From the Associated Press:

Chertoff: U.S. would have been safer with Dubai company at ports

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. missed an opportunity to make its shores safer when it drove away a Dubai-based company poised to operate cargo terminals at several American seaports, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.

In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, Chertoff said the international shipping firm DP World could have helped implement stronger security at many ports where the U.S. now has limited influence.

"We could (have) actually built in some additional assurances, which would have given us more security in the wake of the deal than we had before the deal," Chertoff said. "The oddity of this, the irony of this, is that had the deal gone forward, we would have had greater ability to impose a security regime worldwide on the company than we have now."

DP World, the world's third-largest ports company, got a role in loading and unloading cargo from ships in at least 20 U.S. ports when it purchased the British company Peninsular & Oriental. The Bush administration defended the deal, but under pressure from Congress, the company said this month that it will sell its U.S. businesses to an American buyer.

The decision followed a month of attacks by critics who said they did not trust a government-owned company from the Arabian Peninsula to be given a sensitive role handling cargo at U.S. ports. DP World is owned by the Emirate of Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates.

Chertoff, however, said DP World has a good track record with U.S. authorities and has long been trusted to help move U.S. military materiel and personnel.

Jerry Kilgore lost his bid to succeed the prospective 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner. Though as Election Day drew near, the Kilgore camp believed they had an issue that would put them over the top -- illegal immigration. It didn't work and may be a harbinger of things to come for Republicans if, as the Wall Street Journal editorializes today, the party of Reagan morphs into the party of Tom Tancredo. Just after Kilgore's defeat Fred Barnes noted in the Weekly Standard that Republicans had lost their grip on what had been two solidly Republican counties in Northern Virginia.

From the governor's election in Virginia last week, there's a bit of evidence that the Republican grip on the exurbs may be loosening.... [T]he outcome in Loudoun and Prince William should be alarming to Republicans. Located west of Washington, Loudoun is the second fastest-growing county in the country. Kilgore lost Loudoun by 51 percent to 46 percent. A year earlier, Bush did 10 points better.... The numbers in Prince William, south of Washington, were slightly better. Kilgore was defeated by 50 percent to 48 percent, slipping five points below Bush....

I think there are two better explanations for the Republican retreat in the two exurban counties. First, there's the immigration issue. Late in the campaign, Kilgore played up his opposition to government aid for illegal immigrants. He did so in TV ads and speeches, criticizing Kaine for supporting taxpayer-financed services for illegals and their families. The tagline in his TV spots was: "What part of 'illegal' does Tim Kaine not understand?"

The question is not whether Kilgore was indulging in blatant immigrant-bashing. He wasn't. The question is whether his emphasis on illegals might have been seen as unfriendly to immigrants, especially by the large immigrant communities in the two counties....

"They overplayed the immigrant issue," says Mark Rozell, professor of public policy at George Mason University in northern Virginia. "They may have caused a counter-mobilization by people who were offended by the ads."

Rozell says he was "stunned" when he heard a Kilgore radio ad on illegal immigrants on a classical music station in Washington. "Is that the demographic their ads were supposed to appeal to?" he says. In all likelihood, Rozell says, the ads appealed only to Republicans already committed to vote for Kilgore.

Loudoun and Prince William were not as vote-rich for Bush last year as many other exurbs. Of the 100 fastest-growing counties, according to Brownstein and Rainey, "Bush took 70 percent or more of the vote in 40 of them and 60 percent or more in 70 of them. In all, Bush won 63 percent of the votes in these 100 counties."

So Loudoun and Prince William aren't quite typical in yet another way: They're not landslide Republican counties. But the fact that Kilgore fell far short of the president's showing in the two Virginia exurbs is bound to be a matter of concern to Republicans as they focus on 2006 and 2008.

President Bush opposes the House-passed immigration bill because it isn't "comprehensive" and has asked for everyone involved in the debate to keep it "civil." Of course, he was talking to House Republicans. Having successfully run STATEWIDE in Texas and twice NATIONALLY, the president may have a better grasp on how to maintain Republican majorities than those from overwhelmingly safe districts who appear to be the most vocal on the immigration issue.

Also see "Social Conservatives, Sen. Sam Brownback and Immigration Reform."

From AFP:

US to test 700-tonne explosive

The US military plans to detonate a 700 tonne explosive charge in a test called "Divine Strake" that will send a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas, a senior defense official said.

"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Tegnelia said the test was part of a US effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he told defense reporters.

We also have -- are you ready for this - a 700-tonne explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada," he said.

"And that represents to us the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem," he said.

Go ahead and make the house-passed immigration bill law, writes George Will in today's Washington Post:

And conservatives should favor reducing illegality by putting illegal immigrants on a path out of society's crevices and into citizenship by paying fines and back taxes and learning English. Faux conservatives absurdly call this price tag on legal status "amnesty." Actually, it would prevent the emergence of a sullen, simmering subculture of the permanently marginalized, akin to the Arab ghettos in France. The House-passed bill, making it a felony to be in the country illegally, would make 11 million people permanently ineligible for legal status. To what end?

The good news is that Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader Boehner are coming around to Will's arguments.

Social conservatives couldn't have a better friend on Capitol Hill than the Senator from Kansas. On the cultural divide, he stands as far away from Sen. Kennedy as Pluto is from Mars. Yet, Brownback was instrumental in getting the immigration bill out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Upon passage, he noted the bill, which also tightens border security, isn't "amnesty," which some conservative critics have falsely claimed in much the same way liberals did in accusing Republicans of "cutting" programs when, in fact, they were just slowing the rate of spending growth. It's an effective rhetorical device but deeply misleading. Said Brownback:

I am pleased that we were able to report out a bill that makes positive strides toward a guest-worker program and strong enforcement at the border and on the employer....Committee passage is a big step, but not the final step. Workable immigration reform is one of the biggest issues facing the country today and in the future, and we struck a good balance. We need to continue to work on this bill from the floor of the Senate to ensure that we don’t make the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty bill or the 1996 enforcement-only bill, which together led to an explosion of the illegal immigrant population.

David Brooks in today's New York Times also argues (Times Select, unfortunately) that social conservatives should speak up in support of the Brownback-backed immigration bill and not let opponents claim the moral high ground. Some highlights:

The facts show that the recent rise in immigration hasn't been accompanied by social breakdown, but by social repair. As immigration has surged, violent crime has fallen by 57 percent. Teen pregnancies and abortion rates have declined by a third. Teenagers are having fewer sexual partners and losing their virginity later. Teen suicide rates have dropped. The divorce rate for young people is on the way down.

Over the past decade we've seen the beginnings of a moral revival, and some of the most important work has been done by Catholic and evangelical immigrant churches.... This is evident in everything from divorce rates (which are low, given immigrants' socioeconomic status) to their fertility rates (which are high) and even the way they shop.... By the second generation, most immigrant families are middle class and paying taxes that more than make up for the costs of the first generation. By the third generation, 90 percent speak English fluently and 50 percent marry non-Latinos.... Right now...government pushes immigrants into a chaotic underground world. The Judiciary Committee's bill...would tighten the borders, but it would also reward virtue. Immigrants who worked hard, paid fines, paid their taxes, stayed out of trouble and waited their turn would have a chance to become citizens. This isn't government enabling vice; it's government at its best, encouraging middle-class morality....

Here are two pieces worth reading on the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the "Israel Lobby" in the U.S.

From Max Boot in the LA Times (reg. req'd):

IN HIS CLASSIC 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," the late Richard Hofstadter noted: "One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality that it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed." As examples, he cited a 96-page pamphlet by Joseph McCarthy that contained "no less than 313 footnote references" and a book by John Birch Society founder Robert Welch that employed "one hundred pages of bibliography and notes" to show that President Eisenhower was a communist.

For a more recent instance of the paranoid style, a modern-day Hofstadter could consult "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy," a "working paper" by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. With 83 pages of text and 211 footnotes, the Mearsheimer-Walt essay (part of which appeared in the London Review of Books) is as scholarly as those of Welch and McCarthy — and just as nutty.

And from Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.

Walt and Mearsheimer are not the first to wade into these swamps. In March 2003, US Representative James Moran inveighed against Jews at an antiwar rally: ''If it was not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq," the Virginian Democrat fumed, ''we would not be doing this." It was at about the same time that Professor Edward Said of Columbia University was writing, ''Wherever you look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three inordinately influential minority groups who share . . . unbridled support for extremist Zionism." A year earlier it had been South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, lamenting that ''the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal" in the United States; no one dares oppose Israel ''because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful."

The following is President Reagan's letter accepting the resignation of Caspar Weinberger as Secretary of Defense and thanking him for his great service to our nation:

THE WHITE HOUSE

November 5, 1987

Dear Cap:

It is with the deepest regret that I accept your resignation as Secretary of Defense, effective upon the appointment and qualification of your successor.

Nearly 20 years ago, I had the good fortune to have you serve as my Director of Finance for the State of California. Your exceptional performance in that post as well as in subsequent positions with the Federal Government -- among them, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare -- left me no doubt that you would make an outstanding Secretary of Defense. Not only was I correct in my judgment, but I am confident that you will be remembered as the most distinguished and effective Secretary of Defense in our Nation's history.

For the past seven years, you have worked tirelessly to help restore both America's military strength and its self-confidence. You have always recognized that the mantle of liberty carries with it responsibility and leadership. You've been indispensable in upgrading our military preparedness by promoting the B - 1 bomber, overseeing expansion of our Navy to 600 ships, and eloquently advocating the Strategic Defense Initiative -- the most important technological breakthrough in defense strategy in our lifetime. You have successfully enhanced the quality of our military personnel and improved morale, so that today the percentage of high school graduates among enlistees in our armed services is the highest in our Nation's history. You have also set an example in cracking down on waste and abuse in Pentagon spending, ensuring American taxpayers that their hard-earned monies are being properly and efficiently utilized.

I know well that you are an ardent admirer of Winston Churchill and an astute observer of history. As Secretary of Defense, you have demonstrated time and again the vision, the passion, the sound judgment, and the ability to inspire which Churchill possessed in such full measure. You recognize, as he did, that we live in a dangerous time when the survival and triumph of freedom are not self-evident. If freedom is to endure and expand, it will only be because we understand the lessons of history and the nature of the implacable enemy that confronts us globally. Having immersed yourself in these issues, you have helped this Nation apply these lessons to the many crises that we have faced together. As a result, the United States has been able to conduct itself in the 1980s in a way befitting a great Nation and the leader of the free world. Cap, you have my heartfelt gratitude for your incomparable service to our Nation. I know that as you return to the private sector, you will continue to champion the public policies that have kept our Nation strong, prosperous, and free.

Nancy joins me in offering you and Jane, and your loved ones, our warm best wishes for every future happiness. May God bless and keep you.

Reagan's words -- "we live in a dangerous time when the survival and triumph of freedom are not self-evident. If freedom is to endure and expand, it will only be because we understand the lessons of history and the nature of the implacable enemy that confronts us globally" -- still ring true today.

From Wired.com:

Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.

In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy. But increasingly, they are coming under threat of censorship....

To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter internet content of any country in the world -- second only to China....

Outright political bloggers have an even tougher time.

Hanif Mazroui was arrested in 1994 and charged with acting against the Islamic system through his writings. He was jailed for 66 days and then acquitted....

Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist and blogger, was arrested and charged with insulting the country's leader, collaborating with the enemy, writing propaganda against the Islamic state and encouraging people to jeopardize national security.

He had been in jail for 60 days when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He appealed, and was released on bail. Although his sentence has been reduced to three years, he still faces charges of insulting the leader and writing propaganda.

Another, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been in prison since February 2005. He was first arrested in November 2004 for speaking out against the arrest of three colleagues. According to the Committee to Protect Bloggers, Saminejad's website was hacked into by people linked to the Iranian Hezbollah movement.

After his release, he launched his blog at a new address, which led to his second arrest in February 2005. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and then given an extra 10 months for inciting "immorality."

Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals.

Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the government has just launched a competition for the best four blogs. The subjects: the Islamic revolution and the Quran.

"The government has observed carefully and learned that blogs are important ... and they want to capitalize on that," she said. "They want to lead the movement, they want to control it."

(See here and here.)

Posted on March 21, 2006:

It would be interesting to know whether the NSA program helped snag Babar and his buddies across the Atlantic. From the BBC:

Seven British citizens had acquired "most of the necessary components" to launch a bombing campaign in the UK, the Old Bailey has heard.

Prosecutor David Waters QC said "pubs, nightclubs and trains" were discussed as potential targets, but police moved in before the plot "reached fruition"....

Mr Waters told the jury they would be hearing from an American citizen, Mohammed Babar, who conspired with the defendants.

Babar has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences in the US and, according to the prosecutor, "has an insight as an insider into the events and plans which an outsider could not have".

It is claimed Babar met several of the defendants in England and in Pakistan, where many of them have family connections.

Mr Waters said the defendants' "principal purpose" in travelling to Pakistan was "to acquire expertise in relation particularly to explosives".

It was during a meeting with Babar that 24-year-old defendant Omar Khyam, from Crawley in West Sussex, allegedly told Babar his targets could include pubs, nightclubs and trains....

The prosecutor said Mr Khyam and co-defendant Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton in Bedfordshire, both told Babar they worked for a man who they claimed was "number three in al-Qaeda".

From Asharq Al-Awsat:

Beirut- Informed sources have revealed told Asharq al-Awsat that the international commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri received the transcript of a phone call conversation between a Lebanese official and his Syrian counterpart in which the former confirmed to the latter that the assassination had taken place.

The sources alluded to what was mentioned in commission chief Judge Serge Brammertz's report on achieving a major breakthrough, and cited sources in the international commission that "the breakthrough came about by finding solid proof that periodic meetings were held between Lebanese and Syrian security officials and officials in a Lebanese group known for its allegiance to Syria, in addition to analyzing scores of phone calls held between security officials in that group, the Syrian intelligence center in Beirut, and an important official head office which German Judge Detlev Mehlis referred to in his first report.

The sources confirmed that "analysis of the phone calls, which began on the evening of Sunday 13 February 2005 and continued until 4 pm the following day--in other words, four hours after the crime took place--showed that most of the conversation revolved around the crime. In addition, the commission received the text of a very important phone call held between a high-ranking Lebanese official and his Syrian counterpart in which the former confirmed to the latter that the assassination had taken place and Al-Hariri had in fact been killed."

I usually agree with the editors of the New York Post, but not this paragraph from today's editorial

Forced repatriation, also under consideration, is a drastic - and politically explosive - option. But it needs to be part of the debate, if only to underscore the gravity of the current debate.

Do Republicans really want to go down this road? This blogger makes some interesting points, while this one, I believe, is unfair and doesn't make much sense. Why would a potential GOP presidential candidate take such a position if it were just about "ambition"? And where in the Senator's quote does he exclude tougher border enforcement? He doesn't. Also, President Bush generally supports the bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee, so is he somehow weakening his credentials as a hawk "in the GWOT"? I don't think so. I do have a prediction, though. An immigration bill won't come out of conference until after the November election.

There is an effort afoot to discredit any material that may undermine the narrative that "Bush lied us into war" and that Saddam's connection to al Qaeda was tenuous at best. Consider this quote from an AP wire story today:

[John] Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute, dismissed the documents: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there."

Prados knows "it's not there," even if he hasn't read all the documents -- the vast majority of which haven't been made public let alone translated. Of course, he has a book out saying Bush lied us into war, so there CAN'T be anything that contradicts the book he already wrote.

The same holds for Peter Bergen, who informs us that only "Bush administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league." We learn from Bergen that, "the 9/11 commission found no 'collaborative relationship' between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein...." Well, one of those 9/11 commissioners, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, said recently that the documents are a "very significant set of facts" and "tie [Saddam] into a circle that meant to damage the United States." It's unclear what Republican box Bergen would put the onetime Democratic presidential candidate in. Like Prados, Bergen has invested a lot of time and effort in one particular Iraq war story line. "It's long been known that Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's," he writes, "but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation."

And then there's the ubiquitous Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who pops up in a silly and dismissive front-page piece on the documents in today's New York Times. He notes that "there's no quality control" when you just throw a bunch of documents out into the public domain. Another U.S. intelligence official is quoted anonymously as saying that "our view is there's nothing in here [the documents already released] that changes what we know today." There's no doubt that some documents may be fraudulent and that a few may wildly over interpret the meaning of some the documents. But to dismiss all of them -- leaving aside that fact the most haven't been reviewed -- is a bit rich and arrogant considering how clueless U.S. intelligence was on what was going on inside Iraq and al Qaeda. Consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):

“The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority.”

“According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden.”

“CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership.”

“CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein’s personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda.”

“There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the fall of 2002.”

“Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al Qaeda.”

“The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism.”

Let's recap. The US intelligence consensus was that Saddam wouldn't invade Kuwait in 1990. They were totally unaware that Saddam was operating a "Manhattan Project"-sized nuclear weapons program until after the 1991 Gulf War. They were a bit off on the status of Saddam's wmd programs in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Imagine if they also blew it on the extent of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.

All of the above pretty much encapsulates the current media view. Because they cannot even entertain the possibility that they may have been wrong, there isn't any new evidence that can possibly be produced.

To be continued....

This issue is not a subject of debate on Capitol Hill by either side in the immigration divide, but it should be. Nearly three years ago, John Fonte, the director of the Hudson Institute's Center for American Common Culture, wrote an interesting article on the "need for a patriotic assimilation policy" in the U.S. "It makes no sense to discuss immigration without talking about assimilation," Fonte wrote, "nor does it make sense to develop an immigration policy without an assimilation policy."

But today on Capitol Hill [and in the White House for that matter] that is exactly what is happening. You hardly hear a peep about it. The House-passed immigration bill ignores the topic, while Senate Majority Leader Frist will likely sponsor a similar enforcement-only bill in the Senate. Sen. Specter's Judiciary Committee-passed bill will likely have nothing on "patriotic assimilation" and even Sen. McCain's "earned citizenship" bill says little on the issue. The same holds for the bill sponsored by Sens. Kyl and Cornyn.

It's a fairly good bet that a bill will get through the Senate. What the final legislation will look like when [and IF] it emerges from the House-Senate conference committee is anyone's guess. Though, what is certain is that most immigrants will continue to come to the U.S. because of the opportunity our nation offers for a better life. Agree or disagree with him, Fonte makes some points worthy of debate and consideration by our elected representatives.

From Fonte's May 14, 2004 piece, "We Need a Patriotic Assimilation Policy":

For more than two hundred years, immigrants to America and their children have been successfully assimilated into what has been called the American way of life. This civic or patriotic assimilation of immigrants into the American constitutional regime did not happen naturally. Patriotic assimilation was the end result of a sometimes explicit (and other times implicit) long-range vision formulated by America’s leaders. From the days of George Washington continuing through the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and supported in the past decade by such public figures as Barbara Jordan, this strategic vision has helped to define immigration-assimilation policy by articulating two interconnected ideas: (1) welcoming immigrants and (2) assimilating those immigrants into the mainstream of American civic life....

Closer to our own time, in a 1995 New York Times oped entitled “The Americanization Ideal,” the late Texas Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan wrote, “Immigration imposes mutual obligations. Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture,” but the native-born must “assist them” in learning about America, and, at the same time, must oppose prejudice and “vigorously enforce” laws against discrimination.

In different ways, Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, and Jordan all advocated what I have called patriotic assimilation....

Patriotic assimilation occurs when a newcomer essentially adopts American civic values and the American heritage as his or her own. It occurs, for example, when newcomers and their children begin to think of American history as “our” history, not “their” history. To give a hypothetical example, imagine an eighth-grade Korean-American female student studying the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Does she think of those events in terms of “they” or “we”? Does she envision the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia as something that “they” (white males of European descent) were involved in two hundred years before her ancestors came to America, or does she imagine the Constitutional Convention as something that “we” Americans did as part of “our” history?

“We” implies successful patriotic assimilation. If she thinks in terms of “we,” she has done what millions of immigrants and immigrant children have done in the past. She has adopted America’s story as her story, and she has adopted America’s Founders—Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington, et al.—as her ancestors. (This does not mean that she, like other Americans, will not continue to argue about our history and our heritage, nor that she will ignore the times that America has acted ignobly.)

... A successful patriotic assimilation project would have two phases: (1) setting the terms of the debate by shaping the national conversation on immigrant assimilation in American life and (2) offering concrete programs to assist the project. Strategically, the Bush administration could do, in broad terms, what the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations did in the early twentieth century.

First, Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson used the White House “bully pulpit” to promote an “Americanization” project that would bring newcomers into the mainstream of American life. For example, on July 4 and 5, 1915, President Wilson, cabinet members, and prominent public figures such as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis gave speeches at citizenship ceremonies in 150 cities around the nation as part of “National Americanization Day”....

The mandate of the Office of Citizenship [in the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services] should be to assist our new fellow citizens in understanding the serious moral commitment that they are making in taking the Oath and in swearing true faith and allegiance to American liberal democracy.

Because we are a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country, our nationhood is not based on ethnicity, race, or religion, but instead on a shared loyalty to our constitutional republic and its liberal democratic principles. If immigration to America is going to continue to be the great success story that it has been in the past, it is essential that newcomers have an understanding of, and attachment to, our democratic republic, our heritage, and our civic principles.

In sum, it is time to launch a national initiative aimed at promoting the civic and patriotic assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream of American life. Today as in the past, patriotic assimilation is a necessary component of any successful immigration policy. This does not mean that we should blindly replicate all the past Americanization policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, some of which would be inappropriate today, but it does mean that we have much to learn from our great historical success in civic assimilation. In the final analysis, it means that we should draw on a usable past, exercise common sense, and develop a patriotic assimilation policy that will be consistent with our principles and effective in today’s world.

Blair, in a speech to the Australian parliament:

"But the strain of frankly anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in," he said....

"The danger with America today is not that they are too much involved. The danger is that they decide to pull up the drawbridge and disengage. We need them involved. We want them engaged."

Blair's right. And judging from the activity on Capitol Hill the last few months, he should be worried.

These two editorials are worth a read.

The Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon, a centrist Democrat, argues in today's Washington Post that the best way to prevent a large-scale civil war is to not repeat what happened in Baghdad in April 2003. Back then, unchecked small-scale looting eventually spiraled out of control.

Administration officials have been right in recent weeks to argue that there is no large-scale civil war underway in Iraq....

But if the political process continues to falter and the risk of civil war looms larger, we will also need a military plan for quelling it. Much of the American debate has been asking how to handle an all-out conflict in which Iraq has already fractured and violence is rampant. But the more important question is how to quell violence in the early stages, before such a scenario develops fully....

On this point, initial indications are that American thinking is on the wrong track. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has stated that U.S. forces would not become heavily involved in any civil strife, leaving it instead to Iraqis to sort out the problem. This approach, which mirrors the relatively passive approach U.S. troops took to the reprisal violence after the Feb. 22 bombing, has an understandable appeal. But it is akin to our decision to stand aside and allow wanton looting after Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003, and it could have comparably disastrous consequences....

Civil wars with a heavy ethnic dimension do not typically begin as full-blown conflicts but rather develop an internal dynamic in which hate, rage and fear increasingly influence the actions of a growing number of people.

In such a situation, stemming violence early is critical. Checkpoints need to be manned, curfews enforced, vigilantes arrested or shot, mosques and schools and hospitals protected.

Yes, Iraqi forces can do many of these things and should. And, yes, many of them will. But Iraqi security forces are at present politically untested. Most units are dominated by one group or another. If the country begins to descend toward civil war, the temptation of many will be to take sides in the sectarian strife rather than stop it.

The foreign coalition can do a great deal to discourage this. By deploying with Iraqi police and army troops on the streets, it can provide enough manpower to do the labor-intensive work required to restore order as anarchy begins to spread.... It can act as a glue, helping to hold them together by working with them and providing an example worthy of emulation.

In his statements about letting Iraqis handle their own civil strife, perhaps Rumsfeld was trying to drive home to Iraqis the message that they should not count on the distant American superpower to bail them out if civil war begins. This message is grounded in a sound logic; Iraqis do need to step up to the plate and solve more of their own problems. But as a full indication of what our military plans would be for any incipient civil war, it is not the right strategy. Now is the time to reassess.

And in the current Weekly Standard, Frederick Kagan and William Kristol make a similar point.

WITHIN HOURS OF THE BOMBING of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra on February 22, the media were filled with warnings that Iraq is sinking into civil war. Of course, almost any insurgency is, in a sense, a civil war, and sectarian violence has marked this insurgency from the very beginning. But the fact is that we are not facing a civil war in Iraq, with large-scale military formations fighting one another along ethnic and sectarian lines. Moreover, we can very likely prevent this outcome, and, even better, make real progress toward victory....

U.S. forces have trained the Iraqis in how to set up checkpoints and search houses. And they have spent many hours teaching them that their loyalty is to the government and not their sect; that they must treat prisoners with respect; that they must behave professionally at all times. The continuing presence of U.S. soldiers is critical to the Iraqis' performance. The Iraqi army is holding together as well as it is because it is backed up and supported, materially and psychologically, by the U.S. Army--and by a sense that the U.S. Army will be there for quite a while to come. It is this simple: No stable and energetic U.S. Army presence--no successful Iraqi army. And without an Iraqi army, expect civil war.

Iraq is at a critical turning point, and U.S. forces are essential to helping the Iraqis get past it. Reducing the U.S. presence in the near future makes no sense, and constantly talking about reducing our forces is counterproductive and enervating. If U.S. force levels are (at least) kept steady while reliable Iraqi forces continue to increase--and the U.S. Army and Marines continue to join with the Iraqis in aggressively fighting the insurgents--the overall level of force that can be brought to bear against the insurgency, and in support of a political process that can hold the country together, will increase. And victory will then be achievable.

Ignore this advice,

"When we conduct this debate it must be done in a civil way," Mr. Bush said after meeting with groups that support legalizing illegal aliens. "It must be done in a way that doesn't pit one group of people against another."

and adopt rhetoric like this,

Illegal immigrants are "a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation" [Rep. Tancredo (R-CO) says.

From today's Los Angeles Times:

Iran's Nuclear Steps Quicken, Diplomats Say

VIENNA — With efforts to halt its nuclear program at an impasse, Iran is moving faster than expected and is just days from making the first steps toward enriching uranium, said diplomats who have been briefed on the program.

If engineers encounter no major technical problems, Iran could manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb within three years, much more quickly than the common estimate of five to 10 years, the diplomats said....

According to one non-Western official who closely follows Iran's progress, engineers at a pilot plant in Natanz are likely to start crucial testing in the next couple of days to ensure that the centrifuges and the pipes connecting them are properly vacuum sealed. They are likely to begin feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into a series of 164 connected centrifuges within about two weeks, the official said.

Diplomats and experts say Iran has forgone usual testing periods for individual centrifuges and small series of linked centrifuges, instead apparently trying to put together as many as possible, as quickly as possible.

They said Iran also was likely to begin assembling more centrifuges in mid-April to put together additional cascades of linked centrifuges. The pilot plant can hold up to six cascades of 164 centrifuges each. It could take many months to complete that work, the diplomats said.

The U.S. and its British, French and German allies believe Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, and must be stopped before learning how to enrich uranium. They view the ability to operate a series of centrifuges as a technological tipping point.

"If you can do one centrifuge, you can do 164," said Emyr Jones Parry, British envoy to the U.N. "If you can do 164, you probably can do many more. That means you have the potential to do full-scale enrichment. If you can do enrichment up to 7%, you can do 80%. If you can do 80%, you can produce a bomb"....

The three-year time frame for Iran to produce a bomb cited by diplomats is the same as an estimate by former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright.

In a paper that will be released Monday by the Institute for Science and International Security, which Albright founded, he and a colleague give a detailed description of how, under a best-case scenario, Iran would be able to manufacture enough highly enriched uranium for a crude nuclear device in three years. Albright cautioned, however, that Iran faces many technical hurdles it might find difficult to overcome....

The European Union and the Americans want to exert vigorous pressure on Iran. They insist on a reinstatement of a total moratorium on uranium enrichment that Iran had voluntarily put in place in late 2004 while negotiating with the EU. The U.S. and EU are willing to use a U.N. procedure that gives Security Council resolutions the force of law, and to impose sanctions.

The Russians and the Chinese, mindful of the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq three years ago, fear that taking too hard a line would lead to an escalation of tensions that could result in military action against Iran. They believe that sanctions and other measures might push Iran to abandon the nonproliferation treaty, which keeps international inspectors in the country.

Russia and China would be willing to allow Iran to retain a small cascade of centrifuges for research purposes....

"We're getting to the point where this fundamental difference between the U.S. and EU position and that of the Russians is being overtaken by Iran's … putting new facts on the ground," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department on nuclear issues. "Iran is closer and closer to enrichment, so the effort to deny them the capability is rapidly failing."

Let's hope our intelligence on the status of Iran's nuclear program is better than we had on Saddam's in 1991.

From a Worldwide Standard post, January 13, 2006:

Saddam Came Close to Having a Nuke in '91; Today, Iran Follows Saddam's Nuclear Procurement Playbook

It's easy to forget that the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait barely passed Congress. It's easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or that its Manhattan Project-sized nuclear program went undetected by US intelligence. It's also easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak.

Some history --

Iraq ratified the NPT in 1969. Twelve year later, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. According to the June 22, 1981 Newsweek,

[t]he Osirak reactor was theoretically only for research purposes—but Iraq twice refused a French offer to supply it with low-enriched uranium, insisting instead on weapons-grade, 93 per cent enriched fuel. Iraq was also operating an Italian-built “hot cell” lab for extracting plutonium, and had arranged to buy large quantities of uranium from Brazil, Portugal and Niger—all without any investment in a nuclear-energy program.

In his 2002 book, The Threatening Storm, Clinton NSC official Kenneth Pollack wrote that Osirak “was the key to Saddam’s nuclear weapons program and ... was due to go online within a matter of weeks.” The bombing set Iraq’s “nuclear bomb program back by several years,” but it also “taught the Iraqis an important lesson. Thereafter, Saddam ordered a redoubling of the Iraqi program...camouflaged against detection.” (Pollack would subsequently note this regarding Saddam's nuclear program.)

After the Osirak attack, Iraq would pursue a secret nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by Western intelligence and the IAEA until after the 1991 Gulf War. As former U.N. inspector David Kay wrote in a 1995 Washington Quarterly piece, Iraq would pursue this program while maintaining “its status as a full member” of the NPT because it was “the desire of the military and security services not to attract any undue attention to Iraq’s developing nuclear program that would complicate procurement and development efforts.”

The fact that Hussein was able to conceal his nuclear program was even more remarkable given that: 1) as the Washington Post noted in October 1991, the “scope and sophistication” of its program “resembled the Manhattan Project, the American effort that produced the first atomic bomb”; and 2) Iraq had passed regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On August 11, 1991, the Post reported that:

International inspectors...unearthed one of the most important—and disturbing—finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb.

The location of the sophisticated, secret factory for manufacturing hundreds of uranium gas centrifuges was unknown to any foreign intelligence agency despite intense scrutiny and untouched by five weeks of severe aerial bombardment during the Gulf War that supposedly eviscerated the Iraqi nuclear project. As such, it is a monument to the world’s ignorance about what a determined bomb-builder such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein can do.

The factory was a key component in Iraq’s elaborate highly redundant and largely secret network of physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, industrial mines, metalworking factories, electrical power generators, nuclear research reactors and radioactive waste processing sites—all aimed at swiftly putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.

The Post also reported:

Despite repeated warnings and Saddam’s own public statements, Western experts consistently underestimated Iraq’s scientific and technical capabilities. Inspection officials now believe Iraq was only 12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as previously thought.

Kay wrote that Iraq hid its program by keeping it “heavily compartmentalized” and employing a variety of deception techniques. For example, Iraq created a network of front companies to import nuclear-related materials “in quantities that were below the size that triggered controls.” Equipment was imported ostensibly for civilian purposes but was diverted to the nuclear program as well. (see here for UNMOVIC May 2003 report on Iraq's attempt to "conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks" for missiles, chems & bios)

The Iraqis, Kay continued, had an “accurate understanding of the limitations of U.S. technical collection systems...” and exploited these vulnerabilities through various methods, including:

construction of buildings within buildings... hiding power and water feeds to mislead as to facility use... diminishing value of a facility by apparent low security and lack of defenses... moving critical pieces of equipment at night....

Apparently, Iran has taken a page out of Saddam's nuclear weapons procurement book.

(Though Somalia gets little media attention these days, it remains a battleground for radical Islamists. From Reuters:

MOGADISHU - Heavy fighting between rival Somali militia linked to Islamic courts and a new "anti-terror" alliance has killed about 90 people in the last three days in the capital, Mogadishu, residents and local radio said on Friday.

The United States is also concerned that a small number of Somalis may be providing a safe-haven for these foreign terrorists inside Somalia, which undermines the efforts of those seeking to establish peace in Somalia and threatens the stability of the Horn of Africa," the statement added.)

Posted on February 20, 2006:

Since the early 1990s, al Qaeda has targeted Somalia. Back then, American forces and U.N peacekeepers were the target. Today, as in other regions of the world, they are also increasingly aiming their gun sights on moderate Muslims. From the BBC:

The fighting pits a new group, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, against the Islamic Courts' militia....

Our correspondent says at least five warlords-cum-ministers in the transitional government are behind the new alliance, which is battling the Islamic Courts.

The courts have set up Mogadishu's only judicial system in parts of the capital but have been accused of links to al-Qaeda.

Their critics accuse the courts of being behind the killing of moderate Muslim scholars.

(From AP: "Russia had a military intelligence unit operating in Iraq up through the 2003 U.S. invasion and fall of Baghdad, a Russian analyst said Friday. A Pentagon report said Russia provided Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military movements and plans. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad."

Posted on January 30, 2006:

From Stephen Hayes:

A follow-up on Dan McKivergan’s post on Russia and Iran. Dan wrote of the worrisome prospect of the U.S. putting its trust in Putin on Iran: “We better have a Plan B if Moscow's recent past is prologue. “ The examples he and Mort Zuckerman provide are deeply disturbing. There are more. Russian intelligence services, for instance, trained Iraqi intelligence operatives as late as September 2002, even as Putin and his cronies spoke publicly of a “common goal” on Iraq between the U.S. and Russia.

It’s September 2002. President Bush gives a speech to the UN making clear that his administration would hold Iraq to account for its defiance of UN resolutions. The Russian government, which for years had carried Iraq’s water on the UN Security Council, announced that it would not send troops in the event of war in Iraq and fought hard against U.S. and British efforts to confront Saddam Hussein.

Nonetheless, Russia eventually endorsed UN Resolution 1441, which threatened “serious consequences” that would result from Iraq’s continued flouting of previous UN resolutions. Putin’s government spoke of its partnership with the U.S. on the war on terror. Putin spokesman Sergei Prikhodko declared: "Russia and the United States have a common goal regarding the Iraqi issue" – disarmament. And Russian Foreign Minister Boris Malakhov proclaimed that the U.S. and Russia “are partners in the anti-terror coalition.”

Not quite.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Robert Collier wrote a series of articles in April 2003 on Russian double-dealing on Iraq. The articles provide a stark reminder of the perils in working with Putin’s Russia and of the need to expedite the exploitation of 2 million documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan:

A Moscow-based organization was training Iraqi intelligence agents as recently as last September -- at the same time Russia was resisting the Bush administration's push for a tough stand against Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi documents discovered by The Chronicle show.

The documents found Thursday and Friday in a Baghdad office of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, indicate that at least five agents graduated Sept. 15 from a two-week course in surveillance and eavesdropping techniques, according to certificates issued to the Iraqi agents by the "Special Training Center" in Moscow.

The Russian government, which has expressed intense disagreement with the U.S.-led war on Iraq, has repeatedly denied giving any military or security assistance to the Hussein regime. Any such aid would violate U.N. sanctions that have severely limited trade, military and other relations with Iraq since 1991.

U.S.-Russian relations have been strained by the split over Iraq. It is unclear whether these revelations, coming on top of U.S. charges that Moscow has been supplying other forms of forbidden assistance to Baghdad, may damage them further.

The “Moscow-based organization,” it turns out, was the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

Russian intelligence officials have confirmed that Iraqi spies received training in specialized counterintelligence techniques in Moscow last fall -- training that appears to violate the United Nations resolution barring military and security assistance to Iraq.

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Boris Labusov, acknowledged that Iraqi secret police agents had been trained by his agency but said the training was for nonmilitary purposes, such as fighting crime and terrorism.

Said Labrusov: "The SVR does not refuse cooperation with secret services of different countries in the areas of counter-terrorism and war, fighting drug traffic and investigating the illegal trade of weapons.”

The Chronicle article continues:

However, it seems likely that the Iraqi agents who were trained at the Moscow center were using their skills for other purposes. Found in the same Mukhabarat office with their personnel files and graduation certificates were a host of other documents, including orders for wiretaps and for break-ins at such sites as the Iranian Embassy, the five-star al-Mansour Hotel and private doctors' offices.

Ronald Reagan’s famous aphorism about dealing with the Soviets was “Trust but Verify.” Perhaps it needs updating.

“Don’t Trust.”

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offers some foreign policy advice, "Good versus evil isn't a strategy," for the White House in today's Los Angeles Times. It's very nice of her. The sophisticated Clintonites weaved a world of stability and hope. They were problem solvers, not ideologues, you see. They enticed Pyongyang to "end" its nuclear weapons program with lots of goodies. They brokered Israel-Palestinian negotiations that brought both sides closer to peace. They reacted quickly to events in Rwanda and in the Balkans. They sent a message of strength and resolve following attacks on our forces in Mogadishu and in Dhahran, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and on the USS Cole. And because they acted against the Taliban, thousands upon thousands were prevented from graduating from the extensive network of al Qaeda terror training camps in Afghanistan and setting up shop in nations across the globe. They handed Bush a stable world in January 2001 and then September 11 hit and the ideologues took over, as Sec. Albright informs us. She also has an interesting take on regime change in Iran:

the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely. In today's warped political environment, nothing strengthens a radical government more than Washington's overt antagonism. It also is common sense to presume that Iran will be less willing to cooperate in Iraq and to compromise on nuclear issues if it is being threatened with destruction.

The odd thing here is that Sec. Albright was, I believe, the first senior American official to call publicly for the ouster of Saddam Hussein. She even compared Saddam to Hitler, noting that the world has not "seen, except maybe since Hitler, somebody who is quite as evil as Saddam Hussein." One of the lessons of history, Albright also lectured, is that "if you don't stop a horrific dictator before he gets started too far--that he can do untold damage" and "if the world had been firmer with Hitler earlier, then chances are that we might not have needed to send Americans to Europe during the Second World War. So, my lesson out of all this is deal with the problem at the time that you can and don't step away from it thinking that it'll go away. I think that's the lesson here."

But if "the Bush administration should disavow any plan for regime change in Iran — not because the regime should not be changed but because U.S. endorsement of that goal only makes it less likely," why did she champion regime change in Iraq? Why did President Clinton sign the Iraq Liberation Act, which specifically called for regime change in Iraq? Why did National Security Advisor Sandy Berger deliver a lengthy speech justifying the need for regime change in Iraq? Why did the Clinton administration call publicly for regime change in Iraq if doing so, according to Albright's own logic, not only made Saddam's ouster "less likely" but also strengthened his hold on power because of our "overt antagonism"?

Would Secretary Albright now like to say that she regrets the Clinton administration's comments about Saddam Hussein and the need to get rid of him?

From today's New York Sun:

CAIRO, Egypt - A former Democratic senator and 9/11 commissioner says a recently declassified Iraqi account of a 1995 meeting between Osama bin Laden and a senior Iraqi envoy presents a "significant set of facts," and shows a more detailed collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

In an interview yesterday, the current president of the New School University, Bob Kerrey, was careful to say that new documents translated last night by ABC News did not prove Saddam Hussein played a role in any way in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Nonetheless, the former senator from Nebraska said that the new document shows that "Saddam was a significant enemy of the United States." Mr. Kerrey said he believed America's understanding of the deposed tyrant's relationship with Al Qaeda would become much deeper as more captured Iraqi documents and audiotapes are disclosed...

"This is a very significant set of facts," former 9/11 commissioner, Mr. Kerry said yesterday. "I personally and strongly believe you don't have to prove that Iraq was collaborating against Osama bin Laden on the September 11 attacks to prove he was an enemy and that he would collaborate with people who would do our country harm. This presents facts should not be used to tie Saddam to attacks on September 11. It does tie him into a circle that meant to damage the United States."

The document may be found here.

The other day the Powerline guys noted that NBC News managed to bury a legitimate scoop "beneath a grotesquely misleading headline." They wrote:

March 22, 2006

It Helps to Read Past the Headline...

...of this report by NBC on the CIA's secret source within Saddam's inner circle: Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. The headline and subhead read: "Iraqi diplomat gave U.S. prewar WMD details. Saddam’s foreign minister told CIA the truth, so why didn’t agency listen?

You have to read deep into the story to learn that Sabri told the CIA that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons:

Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had "poison gas" left over from the first Gulf War. Both Sabri and the agency were wrong.

So NBC had a legitimate scoop, and they buried it in a single sentence beneath a grotesquely misleading headline.

Obviously, if Saddam's Foreign Minister admitted that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and leftover poison gas, that would have been seen as the final confirmation of what everyone in the intelligence community already believed. And Sabri's statement that Saddam "desperately wanted a [nuclear bomb]" but would need more than a few months to a year to build one--bizarrely presented as exculpatory by NBC--would hardly have been reassuring.

It's worth noting, too, that NBC's story is based on leaks by anonymous intelligence officials, who, consistent with their usual practice, no doubt spun the story in as anti-Bush a direction as they could. We don't know exactly what Sabri told the CIA.

By rights, this should be the last nail in the coffin of the "Bush lied!" left. But of course it won't be; the "Bush lied!" theory has been deader than a doornail for a long time, but that hasn't prevented it from being retailed by the left.

Today's Washington Post adds new information to the NBC News piece but not until paragraphs five and six. We learn that Sabri told the CIA that Saddam was lying, that biological weapons research was underway, and that Saddam had dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes.

Publicly Sabri was insisting that Iraq had no prohibited weapons of mass destruction. Privately, the sources said, he provided information that the Iraqi dictator had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway.

When it came to chemical weapons, Sabri told his handler that some existed but they were not under military control, a former intelligence official familiar with the situation said. Another former official added: "He said he had been told Hussein had them dispersed among some of the loyal tribes."

To recap, on March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a broad range of concerns regarding Saddam's weapons programs, his connections to terrorist organizations (see here for latest revelations), his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions.

American intelligence (which had evidently factored in Sabri's claims into its analysis) and other foreign governments concluded at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. On top of this were the findings contained in detailed U.N. reports. For example, on March 6, 2003, the United Nations issued a report on Iraq's "Unresolved Disarmament Issues." It stated that the "long list" of "unaccounted for" WMD-related material catalogued in December of 1998--the month inspections ended in Iraq--and beyond were still "unaccounted for." The list included: up to 3.9 tons of VX nerve agent (though inspectors believed Iraq had enough VX precursors to produce 200 tons of the agent and suspected that VX had been "weaponized"); 6,526 aerial chemical bombs; 550 mustard gas shells; 2,062 tons of Mustard precursors; 15,000 chemical munitions; 8,445 liters of anthrax; growth media that could have produced "3,000 - 11,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 6,000 - 16,000 litres of anthrax, up to 5,600 litres of Clostridium perfringens, and a significant quantity of an unknown bacterial agent." Moreover, Iraq was obligated to account for this material by providing "verifiable evidence" that it had, in fact, destroyed its proscribed materials (see more on Hans Blix and the "verifiable evidence" standard here).

The same report noted "a surge of activity in the missile technology field in the past four years" and that while 817 of the 819 Scud missiles Iraq had imported had been accounted for, inspectors did not know the number of missiles Iraq had indigenously produced or still possessed. Similarly, while inspectors had accounted for 73 of Iraq's 75 declared "special" warheads, doubts remained that Iraqi officials were truthful about how many had actually been manufactured. It acknowledged that inspectors had found a handful of 122mm chemical rocket warheads but noted that this discovery may only be the "tip of the iceberg" since several thousand, in the inspectors' judgment, were still unaccounted for. It also stated that no underground chemical facilities had been found but added that such facilities may exist given the size of Iraq and that future inspections in this area would have to rely on "specific intelligence." Finally, the report declared that there appears to be no "choke points" to prevent Iraq from producing anthrax at the same level it did before 1991, that large-scale Iraqi production of botulinum toxin "could be rapidly commenced," and that given Iraq's history of concealment, "it cannot be excluded that it has retained some capability with regard to VX."

A former ABC news employee I've known for many years, who worked in the same New York City headquarters as John Green, called to tell me that he's not surprised by Green's September 30, 2004 email. Bush had used the "mixed messages" line several times in attacking the Kerry's position on Iraq during their debate in Coral Gables, Florida. From Drudge:

ABC NEWS EXEC: 'BUSH MAKES ME SICK'; E-MAIL REVEALED

**Exclusive**

A top producer at ABC NEWS declared "Bush makes me sick" in an email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.

John Green, currently executive producer of the weekend edition of GOOD MORNING AMERICA, unloaded on the president in an ABC company email obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT.

"If he uses the 'mixed messages' line one more time, I'm going to puke," Green complained.

The blunt comments by Green, along with other emails obtained by the DRUDGE REPORT, further reveal the inner workings of the nation's news outlets.

The former ABC employee told me that the anti-Republican attitude was pervasive in the news division. One time, in particular, during the 2000 Florida recount, this person overheard (and will "never forget") a vice president of the news desk tell another senior news desk member in the hallway that, "I hate the f**cking Republicans."

I know. What a shock!

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes today on a "study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes ... at Harvard, that estimates the 'true costs' of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly even $2 trillion." Just so you know where the authors are coming from here's some material from the "study" that didn't make into Herbert's column:

"Many aspects of the Iraq venture have turned out differently from what was purported before the war: there were no weapons of mass destruction, no clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, no imminent danger that would warrant a pre-emptive war. Whether Americans were greeted as liberators or not, there is evidence that they are now viewed as occupiers. Stability has not been established. Clearly, the benefits of the War have been markedly different from those claimed."

"At the beginning of the War, there was a great deal of talk about winning the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East. Recent opinion polls reflecting public opinion in the Arab world show that exactly the opposite has happened. Some American businesses have even claimed that anti-Americanism spawned by the Iraq War has had an effect on their sales and profits. America’s credibility has been diminished: if some time in the future another American President were to claim that he had solid evidence based on intelligence that there was a threat, that evidence is more likely to be treated with skepticism. America has always prided itself in fighting for human rights; but America’s credentials have been tarnished by Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. These are among the many costs of the Iraq War that we do not attempt to quantify, but which should clearly be counted in any assessment of the Iraq War."

"The bombings in Madrid and London have only exacerbated a growing sense of insecurity. Would matters have been even worse had there been no war? One of the stated objectives of the war was to enhance the sense of security (to make sure that the war on terrorism was fought there, not here.) It is conceivable that the Middle East would have been even more unstable than it is today. But especially on the basis of what we know today—Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and it did not have the capacities to develop them quickly – this seems unlikely, Contrary to the assertions before the War by the Administration, Iraq (with its highly secular regime) was not working with Al Qaeda, and was not a training ground for insurgency. Unfortunately, the disorder that has followed the war has provided a place where such training is going on today."

"The price of oil is significantly higher today than it was before the War in Iraq. Even as the country went to war, it was recognized that it might have effects on the global oil market. Some of the remarks of those in the Administration seem to suggest that it may have even been a factor driving the country to war. Larry Lindsey is reported to have said, “the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq…”

The higher price of oil brings costs and benefits. Profits of the oil companies have increased enormously. It is the one group (besides certain defense contractors) that has clearly benefited from the war. (Though popular discussions of the still not-clear motives for going to war often focused on oil, there is so far no reason to suppose that these benefits to one of the President’s “constituencies” played an important motivation.)"

"Economists also think about the value of information. In this situation, postponing war might have allowed us to gather better information with which to judge whether Iraq posed a real threat. This is not, as Americans say, Monday morning quarterbacking: there were already strong suspicions regarding our sources of intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. More time would have enabled the verification of this evidence. The value of this information would have been enormous. The possibility of war later on would have still been an option. Tens of thousands of lives would have been spared, and hundreds of billions of dollars saved."

"All of this leads to economists’ constant urging that politicians undertake a cost benefit analysis before undertaking any project—especially one with as significant consequences as war."

"In response to accusations about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the connection with Al Qaeda, the Administration has been adamant that it did not intentional deceive the American people; it prefers charges of incompetence to those of malevolence."

"We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might actually have succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of those in the Middle East."

You get the picture. They would have left Saddam in power. They also urge politicians to "undertake a cost benefit analysis before undertaking any project—especially one with as significant consequences as war." Robert Kagan and Gerald Baker offer their own "cost benefit analysis" of following the advice of Stiglitz and Bilmes here and here.

Of course, the authors can write whatever they want but to consider this a serious academic "study" is like calling Fahrenheit 9/11 a balanced documentary.

Kosovar Albanians don't think much of the UN but they sure like the U.S. and NATO. This was abundantly clear when I was over there last August. They resented the fact that the UN Security Council sat on its hands while Milosevic's forces rampaged throughout the province. They were also well aware that it was American leadership that moved other nations to ignore the Security Council and act against the Serb forces. Of course, back then Russia and China blocked UN action. The Russians had a soft spot for Milosevic, while the folks who brought us Tiananmen Square believed the killings, torched villages and mass exodus of Kosovar Albanians were an "internal" matter. Today, as this Wall Street Journal editorial points out, it's more of the same:

Today's leading authority on Darfur is the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who prophesied a world "nasty, brutish and short." At least 200,000 civilians have been killed in the past three years and two million more have become refugees. The source of the problem is the Arab rulers in Khartoum, who have pursued an ethnic cleansing campaign against black Muslims in western Sudan. They've equipped the Janjaweed Arab tribesmen to do the dirty work, and that militia is now attacking civilians across the border in Chad, creating 20,000 more refugees.

To his credit, Kofi Annan started shouting about the problem two years ago, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled it "genocide" not long after that. The U.N.'s mighty peace-making machinery then started to roll and . . . nothing. The Chinese (who have close commercial ties to Khartoum) and Russians have blocked any serious intervention. Arab members of the Security Council have also opposed any attempt to single out Khartoum.

And ABC News reported:

The U.N. Security Council remained divided Monday on imposing punitive measures over the conflict in Darfur despite calls for sanctions against Sudanese allegedly blocking peace in the region.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, on the next to last day of the U.S. presidency of the council, scheduled a closed-door meeting to discuss a report by a U.N.-appointed panel that recommended sanctions against key figures from all groups.

Most of the 15-member council were in favor of sanctions, led by the United States, Britain, France and Denmark but Qatar, China, and Russia were strongly opposed, council diplomats said. Qatar is the only Arab member of the council, China is a major buyer of Sudanese oil, and Russia traditionally opposes sanctions.

Perhaps we should create a new position in our diplomatic corps: Ambassador to Nations that Give a Damn about Atrocities.

Additional material (text, audio and video) has just been released by the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office. If you can translate any of it, please send it along. Here's a sample of the material with its accompanying synopsis:

IISP-2003-00038100
Synopsis: Intelligence coded memo by two IIS Officers: O'mer Ghanim Muhammad and Manzar Ibrahim Al Mashhadani containing intelligence information on various topics: Weapon Boat (Ship); Palestinian Muneer Fathi Basiis, Palestinians trained in Iraq, sources, codeetc.

ISGP-2003-00014647
Synopsis: An order from Saddam Hussein to present $25,000 for the suicide bomber families in Palestine.

ISGP-2003-10150276
Synopsis: Saddam Hussein's speech urging the Arab people to get rid of their regimes.

ISGP-2003-10151538
Synopsis: Discussions between Saddam Hussein and Iraqi officials regarding the Iraqi and Arabian Islamic belief awareness.

ISGQ-2003-M0003871
Synopsis: Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Revolutionary council discussing cooperation and unity with the Syrians.

ISGQ-2003-M0001292
Synopsis: Saddam Hussein addressing high ranking officers and talking about the treason of Hussein Kamil.

ISGQ-2003-M0004444
Synopsis: This audio file contains a meeting between Saddam Hussein and the Revolutionary Command Council about the inspection operations which are to be conducted by the United Nations (UN).

ISGQ-2003-M0004667
Synopsis: This undated media file contains 62 minutes and 36 seconds of audio recorded tape, of President Saddam Hussein's meeting with high ranking Iraqi officials, discussing Ikius Report in the Security Council regarding the Iraqi Biological File.

ISGQ-2003-M0005544
Synopsis: Saddam Hussein meeting with the Ba'ath Party National Command and the State Command, on the Oil for Food program, good-neighbor policies, and possibly Iraqi oil export through a Turkish pipeline.

ISGZ-2004-009247
Synopsis: Iraqi effort to cooperate with Saudi opposition groups and individuals in an effort by Iraq to work against Saudi Arabia

ISGZ-2004-028947
Synopsis: A memo from the IIS to hide info from UN inspection team.

ISGZ-2004-031613
Synopsis: IIS report on Kurdish activities, mention of Kurdish reporting on Al Qaida, reference to Al Qaida presence in Salman Pak.

IZSP-2003-00300856
Synopsis: Iraqi Minister of Defense calls for an investigation into why documents of a WMD nature were found by an inspection team.

(Editor & Publisher has more on the Loven controversy here.)

Posted on March 18, 2006 06:13 PM:

The Associated Press or a DNC Press Release?

This piece by Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press is a classic. The DNC couldn't have done a better job. Of course, Loven may want to do her own fact checking before trying to zing the president. For example, she writes:

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. ''Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq,'' he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. ''That is foolhardy policy.''

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Oh really. In fact, John Murtha, the top House Democrat on defense issues, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean all called for an immediate drawdown of troops.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA):

"There's only two plans. One plan is the president's plan, and that's stay the course and hope. And there's a plan that I'm proposing which, which calls for immediate redeployment."

"My plan says redeploy to the periphery, to Kuwait, to Okinawa. And if there's a terrorist activity that affects our allies, or affects the United States' national security, we can then go back in. I'm not talking about going back in to a civil war because we're in a civil war right now. We're caught in between a civil war right now."

Rep. Pelosi (D-CA):

"What I'm her to say is what Mr. Murtha's resolution does, and that resolution is to say that the strategic redeployment in the region, over the horizon, with a force to go in as necessary to protect us -- us, American, American people -- in case of acts of terrorism that could be a threat to us, or to threats to our neighbors in the region, is a better way to, is a better way to proceed."

And Howard Dean told a radio audience that American forces can't "win the war in Iraq," that we need to "bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately," and that the remaining force should fight Zarqawi from a "neighboring country."

Don't hold your breath for a correction.

What America looks like in the eyes of a frequent Daily Kos blogger. Wonder if Senator Harry Reid, who will be attending the YearlyKos convention, and Sen. Kerry, an occasional Kos blogger, agree?

It would be interesting to know whether the NSA program helped snag Babar and his buddies across the Atlantic. From the BBC:

Seven British citizens had acquired "most of the necessary components" to launch a bombing campaign in the UK, the Old Bailey has heard.

Prosecutor David Waters QC said "pubs, nightclubs and trains" were discussed as potential targets, but police moved in before the plot "reached fruition"....

Mr Waters told the jury they would be hearing from an American citizen, Mohammed Babar, who conspired with the defendants.

Babar has pleaded guilty to terrorism offences in the US and, according to the prosecutor, "has an insight as an insider into the events and plans which an outsider could not have".

It is claimed Babar met several of the defendants in England and in Pakistan, where many of them have family connections.

Mr Waters said the defendants' "principal purpose" in travelling to Pakistan was "to acquire expertise in relation particularly to explosives".

It was during a meeting with Babar that 24-year-old defendant Omar Khyam, from Crawley in West Sussex, allegedly told Babar his targets could include pubs, nightclubs and trains....

The prosecutor said Mr Khyam and co-defendant Salahuddin Amin, 31, from Luton in Bedfordshire, both told Babar they worked for a man who they claimed was "number three in al-Qaeda".

Lee Smith's hilarious and devastating response to Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby" is a must read.

Yesterday, the president rightly praised the work of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar. Commanded by Col. H.R. McMaster, the 3rd Cav regained control of a city that had been taken over again by al Qaeda. The president stated:

[B]y September 2004, the terrorists and insurgents had basically seized control of Tal Afar. We recognized the situation was unacceptable. So we launched a military operation against them. After three days of heavy fighting, the terrorists and the insurgents fled the city. Our strategy at the time was to stay after the terrorists and keep them on the run. So coalition forces kept moving, kept pursuing the enemy and routing out the terrorists in other parts of Iraq.

Unfortunately, in 2004 the local security forces there in Tal Afar weren't able to maintain order, and so the terrorists and the insurgents eventually moved back into the town.

But Col. McMaster has also pointed out that it's "clear" we didn't put enough troops on the Syrian border to stem the terrorist flow into Tal Afar. His regiment has been reporting on the lack of troops for some time. Nearly two years ago, for example, the New York Times wrote that,

After the battle here in September [2004] the military left behind fewer than 500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from nearby Syria -- and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school.

It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest.

''We have a finite number of troops,'' said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. ''But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we've cleared the insurgents out.''

The lack of troops aided al Qaeda efforts to infiltrate back into Tal Afar. And once back in, al Qaeda terrorized the local population, killed those who had collaborated with the Americans in 2004, and turned the city into an operational base to launch attacks around Iraq.

While McMaster's "clear and hold" strategy (in which, the colonel explains, the population is "secure[d] so that political development [and] economic development can proceed") has been successful in Tal Afar, success elsewhere, which will require many well-trained troops, may well be enhanced if Secretary Rumsfeld followed the advice of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, who supported Saddam's removal from power and, unlike others, still does, recently explained why the Pentagon's "linear" thinking on the training of Iraqi forces "runs the risk of confirming the adage that guerrillas win if they do not lose." He argues that as Iraqi troops are stood up, they should be added to US forces, not a replacement for them. This policy, Kissinger believes, would "remedy the shortage of ground forces, which has slowed anti-guerrilla operations throughout the occupation."

Whatever one's view of the decision to undertake the Iraq war, the method by which it was entered, or the strategy by which it was conducted – and I supported the original decision – one must be clear about the consequences of failure. If, when we go, we leave nothing behind but a failed state and chaos, the consequences will be disastrous for the region and for America's position in the world....

The views of critics and administration spokesmen converge on the proposition that as Iraqi units are trained, they should replace American forces – hence the controversy over which Iraqi units are in what state of readiness. But strategy based on substituting Iraqi for American troops may result in confirming an unsatisfactory stalemate. Even assuming that the training proceeds as scheduled and produces units the equivalent of the American forces being replaced – a highly dubious proposition – I would question the premise that American reductions should be in a linear relationship to Iraqi training. A design for simply maintaining the present unsatisfactory security situation.

The better view is that the first fully trained Iraqi units should be seen as increments to coalition forces and not replacements, making possible accelerated offensive operations aimed at the guerrilla infrastructure. Such a strategy would help remedy the shortage of ground forces, which has slowed anti-guerrilla operations throughout the occupation. While seemingly more time-consuming, it would in fact present better opportunities for stabilizing the country and hence provide a more reliable exit route....

Sec. Rumsfeld is expected to make a recommendation on whether to keep or lower the current troop level in the next few weeks.

From today's Los Angeles Times:

Some U.S. Officials Fear Iran Is Helping Al Qaeda

WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence officials, already focused on Iran's potential for building nuclear weapons, are struggling to solve a more immediate mystery: the murky relationship between the new Tehran leadership and the contingent of Al Qaeda leaders residing in the country.

Some officials, citing evidence from highly classified satellite feeds and electronic eavesdropping, believe the Iranian regime is playing host to much of Al Qaeda's remaining brain trust and allowing the senior operatives freedom to communicate and help plan the terrorist network's operations.

And they suggest that recently elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be forging an alliance with Al Qaeda operatives as a way to expand Iran's influence or, at a minimum, that he is looking the other way as Al Qaeda leaders in his country collaborate with their counterparts elsewhere....

U.S. officials also said that other senior Al Qaeda figures — including Zarqawi, now the group's point man in Iraq — had moved in and out of Iran with the possible knowledge or complicity of Iranian officials....

The History Channel notes that today is the anniversary of the March 20, 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in Tokyo -- an attack that might have killed tens of thousands if the gas had been more effectively disbursed.

At the height of the morning rush hour in Tokyo, Japan, five two-man terrorist teams from the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult, riding on separate subway trains, converge at the Kasumigaseki station and secretly release lethal sarin gas into the air. The terrorists then took a sarin antidote and escaped while the commuters, blinded and gasping for air, rushed to the exits. Twelve people died, and 5,500 were treated in hospitals, some in a comatose state. Most of the survivors recovered, but some victims suffered permanent damage to their eyes, lungs, and digestive systems. A United States Senate subcommittee later estimated that if the sarin gas had been disseminated more effectively at Kasumigaseki station, a hub of the Tokyo subway system, tens of thousands might have been killed.

And here's some more history.

Following that attack, the Clinton administration would cite the incident in explaining why Saddam Hussein must be disarmed. According to Time magazine, officials were deeply worried that Saddam might transfer wmd material to "radical Islamist groups." On November 15, 1997, President Clinton told an audience that Americans should not view the current crisis with Iraq [the administration was preparing the nation for possible military action] as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, he told people to “think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms.” I wonder if the former president recollects any of this?

The Beltway Blitz explains it all here.

I wonder what his position is on the cartoons. From the Associated Press:

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- A radical Islamic group spokesman has been charged with threatening the government for distributing a leaflet urging Muslims to ''eliminate'' rulers that prevent them from joining the Iraq insurgency, a Danish prosecutor said Monday.

The leaflets, from the Danish chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, called on Muslims to travel to Iraq to join the insurgents fighting coalition troops. They also urged Muslims to ''eliminate your rulers if they stand in your way'' -- a phrase prosecutors interpret as a direct threat to the Danish government.

Denmark has 530 troops stationed in southern Iraq.

James T. Quinlivan, a military analyst at RAND, evaluated the effectiveness of recent stability deployments where the "objective is not to destroy an enemy but to provide security for residents so that they have enough confidence to manage their daily affairs and to support a government authority of their own." Here's what he found. Col. McMaster probably agrees, and perhaps many others (see Gordon, Trainor book) going back to 2003. From the current US News:

Fifteen years ago, Pentagon doctrine suggested there was a strict division between combat operations and peacekeeping, or stability, missions. The Army's experience in Kosovo, Bosnia, and, especially, Somalia, Ancker says, proved that during humanitarian operations designed to stabilize a country, there was still a need for military muscle. But Ancker argues that the Iraq invasion showed that the Army did not grasp the flip side of the Bosnia lesson, that during combat operations there was a need for peacekeeping-style activities. "We did not have that down nearly as well as we thought we had," he says. The next operations field manual will tell commanders that even when engaged in combat operations they need to immediately focus on making the civilian population physically safe, establishing some sort of governance to allow society to function, and restoring essential services.

Vice President Cheney pulled no punches today on Face the Nation:

Q Let me read to you what Senator Kennedy, liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, and a long-time opponent of the war said on the third anniversary. Here's part of his statement. He said:

"It is clearer than ever that Iraq was a war we never should have fought. The administration has been dangerously incompetent. And its Iraq policy is not worthy of the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform. Yet President Bush continues to see the war through the same rose-colored glasses he has always used. He assures the American people we are winning, while Iraq's future and the lives of our troops hangs so perilously on the precipice of a new disaster."

Dangerously incompetent is what he is saying. I want to give you a chance to respond.

VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I would not look to Ted Kennedy for guidance and leadership on how we ought to manage national security, Bob. I think what Senator Kennedy reflects is sort of the pre-9/11 mentality about how we ought to deal with the world and that part of the world.

We used to operate on the assumption before 9/11 that a criminal attack - - a terrorist attack was a criminal act, a law enforcement problem. We were hit repeatedly in the '90s and never responded effectively, and the terrorists came to believe not only could they strike us with impunity, but if they hit us hard enough, they could change our policy, because they did in Beirut in 1983, or Mogadishu in 1993.

We changed all that on 9/11. After they hit us and killed 3,000 of our people here at home, we said, enough is enough. We're going to aggressively go after them. We'll go after the terrorists wherever we find them. We'll go after those states that sponsor terror. We'll go after people that can provide them with weapons of mass destruction. We'll use our intelligence and our military services very aggressively. And we have.

We did in Afghanistan. We've done it in Pakistan. We're working with the Paks. We captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda. We've done it in Saudi Arabia. And obviously, we're doing it now in Iraq. That kind of aggressive forward-leaning strategy is one of the main reasons we haven't been struck again since 9/11 because we've taken the fight to them.

Senator Kennedy's approach would be pack your bags and go home; retreat behind your oceans and assume you can be safe. But we learned on 9/11 that, in fact, what's going on 10,000 miles away in a place like Afghanistan, or Iraq can have a direct impact here in the United States when we lost 3,000 people that morning. And we know now that the biggest threat that we face of all isn't just another 9/11, it's a 9/11 where the terrorists have something like nuclear weapons, or a deadly biological agent to use against us.

The Iraq situation has to be viewed within the broader context of the global war on terror. It is a global conflict. You can't look just at Iraq and make decisions there with respect to how that's going to come out without having major consequences for everything that's going on. And I think we are going to succeed in Iraq. I think the evidence is overwhelming. I think Ted Kennedy has been wrong from the very beginning. He's the last man I'd go to for guidance in terms of how we should conduct U.S. national security policy.

This piece by Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press is a classic. The DNC couldn't have done a better job. Of course, Loven may want to do her own fact checking before trying to zing the president. For example, she writes:

Last fall, the rhetorical tool became popular with Bush when the debate heated up over when troops would return from Iraq. ''Some say perhaps we ought to just pull out of Iraq,'' he told GOP supporters in October, echoing similar lines from other speeches. ''That is foolhardy policy.''

Yet even the speediest plan, as advocated by only a few Democrats, suggested not an immediate drawdown, but one over six months. Most Democrats were not even arguing for a specific troop withdrawal timetable.

Oh really. In fact, John Murtha, the top House Democrat on defense issues, Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean all called for an immediate drawdown of troops.

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA):

"There's only two plans. One plan is the president's plan, and that's stay the course and hope. And there's a plan that I'm proposing which, which calls for immediate redeployment."

"My plan says redeploy to the periphery, to Kuwait, to Okinawa. And if there's a terrorist activity that affects our allies, or affects the United States' national security, we can then go back in. I'm not talking about going back in to a civil war because we're in a civil war right now. We're caught in between a civil war right now."

Rep. Pelosi (D-CA):

"What I'm her to say is what Mr. Murtha's resolution does, and that resolution is to say that the strategic redeployment in the region, over the horizon, with a force to go in as necessary to protect us -- us, American, American people -- in case of acts of terrorism that could be a threat to us, or to threats to our neighbors in the region, is a better way to, is a better way to proceed."

And Howard Dean told a radio audience that American forces can't "win the war in Iraq," that we need to "bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately," and that the remaining force should fight Zarqawi from a "neighboring country."

Don't hold your breath for a correction.

This piece by John Lloyd in the New Statesman is worth a read.

The repeated invasions of contiguous states; the massacres of Kurds and southern Shia; the license given to torturers, rapists and murderers wearing the uniforms of secret police; the complete arbitrariness of Saddam's kleptocratic rule; the development of chemical and biological weapons and the attempt to develop a nuclear weapon - all of these made Iraq an internal hell and an external danger which, sooner or later, would have to be faced down.

The glad hosannas of those who see in the apologies of some who backed invasion a vindication of their own opposition to it are simply signs of self-delusion. Worse, they are yet another evasion of the central question, which George W Bush and Tony Blair did have the nerve to face: what is to be done about dangerous tyrants, beyond hand-wringing, ineffectual and decaying sanctions and ever-more hollow-sounding resolutions at various international levels?

Leadership matters. Tuesday's Globe and Mail has some interesting poll results on the Canadian troop deployment to Afghanistan.

Canadians' views have shifted sharply in support of the Afghan military mission even as troop casualties have mounted over the past three weeks, a new poll suggests.

A modest but clear majority -- 55 per cent of respondents to a nationwide poll taken for The Globe and Mail and CTV over the past four days -- now broadly support the decision to send troops to Afghanistan. Only 41 per cent oppose the deployment.

In late February, more than 60 per cent said that given a vote in Parliament, they would opt against sending troops to the war-torn country. Only 27 per cent said they would vote in favour.... Perhaps most surprisingly, a clear majority -- 59 per cent -- said they are willing to tolerate Canadian casualties to "help achieve security and stability in the region."

The poll results "suggest that a concerted public campaign in defence of the mission by senior military officers, as well as political figures from both the Conservative government and Liberal Opposition, has had an impact."

This change in public attitude doesn't surprise me. A while back, the German Marshall Fund released a poll that found increased European disapproval of President Bush's foreign policy but with an interesting twist. One exception was in Britain (I should note that Poland’s approval numbers mirrored those in the U.S.), “where there was a slight upturn in approval.” I doubt it was a coincidence that this “upturn” occurred in a nation where the national government most vigorously made the case for getting rid of Saddam and for promoting democracy in the region. Bush’s lowest ratings were in countries, namely France and Germany, whose leaders adamantly and very publicly opposed Bush's policies. Even so, Germany's Gerhard Schröder ran on an explicitly anti-American platform and lost to an opponent who forcefully countered his demagoguery. Canada's Stephen Harper did the same against the anti-U.S. rhetoric of Paul Martin. And, of course, Australia's John Howard won a fourth term, while Tony Blair was elected to an unprecedented third. Is there a message here?

If you believe France's current economy is sclerotic, imagine what it will be years from now if millions of French youth possess the same attitude and driving ambition of Maud Pottier. From today's Washington Post:

PARIS, March 16 -- An estimated 250,000 students took to the streets of Paris and major cities across France on Thursday, escalating a political rebellion by the country's younger generation against a government that is floundering in its attempts to restructure a moribund economy....

Maud Pottier, 17, a student at Jules Verne High School in Sartrouville, north of Paris, who was wrapped in layers of scarves as protection against the chilly, gray day [said]: "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked. I'd rather spend more time looking for a job and get a real one."

(This document would certainly be consistent with the type of operations described below.)

From March 14, 2006 post:

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs contains excerpts from a recently declassified report, produced by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, on the inner workings of Saddam's regime. This paragraph, in particular, hasn't received much attention in the media:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

What were the targets? What kind of "preparations...were well under way" by March 2003? Who were to carryout the "martyrdom" operations?

It's also worth noting that on April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq "not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism." Eleven years later, on November 8, 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which declared that the "Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism...."

(Update II: The ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee applauds Sen. Feingold's censure efforts. Sens. Boxer and Harkin have also jumped on the censure bandwagon. And the good news continues. According to the Hotline, "Senate Republicans will force a floor vote on Sen. Feingold's censure resolution after Congress returns from its next recess." No word on a House vote. Hopefully, Sen. Feingold and Company will demand another vote in October.)

(Update: Feingold flops. Apparently, the Democratic leadership would like to gain seats in November. Republicans shouldn't let them off the hook so easily. From the Associated Press: "Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, maneuvering to prevent a vote that could alienate voters. Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal.")

From March 12, 2006 post:

Just when Democrats are gaining ground against the GOP on national security over the port debacle, they suggest something like this. Time to turn the tables, I'd say.

The sarin gas attack that killed 12 and injured thousands in a Tokyo subway in 1995 is back in the news. "The Tokyo High Court has upheld the death sentence against Tomomitsu Niimi," reports Singapore's TODAY, "a key member of the Aum doomsday cult who was convicted of attacks including the deadly 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway."

Following that attack, the Clinton administration would cite the incident in explaining why Saddam Hussein must be disarmed. On November 15, 1997, for example, President Clinton told an audience that Americans should not view the current crisis with Iraq [the administration was preparing the nation for possible military action] as a “replay” of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead, he told people to

“think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.”

Nowadays, the Clinton folks (and many in the media) have historical amnesia on all this stuff.

From today's New York Observer:

“Let’s say skinheads had bought a company to take over our port,” [Sen. Chuck Schumer] said. “I think the outcry would have been the same.” What exactly is Schumer saying here?

From a Fortune magazine piece on Beijing's activities in Africa:

...African governments view China as a more cooperative partner than the West. China has refused to back regular Western rebukes of African corruption and human-rights abuses and last year used its permanent seat on the UN Security Council to block genocide charges against Sudan--source of about 7% of China's oil--for the massacres in Darfur. "The U.S. will talk to you about governance, about efficiency, about security, about the environment," says Mustafa Bello, head of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, who has visited China seven times. "The Chinese just ask, 'How do we procure this license?'"

China has become the biggest foreign investor in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's policies have beggared the country and left millions homeless. Zimbabwe doesn't have oil, but it is the world's second-largest exporter of platinum, a key import for China's auto industry. Chinese radio-jamming devices block Zimbabwe's dissident broadcasts, and Chinese workers built Mugabe's new $9 million home, featuring a blue-tiled roof donated by the Chinese government. While Western politicians railed against Mugabe last year for flattening entire shantytowns, China was supplying him with fighter jets and troop carriers worth about $240 million, in exchange for imports of gold and tobacco.

I'm sure Beijing will be more helpful on the other pressing issues facing the Security Council.

Here's a brief translation of this New York Times piece, In Iran, Dissenting Voices Rise on Its Leaders' Nuclear Strategy: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needs to shut-up so we can move forward on our nuke program without getting overly hassled by the EU, the US and the UN.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee want more scrutiny of the Bush administration. No surprise here. Sen. Jay Rockefeller is just following the script outlined in a Democratic staffer's 2003 memo on how to use the Intelligence Committee to attack the White House. Perhaps this Democratic staffer should just sit in the ranking member's chair to make things easier.

Milosevic's trial for war crimes committed in the 1990s began in 2002 at The Hague. Yet, Khmer Rouge leaders are still awaiting trial on charges of genocide for the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians from 1975-78 under the regime of Pol Pot. Many Cambodians are worried that these aging leaders will die before they face trial for crimes such as those described in the book, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, by Loung Ung. While the Khmer Rouge leaders await trial, the forensic investigation of the mass murders committed during the Saddam Hussein regime continues.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs contains excerpts from a recently declassified report, produced by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, on the inner workings of Saddam's regime. This paragraph, in particular, hasn't received much attention in the media:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

What were the targets? What kind of "preparations...were well under way" by March 2003? Who were to carryout the "martyrdom" operations?

It's also worth noting that on April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq "not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism." Eleven years later, on November 8, 2002, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which declared that the "Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism...."

If you didn't catch it last night, 60 Minutes profiled the operations of the 3rd Armored Cavalry, commanded by Col. H.R. McMaster, in Tal Afar -- a city that had literally been taken over again by al Qaeda before the 3rd moved in. The transcript may be found here. McMaster points out that it's "clear" we didn't put enough troops on the Syrian border to stem the terrorist flow into Tal Afar. This aided al Qaeda efforts to infiltrate the city (U.S. forces had kicked them out in 2004 but then effectively withdrew). Once retaken, al Qaeda terrorized the local population, killed those who had collaborated with the Americans in 2004, and turned the city into an operational base to launch attacks around Iraq. While McMaster's "clear and hold" strategy (in which, the colonel explains, the population is "secure[d] so that political development [and] economic development can proceed") has been successful in Tal Afar, his unit will soon rotate out of Iraq.

(Update II: Uribe supporters won big in yesterday's congressional elections, paving the way for passage of the U.S-Colombia free trade deal. With strong support in Congress and probable reelection in May, Uribe's offensive against the FARC will likely intensify. All of this is pretty remarkable given that just a few years ago the FARC greeted the newly elected president by firing mortars at the presidential palace while he took the oath of office inside. The attack, which killed dozens, led many analysts to offer grim assessments on Colombia's future. Uribe, who came to office after the fail of several "peace initiatives," has proven them wrong.)

(Update: FARC terrorists continue their killing spree in their effort to destabilize Colombia's democracy. This time, AP reports, they gunned down eight unarmed town officials while they ate lunch.)

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez gets lots of media attention with his anti-American rants. But in bordering Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe is a friend of America and an anti-terror ally. In a nation where tens of thousands have been killed and many more scarred physically and emotionally from decades of violence and terror, things are looking a bit brighter these days. Killings and kidnappings are down. Drug production has been cut. Foreign investment is rising; the economy has stabilized; and for the first time in almost a decade Standard & Poor’s boosted its rating for Colombian debt. Not bad for a man derided as a “hardliner” by his political opponents whose election, they warned voters, would be a disaster for Colombia. Right now, Uribe is on track to score another impressive election victory in May and that doesn't sit well with Colombia's FARC terrorists who on Saturday, the Associated Press reports, ambushed a civilian bus with gunfire, killing nine.

"We don't understand how they can attack the unarmed civilian population in this way," Mendoza [Col. Jose Angel Mendoza, police chief of Caqueta state] said in an interview with RCN Radio....

More than a week ago, FARC rebels began distributing pamphlets warning drivers to stay off the highways in Caqueta and Putumayo states. The FARC said the traffic ban was aimed in part to protest the re-election bid of President Alvaro Uribe, a hard-line leader with whom the rebels have shunned peace talks.

Uribe, who is well-liked by most Colombians and seems likely to coast to victory in presidential elections set for May 28, has sought to wipe out the guerrillas militarily.

Uribe's prospective reelection follows in the footsteps of other friends of America. Australia's John Howard won a fourth term, while Tony Blair was elected to an unprecedented third. German and Canadian voters fo

(Update: Feingold flops. Apparently, the Democratic leadership would like to gain seats in November. Republicans shouldn't let them off the hook so easily. From the Associated Press: "Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, maneuvering to prevent a vote that could alienate voters. Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal.")

Just when Democrats are gaining ground against the GOP on national security over the port debacle, they suggest something like
this. Time to turn the tables, I'd say.

Politicians like New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel have claimed that the military relies disproportionately on the poor to fill its ranks. Since the Iraq invasion, in particular, it has become a standard anti-war talking point. The problem is it isn't true.

From today's New York Times:

The American military does not depend on poor recruits to sustain itself, argues Tim Cavanaugh in ''Middle-Class Warfare: Military Recruits and Poverty'' in Reason magazine.

In different ways, Democrats and Republicans both subscribe to the notion that recruits are poor kids driven to enlist by desperate financial conditions. Most recently, it's been an argument for the draft: Impose conscription, the idea goes, and it won't just be poor kids going to war.

Now the conservative Heritage Foundation has analyzed enlistee demographics by looking at household incomes in the zip codes recruits come from. The results indicate a pool of recruits drawn mainly from the middle class. The largest group of new recruits in 2003 -- 18 percent -- came from neighborhoods with average annual household incomes of $35,000 to $40,000, compared to a median household income of $43,318. In all, the top two-income quintiles (comprising households with incomes starting at $41,688) produced 45 percent of all recruits in 2003. A mere 5 percent came from neighborhoods with average incomes below $20,000 per household.

The Heritage findings make sense: While the military offers some attractions in terms of education, training and life experience, the effort and commitment required are so great that service in the enlisted ranks will always lose a cost/benefit comparison with even the most humble minimum-wage job. Noneconomic, nonrational motivations such as patriotism, self-esteem building, or just the desire to change one's life are more compelling factors in the decision to join up.

On trial at The Hague since 2002 for war crimes, former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was "found dead in his prison cell" Saturday morning. His legacy is one of death, destruction and deep ethnic hatred. Last August, I traveled throughout Kosovo and found a place still very much haunted by the Milosevic regime. Today, Kosovo isn't in the news much even though the U.S. has a significant national security interest at stake there. I'll write more on the critical need of getting Kosovo right and the lesson of Milosevic later. For now, here's a piece I wrote for the Weekly Standard last August:

Miles To Go
NATO stopped the bombing in Kosovo six years ago, but the region is still problematic.

Kosovo
"WE HAVEN'T WON THIS YET." That's how a senior Western diplomat serving in Pristina characterized the situation in Kosovo six years after the end of NATO bombing. The intervention against the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic was the right policy, he added, but what we've been trying to accomplish since is "more difficult here than in Bosnia." A bit south of Pristina is the town of Lipljan. There, a Kosovar Albanian man, a geography teacher, sat at a table in the home of a Kosovar Serb and spoke of people "in dark corners who work to undermine efforts [of reconciliation between Albanians and Serbs] because it's not in their interest to reconcile." Similar sentiments were repeated by others in Kosovo. So while Milosevic is tried at The Hague for war crimes, much more work remains to defeat his legacy in Kosovo.

In the late 1980s, Milosevic consolidated power on a platform of extreme nationalism. His efforts to centralize power in Belgrade put the Balkans on a path to war in which over 200,000 people would eventually be killed. In 1989, he forced amendments to the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution which eliminated the autonomy of Kosovo "inaugurating an era of spiraling human rights abuses against the Kosovar Albanian population," as detailed in war crimes documents at The Hague. All this led to the formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1997 and fierce fighting between the KLA and Serb forces operating in Kosovo before NATO intervened in March 1999.

Since 1999, when the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1244 making Kosovo a U.N. protectorate, the goal has been to establish a stable, multi-ethnic democracy. Under 1244, UNMIK--the U.N. Interim Administrative Mission in Kosovo--supervises domestic affairs while KFOR--the 18,000-strong NATO-led Kosovo Protection Force--is tasked with creating a "secure environment" for the transition to full civilian administration of Kosovo.

Soon, the United Nations and members of the Kosovo Contact Group (the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Russia, and Italy) are expected to announce that Kosovo has made enough progress--four elections have been held, a constitutional framework drafted, and provisional government institutions erected--to warrant the start of "final status" talks. The outcome of these talks will determine if Kosovo becomes an independent nation, as the Kosovar Albanians demand and expect, or attains the status of "more than autonomy, less than independence," as Serbian President Boris Tadic frequently advocates in public appearances.

OFFICIALS IN BELGRADE have also been floating the idea of a partitioned Kosovo because, they say, full independence would provoke a nationalist reaction and suffocate Serbia's nascent democracy. Belgrade would absorb the Serb-dominated land north of the Ibar river (the majority of Serbs are also scattered in central and southern Kosovo) while the rest would become an independent state governed by Pristina. According to several Western diplomats, Belgrade has discouraged Kosovar Serb participation in elections and institutions in Pristina to bolster their case for partition.

Even so, partition won't happen. The United States opposes any partition, as does the European Union, on the grounds that a partition would spark even greater regional instability and reward the aggression of Milosevic. Furthermore, the State Department's Nicholas Burns testified to Congress that a partition would undermine the basic principle of a Kosovo "based on multi-ethnicity with full respect for human rights including the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes in safety."

Odds are that Kosovo will gain a sort of probationary independence. Full sovereignty--say within a few years--would be conditioned on, among other things, the return of Serbs who fled Kosovo since 1999 (the State Department estimates over 100,000 fled mainly due to Kosovar Albanian retribution while the United Nations believes about 13,000 have returned) and a demonstrated ability of local government officials to ensure freedom of movement throughout Kosovo. Any transition would also involve a continued international security presence for some time.

BUT MEETING THESE CONDITIONS WON'T BE EASY. Along with an unemployment rate of over 60 percent, ensuring freedom of movement in Kosovo remains the biggest failure of UNMIK and KFOR for the last six years.

A recent report, written by UNMIK chief Soren Jessen-Peterson of Denmark, cited the lack of freedom of movement as a major obstacle to further progress in Kosovo--a conclusion echoed by other international officials and one that is obvious to anyone traveling around Kosovo. If a Kosovar Albanian and Serb want to socialize, they generally do so out of public view. As many stated privately, talks in public raises the risk of being targeted by extremists who are not interested in multiethnic dialogue.

On a Wednesday in Lipljan, where about 450 Kosovar Albanians and 210 Serbs live, five Serb men sat down in a Serb home to talk about life there. "The economy doesn't exist for us," said one, who blamed the international community for their plight. Another revealed that "he talks with his Albanian neighbor in his backyard" but not on the street "where others can see"--that's too dangerous, he said. Asked if all Lipljan's Albanians were hostile, they collectively gestured no. One added that perhaps 1 in 10 Albanians are "hostile to us." Toward the end of the discussion, a Kosovar Albanian, a geography teacher who lives nearby, joined in. He agreed that ethnic relations are bad and blamed "Albanian politicians for not doing enough" to challenge the extremists who want the remaining Serbs to leave Kosovo.

A short distance from the Macedonian border is Prizren, a town where, at least on that day, you could spot children wearing clothing emblazoned with the letters "USA" (I should note that many Kosovar Albanians expressed pro-American sentiment in discussions with them). Outside a small coffee shop a middle-aged Serb said that the "majority of Albanians don't have ill will toward us. The problem is the radicals--the 10 percent who control politics." Later, speaking in the living room of her small home nearby, a Serb woman in her eighties said ethnic relations "were better" before Milosevic came to power and that "Albanians suffered quite a bit under Milosevic." Muzafri, a Kosovar Albanian who now works at a cafe in the center of Prizren, told the story of Serb forces entering his village in 1999 and giving everyone two hours to flee their homes. They joined the hundreds of thousands of other Kosovar Albanians ejected by Milosevic's forces. Asked if he would like the Serbs who still live in town to stay, he responded, "Sure, we should all live together."

ABOUT 60 KILOMETERS NORTHWEST of Prizren is Orahovac, which witnessed heavy fighting between Milosevic's forces and the KLA in 1998 and 1999. At the top of a narrow, sloping street that leads into the town's center is a crowded enclave of about 500 Serbs. They are protected by barbed wire and a handful of KFOR troops. At the lower end live Kosovo Albanians, who vastly outnumber the Serbs. In between is the so-called "buffer zone," which is lined with crumbling, burnt-out buildings. Just outside Orahovac is another Serb enclave of Velika Hoca, which has a fixed military checkpoint on the only road leading into it and is regularly patrolled by KFOR.

Many gravestones line the main road leading into the town of Decan, northwest of Orahovac, along the Albanian border. A May 2005 International Crisis Group report described Decan as a "tinderbox, full of angry armed groups, and isolated from the rest of Kosovo." According to the Louis Segnini, the local UNMIK head, Decan is the home of many "hardcore [KLA] fighters" from the 1990s who today are the town's "political hardliners." They "intimidate other Albanians" from socializing with Serbs, who live in enclaves on the edge of town. For example, every so often Segnini hosts a "sugar meeting" at the local UNMIK headquarters between local Serbs and Albanians to facilitate better relations. But when he suggests that they all go out to a restaurant down the street the Albanians get "very nervous" and decline.

In Mitrovica, a gritty, bustling town northeast of Pristina, the bridge spanning the Ibar acts as the "buffer zone" with a heavy U.N. and KFOR presence at both ends. In March 2004, Mitrovica was also the town which sparked two days of violence throughout Kosovo which left 19 dead, hundreds injured, hundreds of Serb houses burned, and 30 Orthodox churches destroyed along with 72 U.N. vehicles. KFOR was caught by surprise and did little to stop it. The United Nations believes Kosovar Albanian extremists orchestrated the violence to "destroy any ethnic integration," and officials in Belgrade point to the violence to discredit Kosovo's bid for independence. "The more I looked at what happened [in March 2004], the bigger the impact" the violence really had on our efforts, lamented UNMIK's Soren Jessen-Peterson. The International Crisis Group report concludes that "Both Kosovo Albanian extremists seeking to eject UNMIK, and those in Serbia who would prefer Kosovo to discredit itself . . . share an interest in provocation."

Whatever the outcome of the "final status" talks, the United States, the European Union, and NATO must remain engaged in Kosovo and not let the extremist minority win a victory over simple human decency.

Here's an interesting piece from today's New York Times on a Syrian-American doctor's efforts to counter radical Islam:

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

From Reuters:

An official apology "is absolutely necessary ... because your government has not dealt with them (Muslims) respectfully," Islamic scholar Tareq al-Suweidan told a conference hosted by the [Danish] government in an attempt to ease tension over the drawings.

"We want the laws in Denmark and the European Union to be changed, either to have free speech for everyone including on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, or to change the law to respect religious figures like Mohammad," Suweidan said.

From the BBC:

In a sign of the uncertain mood in Denmark, the state railway company barred a billboard advertising a new book about Islam by a Danish professor.

The book, titled What is Islam?, contained no images of the Prophet, and a Danish imam agreed that the company had overreacted. The decision has now been reversed.

No word on whether Jeddah will host the next conference to dialogue on freedom of religion and freedom of the press.

Some may buy Sen. Hillary Clinton's line that she opposed the deal because it would have endangered "our nation’s security." Perhaps a few more may buy into Speaker Hastert's line that his opposition was based on concern for the "safety of our children." Others may believe that it's all about politics. Hillary wants to be president-elect in 2008, while Hastert doesn't want to wake up on November 8 to headlines of Speaker-elect Pelosi. So who is right? Well, in the coming weeks, here are some things to look for to separate the phony opponents from those genuinely concerned about national security.

Each year millions of containers are off-loaded at US ports. But a port's vulnerability doesn't begin at docking. It's just as vulnerable as soon as a ship enters its harbor. Hundreds of containers are on a ship, so a weaponized one buried deep inside isn't likely to be detected before detonation. That's why the Bush administration created the Container Security Initiative to monitor US-bound cargo as it's loaded onto a ship at a foreign port. DP World's takeover of the British firm, P & O, will add about two-dozen foreign ports to their current operations, which span the globe. Following the logic of Clinton & Hastert, DP World's management of these ports will add security risk to U.S. ports. Shouldn't opponents of the deal now raise hell in Congress for a separate security regime for all ships entering US ports that have docked at a DP World foreign port beforehand? And if congressional opponents are so concerned about port security, will they end their pork barrel spending that leads to ridiculous results, such as the one described in this 60 Minutes episode in July 2005?

KROFT: The 9/11 commission recommended that homeland security money be allocated to protect the most vulnerable strategic targets from attacks that would cause the most casualties or economic damage.

But Congress, led by a group of powerful senators from smaller states, had a different plan. It decided to ignore the recommendations and distribute the money much the same way it hands out federal highway funds, with everyone getting a share.

Rep. COX (R-CA): It's pork barrel. It's the kind of distribution of funds that Washington always makes when politics comes before substance. And here we find that the monies are being doled out not necessarily according to national security risks, but rather according to political formulas.

Mr. TOM SCHATZ: Everybody wants a piece of this pie. And after September 11th, it's one of the biggest pies around.

KROFT: (Voiceover) Tom Schatz, who runs a group called Citizens Against Government Waste, estimates that pork barrel spending on homeland security this year will reach $1.7 billion.

Mr. SCHATZ: Members of Congress have figured out how to get their hands on homeland security pork.

(Footage of barges)

KROFT: (Voiceover) Why else, he asks, would the state of Oklahoma get federal funds designated for port security?

I mean, Oklahoma's a landlocked state. I didn't know that they had any ports.

Mr. SCHATZ: They have a river somewhere and that is included under this maritime security provision that was passed by Congress. And in this case, if you have a maritime facility of some kind in the United States, it may get money under this port security grant program.

Don't count on it.

Reader Kevin French emails:

Dubai Ports World is returning the six US Ports to American control and this heads off a political showdown between the White House and the folks up on Capitol Hill but who will be next? I notice the NYSE company has just been listed on the New York Stock Exchange. I just wonder what would happen if a foreign company tried to take a controlling stake in this American financial icon? Anyway, I think any foreign company thinking of purchasing a large American firm from now until the 08 vote might reconsider it because the Democrats and Republicans will jump on it for political advantage. The question now is which American companies do not pose a threat to national security, so they maybe acquired by a non-US company?

Yesterday, on The Charlie Rose Show, John Kerry's running mate was tough as nails on denying Tehran a nuclear weapon.

CHARLIE ROSE: What did you make of what the vice president said, that the United States will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons?

CHARLIE ROSE: Do you agree with it?

JOHN EDWARDS: Not often do I agree with Dick Cheney, but in this case, I do. Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: It cannot allow Iran.

JOHN EDWARDS: Under any circumstances, Iran cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

Of course, Edwards has been running away from his Iraq war vote for many months, so one shouldn't put much stock that he will hold the same position on Iran if the enriched uranium ever hits the fan.

A word of warning from the archipelago:

A fierce debate over sweeping anti-pornography and morality laws that are backed by Islamic parties in the parliament have infuriated the vast majority of moderate Indonesian Muslims....

"People are angry, they are up to the neck, but they are afraid of them because they are militant and they are numbering hundreds, sometimes thousands," Harymurti said of the morality campaigners.

"But because they've created such bad will for a few years, when suddenly the tables turn, people are more than ready to basically slaughter."

...Other provinces like Aceh have moved to implement sharia laws, often without the wide support of ordinary people.

But the proposed morality crackdown is drawing fire from Muslim moderates, as well as most largely Hindu Balinese and Christian Papuans, who have accused Islamic hardliners of attempting to impose sharia law by stealth with the new bills.

From CNET News:

Yahoo and the other top U.S.-based search engines have come under fire for their practice of cooperating with the Chinese government in censoring information online. Yahoo has been accused of providing evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of two Chinese Internet users, including a journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The arrests "are never things you go home and feel good about," Yang said. "We feel horrible about that...We have no way of preventing that beforehand....If you want to do business there you have to comply."

Later in the day, during a question-and-answer session at the JMP Securities Research Conference, he reiterated many of the same statements and added that Yahoo executives have raised the issue with the Chinese government. "We feel the government needs to work on it as a trade issue."

Internet companies have to deal with regulations that affect their business in other countries as well, even in the U.S., which has the Patriot Act, he said. "There is no 100 percent clean, no matter what country you're talking about."

This cover piece, Freedom Fighter, in the latest issue of Progress, a journal published by British Labour Party members, is sure to get the attention of the anti-Bush folks on the island. Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-wing Case for a Neo-Conservative Foreign Policy, argues that Blair's policies are consistent with "the principles of an earlier anti-totalitarian left." What's more, Kamm contends, "in pursuing regime change, Bush has adopted Blairism, not the other way round." And, he further argues, Blair's policies represent "a shrewd strategic judgment" that understands the need "to transform a region that has acted as an incubator for religious fanaticism by failing to provide an outlet for any other kind of dissidence."

Kamm writes:

"The overthrow of theocratic despotism in Afghanistan and Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq is central to Blair’s record. It is part of a distinctive approach that has marked his premiership. That stance represents continuity with the principles of an earlier anti-totalitarian left, and a shrewd strategic judgment of where Britain’s security interests lie in the early 21st century. It is, moreover, sharply at odds with the philosophy and practice of John Major’s government....

The foreign policy of Blair is more than Iraq, but Iraq is how history will judge him, and supporters of the prime minister need to make the case for regime change.

Let us start with what was genuinely the biggest blunder in British foreign policy since Suez. This was Britain’s failure, under a Tory government, to prevent Serb aggression against Bosnia in the early 1990s. Policy at that time consisted of what the historian Brendan Simms has termed a conservative pessimism about the limits to the effective exercise of power in the international order....

You cannot understand Blair’s policies in Iraq without that background. Long before 9/11, he took a fundamentally different approach from Major, Rifkind and Douglas Hurd, and not only in declaratory policy. In Kosovo, he confronted Serb aggression rather than acquiesced in it. He also sent British troops to preserve Sierra Leone from hand-lopping rebels, aware both of the demands of liberal internationalism and of the potential for a failed state to become far more than a regional problem. He argued his case long before President Bush came to see the urgency of promoting democracy overseas....

Of course, there were grievous failures of intelligence over WMD, and the maladministration of post-Ba’athist Iraq has been a scandalous dereliction of duty. But there should be no questioning of the immense benefits to Iraq and to ourselves of overthrowing a gangster regime. Saddam was not responsible for 9/11, but he welcomed it and sought a WMD capability in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. Ba’athist Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMD, but it did possess dual-use facilities that, according to Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could have produced chemical and biological weapons on a rapid turnaround.

Saddam was a sponsor of terrorism, and the most likely conduit for Islamist groups to obtain WMD. There were clear grounds for expecting Saddam to be a regional menace, and few for expecting him to be containable in the way that the Soviet Union was during the cold war. Soviet leaders were brutal and expansionist, but they were rational and calculating political agents. Saddam launched three wars in 17 years (against Iran in 1974, Iran again in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990) that almost destroyed his regime.

But there is a wider issue in the case for regime change. What marked British policy under Major, and was the principal weakness of US foreign policy in the cold war, was a ‘realism’ that took an impossibly narrow view of western strategic interests. In the Balkans in the 1990s, British policymakers allowed a nation to be dismembered by aggressive and genocidal nationalism. In the cold war, American administrations were prone to ally with authoritarian regimes as a bulwark against communism. Both approaches were far from serving the purposes that realism set itself. What overcame communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe was partly collective security involving alliances and military preparedness. But, at root, it was the power of an idea: the appeal of an open and liberal society, as opposed to a closed and sclerotic one. The task of western governments against a new totalitarian threat – though a very old, atavistic totalitarian idea, in Islamist fanaticism – is similarly to implant the notion of freedom....

In the cold war, the nuclear stand off that had dominated world affairs for two generations was finally robbed of its terror by a transformation in the underlying political relations between states. Totalitarianism gave way to the promise of constitutionalism. Our most urgent task today is to transform a region that has acted as an incubator for religious fanaticism by failing to provide an outlet for any other kind of dissidence. Making the spread of democracy the cornerstone of foreign policy extends progressive values and at the same time protects our security. It is a principle that the overthrow of Saddam has served. Regime change in states that have committed atrocities against captive peoples ought to be the thing of which Labour supporters are proudest."

(From Reuters:

But after a government-led media campaign against U.N. intervention, nationalist sentiment in Sudan is running high. The pro-government al-Intibaha newspaper has announced the formation of two new Islamist movements threatening to target foreign interests in Darfur, called the Darfur Jihad Organization and the Blood Brigades. The protestors handed a statement to U.N. offices demanding the immediate eviction of the top U.N. envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk. Sudanese women bearing kalashnikovs joined the march, declaring their readiness to fight foreign troops.

The defense minister also rallied troops against intervention at a military demonstration in Khartoum. "Jihad, victory, martyrdom," the soldiers chanted. "Our martyrs are in heaven, and we are ready," said Defense Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein.)

The atrocities in Darfur continue. But thanks to Moscow and Beijing the government in Khartoum doesn't have to worry about UN-imposed sanctions.

From ABC News:

The U.N. Security Council remained divided Monday on imposing punitive measures over the conflict in Darfur despite calls for sanctions against Sudanese allegedly blocking peace in the region.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, on the next to last day of the U.S. presidency of the council, scheduled a closed-door meeting to discuss a report by a U.N.-appointed panel that recommended sanctions against key figures from all groups.

Most of the 15-member council were in favor of sanctions, led by the United States, Britain, France and Denmark but Qatar, China, and Russia were strongly opposed, council diplomats said. Qatar is the only Arab member of the council, China is a major buyer of Sudanese oil, and Russia traditionally opposes sanctions.

With sanctions off the table, Khartoum is now more brazen in its threats against the deployment of an effective peacekeeping force in Darfur. And, al Qaeda has reportedly made its own threats against such a force.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Envoy to Sudan Reports Threats U.N.'s Jan Pronk says Al Qaeda has warned him and non-African troops who might go to Darfur.

UNITED NATIONS — The world body's top envoy to Sudan said Tuesday that Al Qaeda has threatened him and any peacekeeping troops deployed there from outside Africa, following the Sudanese government's rejection of a proposed U.N. force meant to protect civilians in the nation's Darfur region....

The U.N. is drawing up plans to transform a 7,000-strong African Union force into a U.N.-led operation as the regional troops run out of funding and logistical support. But Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir on Saturday denounced the U.N.'s plan to field a force of as many as 20,000 troops, some from outside Africa, to quell continuing violence in Darfur.

On Feb. 17, President Bush said the number of peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur should be doubled, perhaps with the support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Bashir responded Saturday that such international troops would be at risk.

"We are strongly opposed to any foreign intervention in Sudan, and Darfur will be a graveyard for any foreign troops venturing to enter," he said in Khartoum. Bashir summoned Pronk on Monday to underline his government's insistence on African troops....

The heated political climate in Khartoum has made negotiations over the next step difficult, Pronk said, describing intelligence that suggested that Al Qaeda terrorists were present in the Sudanese capital and had made death threats against him and any U.N. troops that might be deployed to the country.

Sudan's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Omar Manis, reiterated his government's objections to the mission but questioned Pronk's reports of Al Qaeda threats.

"I don't know from where Mr. Pronk got this idea. Sudan is not Al Qaeda. We don't speak for Al Qaeda," he said.

Manis added that Khartoum prefers African troops to international soldiers, even if the existing force is absorbed by a U.N. mission.

"The Sudanese government has already said no," Manis said. "If there are problems with the African Union, let us solve those problems. If there are financial constraints, give them more money. If there are logistical constraints, help them. But nobody seems to be interested in going that path."

Pronk said the political stalemate must be broken because attacks against villagers in the Darfur region were again growing frequent. He described attacks in which thousands of Arab militiamen on camels and horses, followed by government army trucks, plundered Darfur. He also reported new attacks on refugee camps in Chad.

The militias, often backed by the government, have been razing villages in the region of western Sudan since rebel groups took up arms against the government in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of non-Arab villagers have been killed in the government-orchestrated campaign to oust the ethnic groups that supported the rebels, according to the U.N., and more than 2 million people have been displaced.

The attacks have continued despite a peace agreement in a separate Sudanese conflict reached last year, and the African Union forces are spread thin, Pronk said.

"Nothing rips more at the common fabric of humanity than genocide -- and the only way to assert our own humanity is to stand up to it," wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who won't let the world forget about the suffering in Darfur. He continued:

President Bush is doing more about Darfur than most other leaders, but that's not saying much. The French are being particularly unhelpful, while other Europeans (including, alas, Tony Blair) seem to wonder whether it's really worth the expense to save people from genocide. Muslim countries are silent about the slaughter of Darfur's Muslims, while China disgraces itself by protecting Sudan in the United Nations and underwriting the genocide with trade. Still, even Mr. Bush is taking only baby steps.

Here are some grown-up steps Mr. Bush could take: He could enforce a no-fly zone to stop air attacks on civilians in Darfur, lobby Arab leaders to become involved, call President Hu Jintao and ask China to stop protecting Sudan, invite Darfur refugees to a photo op at the White House, attend a coming donor conference for Darfur, visit Darfur or the refugee camps next door in Chad, push France and other allies for a NATO bridging force to provide protection until United Nations troops arrive, offer to support the United Nations force with American military airlift and logistical support (though not ground troops, which would help Sudan's hard-liners by allowing them to claim that the United States.

As with Rwanda and the Balkans for many years, we have, thus far, failed "to assert our own humanity" in Darfur.

While most Americans haven't been following Democratic primary politics in the 28th congressional district of Texas, the Left has been immersed in it. A freshman conservative Democrat (yes, there are a few of them around), Rep. Henry Cuellar, faced a primary challenge from an anti-war liberal, Ciro Rodriquez, who lost to Cuellar in a close vote in 2004. Moveon.org and others on the Left rallied around Rodriquez, who attacked Cuellar for his support of free trade and the president's national security policies. Well, as things stand today, Cuellar won yesterday's primary by a comfortable margin, 53 percent to 41 percent, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting. Guess the people of Laredo see things a bit differently than Kos & Company, who are now busy blaming the defeat on everything else except their candidate's message.

The March/April 2006 Columbia Journalism Review has a revealing profile of Walter Pincus, the Washington Post's leading national security correspondent. There's no link to the piece ("The Optimist" by David Glenn), so these excerpts will have to do:

On the Role of the News Media

Pincus himself plans on writing a book that will be part memoir, part exploration of "what the hell has happened to the news media." He says, however, that he has no urge to retire soon, and is eager to plug away at the Pentagon-surveillance story: "My view is, you do it in chunks. You just keep going back until it sinks in." Sinks in not only to the public consciousness, but also the Washington bunker. Pincus is not at all shy about saying that he hopes his coverage will change the Pentagon's behavior. "That's what papers are about," he insists. "That's why you own a paper, that's why you write for a paper."

...In future coverage, Pincus says, he will return to those crucial weeks in March 2003. He will most likely do so according to his longstanding personal rule of writing a sequence of short, 800-word articles, rather than saving his material for a gigantic Pulitzer-baiting opus. He learned that principle of incremental coverage in part, he says, from Andrew Lack, then of CBS News, in the early 1980s. "Andy came out of advertising," he says, "and he got me thinking that what news stories on the nightly news were -- if you think of them as ads -- it's the visuals, and the message, and it has to be repeated. That's how things get through to people."

On Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

One great advantage that Pincus had during this period was his longstanding friendship with Hans Blix, then the United Nations' chief weapons inspector.... Consequently, Pincus and [Karen] DeYoung were able to offer a tremendous amount of detail about the tug-of-war between the UN weapons inspectors and the various arms of the Bush administration.

As 2003 began, Pincus's coverage of the Bush administration's weapons claims was not notably skeptical. Indeed, drawing partly on Blix, Pincus often recounted the long history of Iraq's various weapons deceptions during the early 1990s. "There was no doubt in my mind," Pincus says, "that there was something there. You couldn't believe there was nothing." By March, however, the UN inspectors had done enough new searching to suggest that, improbably, the Iraqi regime actually had done away with its weapons programs. "The information pouring in over the last few weeks before the war about there not being weapons was just enormous," Pincus says. "But how do you prove a negative?"

...Pincus says his reason for returning to the administration's case about Iraq's weapons is not to personalize the administration's follies -- "the point is not to prove yet again the Dick Cheney overstated the case" -- but to help future administrations avoid similar errors. In a February 10 page-one story, Pincus revealed that Paul R. Pillar, a former high-level CIA officer who was responsible for the agency's Iraq assessments during the prewar period, had accused the Bush administration of cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq's weapons. The story ended by stressing Pillar's wish that the CIA be restructured along the lines of the Federal Reserve, which would keep the agency in the executive branch but theoretically insulate it from political meddling. Where some people might look at the current political climate in D.C. of partisan attack and recrimination and see an abyss, Pincus sees an opportunity of reform.

On Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame

Pincus never wrote about Valerie Plame -- in part, he says, because he already knew a fair amount about the origins of Wilson's trip from various sources, including some in the C.I.A. He did not think it was true that Plame had arranged the trip; and even if that were so, he thought, it had little bearing on the merits or lack thereof of Wilson's report. After Novak's column ran, he says, "I talked to the agency people, and they said it wasn't true."

...Pincus believes that the Bush administration acted obnoxiously when it leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but he has never been convinced by the argument that the leaks violated the law. "I don't think it was a crime," he says. "I think it got turned into a crime by the press, by Joe" -- Wilson -- "by the Democrats. The New York Times kept running editorials saying that it's got to be investigated -- never thinking that it was going to run around and bit them." The entire Plame investigation, he says, has been a distraction from a more fundamental conversation about how the White House handled evidence before the war.

VP Cheney's remark may be the most categorical yet from a senior Bush administration official on stopping an Iranian nuke. From the AP:

March 7, 2006

Cheney Says U.S. Won't Let Iran Get Nukes

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

BODY:

Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and warned "the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime."

Cheney said the Iranian government "continues to defy the world with its nuclear ambitions" and that the issue may soon go before the U.N. Security Council.

"The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose meaningful consequences," Cheney said in a speech to the to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

Cheney spoke as diplomats at an International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, were considering whether to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. The United States believes Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons; Iran says its nuclear program is for generating electricity.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in Washington Tuesday to discuss Iran with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Cheney said the United States joins "other nations in sending that regime a clear message: we will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

He denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for Israel's destruction and denying that the Nazi Holocaust of Jews took place.

He said he supports the "the democratic aspirations of the people of Iran" and said "Iranians have endured a generation of repression at the hands of a fanatical regime. That regime is one of the world's primary state sponsor of terror."

Rep. Edward Markey, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, isn't happy with the nuclear deal President Bush agreed to with the government of India. The deal "has blown a hole in the nuclear rules that the entire world has been playing by, " said Markey, and "empowers the hawks in every rogue nation to put their nuclear weapons plans on steroids now that they can no longer be isolated as non-signers of an agreement that has been shredded."

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, who's no friend of the Bush administration, responds to this line of thinking by noting that it's the nature of the regime that really matters.

In the case of the nuclear agreement, we are somehow supposed to believe that by favoring India, Bush has made it much harder to put pressure on Iran to abandon its apparent weapons program and become a "good guy" nation. This overlooks the fact that Iran is governed by a zealot who has pledged to eradicate Israel and who firmly believes in the inherent evil of the United States of America. As Bush once said about himself, the Iranians do not do nuance.

When it comes to Iraq's national army, infiltration and loyalty may be a bigger concern than the total number of troops trained and deployed -- which is why this is not particularly good news if accurate.

(The AP reports that "the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said he was hopeful Monday about reaching an international agreement to defuse concerns about Iran's nuclear activities and make U.N. Security Council action unnecessary.")

Iran's talks with Moscow and now Beijing appear to be moving forward with Tehran "sounding more receptive to an enrichment joint venture with Russia...." But is any deal better than no deal?

Back in 1994, Sen. McCain was a vocal opponent of the deal President Clinton struck with North Korea. He told PBS's Robert MacNeil that the US would come to "regret [the deal] very, very much" because Pyongyang gets to keep the handful of nuclear weapons it had already likely produced but also much more. McCain continued that even though North Korea has "violated the nonproliferation treaty egregiously time and time again, ... we are now rewarding them.... And not only are we saying it's okay to Korea, but we'll be saying that it's okay to Iran and other countries who will demand a similar deal."

Today the Russians are doing the primary negotiating, but in the end Washington and Europe will have to make a judgment on whether to sign on to any deal struck. To this end, Gary Milhollin and Valerie Lincy of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control have offered some useful yardsticks in which to judge any "breakthrough" agreement.

From the February 1, 2006 New York Times:

...There is little doubt what this cooling-off period is intended for: further negotiations on a proposal that would have Iran shift its large-scale, energy-related uranium enrichment work to Russia.

The Americans, British, French, Germans and Chinese have all shown support for the Russian proposal. Iran, however, showed little interest before mid-January, when it became clear the West was intent on getting tough. Last Wednesday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator called the Russian suggestion "positive" and predicted that it could be "perfected" through further talks.

While this may seem hopeful, the Russian deal actually poses more problems than it solves.

First, even if Russia took over Iran's nuclear energy work, the religious radicals in Tehran would be left with a huge amount of dangerous equipment. The deal covers only the commercial-scale enrichment program Iran has planned for its plant at Natanz. But Iran also has a string of shops for manufacturing centrifuges — which can be used to enrich uranium to weapon grade — a large inventory of centrifuge parts, a stockpile of uranium gas needed to feed the centrifuges (plus a factory to produce more), and a pilot-scale enrichment plant under construction.

Second, Iran draws a distinction between the energy-related work that would go to Russia and other enrichment activity that it likes to call "research." When Iran broke the international seals at three enrichment sites last month and resumed work, its Foreign Ministry said the move was done only for scientific interests and had nothing to do with weapons. Even with a Russian deal, Iran is likely to insist on its right to continue such research, which would allow its scientists to develop the skills necessary to process uranium for bombs.

Last, the proposal, if accepted, would shatter the coalition of states that is finally working together to restrain Iran. Russia would certainly end its tepid support for Security Council action and would agree to let the Iranians continue their "research." The United States is equally certain to refuse such a concession. The Europeans would be torn between the desire to see a successful end to their years of diplomatic effort and their belief that Iran's nuclear ambitions would not be adequately contained.

If we are going to negotiate with Iran, we must hold out for a solution like the one Libya accepted in 2003. Libya allowed everything useful for enriching uranium to be boxed up and carted out of the country. It also answered all questions about its nuclear past and it revealed the names of its shady suppliers, allowing the West to counter the nuclear smuggling network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. Only greater pressure from the Security Council is likely to force Iran to accept a similar agreement.

The Russian proposal is a red herring aimed at helping Iran, a major trading partner of Moscow's, get out of harm's way at the very moment when the world is uniting against it. A Security Council referral came into play only because of Iran's recent behavior: the inflammatory anti-Israel statements of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its ill-timed decision to resume nuclear work. If Iran snaps up the Russian offer, our last, best chance to pressure Iran in the Security Council may be lost.

"Ending a decade-long battle in favor of the Defense Department," the New York Times reports, "the court [8 to 0] rejected the argument of law school faculty members that being forced to associate with military recruiters violated their First Amendment rights to free speech and association. At issue in the case of Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, or FAIR, No. 04-1152, is the Solomon Amendment, which withholds federal grants from universities that do not open their doors to military recruiters 'in a manner at least equal in quality and scope' to the access offered civilian recruiters."

In December, the Weekly Standard's David Tell explained the "mindbogglingly illogical argument" put forth by the law schools involved in the case.

According to the Telegraph,

Iran's Revolutionary Guards have taken the extraordinary step of cutting down thousands of trees in Teheran to prevent United Nations inspectors from finding traces of enriched uranium from a top-secret nuclear plant....

According to western intelligence sources, more than 7,000 trees which may have contained incriminating nuclear traces have been lost in a popular parkland area in the city near the Lavizan atomic research centre....

The order to cut down the trees was given by Mohamed Baker Khalibaf, the mayor of Teheran, who is close to President Mahmoud Ahmadnijehad. The official explanation for the destruction of the trees was to create a national park.

"Faced with attacks against their sheikhs and clan members, a number of Sunni tribes from Hawijah -- a rebel bastion in northern Iraq -- have declared war on Al-Qaeda's frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," reports Agence France Presse.

(The editors of the Washington Post make their Case for Democracy. They write:

Yes, we might welcome the benign dictator who would nurture the "rule of law" until his nation was "ready" for democracy -- and then would give way gracefully to his matured people. But for the same reason that we wish for civil society as a precursor, most dictators do everything they can to squelch it. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak gives space to the Muslim Brotherhood while persecuting his secular liberal opposition, because he wants to be the only acceptable alternative; he doesn't want a civil society. In much of the autocratic world -- Central Asia, Russia, Burma -- the picture is the same.

So it's fair to oppose democracy promotion, but only if you're honest about the alternative. Throughout much of the Muslim world, that alternative is not a gentle flowering of civil society but the conditions that after Sept. 11 were recognized as threatening: closed and stagnant economies that leave millions of young people unemployed; brutal secret police services that permeate society and stifle education and free thinking; corrupt rulers who nurture religious extremism to shield themselves at home and make trouble abroad.)

"What the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East?" ask the editors of the Wall Street Journal today. They also point out that the years before September 11

coincided with the rise of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, the outbreak of the terrorist intifada in Israel, and September 11. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that promoting democracy does not resolve the problem of terrorism in the short-term. What we know for sure is that tolerating dictatorship not only doesn't resolve the terrorist problem but actively nurtures it....

Leaving aside the niggling examples of Japan and Germany, exactly how are we to know that country X does not want democracy, except democratically? Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese have all made their democratic preferences plain in successive recent elections. And with the arguable exception of the Palestinians (arguable because Fatah was as undemocratic as Hamas), they have voted to establish considerably more liberal regimes than what existed previously.

Indeed, Princeton economist Alan Krueger analyzed terrorism data collected by the U.S. State Department over the years. Here's what he found:

Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account ... income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.

Tossing the president's democracy agenda overboard, as some critics advocate, would be a huge strategic blunder.

Today's Washington Post reports on a bipartisan report released by The Council on Foreign Relations on U.S.-Russia relations. The report makes some good points.

The Bush administration should stop pretending Russia is a genuine strategic partner and adopt a new policy of "selective cooperation" and "selective opposition" to the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin, a bipartisan task force has concluded....

The report crystallizes a growing reassessment of Russia in Washington five years after Bush first met Putin and looked into his soul, as the president put it at the time. Rather than champion democracy and Western values, the former KGB colonel has moved to reassert control over Russian society and eliminate opposition.

Administration officials have been disturbed by other actions in recent months, including Russian maneuvering to force U.S. troops out of Central Asia, Moscow's use of energy exports as a weapon against smaller neighbors, and Putin's outreach to Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that just won parliamentary elections.

At the same time, Moscow has moved closer to Washington in the effort to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Once considered a virtual accessory to Tehran's alleged nuclear arms program, Russia lately has turned around and collaborated with the Bush administration to pressure the Islamic state to renounce any such ambitions, although the Kremlin still resists sanctions.

China's leaders haven't acted much better. They have refused, so far, to put the screws on North Korea; they have cut energy deals with Khartoum and Tehran; and they have opposed any real action in the UN Security Council to end the atrocities in Darfur or pressure Iran to come clean on its nuclear program. UN Ambassador John Bolton isn't a threat to an effective Security Council. His critics should spend a little more time spotlighting the obstructionism of Moscow and Beijing.

The tip of the anti-Semetic iceberg? From today's New York Times:

Two strips of red-and-white police tape bar the entrance to the low-ceilinged pump room where a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, spent the last weeks of his life, tormented and tortured by his captors and eventually splashed with acid in an attempt to erase any traces of their DNA....

But it is clear that plenty of people did know, both that Mr. Halimi was being tortured and that he was Jewish. The police, according to lawyers with access to the investigation files, think at least 20 people participated in his abduction and the subsequent, amateurish negotiations for ransom. His captors told his family that if they did not have the money, they should "go and get it from your synagogue," and later contacted a rabbi, telling him, "We have a Jew."

... So far, a total of 19 people, ages 17 to 39, have been arrested in connection with Mr. Halimi's abduction and death, including the French-Iranian woman, whose first name is Yalda.

The police found Islamist literature and documents supporting a Palestinian aid group in the home of at least one of the people arrested, but lawyers involved in the case dismiss Islamic extremism as a motivation, noting that many of the people involved were not Muslim. The Halimis' lawyer, Mr. Szpiner, denied French news reports that the gang had called Mr. Halimi's family and recited the Koran....

Standing in the doorway in Bagneux near where Mr. Halimi was held, the young French-Arab man smiled when asked about Mr. Fofana. "He was nice, everybody liked him," he said. "If the police bring him back here, the guys in the neighborhood will liberate him."

(The corrupt strike back. From yesterday's Christian Science Monitor:

Masked, armed police Thursday stormed the offices of a leading Kenyan media company in a raid seen as punishment for reports criticizing the government's dismal record on corruption.

Dozens of officers carrying AK-47 assault rifles ransacked the Nairobi editorial headquarters of Kenya Television Network (KTN) and the downtown printing press of The Standard, Kenya's oldest newspaper....

Mr. Kibaki's administration has been under fire since an explosive report written by the country's former anticorruption chief John Githongo, who fled to Britain afraid for his life a year ago, was leaked to national and international media in January.

In the report, Mr. Githongo claims several serving and former ministers in Kibaki's Cabinet were extensively involved in a series of shady deals designed to loot $262 million of state funds, in a country where more than half the 31 million population lives on less than $2 a day.)

It was odd that one of the biggest barriers to lifting nations out of chronic poverty -- rampant government and business corruption -- didn't appear on the radar screen at the World Economic Forum at Davos a few weeks back. There wasn't a single panel discussion on a problem that some say costs poorer nations up to twenty-five percent of their national income. Nonetheless, instigated by people tired of empty promises, horrible living conditions, and out-right thievery an anti-corruption wave, has gathered some momentum. The BBC reported on this campaign over the weekend. While today's Washington Post reports on anti-corruption efforts in Kenya --

"'We're a thirsty land of empty promises. Other countries have droughts and you never see their people dying,' Ciira said in this town 50 miles northwest of Nairobi. As she spoke, people gathered around her, some waving copies of one of Kenya's daily newspapers, the Nation, with a three-page spread detailing the largest scandals."

Last week, dramatic details of two of the largest scandals have implicated high-level officials, some of whom allegedly pocketed a total of $1.3 billion in public funds, money that critics say should have gone to irrigation and road projects to help protect farmers from the devastating effects of recurring droughts.

As the country's worst drought in 20 years wears on, many Kenyans are blaming government corruption, not Mother Nature, for their dire situation. The crisis highlights how government fraud and mismanagement can worsen, and in some cases create, food shortages.

-- and at the World Bank under the leadership of Paul Wolfowitz.

The bank has frozen lending to Chad, whose government had reneged on a promise to spend its oil revenue on poverty reduction. Although Chad is a small country, the frozen loans were high-profile: They were an attempt to defy the "curse of oil" and make petrodollars serve development. It took some courage to admit that the curse of oil remained unbroken.

The bank has canceled 14 road contracts in Bangladesh because of corrupt bidding. Two government officials have since been fired, and Wolfowitz plans to ban the private firms involved from future World Bank contracts.

The bank has frozen five loans to Kenya because of corruption, though it did go ahead with a project to improve Kenya's financial management. On a recent stopover in London, Wolfowitz made a point of having dinner with John Githongo, a senior Kenyan official who left the country after issuing a report exposing cabinet ministers' corruption.

The bank has interrupted a project in Argentina that topped up the wages of poor workers. Some of the money seems to have greased the ruling Peronist Party's electoral machine before elections in 2003, and the government has brought charges against one senior official and fired 10 others. The bank's Argentina team responded by building in a few corruption safeguards and pressing to resume lending. But Wolfowitz has demanded that the safeguards be expanded further still. The project has yet to be reauthorized.

Finally, the bank has postponed debt relief for Congo. A team from the International Monetary Fund had certified that the country deserved relief, and the bank was supposed to fall in line last Thursday. But a newspaper report about the Congolese president's extravagant hotel bills was passed around by Wolfowitz's top staff, who noted that KPMG, the firm that audits Congo's state oil company, had refused for three years running to sign off on its financial statements. On Tuesday Wolfowitz called the IMF's boss and asked whether Congo really merited debt relief. On Thursday he refused to go ahead with it.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Armitage has some tough words for the new boss of Foggy Bottom. Of course, I bet Secretary Rice has racked up more international travel miles than her predecessor at this point in his term. But Armitage does have a point. Australia has been a great ally in Iraq and the War on Terror. Why has the post of US Ambassador to Australia been vacant for more than year now?

(The latest from Peters.)

New York Post columnist Ralph Peters continues his daily observations from Iraq. His columns have been totally at odds with some other stuff I have read -- notably William Buckley's piece. Today, he notes:

After the terrorists blew up that shrine in Samarra last week, you heard plenty about the violent confrontations between Sunni and Shia. But you didn't hear about the performance of the Iraqi army's 6th Division, the 506th's partner unit in eastern Baghdad. Largely composed of Shias, the 6th Division deployed its combat vehicles to protect Sunni mosques. Even in Sadr City, the violence never spun out of control. Casualties, yes, Armageddon, no.

Iraq does have a national army. It's getting better every day. Even as I write, they're taking casualties for their country.

His other columns are here, here and here. Time will tell if his conclusions hold up.

The atrocities in Darfur continue. But thanks to Moscow and Beijing the government in Khartoum doesn't have to worry about UN-imposed sanctions.

From ABC News:

The U.N. Security Council remained divided Monday on imposing punitive measures over the conflict in Darfur despite calls for sanctions against Sudanese allegedly blocking peace in the region.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, on the next to last day of the U.S. presidency of the council, scheduled a closed-door meeting to discuss a report by a U.N.-appointed panel that recommended sanctions against key figures from all groups.

Most of the 15-member council were in favor of sanctions, led by the United States, Britain, France and Denmark but Qatar, China, and Russia were strongly opposed, council diplomats said. Qatar is the only Arab member of the council, China is a major buyer of Sudanese oil, and Russia traditionally opposes sanctions.

With sanctions off the table, Khartoum is now more brazen in its threats against the deployment of an effective peacekeeping force in Darfur. And, al Qaeda reportedly makes its own threats against such a force.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Envoy to Sudan Reports Threats U.N.'s Jan Pronk says Al Qaeda has warned him and non-African troops who might go to Darfur.

UNITED NATIONS — The world body's top envoy to Sudan said Tuesday that Al Qaeda has threatened him and any peacekeeping troops deployed there from outside Africa, following the Sudanese government's rejection of a proposed U.N. force meant to protect civilians in the nation's Darfur region....

The U.N. is drawing up plans to transform a 7,000-strong African Union force into a U.N.-led operation as the regional troops run out of funding and logistical support. But Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir on Saturday denounced the U.N.'s plan to field a force of as many as 20,000 troops, some from outside Africa, to quell continuing violence in Darfur.

On Feb. 17, President Bush said the number of peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur should be doubled, perhaps with the support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Bashir responded Saturday that such international troops would be at risk.

"We are strongly opposed to any foreign intervention in Sudan, and Darfur will be a graveyard for any foreign troops venturing to enter," he said in Khartoum. Bashir summoned Pronk on Monday to underline his government's insistence on African troops....

The heated political climate in Khartoum has made negotiations over the next step difficult, Pronk said, describing intelligence that suggested that Al Qaeda terrorists were present in the Sudanese capital and had made death threats against him and any U.N. troops that might be deployed to the country.

Sudan's deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Omar Manis, reiterated his government's objections to the mission but questioned Pronk's reports of Al Qaeda threats.

"I don't know from where Mr. Pronk got this idea. Sudan is not Al Qaeda. We don't speak for Al Qaeda," he said.

Manis added that Khartoum prefers African troops to international soldiers, even if the existing force is absorbed by a U.N. mission.

"The Sudanese government has already said no," Manis said. "If there are problems with the African Union, let us solve those problems. If there are financial constraints, give them more money. If there are logistical constraints, help them. But nobody seems to be interested in going that path."

Pronk said the political stalemate must be broken because attacks against villagers in the Darfur region were again growing frequent. He described attacks in which thousands of Arab militiamen on camels and horses, followed by government army trucks, plundered Darfur. He also reported new attacks on refugee camps in Chad.

The militias, often backed by the government, have been razing villages in the region of western Sudan since rebel groups took up arms against the government in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of non-Arab villagers have been killed in the government-orchestrated campaign to oust the ethnic groups that supported the rebels, according to the U.N., and more than 2 million people have been displaced.

The attacks have continued despite a peace agreement in a separate Sudanese conflict reached last year, and the African Union forces are spread thin, Pronk said.

"Nothing rips more at the common fabric of humanity than genocide -- and the only way to assert our own humanity is to stand up to it," wrote New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who won't let the world forget about the suffering in Darfur. He continued:

President Bush is doing more about Darfur than most other leaders, but that's not saying much. The French are being particularly unhelpful, while other Europeans (including, alas, Tony Blair) seem to wonder whether it's really worth the expense to save people from genocide. Muslim countries are silent about the slaughter of Darfur's Muslims, while China disgraces itself by protecting Sudan in the United Nations and underwriting the genocide with trade. Still, even Mr. Bush is taking only baby steps.

Here are some grown-up steps Mr. Bush could take: He could enforce a no-fly zone to stop air attacks on civilians in Darfur, lobby Arab leaders to become involved, call President Hu Jintao and ask China to stop protecting Sudan, invite Darfur refugees to a photo op at the White House, attend a coming donor conference for Darfur, visit Darfur or the refugee camps next door in Chad, push France and other allies for a NATO bridging force to provide protection until United Nations troops arrive, offer to support the United Nations force with American military airlift and logistical support (though not ground troops, which would help Sudan's hard-liners by allowing them to claim that the United States.

As with Rwanda and the Balkans for many years, we have, thus far, failed "to assert our own humanity" in Darfur.

From Marshall Wittmann's Bull Moose blog:

Some opponents of the war are smugly chortling that "we told you so." Perhaps. But, these opponents do not necessarily occupy the strategic nor moral high ground. Do they really think that any post-9/11 President would allow Saddam to continue to taunt the West with the possibility of WMD? Do they believe that the realist notion of stability in the Middle East is a solution?

And would Iraq and the world really be better with a brutal tyrant still ruling over a country of rape rooms, mass graves and children's prisons? Do these war opponents really long for the "good old days" of Saddam's lovely Mesopotamian paradise that posed no earthly threat to the region?

Is it possible that Iraq will be lost? Of course it is. And it will be much more likely that it will be lost if America leaves precipitously. Then, the supporters of an early withdrawal will have to address the consequences of both an American defeat and that our international Jihadist enemy will be emboldened.

Anti-war Democrats increasingly only see a political up-side in advocating a redeployment, a phased withdrawal, an immediate withdrawal or whatever else they want to call it. History should inform these anti-warriors that Democrats have spent the past three decades attempting to overcome the perception that they are the party of weakness. Whatever short-term gains that they will achieve with their opposition to the war will soon be overtaken by the perception that Democrats are the party of "cut and run."

There is no easy answer to our current predicament. But, defeat is certain if we abandon Iraq.

And then, we would reap the whirlwind.

(Update II: Matthew Yglesias has responded to my updated post. I disagree with his assessment for many reasons but nonetheless thought it only fair to post his response here (scroll down to the March 3 posts). Be sure to also read the comments section for some interesting debate.)

(Update: Some now claim (I'll leave aside the ridiculous remark related to Sen. McCain's Castro comment) that North Korea absolutely didn't have nukes during the Clinton administration. This must come as news to the Clinton folks and just about every other official involved in the North Korean nuke debate in the 1990s. Here's what Amb. Robert Gallucci had to say at a May 2003 Senate hearing.

In 1994, the intelligence community, our intelligence community assessed that North Korea more likely than not had wanted two nuclear weapons. That was based on an assessment that they had reprocessed or could have reprocessed as much as eight or 10 so kilograms of plutonium, in that range in any case and so, we had that assessment and we didn't in the agreed framework provide for the immediate inspections that would help us determine how much plutonium they actually had.

In addition, Sen. McCain, in October 1994, stated, "the accounting for the plutonium that was diverted, that could have, and in the view of the CIA, did result in the construction of two nuclear weapons." On October 20, 2002, the New York Times reported: "Several years ago the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that North Korea already had reprocessed enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make one or 2 nuclear weapons, and that the fuel in storage could be fabricated into 5 or 10 more." There are many other similar examples.

About those fuel rods "in storage" that were supposed to be transferred out of North Korea during the Clinton years under the agreement, Pyongyang never gave them up. And, yes, these would be the same rods that the North has likely extracted plutonium from during the Bush years. Oh, at least since 1996 North Korea was also running a secret uranium enrichment program while getting lots of free oil under the deal. Finally, I'm still waiting to hear if Howard Dean wants a North Korean-style "Framework Agreement" for Iran. Given the Bush administration's lack of progress and incoherence on North Korea, you would think at least one heavyweight Democrat would make the case for such an agreement to the American people.)

Posted on February 28, 2006:

During a speech today accusing President Bush of being weak on defense, Dean stated that,

under no circumstances will a Democratic Administration ever allow Iran to become a nuclear power.

What is Dean exactly saying here? Why use the phrase "nuclear power"?

Is this a "no tolerance" policy that Democrats would not allow Iran to acquire a single nuclear weapon?

Or, is Dean saying Democrats would allow Iran to build nuclear weapons so as it didn't build enough of them to qualify as a "nuclear power"?

Also, let's remember that it was the Clinton administration that rewarded North Korea -- see here -- by letting that government keeps its nuclear weapons and cheat on the "Framework" it signed. Republicans should ask Dean if he has something similar in mind for Iran.

Consider...

In a letter, dated February 21, to Senator Frist, Sen. Clinton wrote:

This sale will create an unacceptable risk to the security of our ports. We therefore request that emergency legislation we are introducing to ban foreign governments from controlling operations at our ports be slated for immediate consideration when the Senate convenes on February 27....

This issue transcends philosophical posturing and partisan bickering – it is about our nation’s security.

But President Clinton apparently believed, at one point, that the sale didn't "create an unacceptable risk." Because if he did believe it was a risk, why would he [and former EPA head and current principal at the [Madeleine] Albright Group] then turn around and push the U.A.E. to hire a former staffer as a lobbyist to drive the deal through?

According to columnist Robert Novak,

While Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was ripping President Bush's handling of American ports management, Bill Clinton was pushing for one of his favorite White House aides to be hired to defend the deal. The former president proposed to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) his onetime press secretary, Joe Lockhart, as Washington spokesman for the UAE-owned company, Dubai Ports World.

The Lockhart deal was never consummated. But the spectacle of the two Clintons going in opposite directions on the UAE port-management question exposed a Democratic fault line. Widespread public reaction against outsourcing control of the ports was seen by Sen. Clinton and other prominent Democrats as a chance to outflank the Republicans on homeland security in this year's elections. Behind the scenes, however, Democrats aligned with the Clinton family were lobbying for the UAE....

According to well-placed UAE sources, the former president made the suggestion at the very highest level of the oil-rich state. The relationship between him and the UAE is far from casual. The sheikdom has contributed to the Clinton Presidential Library, and brought Clinton to Dubai in 2002 and 2005 for highly paid speeches (reportedly at $300,000 apiece). He was there in 2003 to announce a scholarship program for American students traveling to Dubai.

The latest issue of Parameters has an interesting piece, The Future of Afghanistan, by Ali A. Jalali, the nation's interior minister from January 2003 to September 2005. He gives a comprehensive review of what's going on the ground and also warns that the progress made in Afghanistan could vanish if the international community loses interest in the nation.

At the end of the Bonn Process, Afghanistan finds itself at a crossroads. Continued international security and economic assistance, for at least ten more years, and sustained domestic leadership for reform will enable the country to build on achievements made during the past four years, and enable it to become a success story in the region. The other option is for the country to slide back into the difficult past of instability and tension. Given the potentially devastating impact of a failed Afghan state in a globalizing world, leaving Afghanistan can no longer be an option.

The key to the development of democracy and prosperity in Afghanistan is building a viable and capable state and a robust economy. The Bonn Process was dominated by an international agenda for security following the overthrow of the Taliban regime and their al Qaeda allies. The post-Bonn process needs to be based on an Afghan agenda for long-term development as a key to sustained peace and stability. The Bonn Process required Afghanistan to meet certain benchmarks toward democratic development. The succeeding process should identify how the international community can support the implementation of an Afghan development strategy over the next five years. The result should be a compact between the international community and the Afghan government on their joint effort to achieve a clearly defined end-state.

This piece by Daniel Johnson in Commentary magazine ought to drive the British Left crazy.

The British are proud of their independence; they follow American fashions, whether from Hollywood or Washington, only if they can make them their own. Fortunately, Tony Blair made foreign-policy neoconservatism his own before most Britons had even heard of it, so both it and the domestic-policy variety may well have a future in Britain beyond the temporal horizon of the Blair era. From an ideological point of view, certainly, it is the only antidote to the viruses of anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and Islamo-fascism, all of which are now coursing through the bloodstream of the British body politic.

But the necessity of neoconservatism has to be explained and popularized, as David Cameron seems to grasp. For that, many more first-rate intellectuals like Oliver Kamm and Douglas Murray will need to be mobilized. They might well take their cue from their peers on the other side of the Atlantic, where think tanks, sympathetic TV networks and websites, and above all the great American magazines and journals together constitute a permanent symposium on neoconservative thought.

Frequent Weekly Standard contributor Dan Twining emailed his thoughts on one of the most underreported economic stories out there. While China gets most of the attention on the business pages, India has quietly positioned itself to be a dominant player in the 21st century world economy. In fact, MIT's Yasheng Huang argues that India "might be more competitive than China" in the years ahead.

Twining observes:

China's rise is changing the economic and strategic landscapes in Asia and beyond. But the rise of India is an equally compelling story, and one that promises to have similarly tectonic effects on the world economy and the global security order. In this piece, MIT professor Yasheng Huang picks apart some of the "China myths" prevalent among Western and Asian analysts -- myths that have obscured India's emerging dynamism and potential to outperform China in the long run. He even twists on its head the conventional wisdom that India should model its economic reforms on China's. Instead, he urges the Chinese government to take a close look on India's emphasis on education, transparency, and governance. "Unless China embarks on bold institutional reforms," he writes, "India may very well outperform it in the next 20 years."