to the mall? Then discuss the relevance of the following to current affairs (there is something in it for everybody):

In every circle, and truly, at every table, there are people who lead armies into Macedonia; who know where the camp ought to be placed; what posts ought to be occupied by troops; when and through what pass that territory should be entered; where magazines should be formed; how provisions should be conveyed by land and sea; and when it is proper to engage the enemy, when to lie quiet and they not only determine what is best to be done, but if any thing is done in any other manner than what they have pointed out, they arraign the consul, as if he were on trial before them. These are great impediments to those who have the management of affairs; for every one cannot encounter injurious reports with the same constancy and firmness of mind as Fabius did, who chose to let his own ability be questioned through the folly of the people, rather than to mismanage the public business with a high reputation.

I am not one of those who think that commanders ought at no time to receive advice; on the contrary, I should deem that man more proud than wise, who regulated every proceeding by the standard of his own single judgement. What then is my opinion? That commanders should be counseled chiefly by persons of known talent, by those who have made the art of war their particular study, and whose knowledge is derived from experience, by those who are present at the scene of action, who see the enemy, who see the advantages that occasions offer, and who, like people embarked in the same ship, are sharers of the danger.

If, therefore, anyone thinks himself qualified to give advice respecting the war which I am to conduct, let him not refuse the assistance to the State, but let him come with me into Macedonia.

He shall be furnished with a ship, a tent, even his traveling charges will be defrayed, but if he thinks this is too much trouble, and prefers the repose of a city life to the toils of war, let him not on land assume the office of a pilot. The city in itself furnishes abundance of topics for conversation. Let it confine its passion for talking to its own precincts and rest assured that we shall pay no attention to any councils but such as shall be framed within our camp.

-- General Lucius Aemilius Paulus (229-160 B.C.), Rome.

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Behold, Nancy Pelosi's choice to chair the House Intelligence Committee, waxing boneheaded on the subtle differences at the heart of Islam:

Forty years ago, Sgt. Silvestre Reyes was a helicopter crew chief flying dangerous combat missions in South Vietnam from the top of a soaring rocky outcrop near the sea called Marble Mountain.

After the war, it turned out that the communist Viet Cong had tunneled into the hill and built a combat hospital right beneath the skids of Reyes’ UH-1 Huey gunship.

Now the five-term Texas Democrat, 62, is facing similar unpleasant surprises about the enemy, this time as the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

That’s because, like a number of his colleagues and top counterterrorism officials that I’ve interviewed over the past several months, Reyes can’t answer some fundamental questions about the powerful forces arrayed against us in the Middle East.

It begs the question, of course: How can the Intelligence Committee do effective oversight of U.S. spy agencies when its leaders don’t know basics about the battlefield?

To his credit, Reyes, a kindly, thoughtful man who also sits on the Armed Service Committee, does see the undertows drawing the region into chaos.

For example, he knows that the 1,400- year-old split in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites not only fuels the militias and death squads in Iraq, it drives the competition for supremacy across the Middle East between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

That’s more than two key Republicans on the Intelligence Committee knew when I interviewed them last summer. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and Terry Everett, R-Ala., both back for another term, were flummoxed by such basic questions, as were several top counterterrorism officials at the FBI.

I thought it only right now to pose the same questions to a Democrat, especially one who will take charge of the Intelligence panel come January. The former border patrol agent also sits on the Armed Services Committee.

Reyes stumbled when I asked him a simple question about al Qaeda at the end of a 40-minute interview in his office last week. Members of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, are paid $165,200 a year to know more than basic facts about our foes in the Middle East.

We warmed up with a long discussion about intelligence issues and Iraq. And then we veered into terrorism’s major players.

To me, it’s like asking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: Who’s on what side?

The dialogue went like this:

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an al Qaeda club house, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.

That’s because the extremist Sunnis who make up a l Qaeda consider all Shiites to be heretics.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni roots account for its very existence. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe the Saudi Royal family besmirched the true faith through their corruption and alliance with the United States, particularly allowing U.S. troops on Saudi soil.

It’s been five years since these Muslim extremists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center.

Is it too much to ask that our intelligence overseers know who they are?

Civil War
And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Pocito,” I said—a little.

“Pocito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

“Yeah,” Reyes said, rightly observing, “but . . . it’s not like the Hatfields and the McCoys. It’s a heck of a lot more complex.

Sheesh. Has this guy read the hard news part of a newspaper in the last twenty-seven years? Imagine how shocking it will be for Reyes to learn that the United States has enemies.

If you were wondering how seriously our new Democratic overlords would take national security, the Reyes appointment rather neatly answers the question. Not at all.

Via Glenn and Tom Maguire, who notes that the reporter who "mousetrapped" Reyes did the same thing to Republicans before the election.

How can any sitting Representative in the United States Congress be so ignorant? What do they do all day?
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The Center for Strategic and International Studies has a series of twenty questions(pdf) that we must answer in any confrontation with Iran, and the competing answers to those questions. Typical questions: "Is the Iranian regime likely to collapse, and, if so, under what conditions?" and "Would a sharp drop in oil prices threaten regime stability?" The proposed answers are sufficiently balanced that the authors obviously struggled to present the strongest paragraph-length arguments on both sides of each question. In any case, it is excellent background reading for any discussion of American policy toward Iran so you should definitely read it before your next cocktail party.

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According to a Kuwaiti newspaper, which apparently quotes various plausible sources, Syria has a surprisingly advanced nuclear program:

Recently, Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al Seyassah quoted European intelligence sources as saying that "Syria has an advanced nuclear program" in a secret site located in the province of Al Hassaka, close to the Turkish and Iraqi borders. British sources quoted by "Al Seyassah" believe that "it is President Assad's brother, colonel Maher Assad, and his cousin Rami Makhlouf, who supervise the program". This program is based on the Iraqi material that Saddam Hussein's two sons shipped to Syria before and during the war against Iraq. This explains, according to the daily newspaper, why international investigative teams found no proof of the program.

As K. Pablo wrote, "paging David Kay..."

Now, this could very well be nonsense. Perhaps it is bad reporting, or perhaps it is fabricated entirely out of whole cloth. There are probably people even in Kuwait's ruling elites that feel pressure to justify the war, although it is hard to believe there are many Kuwaitis who are not happy to see the end of Saddam Hussein, whatever the reason.
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When an adult in authority accuses a four-year-old of sexual harrassment, who has the dirty mind?

A four-year-old hugged his teachers aide and was put into in-school suspension, according to the father. But La Vega school administrators have a different story.

Damarcus Blackwell's four-year-old son was lining-up to get on the bus after school last month, when he was accused of rubbing his face in the chest of a female employee.

The prinicipal of La Vega Primary School sent a letter to the Blackwells that said the pre-kindergartener demonstrated "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment."

Assuming the facts are as set forth, the principal of La Vega Primary School is dumber than not just any bag of hammers, but all bags of hammers. Or he has a dirty mind. What could be the third explanation?
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Back in April, we elaborated on the report that Iran had announced that it would install 3,000 new centrifuges for the purpose of enriching uranium by the end of 2006. Princeton's Professor Frank von Hippel, by no means a hawk, confirmed to me by email then that, if configured properly, 3,000 centrifuges could enrich enough uranium for one bomb in less than a year.

According to former embassy-occupier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic Republic is right on schedule.

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Cardinalpark's "Win the region" post yesterday generated a couple of particularly interesting speculative comments from a pair of TigerHawk regulars. First, K. Pablo:

It's not hard to make a few assertions that are fairly supportable, and then draw some conclusions:

1. For the foreseeable future, U.S. needs to stay in Iraq, protecting oil fields and the Kurds, securing Baghdad and the central government.

2. Iran will soon undergo upheaval as Khamenei dies, probably within the next three months given what sounds like colon cancer metastatic to the spine. The degree of the upheaval is difficult to predict.

3. Sunni Arab refugees will continue to pour out of Iraq, mostly into Syria and Jordan. Assad won't be able to handle this, and the Iranians won't be able to help him. Syria likely to be destabilized.

4. Hezbollah is likely to cause the downfall of the Siniora government, and has built up an excellent Sturmabteilung with which to replace it.

5. Saudi Arabia and Israel are "re-aligning" at the moment, which will place Hamas in an untenable position. Other re-alignments include Qatar cozying up to Iran, and Turkey and Iran cooperating against their Kurdish populations.

6. al-Maliki and al-Hakim are likely to be drawn into conflict. al-Hakim's SCIRI brethren are more useful to Iran than are al-Maliki and his Sadrist street gangs.

7. Saudis have dropped hints about boosting oil production to depress Iran's economy. Iran can blockade the straits of Hormuz but this is likely to be temporary and at the cost of Iran's navy (until they get a nuke).

My forecast is for a very warm spring, featuring explosions and regime change.

Dawnfire82's response:

Only a few comments.

"2. Iran will soon undergo upheaval as Khamenei dies, probably within the next three months given what sounds like colon cancer metastatic to the spine. The degree of the upheaval is difficult to predict."

The vibes I've always gotten from Iran was that Khamenei was a mitigating force on their crazy, messianic President. If the next Supreme Leader is not of Khamenei's caliber, Iran might get even more bellicose and aggressive. In the end, that could be good for us.

"4. Hezbollah is likely to cause the downfall of the Siniora government, and has built up an excellent Sturmabteilung with which to replace it."

I don't think that the other factions will allow this. If the Christians and Sunni are standing together (as they are now) then they must feel strongly about opposing Hezb Allah. Another civil war seems likely to me, rather than a simple coup.

"7. Saudis have dropped hints about boosting oil production to depress Iran's economy. Iran can blockade the straits of Hormuz but this is likely to be temporary and at the cost of Iran's navy (until they get a nuke)."

A blockade is an act of war, and would again be good news for us. In my opinion, what we need most is a clear cassus beli to do some house cleaning.

Unleash your own thoughtful speculations in the comments. I'll be back, once I've cleaned up the attic.
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If you read one article today, read Andy McCarthy's detailed argument that the United States is, in fact, at war with Iran. Whether we are willing to admit it or not.

I have been reading about Iran all year, and remain uncertain as to the best course of action. I am, however, certain that it would be entirely within our rights in law and morality to launch a total war against that country. Casus belli absolutely exists; the only question is whether it is in our interests to do so, and on that I am exceedingly ambivalent.

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Police said Olivia Hutcherson, 21, of Anderson, S.C., had been arrested for fighting at a Waffle House shortly before she shot herself in the hand with a .22-caliber pistol she had tried to use to light a cigarette.

How strange. I was arrested for fighting at a Waffle House shortly before I tried to shave with a halberd.
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Prince Charles has said that when crowned he will declare himself the "defender of faith," rather than "the Defender of the Faith." Tony Blair seems to have recognized that Charles, along with most of Britain's chattering classes, has imbibed too much multi-culti Kool-Aid. Indeed, Prime Minister Blair seems to have decided that integration is preferable to disintegration, even if it means standing by one culture at the putative expense of another:

Tony Blair formally declared Britain's multiculturalist experiment over today as he told immigrants they had "a duty" to integrate with the mainstream of society.

'No culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of the UK'
In a speech that overturned more than three decades of Labour support for the idea, he set out a series of requirements that were now expected from ethnic minority groups if they wished to call themselves British.

These included "equality of respect" - especially better treatment of women by Muslim men - allegiance to the rule of law and a command of English. If outsiders wishing to settle in Britain were not prepared to conform to the virtues of tolerance then they should stay away.

He added: "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed.

"If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us.

"The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means."

Mr Blair's volte face - just eight years ago he was a multiculturalist champion - was the culmination of a long Labour retreat from a cause it once enthusiastically embraced. In recent weeks, Jack Straw, Ruth Kelly, John Reid and Gordon Brown have all played their part in a concerted revision of the Cabinet's stand which began in earnest after the July 7 bombs in London last year.

Mr Reid, in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday on GMTV, said he was "sick and tired" of the sort of the "mad political correctness" that led to Christmas being devalued. "I think most people just find this completely over the top and I would rather have a bit of what I call PCS - Plain Common Sense - than PC - Political Correctness," the Home Secretary added.

Then there is this from the Times (London):

Plans to withhold grants to religious and racial groups were announced by the Prime Minister today as part of a programme to ensure Muslims and other minorities intergrate into British society....

In a speech on multi-culturism Mr Blair said he also wanted to curb discrimination against women in mosques. He emphasised that he did not want to dilute religious identity but said that all British citizens had a duty to integrate.

He set out a series of proposals designed to strike the "right balance" between integration and diversity, some of which are likely to cause controversy among minority groups.

First the Prime Minister said, all future grants to ethnic and religious groups will be assessed against a test of promoting cohesion and integration.

"In a sense, very good intentions got the better of us. We wanted to be hospitable to new groups. We wanted, rightly, to extend a welcome and did so by offering public money to entrench their cultural presence. Money was too often freely awarded to groups that were tightly bonded around religious, racial or ethnic identities," said Mr Blair.

Speaking in Downing Street, Mr Blair said one of the most common complaints he heard from Muslim women was that they were barred from even entering certain mosques.

He said: "Those (mosques) that exclude the voice of women need to look again at their practices." This would not involve changing the law but the Equal Opportunities Commission had been asked to produce a report by next spring on how it could address the problem of discrimination in mosques.

New British citizens already have to pass a language test but from April the 150,000 to 170,000 people who seek permanent residency in the UK each year will also have to pass an English test before residency is granted.

And visiting preachers would have to have a proper command of English as well as facing the existing test that the Home Secretary can ban them from the UK if their presence is judged not to be in the public good.

The Prime Minister said: "If you come here lawfully, we welcome you. If you are permitted to stay here permanently, you become an equal member of our community and become one of us. Then you, and all of us, who want to, can worship God in our own way, take pride in our different cultures after our own fashion, respect our distinctive histories according to our own traditions; but do so within a shared space of shared values in which we take no less pride and show no less respect.

"The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means. And neither racists nor extremists should be allowed to destroy it."

The question is whether this reversal is following a trend or whether political multiculturalism is so embedded in the schools, universities, and media that no politician can do more than shout in the wind. It is encouraging, I suppose, that this reversal comes from the Labour Party, the putative left wing, but the British have an enormous deprogramming task ahead of them. For starters, Blair should send every bureaucrat, journalist, professor and school teacher a copy of Melanie Phillips' Londonistan.
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It's been awhile since I've posted. TH's brilliant work has carried the day, and I haven't felt the need to add much -- agree or disagree. In general, I think we are in a lull, a respite, in the Middle East War. American political sands are shifting as the Democratic Party moves from being out of power to being in it, and therefore begins to move towards a more responsible, centrist position as a group.

So what constitutes victory in this regional war? And how do we achieve it?

I have long argued that, media arguments to the contrary, toppling the Hussein mafia regime in Baghdad constituted an American military victory in Iraq, just as toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan similarly was an American military victory. The longer term challenges which continue in these countries are extremely complex and will require the passage of time, patience, will and investment to see each nation through to freedom and prosperity. I stubbornly continue to believe this.

However, the Middle East remains unstable. In fact, regional instability has increased because the old, reactionary, tyrannical order of things is fighting back. It is not an accident that Syria and Iran are actively undermining freedom, stability and progress toward prosperity in Iraq and Lebanon. So which philosophy will emerge victorious? Freedom? Syrian Baathism? Shiite Theocracy? Sunni Theocracy?

I obviously believe freedom will eventually emerge victorious. But at what cost? And in what timeframe?

During WWII, the USA and Soviet Union gnawed away at the German Reich's periphery, gradually turning the tide of the hot war against Hitler. German satellites like France and Italy were in turn conquered and flipped or neutralized. They were fundamentally unstable allies to the German Reich.

In this regional conflict -- a far smaller, less difficult challenge by far -- Syria is Iran's key peripheral ally. Iran extends its regional influence through Syria to Lebanon via Hezbollah. To weaken Iran, we should break it from Syria. Syria and Lebanon are both unstable Iranian satellites. Why? Because of the substantial non-Shiite, non-Persian populations in both.

In this sense, I believe it is in America's interest to strike a lucrative bargain with Syria to divide it from Iran and complicate Iran's relationship with Hezbollah. That bargain should involve Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. It involves significant financial incentives that might make us blush. But dealing with Syria is done from strength, and relatively easy to achieve, I think. Dealing with Iran today is not done from strength, unless we deal with it militarily, which we seem loathe to do.

So, what is in the second, classified ISG plan? Beats me.

I have not been a proponent of increasing our troop presence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad. But, if we form some sort of consensus viz. Iran, it may be that we give Syria a carrot, and wave a stick at Iran. That stick would include a very substantial American naval and air presence in the Gulf, more US troops garrisoned in Iraq, and a very tangible opening to Syria.

Patience is required. And maybe the next administration.

[Time stamp corrected.]
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I don't mean to diminish the whole Rovian Bushitler Haliburton conspiracy thing, but I'm just sayin.

Skeptical? Ask the Danish.

H/T: Northeast Intelligence Network
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Apparently, a broken clock is right more often than Paul Krugman.

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If you read one article today, make it Shelby Steele's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: "Our unceasing ambivalence: Why it's so hard to define victory in Iraq." I agree with everything up until the prescription. I may have more to say later.

And if you read two articles today, read Christopher Hitchens on female humor and the lack thereof.

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

And then there's this:

Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

Not that I agree with him or anything. At least not this part: "I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor." Huh? Christianity has certainly been notable for the exaltation of women in both tradition and practice (many Christian men count on their wives to see that they are sufficiently churched-up), but Islam and Judaism? The Muslims would riot in the street if Hitchens stood up in the center of Cairo and said that, and in any case do their utmost in law and custom to circumscribe women. Orthodox Jewish practice also centers more on the men than the women, at least according to the men. The article is entertaining as usual, but Hitchens' agnosticism got the best of him in that line.
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On the question of the pregnancy of Mary Cheney -- who is at once a lesbian, the daughter of the Vice President of the United States, and a supporter of her father -- Kathryn Jean Lopez strikes me as exactly right:

Unless Mary Cheney asks to be part of a political debate about this, there is no need to have a public discussion about her life. The New York Times raises the question of how/who, etc. That just seems outrageous to me. She is not the vice president. She is not the president. That's just uncalled for from anyone in the media/commentariat. I could be wrong but the media/commentators seem to be making it — Mary Cheney's pregnancy — a political issue, not the Cheneys.

Yes, I think fatherhood is crucial and am opposed to redefining marriage and all the rest. And my "deafening silence" on the Mary Cheney "issue" (what nonsense) doesn't change that. But unless Mary Cheney asks to be a spokeswoman on this issue, folks ought to leave her alone.

The linked Times article quotes Family Pride, a gay rights group, which issued a statement about Virginia's lack of recognition of same-sex marriage (Mary Cheney lives in Virginia) and the usual corresponding criticism of out-of-wedlock conception by Focus on the Family. Then the Times says this:

In 2004, Ms. Cheney worked on the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, which won in part because of the so-called values voters who were drawn to the polls by ballot measures seeking to ban same-sex marriage.

Er, no. A very academic no (that is otherwise quite interesting on the impact of same-sex marriage initiatives). Sadly, no. No. A big old Pew Research no. All of these studies and many more can be found by Googling the words *Bush election 2004 gay marriage ballot*. It is hard to find stories with any actual data that make the opposite argument. The New York Times is not only dead wrong in its allegation, it is so wrong about a widely-studied and publicized "urban legend" that we are forced to choose between two explanations: (i) the reporter (Jim Rutenberg) just didn't do the most basic reporting, and his editor didn't ask him the most obvious questions, or (ii) the Times (either the reporter or the editor) deliberately inserted the legend about same-sex marriage initiatives to fabricate evidence in favor of one of the left's favorite arguments, that "so-called" values voters are easily duped. What could be the third explanation?
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Via Glenn, "A short course on brain surgery":

Actually, the video is a short cautionary tale about the pitfalls of Ontario's single-payer healthcare scheme, which preserves the political support for its terrible service by forbidding competition from the private sector. The result? Canadians with money hire consultants who help them get next day medical care in the United States. Would Ontario voters continue to support their single-payer plan if the American system weren't available to release the pressure from at least some of the patients for whom the timeliness of care is a matter of life and death?

The video also exposes another weakness of single-payer systems: they are popular among people with only minor or routine health problems or very acute problems (such as traumatic injury), but can be catastrophic for people who will only be more likely to die or suffer if they do not get access to technology quickly. This is ironic, because the opponents of market-based solutions (such as health savings accounts) often contend that they are a good solution only for the healthy. Perhaps, but as the video demonstrates (and as anybody who is in the industry knows) the same can be said of Ontario's system.

For more on the looming choice between, well, choice and no choice in health care, listen to Glenn and Helen's excellent podcast interview of Dr. David Glatzer, a Canadian physician who has a lot to say about both systems.

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Arab leaders and intellectuals are ecstatic that the Iraq Study Group has declared that America has failed in Iraq. Of course, most of these people needed America to fail, because success would have reminded the world of their own collective cultural, political, economic, social, and civic failures. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that the Western press has been unable to find any leading Arab who is willing to say that it is a shame that apparently only a fascist totalitarian can govern Iraq. Is that because there aren't any such people, or is it that the press just doesn't want to give them a voice?

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Stratfor's morning letter($) is cloak-and-dagger even by their standards:

The Iraq Study Group (ISG), headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, formally released its findings on Wednesday. Outlining a whopping 79 recommendations -- including resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and persuading Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria -- the report's recommendations are far-reaching. It essentially suggests resolving every U.S. foreign policy blunder in the region, all the compounded consequences of these mistakes and the centuries-old dispute over the holy land.

This, suffice to say, is underwhelming.

The report was rife with political compromises intended for domestic consumption. It provided a comprehensive list of the failures of the Iraq war -- failures that are both profound and well-known. This panel of elder statesmen known for back-channel dealings and solving intractable geopolitical problems is capable of much more than that. What the group set out to do -- and what Washington desperately needs it to do -- was to devise a cogent, attainable solution and make specific strategic recommendations. We therefore suspect that a separate, classified report -- the real report -- was placed on the president's desk some time ago.

Amen, and please, Lord, may the last point be true.

Still very busy, but I hope to have a lot to say this weekend.
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I want to believe this is true.

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As Tigerhawk has argued several times, high oil prices make alternative fuels economical and create incentives for innovation. But even the most optimistic among us did not count on such genius as this:

Lauri Venøy wants to use the product created from liposuction to develop bio-diesel.

Bio-diesel can be produced from plant oils and/or animal fat, and the Norwegian sees the scheme as a renewable energy source, newspaper Dagens Nærinsgliv reports.

More than sixty percent of Americans are overweight and the Norwegian's firm in Miami, Florida is in the process of signing an agreement with US hospital giant Jackson Memorial. This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel.

I have to wonder if Lou Dobbs, or anyone else, would complain about the outsourcing of labor in this particular processing plant.

(hat tip: Lucianne)
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You can download a pdf file of the Iraq Study Group report, about 160 pages, here.

I continue to be booked solid at the day job until well into the evening (suggesting that it is more than a day job). However, I encourage our vast and brilliant readership -- especially those without day jobs or who live in parts of the world where it is not day -- to start reading and erupt their howls of derision or subtle insights into the comments.

MORE: That was fast. Andy McCarthy is not happy.

STILL MORE: Power Line is reductionist:

Thus, the ISG report lives up to its advanced billing. The best the "wise men" can come up with is to have our worst enemies try to help us stabilize Iraq. And, apparently, the primary inducement will be to pressure Israel into creating a Palestinian state (as if Iran really cares about that). It's difficult to say which is more pronounced, the craven nature of this recommendation or its lack of realism.

I actually think Iran does care about creating a Palestinian state, but not enough to compromise its own objectives in Iraq, which is much closer to home.
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One would have thought that Jimmy Carter's many strange eruptions over the last few years would have hurt his credibility with serious people. It has.

CWCID: Lucianne.

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I don't know whether these photographs have been altered, but they are incredibly cool.

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Glenn Reynolds is running what now promises to be a multi-part blog symposium on the tactical and strategic challenges in managing Iraq and confronting Iran and Syria. Much as I would like to participate, I'm in the middle of "quarterly meetings week" at the day job, so I have no time for the thoughtful treatment that this subject deserves. For those few of you who do not also read Instapundit several times a day, do go there and read some of the linked articles.

In addition, I suggest purchasing Stratfor's special report, "U.S. Options in Iraq," which even non-subscribers can buy for less than $20 through Stratfor's main page. They will email it to you automatically, so you can get it within five minutes of now!

With that plug, I hope they will forgive my reproduction of the introduction of Stratfor's report, which I think sets the table for the wider discussion very nicely:

Most wars have two sides. A few have three. The sides in this war are nearly uncountable and shifting. The main combatant parties are the United States, the Sunni community, the Shia and the Kurds. The complexity is compounded by the fact that each of these groups is itself torn by rival factions. Thus, even the simple statement that Sunnis and Shia are at war with each other must be carefully qualified, because there is no single Sunni or Shiite position. It was not always this way: At various points there was much greater cohesion and coherence than at others. But that time is past. Now, this is less of a war than an extremely violent free-for-all. Iraq was once seen as a way for the United States to send a clear message to the Islamic world and as a base from which U.S. forces could operate in the region. The United States, however, has failed to make an example of Iraq and, instead of projecting self-confidence and power, it is now projecting doubt and weakness in the region. The United States chose to be feared more than loved, to use Machiavelli’s phrase. It is no longer feared and could never have been loved. It is in the worst of all possible worlds. It must shift its strategy.

Current U.S. Strategy

The American strategy in Iraq has been, since the emergence of the insurgency:

1. To create an Iraqi government that would be representative of all ethnic and religious groups and political tendencies within the state.

2. To establish a security environment in which this government could be formed, mature, create institutions necessary for governing and, finally, govern.

3. To transfer responsibility for security in Iraq to this government, with U.S. forces remaining in Iraq but withdrawing from direct involvement in maintaining that security.

To implement that strategy, the United States had to defeat or at least contain the insurgency. That insurgency initially involved the Sunnis primarily, but it has evolved into a much more complex situation in recent months. Therefore, the task of providing security has evolved from simply an attempt to defeat the Sunni insurgents to an attempt to control Shiite groups as well, along with the need for containing Sunni-Shiite violence and serious tensions within these groups.

Iraq is a country of about 27 million people, and Baghdad is a city of about 6 million. The United States currently has about 140,000 troops in Iraq, a fraction of which are capable of direct combat operations. The United States was unable to suppress the Sunni insurgency on its own. The likelihood of it being able to contain and suppress the current kaleidoscope of insurgencies and militias is, based on past experience, unlikely in the extreme.

With that in mind, the possibility of the Iraqi government assuming responsibility for security is even less likely. It is important to understand, from the outset, that the Iraqi government — as conceived of by the United States — cannot possibly function as a government. The American plan was a coalition government, but the factions represented in that government are engaged in a civil war with each other. The very best that can be said of some is that they are deeply suspicious of each other.

Each faction of the government sees its institutions as a means for pursuing its own interests against other factions. They see the political battle as an adjunct to the military battles being fought in the streets. The government of Iraq exists only in the most formal sense, as having ministers and ministries. But in fact, there is no functioning government — nor can there be one while the civil war is raging. The idea that the weakness of the Iraqi government lies in insufficient training or corruption or not enough advisers misses the crucial point: A state cannot function so long as its constituent parts do not agree on the nature of the state and are waging open warfare against each other.

The United States’ current position is, therefore, unsustainable. In effect, the United States is fighting the putative members of the Iraqi government in order to induce them to make the government function. And none of this takes into account the fact that the Shia in particular do not want the government to function, except on their terms; that the Sunnis cannot accept those terms; that the Kurds are making their plans without reference to the government and that U.S. forces can’t provide security anyway.

The Global Environment

If the American invasion of Iraq had gone as planned and Iraq had turned into a pacified, pro-American country, the United States would have assumed an enormously powerful position geopolitically, quite independent from the U.S.-jihadist war. Between U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the position of Israel and India, U.S. power and allies would have straddled the area from the Levant to the Hindu Kush. Syria and Iran would have faced threats from multiple directions. The Arabian Peninsula would have faced U.S. ground forces to the north and U.S. naval power on three sides. Pakistan would have been bracketed from Afghanistan and India.

An implicit U.S.-Israeli-Indian coalition would have created a strategic reality that would have placed Muslim regimes on the long-term defensive. It would have made the United States the dominant power in the region, and — given Washington’s relationships with Egypt and Morocco — would have created momentum that would have extended that power through North Africa as well. The United States would have had substantial resources at its disposal for operations in Central Asia, and that region would have been subsumed into the U.S. security system. In no sense would the United States have dominated all of the Islamic world, nor would Muslim public opinion have reviled U.S. actions any the less or hostile regimes like Iran have been eliminated. Nevertheless, the reality would have forced the region to the strategic defensive.

Quite apart from the Muslim world, this is not an outcome that would have been welcomed by other great powers. As the Franco-Russian-German bloc showed prior to 2003, the prospect of American domination in Iraq would have undermined, for a long time, any strategic interests they might have in the Middle East. Not all, but many, major powers did not want to see the United States succeed in Iraq — not because they had a deep interest in Iraq itself or because they supported Islamic radicalism, but because U.S. domination of the Middle East would have tilted the global balance of power in favor of the United States for a very long time. U.S. influence in the region would, among other things, have given the United States substantial influence over the region’s oil supplies, particularly the sizeable reserves in Iraq. With petroleum and geography added to already overwhelming American military and economic power, a victory in Iraq would have redefined the world.

This means that many countries outside the region were not unhappy to see the failure of U.S. strategy in Iraq. It also means the United States is unlikely to gain more international support to pursue its original mission. Success for the United States in Iraq would pose serious challenges to these countries.

Many European countries — including Spain, Italy and most of Eastern Europe — did side with the United States. In each case, their position was not based on any particular interest in Iraq, but on achieving a relationship with Washington for other purposes or, in the case of Eastern Europe, out of fear of the Franco-Russian-German bloc. However, as conditions in Iraq deteriorated, their inclination to increase or even maintain their fairly insignificant troop commitments declined.

The point here is that from the standpoint of Europe and much of the non-Islamic world, there are those who welcome an American defeat in Iraq and those who regret it, but not to the point of taking risks alongside the Americans. It was not true to say the United States had no international support at the time it invaded Iraq, but it is certainly the case that it lacks it now. Even among the strongest U.S. allies, the United Kingdom and Australia, for example, the appetite for the war has substantially dissipated. It is not true to say that if the United States continues the war, it does so alone. It is fair to say, however, that it cannot expect a significant infusion of forces from the outside and might well experience a decrease.

While countries allied with the United States in Iraq peel away under the pressure of failure, the United States cannot simultaneously pursue its original plan and expect increased international support. The global environment is hostile to U.S. plans in Iraq.

The Regional Environment

The non-Arab power with an overriding interest in Iraq, other than the United States, is Iran. There is a historical tension between Iraq and Iran that can be traced back to the states’ Biblical antecedents and is deeply ingrained in the regional geopolitics. Part of this tension derives from Arab/Persian rivalries, which can be clearly seen in other parts of the region as well; part of it also derives from the Sunni/Shiite confl icts that now are roiling Iraq itself.

Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, the most recent manifestation of this tension was the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, which took hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. Iranian policy since that point has been fixed: to prevent the re-emergence of any centralized power in Iraq that could pose a threat to Iranian national security. Iran must protect its flank. For Iran, the American goal of an Iraq united under a powerful central government that is aligned with the United States is its worst-case outcome. The United States would be able to use Iraq to re-establish the balance of power between Baghdad and Tehran, recreating the Iraqi threat toward Iran in a more dangerous form than it existed under Hussein. This is something Tehran must prevent, using all means possible.

Iran’s primary goal, therefore, is to turn Iraq into a reliable ally. In order to achieve this, Iraq must have a Shiite-dominated government and defense structure, with Kurds and Sunnis marginalized. Any hint of the re-emergence of Sunni power in Iraq strikes at the heart of Iranian security interests. Anything that gives the Kurds power, either regionally or in Baghdad, raises the specter of Kurdish nationalism gaining traction in Iran. Of the two threats, the most pressing are the Sunnis, who outmaneuvered the Shia in post-revolutionary Iraq and who, Iran fears, can do the same again if given freedom to maneuver. The Kurdish question is secondary: Iran and Turkey will deal with Kurdish regional autonomy in due course.

In order to achieve its primary goal, Iran not only must see the Shia overwhelmingly dominate any Iraqi government, but the Iraqi Shia must be dominated by their Iranian co-religionists. This is not as simple as it appears, since — as we shall see — the Iraqi Shia are split and since there is a degree of distrust between elements of the Iraqi Shia and Iranian Shia. There are doctrinal differences between the two sides, and ethnic tensions, but there is also the fear that Iranian domination will turn Iraq into a pawn in Tehran’s grand strategy and siphon oil profits away from Iraq toward Iran. Therefore, Iranian domination — as opposed to penetration — of Iraqi Shia is not a given.

If the Iranians cannot achieve their primary goal, there is a secondary goal that they can achieve: the partition of Iraq. If they feel they cannot guarantee their domination of a government in Baghdad, then partition achieves two purposes for Iran. First, Iraq would not be able to regain its position as peer competitor with Iran. Second, there would be a Shiite entity in southern Iraq that would be inherently dependent on Iran. A Shiite state in that location would be seen as a threat to the Saudis and would face the natural hostility of the Sunni states. Therefore, any Shiite state in the south would need Iran to guarantee its security.

This situation would prevent the United States from marshalling and supplementing Iraqi power against Iran. It would put Iran in a pre-eminent position south of Baghdad. Therefore, Iran would be in a position to project power into the Arabian Peninsula. But for U.S. forces, if they were to remain in Iraq, the Iranians would be the pre-eminent military power in the region. They would be able to threaten the Kuwaiti and Saudi military forces — as was the case immediately after the fall of the Shah — and force the Saudis to reconsider permitting an American presence in the kingdom, which is what sparked the emergence of al Qaeda in the first place.

As important, the Iranians might be able to mobilize substantial Shiite populations in the Arab Persian Gulf region. The Shia constitute a signifi cant portion of the population in many of the oil-rich Arab states: Saudi Arabia (20 percent), Kuwait (35 percent), Bahrain (70 percent), Qatar (10 percent), and the United Arab Emirates (15 percent). The Iranians maintain close links to these Arab Shia through local religious and political groups. On the whole, these groups have not threatened existing regimes. Neither economic nor political interests forced a confrontation.

But as we have seen in Iraq, the Iranians have sufficient influence among Shia in the region to potentially change this equation. If they were able to back unrest in these countries with a direct military threat, the Iranians would be in a powerful position. It was this thinking that motivated the Iranians to use their influence in Iraq to destabilize the situation in June and July 2006.

The Iranians wanted the United States to overthrow Hussein and replace his regime with a Shiite government. The Americans thought they had the option of crafting a regime to their own liking. However, they underestimated not only Sunni resistance but also Iran’s ability to destabilize the situation. The Iranians were prepared to provide support to the Americans while fighting the Sunnis. But when the Sunnis shifted toward political accommodation that could lead to an unacceptable outcome for Tehran — signaled by the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in early June and the nearly simultaneous appointment of a Sunni as Iraq’s minister of defense — the Iranians shifted their position to encourage direct civil war between Shia and Sunnis.

Had the Shia maintained what appeared to be their course politically when al-Zarqawi was killed, accommodation would seem to have been possible. But, under Iranian influence, the Shia drew back from the political process in Iraq and increased their attacks against the Sunnis. Along with this shift, Tehran encouraged its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to become more aggressive toward Israel, and provided military equipment and training for this effort. The conflict in July-August 2006 was the outcome, and it stunned both Israel and the world. For whatever reason, Israel was unable, for the first time since the founding of the modern state, to crush an enemy in war. This increased the confidence of Syria, another Iranian ally dominated by an Alawite government, to raise its pressure on Lebanon.

In short, Iran had three goals. First, it wanted to be the dominant power in Iraq. Second, it wanted to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. Finally, it wanted to reclaim for the Shia the distinction of leading the Islamist renaissance — a position that had been assumed by Sunni al Qaeda. By the fall, it was on the verge of achieving this. The key was Iraq: Iran either had to create a situation that would force the Americans’ withdrawal, thus leaving Iraq to the Iranians, or failing that, a civil war that would divide the nation, allowing Iran to dominate the new, southern Shiite entity. That would give Iran the ability to begin to dominate the Persian Gulf, and would give it revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world.

The Saudis were obviously to be the loser in this game. But the Saudis had very limited options. The states of the Arabian Peninsula as a whole could not hope to block Iran militarily. For Riyadh, maintaining a robust buffer — provided either by Sunnis or external powers — between the Saudi oil fields and Iran is vital. But if the Saudis’ open dependency on the United States increased, it could destabilize the kingdom. If they pressed too hard against Iran, the region’s Shia might rise. The Saudis could provide support to the Sunnis in Iraq, but that would be a double-edged sword. For one thing, doing so could drive a wedge between Riyadh and the United States, or force the United States to withdraw from Iraq. For another, it could draw the Saudi kingdom into a conflict with the Iranians that it could not win.

The sum total of all these equations is that the United States was maneuvered into a position in which its options were limited, in which it had few allies, in which it had insufficient military power — and all of this during an election year. The Iranians understand American elections: They helped bring Jimmy Carter down by holding U.S. hostages until after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. They knew that the worse the situation was in Iraq, the worse the position of George W. Bush in the polls. All of these factors were converging to place Iran in a superb negotiating position. Add to this the American fear that Iran might develop nuclear weapons — and the dearth of U.S. military options to deal with that scenario — and the Iranians felt they had the United States on the ropes.

Most important, the United States had lost control of the internal security and political situation in Iraq. The system had fragmented, and the U.S. goal of a united state under a pro-American government in Baghdad had disappeared. How badly the situation had fragmented is something that must be understood in detail before turning to the current U.S. options.

When the history of the regional war is written -- and it is so politicized that the first genuinely honest accounting will probably be written by somebody who is in elementary school in 2006 -- we will have the benefit of many intervening descriptions of the motives of the various actors. It may be that Stratfor's construction, which is surely a useful device for thinking about the way forward, is as close to accurate as any other. Without, for the moment delving into the prescription for resolving Iraq in some way that satisfies the global chattering classes, it is obvious that there are some lessons -- and questions -- that can be learned already.

First, you can’t fight a war without taking the interests of related powers into account, and planning for their reaction. The question arises, why does it at least seem that the United States did not anticipate Iran’s menu of responses to the American invasion there? Did Iran signal that it would cooperate (as it had in Afghanistan)? Did we believe that the overwhelming victory that we expected in Iraq would deter Iran from intervening? If so, we were led (see below), or led ourselves, down the primrose path. What chance was there that Iran could allow American soldiers to surround it without striking back? This did not need to be a reason to oppose the invasion of Iraq -- it might just as easily have turned into an opportunity -- but I'm sorry to say that there is no external evidence that we had a strategy to exploit that opportunity. This seems like a specific version of the more general problem that Tommy Franks' invasion plan does not seem to have contemplated the fighting of a regional war, which in turn suggests that if the administration was consciously pursuing a regional strategy it did not filter down to the Pentagon.

Second, we need to know if we were played by Iranians or allied exile groups. It may be that the Iranians bluffed us into believing that they would be more accomodating to our invasion of Iraq than they turned out to be. Also, I have seen the claim (perhaps also from Stratfor) that leading Iraqi Shiite exiles -- including the well-known Ahmed Chalabi -- probably did not tell us everything they knew about the extent to which Iran had penetrated the Shiite community in southern Iraq in particular. Suppose that either speculation is true. It would be but another in a long line of Iranian bluffs in the last thirty years, including during the negotiations over the release of the hostages (see Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah) and in advance of Madeleine Albright's famously rejected apology. Americans should be very worried that the Iranians have repeatedly led our diplomats and intelligence officers around by the nose. We must remember that they will do it again unless we guard against it.

Third, if we are going to sustain a "forward" strategy in the regional struggle, we need to develop a more sophisticated appreciation for local politics. Josh Manchester's "go native" strategy may or may not be a useful solution for Iraq, but it is an essential requirement for engagement in the region. We need to build a large cadre of experts within and without the military who can help us navigate this world. If we're not willing to do that, we need to retreat to the frankly failed strategy of "offshore balancing," hope that the locals can take care of the extremists, and keep our fingers crossed. The problem, it seems to me, is that there are very few academic experts on the region who are genuinely sympathetic to a forward strategy. Will our univesities be willing to support this war, even if they are able?

I'm sure there are many more questions and answers, and I look forward to reading all of Glenn's links. Perhaps I will have time for more later. In the meantime, unlock the safeties and comment at will.
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I still think this is one of the best political ads of the last thirty years:

What do you suppose the reaction would be if a national security candidate ran an analogous ad in 2008? ...

"There's a camel in the desert. For some people, the camel is easy to see. Some people don't see it at all...."

So a camel isn't that scary. Fair enough. How about: "There's a raving lunatic in the desert. For some people, the raving lunatic is easy to see. Some people don't see him at all..."

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Dr. Norman Borlaug, the man who has saved more human lives than any person ever, is an Iowan. Reading the story of his accomplishments at the link, one is forced to wonder whether "Iowa stubborn" is not one of Dr. Borlaug's fundamental success factors.

MORE: On reflection, I would think that Louis Pasteur would give Norman Borlaug a run for the money in the aggregate lives saved contest.

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Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe have decided that the green side of the global warming debate is so indisputable and that the arguments in opposition are so worthless, that people shouldn't hear them at all.

Washington has no shortage of bullies, but even we can't quite believe an October 27 letter that Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Its message: Start toeing the Senators' line on climate change, or else.

We reprint the full text of the letter here, so readers can see for themselves. But its essential point is that the two Senators believe global warming is a fact, and therefore all debate about the issue must stop and ExxonMobil should "end its dangerous support of the [global warming] 'deniers.' " Not only that, the company "should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history." And in extra penance for being "one of the world's largest carbon emitters," Exxon should spend that money on "global remediation efforts."

The Senators aren't dumb enough to risk an ethics inquiry by threatening specific consequences if Mr. Tillerson declines this offer he can't refuse. But in case the CEO doesn't understand his company's jeopardy, they add that "ExxonMobil and its partners in denial have manufactured controversy, sown doubt, and impeded progress with strategies all-too reminiscent of those used by the tobacco industry for so many years." (Our emphasis.) The Senators also graciously copied the Exxon board on their missive.

Corporations, of course, have all the same First Amendment rights that individuals have. Otherwise, The New York Times Company, Disney, News Corp., Time-Warner and every other mainstream media company would have no right of freedom of the press. This point seems to be lost on Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, who obviously think it is just fine to threaten somebody for expressing an opinion. For all the whining about the allegedly intimidating tactics of the Bush administration, at least the White House was objecting to the publication of facts that were held to be secret under law. This is nothing more than a naked attempt to suppress the expression of opinion, which should be of concern to journalists everywhere. The mainstream media's response to this will reflect whether it acts on principle, or only in accordance with its dominant political narrative.
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According to The Guardian, Iran has rolled out a comprehensive new campaign to block web sites that violate the sensibilities or political interests of its ruling mullahs, including, inexplicably, The New York Times.

Sorry. Cheap shot.

I have two questions for our more learned Iran-watchers out there. First, is this a sign that the regime is weak, or that it is strong? Conversely, will reformers despair from this, take to the streets, or circumvent the blocks?

Second, did Iran develop the blocking software, or did some other police state sell it to them? Did the Chinese help them build a Great Firewall of Persia?

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They both want to shorten the term of their elected president.

Just sayin'.

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It seems that one or more students at the Columbia University School of Journalism cheated on the final exam of a course in ethics. Glenn Reynolds wrote that "you can't make this stuff up... Sadly, you don't have to."

Columbia has responded as any post-modern university would. Having detected cheaters in its midst, Columbia has decided that the scandal presents a teachable moment.

As Columbia University continues to grapple with allegations of cheating on a final exam in a journalism ethics course, students have been assigned to write an essay on an issue that parallels the one faced by their own professors.

The topic: What should a newspaper’s executive editor do after receiving “a tip from a credible source that one or more unspecified articles in recent editions of the newspaper contain fabricated material”?

The essay, which may be up to 500 words, is due Tuesday. No problem. I'll get it done before Desperate Housewives. Since it is the season of goodwill on Earth, I hereby authorize any enrolled Columbia journalism student to copy from this post, in whole or in part, with or without attribution, for incorporation into or substitution for the aforementioned assignment due Tuesday.

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If the executive editor of a newspaper receives a "tip from a credible source that one or more unspecified articles in recent editions of the newspaper contain frabricated material," what should she [NOTE to Columbia J-School students: Be sure to sprinkle in feminine gender pronouns, even for generic nouns. Professors eat that shit up. - ed.] do?

As tempting as it may be for your exhausted executive editor to blow off such a generic allegation, which by its terms might apply to dozens of stories and every reporter on his her staff, if she actually has respect for her product -- the stories in her newspaper -- she will investigate the tip. Fortunately, this will be easy for her to do, because her mainstream media corporation has had to build a vast apparatus for enforcing corporate standard operating procedures (such as the policy against the intentional fabrication of "material"), collect anonymous tips about possible violations of those procedures, and investigate claims that the procedures have been violated, intentionally or otherwise. This apparatus, a dark alliance of "internal audit," the law department and human resources, has developed tremendous experience in getting to the truth of any matter that employees would prefer to cover up, whether relating to possible violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley law or all the various means by which one employee might sufficiently hurt the feelings of another that the media corporation will be found liable if it does not do something. The executive editor will quickly realize that this huge prosecutorial machine, which she has supported in her editorials as a means for investigating and punishing "corporate wrongdoing," is now quite conveniently at her disposal to investigate the "credible" tip that one of her reporters is acting without regard to editorial policy.

One of two things will happen. Either the investigation will uncover the "fabricated material" and the fabricator thereof, or it won't. If it fails, then there is no reason to believe that the tip -- which related only to "unspecified" articles -- is in fact credible. End of problem and end of essay, but for the small question of disclosure to the public. No, the investigation should not be disclosed, because there is nothing to say other than "we received an anonymous allegation that one or more of our stories contained an innacurate fact, but upon complete investigation were able neither to prove nor disprove the allegation." That sounds as idiotic as it is, and no business -- not even a newspaper -- should have to admit that there was a rumor it produced a defective product.

If, however, the investigators demonstrate that one of the paper's reporters has fabricated "material" in a published article, there is the question of discipline. Companies that take their products or services seriously -- say, medical device manufacturers, consumer products companies, or banks -- would immediately terminate any employee who did what this reporter has done, which is to adulterate or corrupt a product intentionally. Any employee who does that has not merely violated a company policy; he has attacked the foundation of the public's trust in that company's brand. For companies that take their products seriously, there is no remedy for this problem short of prompt termination. Does our executive editor take her product seriously? If so, she has no choice. If not, she will reveal that attitude when she fails to terminate the guilty reporter.

The final question, then, is the extent of public disclosure following the investigation. The newspaper must of course prominently correct the known factual inaccuracies. Whether it should report that the inaccuracies were the intentional act of the reporter rather than a failure of the organization depends on whether the newspaper genuinely takes responsibility for the work of its reporters. If it does, it should not publicly blame the inaccuracies on the terminated reporter. After all, if it takes responsibility for the work of its reporters, then the adulterated stories were a managerial failure as much as the work of the rogue. However, if the newspaper regards itself as a mere vehicle for the expression of its reporters -- and if it says as much -- then perhaps it has exalted the status of the reporter to such a degree that it is appropriate to blame the reporter publicly for the fraud.

In all cases, we ultimately know this much to be true: the executive editor's internal and external responses to the tip and the investigation will reveal a great deal about the newspaper's regard for the quality of its product.

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WARNING to all Columbia journalism students who want to copy this post and hand it in on Tuesday: it is more than 500 words. But, presumably, you know how to edit.

MORE: Spelling error corrected per the Grouchy Old Man. All part and parcel of the distributed, open source editing that keeps the blogosphere sharp!
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The Corner's Andrew Stuttaford links to an article in the Daily Telegraph that reports that the United States wants to spray herbicides on the Afghan poppy crop. Stuttaford asks "is the White House serious about winning in Afghanistan?" Judging from the Telegraph article, it isn't:

The Afghan government is to launch a campaign of herbicide spraying of opium poppy for the first time following intense American pressure for a more radical approach to the country's burgeoning drugs problem....

A senior diplomat in Kabul said that spraying would be expensive and spur health scares and fears of wider contamination, potentially pushing farmers towards the Taliban. He added: "Aerial spraying would almost certainly be a disaster for Afghanistan given that poppy is grown in small portions of farmers already limited holdings. It would destroy legal crops more than illegal."

If the United States makes a convincing case that the aerial destruction of Afghanistan's poppy crop and the attendant collateral damage will help us win the war (perhaps by denying the insurgency of a source of funds), then we should do it. However, if (as we all suspect) somebody in the White House regards our occupation of Afghanistan an opportunity for another war on drug-traffickers, then both the idea and the person who had it is transportingly stupid. Indeed, if the Bush administration lets the anti-drug zealots screw up the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan so that we can temporarily reduce poppy crops in Afghanistan during the few remaining years the Democrats will allow us to remain there, even I will regret voting for George Bush in 2004.

If we want to interdict the poppies we should buy them, or pay local chiefs and warlords to make sure their farmers don't grow them in the first place. We are expert at manipulating the production and price of crops grown in Iowa and Florida and Mississippi, so it is not obvious why we could not do so in Afghanistan.
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Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club, elaborating on Westhawk, argues that the Sunni insurgency has been a catastrophic military and political failure, and led the Sunnis of Iraq into a strategic cul de sac:

In an irony that must rank as one of the most curious in history, the insurgency in al-Anbar finds it must continue precisely because of the threat of a US drawdown. At the end of a sequence of blunders, Sunni strategists have managed to add yet one more. It is a continuation of a failed policy which begun with the Sunnis defying the US Armed Forces; that led to US Armed Forces building up a Shi'ite Army; that resulted in the crushing of Sunni strongholds. It continued in their absurd response to defeat: provoking civil unrest in an internal conflict they could not hope to win. That civil unrest has come within a handsbreadth of politically driving America from Iraq. And now they realize too late that an American withdrawal means their inevitable massacre in a war they are now too weak to win. The Sunnis find themselves, as Westhawk puts it, looking at a political "chasm" they cannot cross.

The massacre of the Sunnis is not quite "inevitable." There remains the possibility of significant intervention from Sunni Arabs in the region, which is precisely what Saudi Arabia has threatened to do.

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. Major Saudi tribal confederations, which have extremely close historical and communal ties with their counterparts in Iraq, are demanding action. They are supported by a new generation of Saudi royals in strategic government positions who are eager to see the kingdom play a more muscular role in the region.

Because King Abdullah has been working to minimize sectarian tensions in Iraq and reconcile Sunni and Shiite communities, because he gave President Bush his word that he wouldn't meddle in Iraq (and because it would be impossible to ensure that Saudi-funded militias wouldn't attack U.S. troops), these requests have all been refused. They will, however, be heeded if American troops begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq. As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene.

Read the whole thing. Note that the disclaimer at the end -- that it does not represent "official Saudi policy" -- is a crock. As I wrote yesterday, the projection of Sunni power into Iraq would have terrible long-term consequences, and is reason enough to sustain the American military presence.
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First, a couple of exciting quizzes via AtlanticBlog:

Can somebody, by the way, explain why we started calling English class "Language Arts"? I've never received a clear explanation.

Via Megan McCardle, test your accent:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Then, via the TigerHawk Son, a quiz that measures your geekiness in far greater detail than either of the foregoing. (Son admonishes, "be honest, because there are a lot of Star Trek questions.")

I scored just under 20%. Which is not a good sign from any perspective.

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If you're a Battlestar Galactica fan, you'll love this highlight reel. If you're not, it may persuade you to become one.

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Michael Ledeen, who both knows an enemy when he sees one and comments here from time to time, is writing a blog at Pajamas Media, "Faster, please!" Great title, but right now I'd settle for "Forward, please!"

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Paul Mirengoff has a rather good short post this morning about the prospects for the containment of Iran via regional proxies.

Diana West (no "realist" to my knowledge) notes that an adviser to the Saudi government, Nawaf Obaid, has said that in the event of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the Saudi government might try to check the spread of Iranian influence by supporting Iraq's Sunni fighters and by inducing a drop in oil prices so as to limit Tehrans's ability to subsidize proxy militias. Diana argues that "a Saudi-Iranian rift over Iraq sounds like a win-win situation for the United States," especially if accompanied by a drop in oil prices. And she contends that such a scenario provides an alternative to "victory" (probably unattainable) or "cataclysm" in Iraq.

I'd be quite surprised if, in the absence of a U.S. presence in Iraq, the Saudis would be able to counter-balance Iran there. It strikes me as more likely that al Qaeda, if anyone, would serve that function (not that the Saudis and al Qaeda necessarily represent an "either-or"). I'd also be surprised if, without substantial assistance from the U.S., the Saudis or anyone else would be able to check Iranian power in the region as a whole.

I do agree, though, that Sunni-Shia strife in Iraq is not a threat to our security (as long as we're not in the crossfire) and that certain of Iran's neighbors are likely to be far better long-term anti-Iran coalition partners than the Europeans. Finally, I note that to the extent James Baker wants to enter into a grand bargian with Iran, he is not only unrealistic, he's not even a "realist" in the academic, balance-of-power sense.

West's column, which bears the silly headline "Saudi-Iranian rift?" (as if there has ever not been one), had this to say about the prospect that the Saudis would work against Iran in the event of an American withdrawal:

Here's an "or else" scenario from Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to the Saudi government, that actually sounds promising -- not a term that usually springs to my mind to describe Saudi scenarios. Contemplating what he would call an unwelcome American withdrawal from Iraq, Mr. Obaid writes that the Saudi government just might fill the breach out of "religious responsibility" to Iraq's Sunni minority. Saudi Arabia, "the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community," Mr. Obaid writes, just might decide to support Iraq's Sunni fighters, just as Iran has been supporting Iraq's Shi'ite fighters, to avert a possible "full-blown ethnic cleansing."

Imagine: Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shi'ite Iran -- and nary an American soldier ordered to pull his PC punches in the crossfire. But there's more. Mr. Obaid continues: King Abdullah might also "decide to strangle Iranian funding of the [Shi'ite] militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties ...The result would be to limit Tehran's ability to continue funneling hundreds of millions each year to Shi'ite militias is Iraq and elsewhere."

I like. If Saudi Arabia "strangled" Iran's economy, that would also strangle Iran's capacity to fund its nuclear blackmail program, not to mention Hezbollah and other murderous proxies. And what was that the Saudi adviser said about cutting the price of crude oil in half?

A Saudi-Iranian, Sunni-Shi'ite rift over Iraq sounds like a win-win situation for the United States, maybe even better than the Sino-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War. This time around, instead of nuclear weapons to build in the interim, we would have something even more liberating to work on -- energy independence.

At the risk of getting on Diana West's bad side, this is silliness at many levels. Let us count the ways:

First, the last thing we want is the Saudis funding more Sunni Islamic proxy warriors. We thought that was a great idea in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- and it may have been worth it even in retrospect, if you believe Afghanistan brought down the Soviet Union a decade or two earlier than it would have fallen otherwise -- but the blowback is the war we have now. The only thing worse than a wealthy, corrupt, monarchial Saudi Arabia spending all its excess money on yachts and mosques in Pakistan is the same country arming and training mujahideen. What will they do when Iran is sufficiently contained? Find somebody else to blow up, that's what. The problem of unemployed soldiers is a famous one in history, and Americans (particularly, I'm sorry to say, on the right) seem oblivious to it. Americans are blind to this problem because we are just about the only people on earth who both willingly go to war and delight in returning home to an ordinary life when the war is over. For most soldiers in most places through most of history, there is no better ordinary life to return to.

Second, this is another version of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf, the failed approach that led us to support Saddam Hussein against Iran in a barbaric war, triggered the "tanker war", brought us into Saudi Arabia when Saddam counterbalanced his way into Kuwait in 1990, and led to the twelve year "warm war" against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, during which we enriched the worst people in the region with sanctions, flew 10,000 sorties a year against Iraq, bombed it far more often than Democrats are willing to admit, and still could not bring Saddam Hussein to heel. In all of these ways, offshore balancing -- the failed strategy of favoring stability over freedom in the region -- led to September 11. Whatever the other failures of the Bush administration's foreign policy, this insight remains true. We must not allow our stress over Iraq to push us back into offshore balancing, which is where I fear James Baker is going to lead our president. If George Bush follows the advice of Baker and other Saudiphiles, he will have abandoned the one great foreign policy insight of his administration and destroyed any hope that history will regard him differently than the current opinion of the New York Times.

Third, the Saudis have had plenty of chances to contain Iran. The ugly truth is that they will not get their hands truly dirty for several reasons, the most significant of which is that they know that even if the United States retreats from Iraq it will come riding to Saudi Arabia's rescue if Iran gets too aggressive. It was this confidence that allowed the Saudis to obstruct our investigation into Iran's previous attack on the United States, the bombing of the Khobar Towers. Nothing will shake that confidence short of an aggressive American strategy to slash our economy's reliance on imported oil, the one thing that can weaken all the disgusting and dangerous regimes that need to be "balanced" only because of their natural resources.

The Persian Gulf and environs will be of strategic significance so long as the world's economy depends on petroleum, after which it will slide back into the primitive incompetence that characterized it from the rise of the Ottoman Empire until the oil age, at least if it continues its tradition of monarchial, theocratic and fascist oppression. If you believe that the oil age will continue for several generations, you know that neither we nor the other major powers of the world will be able to ignore the region. The choices are "offshore balancing" or some other strategy, and I think that history teaches us that some other strategy is now necessary. There was a chance that Iraq might have been a model for regional reform, but we unaccountably did not match our military planning to the transformational objective. We obviously need a new plan. Hoping that the Sunni kings fund terrorists to attack the Shiite clerics is not only not a plan, it is an obviously terrible idea.

The question, of course, is what would a better strategy look like?
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In this morning's Wall Street Journal, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov decries the failure of American strategy in some of the sharpest diagnosis you are likely to read in a newspaper. While I do not agree with every aspect of his prescription, he nails the description:

For the past few years, the dictators and terrorists have been gaining ground, and with good reason. The deepening catastrophe in Iraq has distracted the world's sole superpower from its true goals, and weakened the U.S. politically as well as militarily. With new congressional leadership threatening to make the same mistake--failing to see Iraq as only one piece of a greater puzzle--it is time to return to the basics of strategic planning.

Thirty years as a chess player ingrained in me the importance of never losing sight of the big picture. Paying too much attention to one area of the chessboard can quickly lead to the collapse of your entire position. America and its allies are so focused on Iraq they are ceding territory all over the map. Even the vague goals of President Bush's ambiguous war on terror have been pushed aside by the crisis in Baghdad.

The U.S. must refocus and recognize the failure of its post-9/11 foreign policy. Pre-emptive strikes and deposing dictators may or may not have been a good plan, but at least it was a plan. However, if you attack Iraq, the potential to go after Iran and Syria must also be on the table. Instead, the U.S. finds itself supervising a civil war while helplessly making concessions elsewhere.

This dire situation is a result of the only thing worse than a failed strategy: the inability to recognize, or to admit, that a strategy has failed.

Read the whole thing.
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Glenn Reynolds links to Walter Olson's op-ed piece arguing for reform of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other laws and regulations that chill risk-taking and drive capital from the United States. Glenn's Insta-verdict: "I think there's an excessive degree of complacency on this topic." I obviously think so as well, given my recent blogging zig into the tedious but critical subject of corporate governance.

Olson wonders whether the Democrats, who are not exactly thought of as the friends of business, will bash corporate America more than liberate it:

What’s more, the new Democrat Congress is likely to find business bashing more appealing than restricting litigation.

Maybe, but I think the opposite may be true. The Republicans, who are always vulnerable to the charge of being in the pockets of the "corporations" and their "Benedict Arnold CEOs," could not be seen to loosen reforms enacted in the wake of the financial scandals of 2001-2002. The Democrats, who have long-established anti-business bona fides, can support reform in the name of "competitiveness" or some other rationale that will simultaneously placate their populist constituencies and reassure the socially liberal working wealthy (such as New York investment bankers and California technology entrepreneurs). Only Nixon could go to China, and only the Democrats can fix Sarbanes-Oxley.

Olson hints at this, pointing out (as I have also pointed out) that New York Democrat Chuck Schumer called for SarbOx reform even before the election. Smart move. It could be just what the Democrats need to persuade pro-growth Americans that they won't gum up the world's most dynamic rich country economy.
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I made my first trip to Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, flying in to Memphis to give a short talk at an awards presentation at the Racket Club. I brought what is basically my stock speech for this sort of event, but I always try to lighten things up a bit with a few custom lines tailored to my audience. This evening was no exception, and early in my presentation I made the following remarks:

I always envisioned my first visit to Tennessee would take me to the Jack Daniels distillery, or at least that of George Dickle. But I’m thrilled to be in Memphis, since in addition to enjoying the brown liquors, I also happen to be a compulsive music collector, and am thus equally honored to find myself in the home of Stax, Sun, and Goldwax records, all of which I revere. Now if I can just score some barbecue before I leave town it I’ll have no regrets whatsoever...

And then I got on with my talk.

Later, after the proceedings were over, I realized that my feeble attempt at humor had not been taken lightly. When he found out I was leaving for Chicago first thing in the morning, my host, a financial executive at Federal Express, insisted on taking me out for Memphis barbecue that very night. Out of courtesy I offered a feeble "oh, that's very kind of you but I'd hate to put you to any trouble," but he no doubt sensed the insincerity in my voice and insisted, at which point I gleefully accepted.

He took me to the nearest place, Corky's, which he warned was not the very best barbecue in Memphis, but it was pretty damn good. Memphis is known for "dry rub" ribs, but the lady who waited on us insisted that the "wet" ribs were also first rate, so I ordered half a slab of each. My host ordered a basket of biscuits, which seemed superfluous to me, but he said you need the biscuits for the "whole Corky's experience." I didn't want to fill up on bread with ribs coming, but reconsidered when the basket of deep fried biscuits arrived at the table. Dipping those babies in bbq sauce was a real treat. The ribs arrived and were terrific, and all told, I was very pleased with my Memphis BBQ experience.

Corky's, by the way, has taken full advantage of its location in the Fed Ex hub, and apparently does enough mail order business to have its own Fed Ex depot that does nothing but send shipments of Corky's barbecue all over the world overnight. If you want to order some for yourself, you can do so here.
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Last night I walked from the Pierre Hotel at 61st and Fifth Avenue in New York City back to Penn Station, which is at 32nd and 7th. It was 70 degrees outside on the last day of November, and there were stylish people in short sleeves and bare midriffs doing their Christmas shopping in the most lavish stores in America. It made me remember a thought I have had before: if global climate change has warmed the winters in the American northeast without heating up the summers -- and that certainly appears to be the impact in the last twenty years -- has the effect been to co-opt the very people who would otherwise most support the relatively few American greens who want us to join Kyoto? If Manhattan's non-driving liberals aren't worried about climate change, what American will be?

Anyway, I cut through Rockefeller Center and snapped a few pictures. Everything was as it usually is this time of year, except the ice on the skating rink was very wet and nobody wore winter clothes. As always, click on the pictures to enlarge them.

It really is Decemberween.

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