A big rap against Hillary Clinton getting the Democratic presidential nod has been that her position on the Iraq War has put her at odds with the party’s anti-war base. Lefty bloggers and prominent liberal journals like The Nation have pounded away at her for not doing a John Kerry-like flip-flop on the war. But if the past few weeks prove anything, it shows the power of the Clinton political machine.

A couple weeks back, Bill Clinton arranged a meeting with liberal bloggers in his New York City office. The bloggers “came away with stars in their eyes,” in the words of Paul West of the Baltimore Sun. Last weekend, the former president went after Fox News and conservatives, to the applause of the Democratic base. Democratic politicians and Clinton operatives also joined in the Fox bashing. Hillary Clinton then jumped in by hitting President Bush for not doing enough prior to September 11. She followed that by blasting the president over the terrorist detainee bill – a bill that gives “the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people…” – again to the wild applause of the Democratic base.

So in the blink of an eye, the Clintons fired up the base, took it to the Republicans and dominated the headlines. Come primary time, the Clinton machine will much more formidable than people realize should the New York senator make a run. Of course, the general election is another matter. Stay tuned.

I assume many modern-day Democrats would view FDR as an extra-constitutional tyrant running a “thinly veiled military dictatorship.” From today’s Washington Post:

The [terrorist detainee] bill contains some protections unavailable to the eight Nazi saboteurs who came ashore in the United States in 1942 and were captured two weeks later. Six were executed that year after a closed military trial on the fifth floor of Justice Department headquarters. That proceeding was upheld by the Supreme Court in a decision it explained two months after the electrocutions.

Also, the Democratic Leadership Council’s Marshall Wittmann offers some tough words:

It is safe to say that America is providing non-state combatant detainees more rights and better treatment than any other nation would do under similar circumstances. These military tribunals compare favorably with any others in our own history from Washington to Lincoln to FDR. The hysteria about "tyranny" in America is truly inappropriate.

America accords extraordinary rights even to our enemies who would use all means necessary to kill us and our families. How many countries in the history of civilization would give these rights to killers who refuse to abide by the rules of war and who don't exactly adhere to international treaties? The congressional debate over the last few days was not over "torture" but rather setting reasonable procedures to interrogate and address the status of stateless terrorists and their enablers who refuse to abide by the rules of war.

It comes down to a clash of perspectives between those who view the fight against Jihadists as a criminal action against a gang versus those who view it as a war against a terrorist movement that rejects the normal rules of combat. If you believe the former, the detainees should have access to all of the protections and rights of the American legal system. If your perspective is that this is a war, then the normal protections that are championed by the ACLU for American citizens do not apply.

America remains the great hope of liberalism in a world threatened by reactionaries who seek to repeal civilization and return us to the seventh century. For the sake of the soul of progressivism, it is time for liberals to speak these truths.

Anti-Bush animus is leading lefties to lose perspective and adopt the old "Blame America First" mentality. The enemy is not us.

(Today's Christian Science Monitor has more on his bid for a Security Council seat: “One country that supports Venezuela's campaign is China, which is perhaps not enthralled with the Chávez rhetoric but is lured by the idea of more countries holding its worldview on the Council. China has not been shy about its preference to see greater respect in Security Council deliberations for nation-states' rights, and less attention to individuals' universal rights - ideas implicit in Chávez's discourse.”)

Posted on August 9, 2006:

This fall the UN will vote to replace the current non-permanent members of the Security Council with new nations. Though little reported in the media, for many weeks Hugo Chavez has been traveling the globe trolling for enough votes from regimes opposed to the U.S. to get on the Council. He’s been offering cut-rate oil deals and has signed agreements to buy weapons. His latest campaign swing brought him to Tehran, where he lavished praise on the regime for standing up to the Americans. Now, he’s taken up the cause of Hezbollah and has accused Israel of perpetrating a “new Holocaust” in Lebanon. On Monday, Israel withdrew its ambassador to Venezuela. Earlier, Chavez recalled Venezuela’s charge d’affaires to Israel. In a recent televised speech, the BBC reports, Chavez said that he had

no interest in maintaining diplomatic relations, or offices, or businesses, or anything with a state like Israel….

Israel has gone mad. It's attacking, doing the same thing to the Palestinian and Lebanese people that they have criticised - and with reason - the Holocaust. But this is a new Holocaust.

At least one very senior Republican I know of believes the Bush administration must make denying Chavez a seat on the Council a top priority. Specifically, all U.S. ambassadors should let their host country know that the U.S. government would view a vote for Chavez as an unfriendly act. The administration should also encourage a friendlier nation in Latin America to seek a Security Council seat.

One thing is for sure: If Chavez succeeds, it would be very bad news for the U.S.

The Senate passed the terrorist detainee bill tonight, 65 to 34. The minority leader opposed final passage, as did all the prospective Democratic presidential candidates – Bayh, Biden, Kerry, Feingold, and Hillary Clinton. Here’s Sen. Clinton’s statement opposing the bill:

The Senate, under the authority of the Republican Majority and with the blessing and encouragement of the Bush-Cheney Administration, is doing a great disservice to our history, our principles, our citizens, and our soldiers. The deliberative process is being broken under the pressure of partisanship and the policy that results is a travesty….

Once again, there are those who are willing to stay a course that is not working, giving the Bush-Cheney Administration a blank check – a blank check to torture, to create secret courts using secret evidence, to detain people, including Americans, to be free of judicial oversight and accountability, to put our troops in greater danger.

And here is McCain’s urging its passage:

This legislation will allow the CIA to continue interrogating prisoners within the boundaries established in the bill. Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act….

Finally, I would note that there has been opposition to this legislation from some quarters, including the New York Times editorial page. Without getting into a point-by-point rebuttal here on the floor, I would simply say that I have been reading the Congressional Record trying to find the bill that page so vociferously denounced. The hyperbolic attack is aimed not at any bill this body is today debating, nor even at the Administration’s original position. I can only presume that some would prefer that Congress simply ignore the Hamdan decision, and pass no legislation at all. That, I suggest to my colleagues, would be a travesty.

(The House also passed legislation yesterday authorizing a robust terrorist wiretapping program. 177 Democrats voted against final passage, including Hoyer and Tauscher.)

To understand just how much the Democratic center has collapsed look no further than Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer. Last September, Roll Call reported that Hoyer had cobbled together a dozen or so of his colleagues "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense." Hoyer also said that Democrats had lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” A few months later, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA), a member of Hoyer's group and also onetime vice chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, co-sponsored legislation with Rep. John Conyers (MI) calling for the termination of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program -- a program Gen. Hayden said "has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." Tauscher dubbed the Bush administration's actions "despicable.”

Fast forward to yesterday’s House vote on the terrorist detainee legislation. Hoyer (along with Tauscher) was one of 160 Democrats who opposed the bill. Why? The bill "is really more about who we are as a people than it is about those who seek to harm us,” said Hoyer. “Defending America requires us to marshal the full range of our power: diplomatic and military, economic and moral. And when our moral standing is eroded, our international credibility is diminished as well." Actually, the bill, as Sen. McCain explained, keeps a critical wartime intelligence program going so we can disrupt al Qaeda operations to attack us.

Look, [the] ACLU and the New York Times don't like the agreement, but we think this will recognize, people will recognize that it defends both our values and our security. Some want the CIA not to be able to carry out this program. That was never our intent. And--but it was--it's very important that we have this tool to collect intelligence.

Democrats have now backed themselves into a corner with the ACLU and the New York Times. Republicans may want to note it.

A reader emails on this ("Al-Qaida in Iraq: 4,000 Insurgents Dead") AP piece:

Yikes. You mean they have an actual number? Do the guys who wrote the NIE think the Iraq war created more than 4000 active, fighting terrorists?

Senator Clinton made the following statement on the NIE on September 25:

Its findings as described in the press are deeply distressing because they confirm what a lot of us feared that the policies pursued by this administration have not worked and therefore we are breeding terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis who try to get up and go on with their lives. I have been a strong critic of the administration's policies from the very beginning - the way they have conducted themselves, the decisions they have made the strategic blunder after blunder that they are responsible for. I would hope that they would listen to other people and obviously they haven't been willing to do that which is why this election in November is so important.

Does the senator now believe that it was a “strategic blunder” to take Saddam out in March 2003?

Does she agree that Iraq was a “cause celebre” for al Qaeda prior to the invasion?

Does she believe it would be a “strategic blunder” for President Bush to follow the advice of the Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and the other Ned Lamont Democrats and withdraw from Iraq?

Would such a policy “breed” more “terrorists who will not only take aim at us but at our friends and allies including innocent Iraqis”?

Ned Lamont is still getting trounced in the polls, reports the Hartford Courant:

Lieberman maintains a 10-point advantage among likely voters in the poll, leading Lamont 49 percent to 39 percent in a three-way race. Republican Alan Schlesinger trails with 5 percent….

The Quinnipiac poll showed that Lieberman has higher favorability ratings among likely voters, 51 percent to Lamont's 31 percent. While Lamont has slightly higher favorability numbers among Democrats (47 percent to 43 percent), Lieberman far outdistances his challenger among likely Republican and unaffiliated voters. Seventy percent of Republicans view Lieberman favorably compared to 12 percent for Lamont, and 48 percent of independent voters view Lieberman favorably compared to 30 percent for Lamont.

Meanwhile, Marshall Wittmann over at the DLC writes:

It appears that the vaunted grassroots campaign is running dry for cash. The Hartford Courant,

"Democrat Ned Lamont is reaching for his hefty checkbook yet again. The multimillionaire businessman wrote a $750,000 check this week to help fund his campaign against Sen. Joe Lieberman, the three-term incumbent running as an independent after losing the Democratic nod to Lamont."

People power!!!!

Reuters reports:

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans on Wednesday not to bow to fears of Islamic violence after a Berlin opera house canceled a Mozart work over concerns some scenes could enrage Muslims and pose a security risk.

"I think the cancellation was a mistake. I think self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practise violence in the name of Islam," she told reporters. "It makes no sense to retreat."

Merkel's comments, which echoed those of other senior German politicians, fueled a row over the cancellation of Mozart's "Idomeneo" that overshadowed a government-sponsored conference to promote dialogue with the country's 3.2 million Muslims.

Merkel joins Australia’s John Howard in not knuckling under to threats and intimidation.

Given Sen. Hillary Clinton's remark yesterday,

I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team,"

has the Richard Clarke-authored Millennium after-action report on the Clinton administration’s anti-terror efforts ever been made public? From the 9/11 report, Staff Statement Number 8:

In a January 2000 note to Berger, Clarke reported that the CSG drew two main conclusions from the Millennium crisis. First, it had concluded that U.S.-led disruption efforts “have not put too much of a dent” into Bin Ladin’s network abroad. Second, it feared that “sleeper cells” or other links to foreign terrorist groups had taken root in the United States. Berger then led a formal Millennium after-action review....

In 1998, bin Laden officially declared war on all Americans. It was the “individual duty for every Muslim,” bin Laden declared, “to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military.” His declaration was apparently an effective recruitment tool. By 2001, al Qaeda had trained in Afghanistan “perhaps over 10,000 terrorists,” according to Richard Clarke, before they dispersed to "probably between 5o-60 counties." The 1998 war declaration/recruitment propaganda listed the “crimes and sins committed by the Americans” against Muslims. At the top of list was Iraq:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Charles Krauthammer put all this into perspective in light of the NIE last night on Fox News:

On the one hand it is a "cause celebre," it attracts jihads. But in fact, Iraq before 9/11 was a "cause celebre." If you look at the declaration of war that Osama issued in 1998 against the United States, Iraq, with reasons No. 1 and No. 2.

No. 2 was the sanctions embargo, killing Iraqi children, that was a reason to go to war against America due 9/11. No. 1 was the stationing of American troops, infidels if the holy places of the Mecca and Medina, meaning our troops in Saudi Arabia who were there protecting against Saddam. So, Iraq has always been a factor.

On the other hand, the factor is that if we fight the jihads in Iraq and we succeed, then that will be a defeat for jihad. It's on the one hand and on the other, the idea that it is the cause of the spreading of terrorism is absurd. It was propaganda in the press and it was not a reflection of reality….

[L]ook, when we attacked Japan, the home islands, it increased a recruitment for kamikazes. Was that a reason not to attack the Japanese home islands? If you're going to hit the bad guy, of course he's going to get upset about it. Big deal. What's new about that?

And, secondly, look, if it is a magnet, just this week a guy called Omar Faruq, the head of al Qaeda in Southeast Asia was killed in Basra, by the British. He was a guy who ordinarily would be in Southeast Asia planning attacks on Americans, on Australians, et cetera. He went to Iraq, he died in Iraq. If that's a magnet -- and a lot of them go to Iraq and die in Iraq. It's a good thing.

Andrew McCarthy has more here on Iraq and al Qaeda recruitment.

From AFP:

Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put rewriting the US-imposed pacifist constitution at the top of his agenda, a move that could lead to a more active military role overseas but alarm neighboring countries.

Abe, who took office Tuesday as Japan's first prime minister born after World War II, has been vague on much of his platform but has passionately vowed to revise the constitution, saying he wanted to "write it with my own hand."

"I belong to the post-World War II generation. The era dominated by the preconceived idea that the constitution should never be changed is over," Abe said during the campaign.

But experts said the process of rewriting the constitution would likely be slow and methodical as Abe seeks to win over skeptics both at home and abroad.

Here's the "Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States dated April 2006." Among other things, the NIE, which Democrats have embraced, indicates that a jihadist failure in Iraq would hurt their cause. It will be interesting to listen to Democrats explain how their troop withdrawal plans for Iraq would hasten that failure. As I noted earlier today, Democrats can’t even convince sympathetic generals to buy into what they’re selling on the cut-and-run front. Sen. McConnell has it right:

Whoever leaked this report forgot to mention a key finding of the intelligence community: If we defeat the terrorists in Iraq, there will be fewer terrorists inspired to carry on the fight. In other words, defeating terrorists in Iraq not only secures that new democracy, but prevents future attacks here at home. This is a dramatically different message than the selective leaks to the media.

It’s important to remember that terror attacks against the United States didn’t start the day our troops entered Baghdad, and they won’t end if we leave Iraq to the terrorists.

Also, Robert Kagan makes some excellent points on the NIE in today’s Washington Post.

The Supreme Court ruled against aspects of the president’s policy on the handling of those captured in the war we are engaged in. The elected president then goes to Congress seeking legislation that is consistent with the Court’s Hamdan decision. He comes to an agreement with Senators McCain, Graham and Warner on bill language. Elected officials will soon debate and vote on that language on the Senate floor. Amendments to that language will also be debated and voted on. What ever passes the Senate must then be reconciled with the House bill before both houses vote again on the final measure. Once passed, the bill will hit the president’s desk for his signature. And even after that, the Supreme Court can still weigh-in. Some disagreed with Sen. McCain’s role in all this and now, because they disagree with the compromise bill, are lecturing him on torture and implying that his actions in brokering a bill that keeps a critical intelligence program operating have aided the creation of a “thinly veiled military dictatorship.” I'd venture to guess that Sen. McCain has much more insight into the nature of military dictatorships than most of his critics.

The folks at Britain's Henry Jackson Society have an interesting response (click on "latest editorial") to David Cameron’s recent foreign policy speech that I discussed two weeks ago. They write:

The cherry picking between the Hurd-Rifkind school of realism and the liberal interventionism of William Gladstone and Tony Blair is unsustainable. Mr. Cameron must realise now that the severe security and strategic challenges facing Britain and the international community calls for a coherent foreign policy which does not attempt to be all things to all people. Hesitation, indecision and muddled thinking are not what the present dangerous circumstances call for. Mr. Cameron’s speech exposes two competing world-views and two competing conceptions of Britain’s role in the world. Sooner or later he will have to choose which one it is that he truly believes is best for Britain’s security and prosperity.

From CBS News:

SMITH: I want to go back now to Michael Scheuer once again. Let's talk about what President Clinton had to say on Fox yesterday. He basically laid blame at the feet of the CIA and the FBI for not being able to certify or verify that Osama bin Laden was responsible for a number of different attacks. Does that ring true to you?

Mr. MICHAEL SCHEUER (CBS News Terrorism Analyst): No, sir, I don't think so. The president seems to be able--the former president seems to be able to deny facts with impunity. Bin Laden is alive today because Mr. Clinton, Mr. Sandy Berger, and Mr. Richard Clarke refused to kill him. That's the bottom line. And every time he says what he says to Chris Wallace on Fox...

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

Mr. SCHEUER: ...he defames the CIA, especially, and the men and women who risked their lives to give his administration repeated chances to kill bin Laden.

SMITH: All right, is the Bush administration any less responsible for not finishing the job in Tora Bora?

Mr. SCHEUER: Oh, I think--I think there's plenty of blame to go around, sir, but the fact of the matter is that the Bush administration had one chance that they botched and the Clinton administration had eight to 10 chances that they refused to try. At least at Tora Bora our forces were on the ground. We didn't push the point. But it's just an incredible kind of situation for the American people over the weekend to hear their former president mislead them.

Yesterday, the Democrats got together with some retired generals who’ve been highly critical of Sec. Rumsfeld’s handling of the Iraq War. The generals spoke before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, but, as the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes, they also delivered a message the Democrats didn’t want to hear.

But Democrats, while celebrating Batiste's criticism of the administration, exercised some selective listening at the hearing when Batiste and his colleagues offered their solution: more troops, more money and more time in Iraq.

"We must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge," Batiste warned.

"We better be planning for at least a minimum of a decade or longer," contributed retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes.

"We are, conservatively, 60,000 soldiers short," added retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of building the Iraqi Security Forces.

That last remark caused Schumer to shake his head, indicating he was not so sure. And, indeed, the retired officers' recommendations were off-message for the Democrats. Six of the seven Democrats at the hearing supported legislation calling for the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq this year. One, Richard Durbin (Ill.), voted for the pullout to be mostly complete by next summer.

Is any of this cited on the Democratic Policy Committee website or in the press releases put out following the "hearing"? Not a chance. On troop levels the generals have a point, as the National Review's Rich Lowry and the Standard's William Kristol explain here.

One way to send a message to Hugo Chavez, as Sen. McCain argues, is for Senate Democrats to stop obstructing the confirmation of John Bolton as UN Ambassador. From the AP:

Bolton Derides Venezuela Airport Protest

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- U.S. Ambassador John Bolton on Monday derided the Venezuelan foreign minister's protest over being detained at a New York airport as ''street theater'' and propaganda.

Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro claimed officials tried to frisk and handcuff him at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he left the annual U.N. General Assembly session on Saturday. Screeners grew suspicious when Maduro used cash to purchase a one-way ticket to Miami shortly before the flight was to leave, U.S. officials said….

The U.S. State Department has apologized for Maduro's treatment, but Bolton was less conciliatory.

''There was no 'incident' at the airport -- this was Venezuelan street theater,'' Bolton said. ''He did not request the courtesies we would have extended to get him through the airport. He purchased his ticket at a time and in a manner and with funding such that he was asked to go to secondary screening and he objected to that.''

''And the first thing he did was call the press and speak to them in Spanish, so this is propaganda,'' Bolton said….

President Clinton also claimed on Fox News yesterday that “all the right-wingers” believed he was “too obsessed” with bin Laden, that he “did too much” in going after the al Qaeda head. The reality is a bit different. Many conservatives applauded Clinton’s decision to strike in Sudan and Afghanistan following the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In November 1998, for example, Andrew McCarthy wrote a lengthy piece in the Weekly Standard in support of the strikes, but he also explained why the Clinton administration’s overall approach to combating the terror threat was woefully inadequate. Similar to what Reuel Marc Gerecht would argue in the wake of the USS Cole bombing, McCarthy pushed the administration to treat international terrorism as “a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue.” He wrote:

Does the administration actually grasp the nature of the threat we face? Following the August 20 retaliatory strikes, secretary of state Madeleine Albright and national security adviser Samuel Berger rejected the predictable "wag the dog" accusations with solemn admonitions that, in terrorism, the United States has suddenly been confronted with a "new war" -- one we would now have to be prepared to fight, alone if necessary. This was exceedingly curious. There is nothing at all "new" about radical Islam's terrorist war against the United States. It has been going on since the late 1980s. It has been openly declared since the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, which killed six, injured over a thousand, and caused nearly $ 1 billion in damage. Its leaders, moreover, have been promising for more than five years that in pursuing this war, they would kill American civilians and bomb American military installations and embassies overseas….

Such an adversary will not be defeated by the techniques the president recommended at the U.N. -- increased international cooperation in the prosecution and extradition of terrorists. These are necessary steps, but breathtakingly inadequate. A military threat calls for a military response….

In the main, international terrorism is a military problem, not a criminal-justice issue. There is a severe limit to the circumstances in which it is either possible or prudent to apprehend terrorists overseas only to swaddle them in the rights of American defendants -- including education them, through the extensive discovery our system mandates, as to what we know about them and the precious and regrettably scarce sources of that information. Terrorists, furthermore, see the world in gimlet-eyed simplicity. They are not swayed by our breathless pursuit of international conventions that are broken with impunity, weapons-inspection regimes that we lack the stomach to police, or "peace processes" that become hideous euphemisms for body counts. These convey weakness. What impresses them is the certainty that force will swiftly and surely be met with exponentially superior force. That alone is a meaningful deterrent.

"So you did Fox's bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me. What I want to know is…."

President Clinton's remark aired on the very day two of the nation’s most prominent papers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, ran above-the-fold stories on a classified National Intelligence Estimate, selectively leaked by a Bush detractor no doubt, that purportedly concluded last April that the Iraq War has bolstered terrorist recruitment. Six weeks before the November election that NIE appears in the press, and the Democrats are busy putting out press releases crowing about it. “Hit job,” anyone?

In his Fox News interview, President Clinton stated:

All of President Bush’s neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t do enough said I did too much — same people.

Not quite. In fact, this magazine published two cover pieces by contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the “right-wing/neocon” American Enterprise Institute, which criticized both the Clinton and Bush administrations for NOT forcefully responding "enough" to bin Laden following the USS Cole bombing.

From “G-Men, East of Suez: A serious anti-terrorism policy would unleash the military, not deploy the Justice Department,” October 30, 2000:

More important, the FBI's methods reveal, again, the strategic vacuum at the heart of the Clinton administration's counterterrorist policies. Trying to arrest and prosecute terrorists--treating terrorism as crime--actually endangers American power overseas. Traditional realpolitik and gunboat diplomacy--the only meaningful responses to terrorists who kill Americans--gets cast aside in favor of far-off prosecutions that may well do more damage to America than terrorism….

The State Department and the National Security Council, of course, cannot conceive of doing anything more forceful than utter reproaches and reprimands, which inevitably preface new appeals to the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service with very close links to the Taliban, to do something about bin Laden. If bin Laden is discovered to be behind the attack on the USS Cole before January 2001, the Clinton administration, given the past, can be expected to fire more cruise missiles at tent and mud-brick Afghan training camps. CIA director George Tenet and his minions will complement the attack by leaking to the press that "we now have bin Laden in a box." Counterterrorism budgets in Washington will inevitably go up, further increasing the possible size of the next FBI-led team sent overseas to investigate a bombing.

From “A Cowering Superpower: It's time to fight back against terrorism,” July 30, 2001:

Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, scored an impressive victory by nearly sinking the Cole, yet Washington still has not responded. Our fear is pure oxygen to Islamic militants. Every alert, particularly when it panics U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, sends an adrenaline rush into the central nervous system of men truly convinced that with God’s help and the right explosives they can crack the will of the infidels who are, in their eyes, destroying the one true faith.

Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to yank the Marines out of Jordan is, when viewed from the mud-brick and cinder-block ghettos of the Middle East, an extraordinary triumph, further proof that the martyrs of the Cole attack died gloriously. America’s military leaders may think that they’re being prudent with our soldiers; the average man in the streets of Amman certainly knows better. Terrorism is war by unconventional means. Its ultimate objective is the psychological debilitation of the enemy through fear. In the fight against terrorism, the U.S. military’s ever-more exclusive focus on "force protection" diminishes the awe in which America is held abroad, the ultimate guarantor of the safety of U.S. civilians and soldiers, especially in lands where hostility to the West rests near the surface.

Senator McCain made some important points today on CBS’ Face the Nation. He pointed out that al Qaeda has recruited successfully over the years by highlighting its “successes” against the U.S., which is why “we need to prevail in Iraq.” Indeed, in the 1990s bin Laden would claim that Mogadishu and other events showed that America was "a paper tiger" and "a weak horse." He and his followers would use such imagery as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, "the strong horse" in bin Laden's words, throughout the decade. In fact, though little reported in the media, al Qaeda had recruited and trained thousands before September 11, 2001. Richard Clarke told PBS' Frontline that by the end of 2000 al Qaeda had a presence "in probably between 50-60 countries [and] that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan." ”

McCain also called for a larger Army and Marine Corps, criticized the position of the ACLU and the New York Times on the recent terrorist interrogation deal, and said that Democrats should stop obstructing the confirmation of John Bolton as UN Ambassador – particularly after the “two-bit dictators” traveled to the UN in New York to trash the U.S. president. McCain…

On Jihadist Recruitment and Winning in Iraq:

I think that it's obvious that the difficulties we've experienced in Iraq have certainly emboldened [them]. Lack of success always does that. But I would also argue that these people didn't need any motivation to attack us on September 11th. According to their history--and there's some validity to it--this begins with bombing of the--and killing the Marines in Beirut, and then Somalia, and now other, quote, "successes" of theirs. But I would--I think it would argue that we need to prevail in Iraq, and that if we fail, then our problems would be much more complicated. But if it wasn't Iraq, it'd be Afghanistan; if it wasn't Afghanistan, it would be others that they would use as a method of continuing their recruitment….

This town, as we all know, there's nothing secret in our nation's capital. All I can do is say I think the president recently has laid out our challenges very well in Iraq. We all know that things are not going as well as we want it to. The Marine intelligence report that was leaked about Anbar Province, and the difficulty--this is long and hard and tough. But the benefits of success are enormous, and the consequences of failure are enormous. So frankly it doesn't astound me that we would get an intelligence report that if we're not succeeding as well as we had hoped, that that would encourage the enemy.

I think the tactics have been flawed, and that's been well documented and chronicled. We didn't have enough troops over there, the looting shouldn't have taken place, the difficulties in not anticipating the enormous challenges of bringing democracy and stability to a place that has been ruled by an absolute, terrible, repressive dictator for many years. That doesn't mean to me that, therefore, we should then plan on leaving. It means that we should fix the mistakes; it means that we have to make progress….

On the Need for a Bigger Army and Marine Corps (also see the current Weekly Standard editorial here):

We've got to expand, and should have five years ago, six years ago, expand the Army and the Marine Corps…. We live in a very dangerous world, and we not only need to have the equipment--which by the way, the Guard is having a problem with getting their equipment replaced--but we also need the personnel as well….

On the ACLU, NY Times:

Look, [the] ACLU and the New York Times don't like the agreement, but we think this will recognize, people will recognize that it defends both our values and our security. Some want the CIA not to be able to carry out this program. That was never our intent. And--but it was--it's very important that we have this tool to collect intelligence.

On the Democrats and John Bolton:

But I would--I would say that this is an argument to get John Bolton confirmed as our UN ambassador. He's smart, he's tough, he would respond to these guys. And he could talk back to these two-bit dictators who have the air fare to New York. And I hope my Democrat friends will stop holding up the nomination of John Bolton.

Here are some things Bill Clinton didn't mention in his Fox News Sunday interview that will air tomorrow morning.

ABC's "The Path to 9/11," the USS Cole and John O'Neill

What Newly Released al Qaeda Letters on Somalia/U.S. Withdrawal Tell Us

Does Secretary Madeleine Albright Regret Calling for Regime Change in Iraq?

Clarke, Freeh & the JCS

Howard Dean may believe "THE fight on terror" is in Afghanistan. But the reality is the fight is global, as Tony Blair recently noted. Here's another example of what Blair's talking about from Reuters:

MANILA, Sept 22 - Islamic militants from Indonesia have been training radicals in the southern Philippines in bomb-making, local officials said on Friday after the seizure of explosive devices at a guerrilla base in a remote island.

On Aug. 4, soldiers found a stockpile of improvised bombs, some fashioned out of howitzer and mortar rounds, with electronic anti-tamper sensors and digital timers at a hideout of the Abu Sayyaf, the most violent of Islamic separatist groups in the Philippines….

"Some of the improvised bombs we saw in Jolo bore striking similarities to the lunchbox-type explosives found in the house where Azahari was killed," an intelligence officer told Reuters.

The official was referring Azahari Husin, a Malaysian engineer who was the top bomb-maker for Jemaah Islamiah, a group fighting for a pan-Islamic state across large parts of Asia.

Azahari, who was killed in 2005 in a raid on an Indonesian safehouse being used by Jemaah, allegedly designed the bombs used in the 2002 Bali bomb attacks and explosions at the Marriott hotel and Australian Embassy in Jakarta….

"These improvised bombs show a capability heretofore unseen among local terrorist groups," Defense Secretary Avelino Cruz told a forum in Manila on Thursday.

"Close similarities to improvised bombs being used in the Middle East and Afghanistan have been noted."

Here's the transcript from President Clinton's anger-filled interview with Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. The interview will air tomorrow. Clinton does make a few valid points, but he also neglects to mention many others. I’ll write more on this later.

(From AP: Bombings inflame tensions in Kosovo -- Over the past week, there have been four bombings…. But parliament speaker Kole Berisha insists the violence is a deliberate attempt to destabilize Kosovo at a delicate stage in its drive for statehood…. But the chances of more violence like the March 2004 riots that killed 19 people and displaced thousands "are unfortunately rather high," warned Alex Anderson, Kosovo project director for the International Crisis Group….)

Posted on September 15, 2006:

There will likely be more violent acts like this one as the current final status talks draw to a close -- and possibly for some time after. From AP:

Kosovo interior minister's car bombed

Fri Sep 15, 6:29 AM ET

A bomb placed under the Kosovo interior minister's car exploded early Friday in an eastern town in the U.N.-run province, police said.

No one was hurt by the blast, which occurred a few hours before Serbian and ethnic Albanian negotiators in Vienna, Austria, resumed contentious U.N.-brokered talks on Kosovo's future status.

Kosovo's parliament speaker said he considered the explosion to be directed against the talks.

(If you get a chance, read Charles Krauthammer's excellent piece in today’s Washington Post. He writes: “And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour. In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.” John Howard isn’t one of those followers.)

Posted on September 21, 2006:

As I have noted many times, Australian Prime Minister John Howard is a rock-solid U.S. ally and a strong world leader in the War on Terror. He hasn’t taken the David Cameron path of backpedaling on the decision to remove Saddam from power or that of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who ran away from Iraq. And Howard hasn’t shied away from speaking out on the Pope’s recent comments and the ensuing intimation campaign, which, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is “trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions.” An avid Standard reader from Australia sends along this interesting interview Howard gave on Australian TV on Tuesday. Some highlights:

TONY JONES: Now, PM, let's move on to other issues: As you'd be well aware, the Pope has provoked anger in the Muslim world after quoting a 14th century emperor who accused the Prophet Mohammed of inspiring evil and inhuman human ideas and spreading his word by the sword. Now Australia's leading Catholic has called, again, for an examination of whether the Koran, and what the Koran, in fact, has written about violence.

JOHN HOWARD: Yes.

TONY JONES: Do you think Cardinal Pell has a point in focusing on what the Koran has written about violence?

JOHN HOWARD: Well I think the cardinal has a point in making the point that it's a strange form of restraint to respond to words you disagree with, with demonstrations and threats of violence. The Islamic community is perfectly entitled to criticise the Pope and the Pope is perfectly entitled, and other religious leaders are perfectly entitled, to express their views about other religions. But we're all meant to believe in peace and we're all meant to adhere to peaceful religions and I just think it's very strange and disappointing that whenever the Pope says something that people, or on this particular occasion, let's stick to this, he has said something that people don't agree with and that provokes demonstrations. Now, we are all meant to be bound by a belief in free speech and free expression, and my, I suppose, exasperation would be that of many of the people in Australia, that, okay, they may not like what His Holiness said and whether he should have said it or not is, in a sense, beside the point, but we are meant to believe in free speech and we are meant to not overreact. I think it's very important with these things that people don't overreact. I'm sure the great bulk of Catholics around the world want good relations with Islam, and the Catholic Church, itself, cops a fair amount of abuse on a daily basis. If Catholics rioted every time people attacked the Catholic Church, you'd have riots on a very regular basis.

How refreshing.

AFP reports:

Israel and Saudi Arabia have been conducting secret negotiations, the top-selling Hebrew daily reported on its front page.

"Secret negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia," headlined Yediot Aharonot, reporting that contacts had begun during the recent 34-day war in Lebanon between Israel and Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

Asked whether there were secret talks going on with Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted as saying: "I don't have to answer every question".

Olmert was quoted as saying, however, he was "very impressed with various acts and statements connected with Saudi Arabia, both those that were made publicly and others as well.

"I am very impressed with King Abdullah's insight and sense of responsibility," he added, when asked about whether he regarded a Saudi peace initiative favourably.

In March 2002, the Arab League adopted the Saudi proposal that would see the Arab world normalise relations with Israel in exchange for a withdrawal from all land occupied since 1967 and a negotiated solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.

Why? The ACLU and the editors at the New York Times don’t like the terrorist interrogation deal. The Times is urging Senate Democrats to filibuster the bill and the ACLU is calling it a “charade of a compromise.” It doesn’t get any better than that if you’re a Republican considering a run at the White House. Republicans can only hope that Senate liberals take the bait the New York Times has dangled in the front of them.

And while the ACLU is dismayed with the deal, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas offered his support on Fox News:

What the American people can be assured of is they're as aggressive as necessary, but short of the prohibitions against torture, cruel, and inhumane treatment.

Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel were quick to condemn the remarks of Hugo Chavez. Good for them. But there’s something else afoot here. I suspect Democratic election strategists are a bit nervous over all this. Americans view Democrats as far more willing to work through the UN to deal with international problems than Republicans. Fair or unfair, the extensive news coverage of the UN circus (let alone the oil deals a few Democrats have cut with Chavez) isn’t helpful to the Democrats, and I bet Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know it.

So what should the Republicans do? Here’s a suggestion: bring John Bolton’s nomination to the Senate floor as soon as possible and ask Sen. McCain to lead the fight for his confirmation on the floor and in the media. McCain’s a very strong backer of Bolton, and Democrats would be hard pressed to maintain a filibuster preventing an up or down vote on Bolton. Moreover, the Republican message should be straightforward if a cloture vote is necessary: a vote to end the Bolton filibuster is a vote against Hugo Chavez. That will get the attention of voters.

As I have noted many times, Australian Prime Minister John Howard is a rock-solid U.S. ally and a strong world leader in the War on Terror. He hasn’t taken the David Cameron path of backpedaling on the decision to remove Saddam from power or that of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who ran away from Iraq. And Howard hasn’t shied away from speaking out on the Pope’s recent comments and the ensuing intimation campaign, which, as the Wall Street Journal put it, is “trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions.” An avid Standard reader from Australia sends along this interesting interview Howard gave on Australian TV on Tuesday. Some highlights:

TONY JONES: Now, PM, let's move on to other issues: As you'd be well aware, the Pope has provoked anger in the Muslim world after quoting a 14th century emperor who accused the Prophet Mohammed of inspiring evil and inhuman human ideas and spreading his word by the sword. Now Australia's leading Catholic has called, again, for an examination of whether the Koran, and what the Koran, in fact, has written about violence.

JOHN HOWARD: Yes.

TONY JONES: Do you think Cardinal Pell has a point in focusing on what the Koran has written about violence?

JOHN HOWARD: Well I think the cardinal has a point in making the point that it's a strange form of restraint to respond to words you disagree with, with demonstrations and threats of violence. The Islamic community is perfectly entitled to criticise the Pope and the Pope is perfectly entitled, and other religious leaders are perfectly entitled, to express their views about other religions. But we're all meant to believe in peace and we're all meant to adhere to peaceful religions and I just think it's very strange and disappointing that whenever the Pope says something that people, or on this particular occasion, let's stick to this, he has said something that people don't agree with and that provokes demonstrations. Now, we are all meant to be bound by a belief in free speech and free expression, and my, I suppose, exasperation would be that of many of the people in Australia, that, okay, they may not like what His Holiness said and whether he should have said it or not is, in a sense, beside the point, but we are meant to believe in free speech and we are meant to not overreact. I think it's very important with these things that people don't overreact. I'm sure the great bulk of Catholics around the world want good relations with Islam, and the Catholic Church, itself, cops a fair amount of abuse on a daily basis. If Catholics rioted every time people attacked the Catholic Church, you'd have riots on a very regular basis.

How refreshing.

Two newspapers with two very different opening paragraphs today on the state of the GOP --

From the Los Angeles Times:

President Bush's approval rating has reached its highest level since January, helping to boost the Republican Party's image across a range of domestic and national security issues just seven weeks before this year's midterm election, a new Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

From the New York Times:

With barely seven weeks until the midterm elections, Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of the Republican-controlled Congress, with substantial majorities saying that they disapprove of the job it is doing and that its members do not deserve re-election, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

From AP:

[Chavez] later spoke to hundreds of New Yorkers who filled a college hall Wednesday night, saying he hopes Americans choose an "intelligent president" in the future….

He drew a standing ovation when he said Bush committed genocide during the war in Iraq.

"The president of the United States should go before an international tribunal," Chavez said as applause filled the hall at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He compared the Bush administration's actions to those of the Nazis….

Since the Georgian democratic revolution in 2003, U.S.-Georgia relations have warmed considerably. The U.S. military recently signed another military assistance accord with the former Soviet republic, and Radio Free Europe reports that NATO will announce tomorrow that formal talks will begin with Tbilisi that could eventually lead to full NATO membership. As you can see, Georgia sits in a strategically significant region of the world and, so far, has been a success story for American diplomacy.

(Source: UN)

In an interview last night with Fox's Bill O’Reilly, Gov. Mitt Romney made some good points. He spoke on the global nature of the war we are engaged in and warned that too many in the world don’t fully understand the threat posed by the "extreme, violent jihadists.” The governor criticized those who advocate rapid withdrawal from Iraq, but he also took a shot at the Bush administration: “I don't think we had as effective a plan in place as we need to have or enough boots on the ground to secure the country but that's over now.”

But the issue of whether we have “enough boots on the ground” today isn’t "over." Iraq is a major front in the war against the “extreme, violent jihadists,” which is why the National Review’s Rich Lowry and the Standard’s William Kristol continue to press for a surge in American forces –- see here and here –- to ensure that we prevail in a security environment that has steadily deteriorated. Gov. Romney should join them.

The Arizona senator has come under an avalanche of criticism from conservatives (though Reagan Secretary of State George Schulz supports his position) for his opposition to making changes to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Agree or disagree with him, McCain makes his case in today’s Union Leader:

MY FRIEND Joe McQuaid has raised an important question. Can America prevail over a barbaric enemy who holds our values in contempt and uses them against us without compromising those values and altering long-standing treaty obligations that reflect them? I believe we can. He worries that we cannot.

On one point Joe and I are in complete agreement. Our war against Islamic terrorists is a new kind of war. Our enemies are stateless; they reside in many countries, even, we assume, within the borders of our own country. They kill combatants and non-combatants alike with savage cruelty and take a truly evil delight in crossing all civilized boundaries governing the conduct of war. All wars are a miserable business, and this one is particularly so. That is why I believe we must prosecute it as rapidly as we can and as violently as we must.

It often seems to me and many Americans that international public support for the United States is always strongest when we are the victims of terrorism and weakest when we forcefully defend ourselves from it. We must persevere confident in the necessity and justice of our cause even though we can expect that much of the world, even our allies, will often find fault with us as we seek to defeat the enemies who threaten us and them.

History will vindicate us, even though many of us will no longer be around to read it. And when history records our victory may it also celebrate the fact that we fought an enemy who believed our values made us weak and discovered in the end that our faithfulness to our values was as important to their defeat as was the strength and courage of our armed forces.

Tony Blankley explains in today's Washington Times.

(According to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, "the Bush administration's strategy of emphasizing the continuing threat of terrorism may be having an effect. President Bush's job approval rating has risen to 44%. Americans have become more positive about the war on terror. Voters are more likely to support a candidate who backs Bush on terrorism rather than one who opposes him. By a slight margin, Americans tend to think the country will be safer if the GOP retains control of the House.”)

Posted on August 22, 2006:

Today's USA Today/Gallup poll shows an up tick in the president’s approval rating. It’s now 42 percent, “suggesting that more positive evaluations of Bush could be tied to his handling of terrorism.” Other polls also show a GOP advantage on security-related issues. An AP poll conducted well before the news of the latest terror bomb plot found:

One bright spot for the GOP is that Republicans hold an advantage over Democrats on issues such as foreign policy and fighting terrorism _ 43 percent to 33 percent _ and a smaller edge on handling Iraq _ 36 percent to 32 percent.

The AP-Ipsos poll was conducted after the divisive Democratic debate in the Senate over setting a timetable for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq. Potential voters were paying attention to the GOP complaint that Democrats want to "cut and run."

"It seems like the Democrats want to pull out or start to pull out, and I don't think that's the correct thing to do," said Eric Bean, 24, a college minister in Fort Worth, Texas. "I'd much rather see a Congress that would support our president. I think George Bush is doing the best he can. I think Republicans will support him."

As I noted in July, if Democrats were hitting Republicans from the right on national security, the GOP would be in far deeper trouble. But naturally they’re not, which gives Republicans an opening to schedule as many security-related votes (with lots of debate) as possible before November 7. Also, Ned Lamont will likely say a lot of things before election day that will help make the GOP's case against the Democrats. Republicans should nationalize his comments as much as possible and note all the major Democrats who are actively campaigning for Lamont against the hawkish Lieberman. Americans aren't going to buy the Frank Rich line (see Sunday's New York Times) that the Lamont Democrats really are tough as nails on the terror front.

Here are two pieces worth reading. The editors at the Wall Street Journal write:

It's a familiar spectacle: furious demands for an apology, threats, riots, violence. Anything can trigger so-called Muslim fury: a novel by a British-Indian writer, newspaper cartoons in a small Nordic country or, this past week, a talk on theology by the head of the Roman Catholic Church….

Taken alone, these are strong words. However, the pope didn't endorse the comment that he twice emphasized was not his own. No matter. As with Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," which millions of outraged Muslims didn't bother to read (including Ayatollah Khomeini, who put the bounty on the novelist's life), what Benedict XVI meant or even said isn't the issue. Once again, many Muslim leaders are inciting their faithful against perceived slights and trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one of the world's major religions….

By their reaction to the pope's speech, some Muslim leaders showed again that Islam has a problem with modernity that is going to have to be solved by a debate within Islam. The day Muslims condemn Islamic terror with the same vehemence they condemn those who criticize Islam, an attempt at dialogue--and at improving relations between the Western and Islamic worlds--can begin.

And the AFP reports on the comments of Australian Archbishop Cardinal George Pell:

"The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedicts main fears," Pell said in a statement late Monday.

"They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence."

"It is always someone elses fault, and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored," the cardinal said….

(I noted in an earlier post that I’d checked to see if any of the material below is discussed and evaluated in the latest Senate Intelligence Committee report. It isn’t. In fact, there’s not a single mention of either group in the report. )

Posted on September 14, 2006:

The BBC reports on Zawahiri's latest claim "that a radical Algerian Islamist group has joined al-Qaeda and is being urged to punish France.” In the video that aired on a website on September 11, Zawahiri stated: "Osama Bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC [the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat] has joined al-Qaeda." He called on the Algerian-based terror group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders.” The GSPC has since released a statement: “We pledge allegiance to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden... Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike who and where he likes.”

How did the GSPC come about?

In 1997, a splinter group emerged from Algeria’s GIA (Armed Islamic Group) called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC. Stanley Bedlington, who worked counterterrorism for the CIA from 1986 to 1994, told USA Today in December 2001 that "we traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq." But how close a relationship the GSPC had with al Qaeda before this recent pledge has been difficult to nail down. Some say there wasn’t much of one; others believe the GSPC had close ties to bin Laden. A January 2004 analysis from the Center for Defense Information noted this on the relationship between the GSPC and bin Laden:

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) has emerged in recent years as a major source of recruiting and other support for al Qaeda operations in Europe. A splinter faction of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the GSPC is engaged simultaneously in efforts to topple Algeria's secular government and to organize high-profile attacks against Western interests on the continent....

Yet more alarming to U.S. and European observers, by 2000, according to Italian investigators, the GSPC had taken over the GIA's external networks across Europe and North Africa and were moving to establish an 'Islamic International' under the aegis of Osama bin Laden. Haydar Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian known as "the Doctor," was instrumental in this reorganization. Abu Doha moved to the UK in 1999 after serving as a senior official in a Qaeda Afghan terrorist camp.

Doha was one of the first to encourage the GSPC to split from the GIA and he helped recruit new terrorists from the large base of disenfranchised Algerian youth in Europe's cities, especially in France. (Algerians to have been among the most numerous militants at al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the war.) Many of these new adherents were involved in petty crimes such as car theft, credit-card fraud, and document forgery; and their earnings were now channeled to finance terrorist operations.

Another Algerian, Mohamed Bensakhria, who was based in Germany, and a Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, based in Italy, helped Doha establish and coordinate these cells across Europe. They expanded upon the Algerian base of recruits by incorporating radical militants who had left behind dormant conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Bensakhria and Maaroufi also created a vast support network that provided newcomers with false documents, lodgings, and incidental spending money.

In recent years, authorities have foiled an alarming number of terrorist plots across Europe and uncovered cells — many linked in one way or another to the GSPC — in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. Some of the high profile operations planned included a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Paris and Rome, and attacks on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

Bensakhria was arrested in Spain in June 2002. Maaroufi is wanted in Italy but remains free because of his Belgian citizenship, which prevents his extradition to Italy. Meanwhile, Abu Doha has been connected to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted for trying to attack Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium changeover, and is currently in British custody fighting extradition to the United States.

Although European and allied authorities have now begun to unearth the myriad connections between these groups and expose their plots, the struggle continues. Most recently French officials arrested four people, two Algerians and two Moroccans, on Dec. 16, 2002, in possession of chemicals and a military personal-protection suit. French authorities say they appear to have been planning a chemical attack. The four were later linked to the GSPC Frankfurt cell.

The group's possible contact with Saddam’s regime was touched on in the January 2006 Weekly Standard cover piece, "Saddam's Terror Training Camps." Regarding the training of Algerian terrorists, in particular, Stephen Hayes wrote:

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army.

I haven’t checked the recent Senate Intelligence report to see if any of the above is discussed and evaluated, but I will.

This time things would be different. If Iran didn’t stop uranium enrichment by a date certain, Tehran’s defiance would be met by a tough, united international response. Think again. From The Independent:

President Jacques Chirac has broken ranks with the US and Britain by calling for the suspension of UN Security Council action against Iran during negotiations over its nuclear programme.

The AP reports:

The president of Somalia's interim government narrowly escaped a suicide bomber yesterday — a new tactic in a troubled land where an Islamic militia is vying for power. The leader's brother and 10 others died in the blast and a subsequent gun battle.

The foreign minister said the attack, along with the slaying of an Italian nun in the capital Sunday, had "the hallmarks of Al Qaeda."

…An increasingly powerful hardline Islamic movement — accused by the U.S. of having links with Al Qaeda — seized the capital, Mogadishu, in June and now controls much of the south.

"This is the first suicide bomber in Somalia," Foreign Minister Ismail Mohamed Hurre told the Associated Press in neighbouring Kenya. "This has the fingerprints of Al Qaeda all over it."

As in Anbar, the areas in Baghdad with the most violence have the fewest troops. From today’s New York Times:

On Thursday, the senior American military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said scores of mutilated bodies found in the middle of the week appeared to be ''from murder execution-style type activity.'' He said the rise in killings was occurring in parts of Baghdad where American forces had not swept through as part of the new security push.

From Reuters:

Gunmen killed an Italian nun at a children's hospital in Mogadishu on Sunday in an attack that drew immediate speculation of links to Muslim anger over the Pope's recent remarks on Islam.

The Catholic nun's guard also died from pistol shots in the latest attack on foreign personnel in volatile Somalia.

The assassinations were a blow to Mogadishu's new Islamist rulers' attempt to prove they have pacified one of the world's most lawless cities since chasing out warlords in June.

The bodyguard died instantly, but the nun, from the Missionaries of the Consolation order based in Nepi near Rome, was rushed into an operating theatre after being hit by three or four bullets in the chest, stomach and back.

Nuns aren’t the only targets. Today, as in other regions of the world, weapons have been increasingly aimed at 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.

(David Cameron's Clinton-like triangulation continues.)

Posted on September 12, 2006:

Britain's Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, made a few good points in a foreign policy speech delivered yesterday. But it was also a bit confusing on substance at times. The prospective British PM said, for example, that he supported the ouster of Saddam but then went on to quote a line from Democratic Senator Joe Biden about the perils of invading Iraq “virtually alone.” In March 2003, Prime Minister Blair made the tough decision to go into Iraq because the UN Security Council refused to enforce its own resolutions. Does Cameron now believe we should have left Saddam in power and pursued a policy of containment? Should Bush and Blair have waited until the French were onboard? He didn’t say.

Cameron also noted: "Foreign policy decisions are not black and white, something which the public well understands.” The process of arriving at a decision may not be “black and white” in most cases, but making it surely is. To govern is to choose. Prime Minister Thatcher (who visited the White House yesterday) faced a choice: order the fleet to the Falklands or keep it away. She then faced another decision: to attack or not attack Argentine forces. John Major’s government had a choice: confront Serbian aggression early on in the Balkans or sit back.

I suspect a Prime Minster Cameron may also have to make tough “black and white” decisions on Iran’s nuclear program, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and other issues off today’s radar screen. Should that time arrive, he may even gain a greater appreciation for the steadfastness of Tony Blair, a good friend of America who, in the face of withering criticism at home and abroad, didn’t "go wobbly" on us in Iraq .

Perhaps not. Pope John Paul II often spoke on the decline of European Christianity and the continent’s empty churches. But Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to Germany may foreshadow a Christian resurgence, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

[S]ome may be surprised at the receptivity in Germany this week to visiting Pope Benedict XVI's message: Europe needs to rethink the thesis that secularism and economic progress go hand in hand….

Germans themselves are modeling a growing acceptance of religion's role in shaping society….Church attendance is no longer declining, and in one state the number of young churchgoers is going up, says Voigt. Approximately two thirds of the 82 million citizens are church members. About 26 million are Roman Catholics, and a similar number are Protestants….

"Germany is a place where one can imagine a rethinking of this stultifying secularism and the moral relativism" prevalent in much of northern and western Europe today, says George Weigel, an American biographer of Pope John Paul II, and the author of "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God."

"German public life has a kind of intuitive sense in the wake of WWII that you can't have a world without moral reference points, or you get you-know-what," Mr. Weigel explains….

In the last 15 years, however, that notion that being normal and being religious are two different things has been changing, says Schieder. One factor driving that change may be the renewed interest over the last two decades in German political economist Max Weber, who linked Calvinism to the rise of capitalism in his seminal work, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

But another key factor, Schieder and other experts agree, is the presence of 2.6 million Muslims in Germany today.

"Some people have claimed that the presence of Muslims in these societies, and the possibility of Turkey coming into the European Union, might actually reinforce in the long run the Christian identity of Europe because it will remind Europeans of what they've been and make them want to recover that," says Timothy Shah at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington.

There will likely be more violent acts like this one as the current final status talks draw to a close -- and possibly for some time after. From AP:

Kosovo interior minister's car bombed

Fri Sep 15, 6:29 AM ET

A bomb placed under the Kosovo interior minister's car exploded early Friday in an eastern town in the U.N.-run province, police said.

No one was hurt by the blast, which occurred a few hours before Serbian and ethnic Albanian negotiators in Vienna, Austria, resumed contentious U.N.-brokered talks on Kosovo's future status.

Kosovo's parliament speaker said he considered the explosion to be directed against the talks.

The National Review's Rich Lowry writes:

Lawrence Korb and Peter Ogden of the Center for American Progress had an op-ed in the Washington Post Thursday responding to the piece I wrote with Bill Kristol the other day. They argue we simply don’t have any additional troops to send to Iraq. The headline is, “Why We Can’t Send More Troops.” Note the “can’t.” Not “shouldn’t,” “can’t.” This is nonsense.

As recently as December 2005, we had 160,000 troops in Iraq. Now, we have 147,000. Are we to believe that suddenly it is impossible to have another 14,000 or so — roughly four combat brigades — in Iraq to be back at 160,000? Those troops would nearly triple the number of troops we are currently surging into Baghdad.

Let’s say we are talking about another two or three divisions, in other words 30,000-45,000 troops. That is certainly doable as well, even though it would obviously be a strain. The way critics of the war argue that it is impossible to send more troops is to assume we need 250,000 troops in Iraq to make any difference. That would indeed be impossible.

But increments short of that will make a difference in Iraq. The Marine intelligence officer whose downbeat report in Anbar recently got so much attention said another division, 15,000 troops, would make a difference there. 15,000 more troops would unquestionably make a difference in Baghdad, too. Much smaller increases in Ramadi and elsewhere would dramatically change the local equations as well. Remember: Only about 3,500 American soldiers were enough to clear Tall Afar.

Let’s roll through Korb and Ogden’s argument.

The BBC reports on Zawahiri's latest claim "that a radical Algerian Islamist group has joined al-Qaeda and is being urged to punish France.” In the video that aired on a website on September 11, Zawahiri stated: "Osama Bin Laden has told me to announce to Muslims that the GSPC [the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat] has joined al-Qaeda." He called on the Algerian-based terror group to become "a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders.” The GSPC has since released a statement: “We pledge allegiance to Sheikh Osama Bin Laden... Our soldiers are at his call so that he may strike who and where he likes.”

How did the GSPC come about?

In 1997, a splinter group emerged from Algeria’s GIA (Armed Islamic Group) called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC. Stanley Bedlington, who worked counterterrorism for the CIA from 1986 to 1994, told USA Today in December 2001 that "we traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq." But how close a relationship the GSPC had with al Qaeda before this recent pledge has been difficult to nail down. Some say there wasn’t much of one; others believe the GSPC had close ties to bin Laden. A January 2004 analysis from the Center for Defense Information noted this on the relationship between the GSPC and bin Laden:

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) has emerged in recent years as a major source of recruiting and other support for al Qaeda operations in Europe. A splinter faction of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the GSPC is engaged simultaneously in efforts to topple Algeria's secular government and to organize high-profile attacks against Western interests on the continent....

Yet more alarming to U.S. and European observers, by 2000, according to Italian investigators, the GSPC had taken over the GIA's external networks across Europe and North Africa and were moving to establish an 'Islamic International' under the aegis of Osama bin Laden. Haydar Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian known as "the Doctor," was instrumental in this reorganization. Abu Doha moved to the UK in 1999 after serving as a senior official in a Qaeda Afghan terrorist camp.

Doha was one of the first to encourage the GSPC to split from the GIA and he helped recruit new terrorists from the large base of disenfranchised Algerian youth in Europe's cities, especially in France. (Algerians to have been among the most numerous militants at al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the war.) Many of these new adherents were involved in petty crimes such as car theft, credit-card fraud, and document forgery; and their earnings were now channeled to finance terrorist operations.

Another Algerian, Mohamed Bensakhria, who was based in Germany, and a Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, based in Italy, helped Doha establish and coordinate these cells across Europe. They expanded upon the Algerian base of recruits by incorporating radical militants who had left behind dormant conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Bensakhria and Maaroufi also created a vast support network that provided newcomers with false documents, lodgings, and incidental spending money.

In recent years, authorities have foiled an alarming number of terrorist plots across Europe and uncovered cells — many linked in one way or another to the GSPC — in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. Some of the high profile operations planned included a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Paris and Rome, and attacks on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

Bensakhria was arrested in Spain in June 2002. Maaroufi is wanted in Italy but remains free because of his Belgian citizenship, which prevents his extradition to Italy. Meanwhile, Abu Doha has been connected to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted for trying to attack Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium changeover, and is currently in British custody fighting extradition to the United States.

Although European and allied authorities have now begun to unearth the myriad connections between these groups and expose their plots, the struggle continues. Most recently French officials arrested four people, two Algerians and two Moroccans, on Dec. 16, 2002, in possession of chemicals and a military personal-protection suit. French authorities say they appear to have been planning a chemical attack. The four were later linked to the GSPC Frankfurt cell.

The group's possible contact with Saddam’s regime was touched on in the January 2006 Weekly Standard cover piece, "Saddam's Terror Training Camps." Regarding the training of Algerian terrorists, in particular, Stephen Hayes wrote:

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army.

I haven’t checked the recent Senate Intelligence report to see if any of the above is discussed and evaluated, but I will.

Jimmy Carter on CNN: "I've lost my confidence in Joe Lieberman and don't wish to see him re-elected." Meanwhile, taking a page out of Jimmy Carter's playbook, Bill Clinton is overseas dumping the U.S., reports The Times (London): "You've got a great economy, better growth than America has and less inequality than America."

(A reader from our good friend Australia writes:

I saw your post 'Fighting Corruption as an Anti-Poverty Program' and how "too little attention is given to one of the biggest barriers to lifting nations out of chronic poverty -- rampant government and business corruption."

Our Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, is taking a tough line on this issue in relation to a developing dispute in the Solomon Islands. He's doing a great job on this.

Check out some of these links: one is from PM Howard's interview on the matter (last few paragraphs) and news reports here, here and here.

Clearly, Howard is continuing his record as a world leader who thinks and acts clearly and decisively on these issues - whether it is in Afghanistan, Iraq, Solomon Islands or elsewhere.)

George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously pledged at least $150 million to alleviate hunger and poverty in Africa. Soros will donate his money to the UN Millennium Villages project, which operates in 10 African nations. The other two foundations will fund a “scaling up” of agricultural programs designed to increase crop yields. “Gates speculated that once the projects to help farmers got off the ground,” AP reports, “the farmers and their governments would reinvest in the infrastructure needed to make a lasting impact.” But a major key to securing a “lasting impact” will be to hold those governments that engage in illicit practices accountable. As I have noted in an earlier post, too little attention is given to one of the biggest barriers to lifting nations out of chronic poverty -- rampant government and business corruption – and to those trying to shine the spotlight on such activity.

Regarding my September 8 post, a professor at one of the nation's war colleges emails:

This line from Bodine's CYA op-ed says it all:

"The Cole was also a crime scene, and crew members were witnesses."

At no other time in US history, can I remember an attack against a US warship considered a mere "crime." We might not have responded appropriately to the German attacks on the destroyer USS Kearny or other warships serving as convoy escorts in the North Atlantic prior to Pearl Harbor. But we also didn't refer the matter to the FBI and hope the Nazis would cooperate.

The attack on the Cole was an act of war, pure and simple; Bodine still doesn't get it.

Britain's Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, made a few good points in a foreign policy speech delivered yesterday. But it was also a bit confusing on substance at times. The prospective British PM said, for example, that he supported the ouster of Saddam but then went on to quote a line from Democratic Senator Joe Biden about the perils of invading Iraq “virtually alone.” In March 2003, Prime Minister Blair made the tough decision to go into Iraq because the UN Security Council refused to enforce its own resolutions. Does Cameron now believe we should have left Saddam in power and pursued a policy of containment? Should Bush and Blair have waited until the French were onboard? He didn’t say.

Cameron also noted: "Foreign policy decisions are not black and white, something which the public well understands.” The process of arriving at a decision may not be “black and white” in most cases, but making it surely is. To govern is to choose. Prime Minister Thatcher (who visited the White House yesterday) faced a choice: order the fleet to the Falklands or keep it away. She then faced another decision: to attack or not attack Argentine forces. John Major’s government had a choice: confront Serbian aggression early on in the Balkans or sit back.

I suspect a Prime Minster Cameron may also have to make tough “black and white” decisions on Iran’s nuclear program, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and other issues off today’s radar screen. Should that time arrive, he may even gain a greater appreciation for the steadfastness of Tony Blair, a good friend of America who, in the face of withering criticism at home and abroad, didn’t "go wobbly" on us in Iraq .

Radio Free Europe reports that the Iranian oil minister is worried enough about falling crude prices to float consideration of OPEC production cuts. “’The high level of crude oil production has led global oil reserves to rise above the usual level,’ he said [in Vienna], provoking ‘instability and the decline in prices in the past month.’" Lower oil revenue is a big deal to a regime that uses the cash to avert domestic instability. As the Washington Post reported last May,

Iran uses a good chunk of that [oil] money to raise public-sector wages and to subsidize its own gasoline prices, one way to keep domestic discontent in check when unemployment is running at more than 12 percent and inflation at 13 percent.

All this is why squeezing Iran’s oil revenue should be a top priority of the U.S. government, as former Bush administration official Mark Sumerlin argues here.

From today's Wall Street Journal editorial:

What would Jack Bauer do? If he worked at the CIA in real life today, the anti-terror hero of Fox's "24" would apparently be buying insurance in case the ACLU or John Kerry decided to sue or subpoena him for protecting America with too much vigor.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that more CIA counterterrorism officers are signing up for private insurance that would pay for civil judgments and legal costs if they are sued or charged with a crime. These are the agents who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and other jihadis, using what President Bush last week called methods that were legal but "tough." Those methods succeeded in breaking these men into divulging information that led to the arrest of other al Qaeda bigs, and to the foiling of plots that could have killed thousands.

"'There are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be coming' from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors if Democrats capture the White House in 2008," wrote the Post, quoting a retired intelligence officer close to the CIA's Directorate of Operations, which conducted the interrogations. This is not paranoia. We reported yesterday how Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, is blocking Bush nominees simply for having been mentioned in passing in emails about Guantanamo. Some of us also remember the infamous Frank Church hearings of the 1970s that pilloried the CIA and weakened it for decades.

Though the government pays the premiums for this kind of insurance, it is a sorry spectacle that these agents must now fear partisan retribution for having done precisely what the country asked them to do. The story is one more reason Congress should follow through on Mr. Bush's request to put its stamp of approval on such interrogations, including ex post facto immunity for these CIA officers.

Intelligence is the front line of this anti-jihadi conflict, and the danger from the current political second-guessing is that CIA officers will go back to the FBI's law enforcement mentality of reading terrorists their Miranda rights that failed the country leading up to 9/11. The country needs Jack Bauer insurance, too.

(National Review's Rich Lowry and the Standard's Bill Kristol weigh in on the troop issue in today’s Washington Post.)

In Iraq, the lack of troops has been a major problem for years, and little has been done about it. A review:

From the May 3, 2004 Weekly Standard:

But can the coalition get the insurgency under control with the forces it now has available? Only if it is very, very lucky. A wise strategy would be to immediately dispatch at least six more combat brigades (about 40,000 troops with their necessary support groups), sending one each to Falluja, Karbala, Najaf, and Mosul, one to strengthen the patrols along the Iranian border (we might even need one more along the Syrian border, given the recent violence there), and one for a reserve. We can already see sufficient dangers in these areas to warrant preventive reinforcements. If we increase our presence now, we might be able to deter new problems, with increased patrolling, and to solve some old ones--including the standoff with Moktada al-Sadr that has been allowed to drag on very dangerously.

Neither the Bush administration nor its critics seem to want to acknowledge that wars and counterinsurgencies are made up of a string of fleeting opportunities that, once past, can never be recovered. The coalition has received ample warning of the possibility of widespread violence erupting suddenly in Iraq. By sending more troops now, we stand a fair chance of preventing an explosion. If we wait until it has occurred, the prospects for success in Iraq will have dimmed dramatically…. Any sound strategy for dealing with the problems in Iraq today, however, will have to begin with more troops. A paucity of American forces in Iraq has been the central problem of U.S. policy since before the war began. It remains the central problem today. Until it is resolved, the outlook will remain grim.

From the New York Times, June 16, 2005:

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.''

From the April 26, 2006 Stars and Strips:

U.S. troops entered Mukhisa and the adjacent town of Abu Kharma on Sunday after hearing that the region is home to foreign fighters, members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group and financiers behind roadside bomb and mortar attacks, said Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher, battalion commander....

One obstacle his troops face is that the two towns’ contact with coalition forces over the past three years has consisted of three raids, in which hundreds of townspeople were arrested only to be released later, Fisher said.

“When you neglect a town and don’t engage the population, the terrorists who are here and the insurgents can tell them anything they want, and they will believe it because there is no one else telling them anything different,” he said.

From a May 30, 2006 Washington Post piece:

...Marine officers on the ground have been open for more than a year now about needing more troops in Anbar, whose Sunni population, remoteness and comparative lawlessness have made it a stronghold for the insurgency. Anbar borders Syria, a conduit for some of the weapons, money and fighters.

From AP, June 19, 2006:

Hundreds of American and Iraqi troops backed by a U.S. gunship pushed into an insurgent-infested section of eastern Ramadi, expanding their campaign to bolster their presence in one of Iraq’s most violent cities….

“It’s one of the first steps to moving into areas of the city that have not had a large coalition or Iraqi presence for a long time, if ever,” said Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division that oversees the city.

And now this piece, “Situation Called Dire in West Iraq,”, from today’s Washington Post:

[Chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq Col Pete] Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence.

One view of the report offered by some Marine officers is that it is a cry for help from an area where fighting remains intense, yet which recently has been neglected by top commanders and Bush administration officials as they focus on bringing a sense of security to Baghdad. An Army unit of Stryker light armored vehicles that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent to reinforce operations in Baghdad, leaving commanders in the west scrambling to move around other troops to fill the gap.

The stakes couldn’t be higher in Iraq, but our commanders are still, years after the invasion, “scrambling” to fill the troop gap. The buck stops where?

The BBC reports:

A Somali radio station has resumed broadcasting after it was closed down by Islamist leaders for playing local love songs.

However, Radio Jowhar is no longer playing any music, even jingles.

The Union of Islamic Courts, which controls much of the south, is split between hardliners, who want Taleban-style rule, and moderates….

"It is useless to air music and love songs for the people," said Jowhar Islamic official Sheik Mohamed Mohamoud Abdirahman.

Some residents were upset by the radio ban.

"This directive is like the Taliban," Ali Musse told the AP news agency.

"It is censorship against independent media and freedom of expression."

To Somalia’s west, freedom of expression has led to the beheading of a newspaper editor in Khartoum. From Aljazeera:

A Sudanese newspaper editor who was kidnapped by armed men has been found beheaded.

Mohamed Taha was snatched from outside his home in the capital Khartoum on Tuesday.

A photograph showed his body bound at the feet and hands with his severed head next to his body, a Reuters witness said on Wednesday.

He was found on a dirt street in a middle-class residential district of southern Khartoum.

Dozens of Sudanese journalists gathered at the Khartoum mortuary, guarded by heavily armed police.

Aziza Abdel Rahman, a journalist working for the country's armed forces magazine, said: "The Sudanese press will not be intimidated. We will write our views even more. This will not stop us."

Taha was arrested last year and his al-Wifaq paper closed for three months after it published a series of articles questioning the roots of the Prophet Muhammad, which were condemned by Sudan's powerful Islamists.

Local papers quoted his family as saying a group of men bundled Taha into a car outside his home and sped off towards central Khartoum.

Securitywatchertower.com has more here.

If you get a chance, I highly recommend reading Mayor Giuliani’s piece in USA Today. What it shows is that if Giuliani jumps into the presidential race he’ll offer a tough, clear-minded view into the nature of the enemy, and he will be unabashed in taking on the liberals on national security issues. The mayor may want to consider following up with some speeches defending our strategic policy since September 11 and note some of this regarding America's global image. Some highlights from the Giuliani piece:

The attacks did not begin on Sept. 11, 2001. They actually began sometime in the late 1960s, when Islamic radicals started hijacking planes and directing terror at civilians. The first attack that drew significant international attention was the slaughter of the Israeli wrestling team at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Numerous attacks followed, leading up to Sept. 11 and the deadliest ever attack on American soil.

The attacks have continued unceasingly since 9/11 and include those on Bali, Indonesia; Madrid; Beslan, Russia; London — and the recent interrupted plot in the United Kingdom, which might have been even deadlier than the attacks five years ago.

So the killing of innocent civilians by Islamic fanatics has been going on for some time. What was quite different about the attacks of five years ago is that Sept. 11, 2001, marks the day that our nation went on offense against the terrorists.

We broke the pattern of inconsistent response to previous attacks. We began a concerted effort to defeat Islamic fundamentalist terrorism….

The United States has successfully prevented domestic attacks over the past five years, but the terrorists have not relented. Think of the innumerable attacks from Israel to Iraq and the reported attacks planned by sleeper cells in Buffalo; Portland, Ore.; and Canada that were disrupted by alert authorities.

Some argue that the attacks continue because of the war in Iraq. But the attacks began decades before the Iraq war. Some argue that our enemies seek negotiation and understanding. But our enemies have made clear to us that what they seek is the annihilation of our most precious freedoms.

One of the main reasons for the founding of the United States was to establish freedom, particularly freedom of religion. Our enemies oppose freedom, particularly freedom of religion. This was made shockingly clear by the recent gunpoint "conversion" of two kidnapped journalists in Gaza. The terrorists don't want to understand and co-exist alongside Western democracies. There are those over the past 30 years, and even to this day, who want to negotiate with the fanatic Islamic terrorists. But the fanatics don't want to negotiate. They want to establish a world in which everyone practices a perverted version of their religion. They want to return to a time before the modern age, to a world in which women have no rights and religious dissent is met with death.

These attacks are about a radical form of Islam that views our very existence as a grave threat. This is not a debate over values or policies. This is not a border dispute. This is a war over the preservation and expansion of the modern world.

Yesterday, on Fox News Sunday, Howard Dean stated:

You know, Afghanistan is turning against us, and that is where the fight on terror is. That's where Osama bin Laden is. Osama bin Laden has not been captured five years later. That's a big problem.

The “fight on terror is” in Afghanistan, but it’s also in Iraq and in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. The fight is “global,” as Tony Blair explained a few weeks back: "No-one who ever half bothers to look at the spread and range of activity related to this terrorism can fail to see its presence in virtually every major nation in the world." Afghanistan became a terror state in the 1990s, when the Taliban took control and offered bin Laden and his terror cohorts safe harbor from which they trained “perhaps over 10,000 terrorists,” according to Richard Clarke, before they dispersed to "probably between 5o-60 counties."

Today, Afghanistan and Iraq are major fronts in the "fight on terror." Zawahiri explained Iraq's importance in his letter to Zarqawi: “The first stage," he wrote, is to “expel the Americans from Iraq.” He also counseled Zarqawi to be prepared:

[T]hings may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us, and before we are surprised by the conspiracies of the Americans and the United Nations and their plans to fill the void behind them. We must take the initiative and impose a fait accompli upon our enemies, instead of the enemy imposing one on us, wherein our lot would be to merely resist their schemes.

Dean may believe that the only "fight on terror" is in Afghanistan, but the enemy who hit us on September 11 surely doesn’t.

(Marc Sumerlin, formerly deputy director of the National Economic Council, outlines a sanctions strategy in the current Weekly Standard. He notes: "The most important policy would be to announce without delay a coordinated release of strategic petroleum stocks…. Global government-controlled petroleum of IEA member countries could offset about 20 months of Iranian oil exports--a figure that should not only make Tehran nervous, but could also allow for an over-release, providing more oil to markets than was taken off-line. A coordinated oil release would shift supply from religious fanatics to known allies and demonstrate that oil vulnerability can be a two-way street. During the Persian Gulf war, a release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was announced on the same day that the war began.")

Posted September 5, 2006:

David Lynch has a very interesting piece in today’s USA Today. It suggests that that the conventional wisdom on Iran – that it holds all the economic cards in the nuclear showdown – is largely wrong. The regime may be much more vulnerable to comprehensive sanctions than many realize. Lynch notes that foreign direct investment in Iran is one-tenth that of Turkey, unemployment hovers in the double digits, and, since Ahmadinejad took office, Iran’s stock market has plummeted 32 percent. He writes:

As Iran hurtles toward a confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program, the nation's economy remains a dysfunctional wreck….

The official unemployment rate is 11%, although economists such as London Metropolitan University's Parvin Alizadeh say the actual total is twice that figure. Even government ministers acknowledge jobless rates as high as 18% in some provinces….

Foreign direct investment in the current year is expected to reach just $1.5 billion; neighboring Turkey, of comparable size, anticipates $11 billion. For the Iranian year that ended in March, the economy grew an estimated 6%, but that mostly reflects the impact of surging oil revenue and expansionary government spending, which has doubled in four years, says the International Monetary Fund.

Three years of confrontation between Iran and the U.S. over the nuclear issue have chilled domestic businesses that depend upon the outside world. Near the ancient ruins at Persepolis, about 30 miles outside Shiraz, restaurateur Rasoul Azeemzadeh mourns lost opportunities….

Likewise, in the lobby of the Tehran Stock Exchange, glum investors gather to stare at the overhead screens displaying sinking share prices. Since Ahmadinejad's election, the market has dropped 32%….

Ahmadinejad's surprise victory in last year's presidential election, however, was fueled by public dissatisfaction with the clerical regime's economic track record. During the campaign, the former Tehran mayor denounced soaring inequality and widespread corruption among Iran's clerical elite. He also attacked the "oil mafia" running the country's key industry and vowed to spread the wealth.

From Tehran's venerable central bazaar, with its smells of coriander and cumin, to the Internet cafes where young Iranians gather, there is talk of a turn to the East. To many Iranians, China and India appear as both potential business partners and economic models for their country, with its well-educated population and strategic location, to emulate. That explains why some of the political "carrots" the U.S. and Europe are offering in return for a halt to Iran's uranium enrichment program may not sway Ahmadinejad.

Iran is vulnerable to a cutoff of international bank loans and gasoline imports, which make up around 38% of domestic consumption. Iranian officials insist that, given Russian and Chinese reluctance to act, real punishment may never materialize.

Other reports have also touched on Iran's shaky economy.

In May, the Washington Post pointed out: "Experts on Iran point to a number of reasons it might be reluctant to cut oil exports. Oil accounts for 85 percent of Iran's exports, according to an International Monetary Fund report issued last month. Revenue from those exports makes up 65 percent of government income. And Iran uses a good chunk of that money to raise public-sector wages and to subsidize its own gasoline prices, one way to keep domestic discontent in check when unemployment is running at more than 12 percent and inflation at 13 percent."

And in April, Radio Free Europe reported that Iran's president had been traveling around the country reassuring people on the economy:

President Ahmadinejad has discussed the issue of unemployment -- estimated to be at least 11 percent and closer to 20 percent -- in several recent speeches, hinting at his recognition that he must satisfy voters' most immediate concerns. He announced in the northeastern town of Quchan on April 11 that 180 trillion rials (approximately $200 million) will be distributed in the provinces for job creation, IRNA reported. In a speech in Mashhad on April 10, he said, "Employment is one of the most important issues to be tackled by the nation and the government," state television reported. "There are so many young people who have a specialization. They have learned and studied but there is no employment opportunity for them."

All this suggests that the regime’s stability would be highly vulnerable to UN Security Council-imposed sanctions. But passing Chapter 7 sanctions would require Russia and China to act responsibly, which is why John Bolton is making alternative plans on the sanctions front.

(KSL.com reports: "A controversy over words at BYU this morning. A professor is on paid leave for suggesting the government is responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The man on paid leave is Dr. Steven Jones. He's a physics professor involved in the so-called ‘9-11 Truth Movement.’” Last week, Reuters reported on another professor from the “9/11 Truth” group who teaches at the University of New Hampshire.)

Posted on June 21, 2006:

The U.S government murdered thousands of its own citizens on September 11, 2001. That theory has been circulating among an assortment of America haters, Jew haters, paranoids … and a few professors at U.S. universities. An upcoming cover story in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at a group called “Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors – more in the humanities than in the sciences – from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.” The co-chair of the group, Steven E. Jones, is from, of all places, Brigham Young University and has been roundly denounced by his colleagues at the Utah campus. Jones and the others believe preplanted explosives took down the World Trade Centers. Why? In order to “manipulate Americans” into supporting policies, as the conspiracy thinking goes, that seek world domination through the barrel of a gun and to fatten the profits of the oil companies and weapons manufactures. Another “scholar,” David Ray Griffin, wrote the book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, “exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11.” A blurb on the book’s jacket reads:

The most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration’s relationship to that historic and troubling event.

The blurb’s author isn’t some obscure academic. It’s Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, best-selling author and frequent speaker at American universities across the country. The good news is that unlike Zinn most other academics in the U.S. believe “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” are just a bunch of crackpots.

Letter to the Editor of the Washington Times, September 6, 2006:

Friday's Page One article "Gingrich opposed to U.S. strike on Iran" suggests that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich would oppose a possible military action against Iran to prevent the regime from becoming a nuclear power. This is not true.

To be clear, Mr. Gingrich believes that the Iranian regime cannot be allowed to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. However, though a military strike on Iran's well-hidden and well-protected nuclear facilities (many of which are spread out and deep underground) would degrade that country's nuclear program, it would not guarantee that Iran would not ultimately acquire a nuclear weapon.

Therefore, regime change in Iran should be America's strategy.

Mr. Gingrich believes that a successful policy of regime change in Iran should start with what President Reagan did in Eastern Europe to defeat communism. By employing a comprehensive strategy that relied on America's economic, political, diplomatic and intelligence capabilities, Mr. Reagan defeated the Soviet Union without firing a shot. This should be our goal in Iran as well.

Mr. Gingrich has said that "a nonviolent solution" that allows terrorists to get stronger and Iran to threaten us with nuclear weapons would be "a defeat," but this is not inconsistent with his belief that there are nonviolent solutions that can weaken terrorists and could prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. However, the goal remains the same, and that is to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons without military action if possible but with force if necessary.

Rick Tyler

Communications director and spokesman

Gingrich Communications

Good points.

Weighing in on the ABC mini-series "The Path to 9/11," the former ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, writes ("9/11 Miniseries is Bunk") in today’s Los Angeles Times:

One of the myths perpetuated by ABC played out in the steamy port city of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, using an FBI agent out of New York, John O'Neill, and the U.S. ambassador to that country. According to the mythmakers, a battle ensued between a cop obsessed with tracking down Osama bin Laden and a bureaucrat more concerned with the feelings of the host government than the fate of Americans and the realities of terrorism. I know this is false. I was there. I was the ambassador.

I am not here to either defend or attack O'Neill. He was a complex man. But what happened after Al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole was a complex story. Within hours, our embassy in Sana, Yemen, received support from Washington, U.S. military commands in the region and neighboring U.S. embassies. Within days, our presence in Aden went from zero to more than 300 people from the Navy, Marines, the intelligence community, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the FBI, the State Department and my embassy. We had a clear and common goal: honor those killed by finding those guilty.

As ambassador, I had four missions: recover the Cole and her crew; provide security for the burgeoning U.S. presence in Aden; establish a joint Yemeni-American criminal investigation, as agreed between the president of Yemen and FBI Director Louis Freeh; and maintain the Yemeni-American relationship.

These tasks were not sequential but deeply interdependent. The recovery of the ship and its crew was the most urgent. The Cole was also a crime scene, and crew members were witnesses. Recovery efforts had to be coordinated with naval investigators and the FBI. With an unsettled threat, I could not allow either to go forward without rigorous security at the harbor and at our base of operations. The least quantifiable of the four mandates was our relationship with the Yemeni authorities. Diplomatic relations are not an end in themselves but rather provide a context within which we are able to operate — or not. Our cooperative relationship enabled the recovery, the security and the investigation to move forward, to work through the tensions, disagreements and conflicts that naturally arose. The attack on the Cole was a hostile act, but this was not a hostile government or a hostile people. It was my job to make sure everyone involved understood that our actions must not subvert our goals.

The realities of a U.S. investigative style inevitably collided headlong with the limited capabilities of Yemen. The Yemenis knew Aden and its people but lacked technical and professional competence; the FBI had the forensic and technical capability but could not operate "on the street" in Aden. The friction, the suspicion, the miscommunication between the two could not, however, be allowed to derail a successful criminal investigation of the attack, its roots in Yemen and its links to other attacks against Americans around the world. Yemen's subsequent willingness to cooperate with us in the war on terrorism confirms the value of working with it — not seeing it as the enemy.

John O’Neill was no ordinary FBI agent tasked to Yemen to investigate the Cole bombing. Long before September 11, O’Neill had warned about the threat al Qaeda posed to the U.S. In late August 2001 he took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. He was killed there on September 11. PBS’ Frontline aired an excellent program on O’Neill called “The Man Who Knew” in October 2003. The program focused on O’Neill’s uphill battle against the U.S. government bureaucracy and also on what happened in Yemen following the USS Cole bombing. O’Neill can’t defend his actions today, so here’s the Yemen-related section from the Frontline transcript:

NARRATOR: To protect the hundreds of investigators on the ground, O'Neill and American military commanders wanted to show the Yemenis a forceful presence -- guns ready, perimeters established. But much to O'Neill's surprise, that approach quickly angered the American ambassador, Barbara Bodine, who felt his actions were harming U.S.-Yemeni government relations.

RICHARD CLARKE, NSC Chief of Counterterrorism '92-'01: You had an ambassador who wanted to be fully in control of everything that every American official did in the country and resented the fact that suddenly there were hundreds of FBI personnel in the country and only a handful of State Department personnel. She wanted good relations with Yemen as the number-one priority. John O'Neill wanted to stop terrorism as the number-one priority. And the two conflicted.

FRAN TOWNSEND, Deputy U.S. Attorney general '95-'01: This results in meetings between the attorney general and State, FBI, C.I.A. and Justice. But Ambassador Pickering is at it, the undersecretary, and the attorney general. Things are getting raised to that kind of a level, this has become such a bone of contention between them.

RICHARD CLARKE: Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, the State Department, the Defense Department -- almost all of us thought that John O'Neill was doing the right thing.

NARRATOR: But not the higher-ups at the FBI.

BARRY MAWN, Director FBI NYC '00-'02: There may have been people at FBI headquarters that were going, "See? I told you so." You know, "John does upset people and get them upset. And maybe he wasn't the right guy." But that's -- I mean, that's all childish gossip and rumoring, as far as I'm concerned.

NARRATOR: But on the ground in Yemen, the law enforcement agents saw a very different John O'Neill.

MICHAEL DORSEY: I think he developed a real sense of closeness with the senior Yemeni officials. They referred to him in Arabic as "Alach [sp?]," which is "the brother," and oftentimes referred to him as "the commander" or "your commander." They had a real sense of appreciation for his seniority in the U.S. government and for what he represented. And I knew that they came to trust John.

NARRATOR: For six years at the center of the FBI's counterterrorism effort, O'Neill and his team had built the evidence on the mounting bin Laden threat: failed plots to kill hundreds of Americans in Jordan, Ressam's explosives headed to LAX, an aborted Al Qaeda plot to blow up another American warship, the USS The Sullivans, and now the Cole. The Yemenis finally agreed to let the FBI join in the interrogation of one of their most prominent suspects, Fahad al Quso.

O'Neill and his agents believed al Quso knew about bin Laden's desire to videotape the destruction of the Cole, and possibly a whole lot more. O'Neill worked his newly developed Yemeni police officials and old allies in the CIA.

NARRATOR: He had come to believe that some Yemeni officials were not being forthcoming about information from al Quso and other suspects. It was the Khobar Towers investigation all over again. (emphasis mine)

But the weeks were taking their toll. O'Neill needed a break. He'd get back to al Quso after he returned from New York at the first of the year.

VALERIE JAMES (O’Neill’s wife) : I have to tell you, when John came home -- he got home, I think it was two days before Thanksgiving because he kept telling me he was going to try to be home for Thanksgiving. He -- John had dropped 20, 25 pounds.

NARRATOR: In New York, he plotted his return to Yemen. He had taken a Yemeni police delegation on a tour of Elaine's and other hotspots. He was working them, trying to get unfettered access to al Quso and what he knew. But then he was told he wouldn't be allowed to return to Yemen. Ambassador Bodine denied his visa.

CHRIS ISHAM, ABC News: I mean, John was not rational on the topic of Ambassador Barbara Bodine. He was -- I mean, "livid" would be putting it mildly. I mean, one can't forget that John was -- he very American, but he was also very Irish.

INTERVIEWER: And that means?

CHRIS ISHAM: That means when he got hot, he got hot. And he was hot. There's no question about it. I think he felt that she was on the wrong side.

NARRATOR: Ambassador Bodine would not grant FRONTLINE's request for an interview. She was quoted in The New Yorker magazine. "The idea that John or his people or the FBI were somehow barred from doing their job is insulting to the U.S. government, which was working on Al Qaeda before John ever showed up. This is all my embassy did for 10 months."

For weeks, the ambassador had been making the case against O'Neill, even lobbying Louis Freeh. Finally, her accusations had their intended effect. Headquarters supported her decision not to let O'Neill back into Yemen.

BARRY MAWN: John was upset. She was bad-mouthing him. She had caused a stir at headquarters. I actually think John was more disappointed that our headquarters didn't back us, as far as sending him back and taking a stronger stand with the State Department. Eventually, our headquarters said, "Well, let's try and work around not having John go back." And so that's what I had to do.

NARRATOR: So O'Neill would not be in Yemen. The investigation slowed to a crawl.

MICHAEL SHEEHAN, Chief Counterterrorism, State Dept. '98-'01: I watched with dismay as the issue of the USS Cole completely disappeared from the U.S. scene, completely -- again, in a new administration. It was just not on their agenda. Clearly, it was not on the agenda of the Congress, the media or anyone else. Again, it went into oblivion.

NARRATOR: By spring, intelligence about Al Qaeda forces in Yemen convinced O'Neill they were about to target his agents. O'Neill pleaded with Barry Mawn to pull them out, and Mawn agreed. O'Neill's investigation in Yemen was effectively over.

CHRIS ISHAM: We don't know what would have happened if John could have done his job in Yemen and had really had the full back-up to go and to really push in Yemen and what kind of networks he could have exposed. But you know, we do know there were Yemenis involved in the attacks of September 11th. So is it possible that if he had been able to really open up that network and really expose that network, that he could have in some way deterred the tragedy of September 11th? I don't think we know, but it's sad because we won't know the answer to that. But I think there is a fighting -- he would have had had a fighting chance if he'd been able to do his job.

Frontline also speculated on the “what if” O’Neill was allowed to continue his investigation in Yemen:

Following Sept. 11, Fahad al-Quso was interrogated again in Yemen on Sept. 12, 13 and 14 by FBI and Navy investigators, who had only just returned to Yemen a few days earlier. One of O'Neill's last acts at the FBI in late August 2001 was to sign the authorization for that return.

Interrogators showed al-Quso the CIA surveillance photos taken at the critical January 2000 Malaysia meetings. Al-Quso identified Alhazmi and Almidhar and admitted he was a bagman for Al Qaeda, presumably to fund the conspirators' future operations. He claims he wasn't at the meetings, but that Alhazmi and Almidhar met with him soon after the meetings concluded.

One investigator admitted to FRONTLINE that al-Quso's connections to the 9/11 conspirators was a staggering revelation, and he still had nightmares about it. When asked what might have been discovered if they'd learned of al-Quso's connections earlier, he responded, "the possibilities are mind-boggling."

So there was the trail -- the pieces of information linking the Malaysia meetings in January 2000, to the USS Cole attack of October 2000, to the 9/11 plot. At those meetings in Malaysia, it's believed both the 9/11 and Cole plots were planned, their operatives met with each other, and investigators suspect one or more Al Qaeda operatives at the meetings worked both the Cole and 9/11 plots.

The stunning and logical question that hangs in the air about John O'Neill's compromised USS Cole investigation in Yemen is, "What if?"

What if FBI headquarters had backed O'Neill and pushed the State Department to allow him to return to Yemen in January 2001 (over the objections of U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine) to continue his investigation?

If O'Neill had been allowed to go back, what could he have done that wasn't already being done? Given his aggressiveness in investigations, it would have meant more wiretaps, more surveillance of suspects, and pushing the government for more arrests. And as his colleagues like Barry Mawn, Clint Guenther and Mary Jo White knew so well, it all would have been done in the John O'Neill style:

-- wining and dining the head of Yemen's PSO, Yemen's equivalent to the FBI...

-- working with the CIA agents in Yemen and building on those past relationships from his Station Alex days...

-- holding the Yemeni officials' feet to the fire to get more access to those detained, and using the interrogations to slowly unravel the Al Qaeda network in Yemen -- especially, Fahad al-Quso, who O'Neill knew had been holding back ...

This is the scenario that might have played out in Yemen and the one that still bothers O'Neill's former allies and supporters. For them, it is conceivable that, in the end, John O'Neill would have been able to learn about that critical January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, and to start connecting the dots that ultimately led to Sept. 11, 2001.

One last thing. Contrary to Bodine’s claim of the “cooperative relationship” between the US and Yemeni governments, Richard Clarke told Frontline just the opposite:

The first thing was the government of Yemen didn't want us to know all the details; in part, because that would reveal that some low-level people in the Yemeni government may have been part of the conspiracy; in part, because it would have shown that the Yemeni government didn't really have control over a large section of Yemen; in part because it would have shown that Yemen was filled with terrorists from a whole variety of different organizations. So Yemen didn't want to cooperate fully, didn't want us to see everything that was there.

It's definitely campaign season. This proposal -- the idea that you would cede decisions of such magnitude from the elected commander-in-chief to ground commanders -- is beyond silly. The President, whether Republican or Democrat or Independent, decides when the military objective has been met and the mission complete.

AFP reports that "China has said it remains opposed to sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear drive, one day after top US envoy Christopher Hill nudged Beijing to take more action over the issue.” Guess this is one way China is thanking us for going to bat for them at the I.M.F.

In a speech today, Senator and potential Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden "blasts" the president’s national security policies:

It is time for America to recapture the totality of our strength -- our military, economic, and diplomatic might…. That is what won the Cold War. That is what has gotten lost these past five years.

That’s interesting. At least during the Reagan years, the vast bulk of Democrats fought the very policies that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. And many of them are the same ones who are today advocating an Iraq troop pullout policy that would, in the view of many, bolster the terrorists. In the past, Biden has kept his distance from the Dean/Moveon.org wing of his party. But his presidential ambitions may be changing that -- especially as the primary campaign heats up.

(The news gets better for Romney with the editors of the Boston Globe attacking him for being “under the influence of those deliberate simplifiers” in the “far right.” Of course, one major thing the liberal sophisticates at the Globe don’t mention is that under Khatami, as Middle East scholar Reuel Marc Gerecht has noted, “the Islamic Republic probably made its most profound clandestine nuclear strides during the presidency of the ‘clerical leftist reformer.’")

Posted September 5, 2006 (3:36 p.m.):

Call it a twofer. In conservative circles, bashing Khatami and Harvard is never bad politics. Thus, the Romney folks just put out this press release:

ROMNEY DENOUNCES KHATAMI VISIT TO HARVARD

Governor Mitt Romney today ordered all Massachusetts state government agencies to decline support, if asked, for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s September 10 visit to the Boston area, where he is scheduled to speak at Harvard University.

“State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel,” said Romney.

Romney’s action means that Khatami will be denied an official police escort and other VIP treatment when he is in town. The federal government provides security through the U.S. State Department.

Romney criticized Harvard for honoring Khatami by inviting him to speak, calling it “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists, especially on the eve of the five-year anniversary of 9/11.”

Said Romney: “The U.S. State Department listed Khatami’s Iran as the number one state sponsor of terrorism. Within his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of dissidents who spoke out for freedom and democracy. For him to lecture Americans about tolerance and violence is propaganda, pure and simple.”

Romney cited a litany of hateful actions by Khatami, including his support for violent jihadist activities:

During the period of time he was in office, from 1997 to 2005, Khatami presided over Iran’s secret nuclear program. Currently, the Iranian Government under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is snubbing the international community’s request to cease nuclear weapons production.

In the recent conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border, Khatami described the terrorist group Hezbollah as a “shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.”

Khatami has endorsed Ahmadinejad’s call for the annihilation of Israel.

During Khatami’s presidency, Iran refused to hand over the Iranian intelligence officials who were responsible for the attack on the Khobar Towers that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.

In his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of Iranian students, journalists, and others who spoke out for freedom and democracy. Khatami relaxed freedom of speech laws giving democracy reformers a false sense of security only to engage in one of the largest crackdowns in the country’s history.

In Khatami’s Iran, there was no religious tolerance. According to the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom, Iran was one of the worst offenders of religious persecutions. Minorities, such as Evangelicals, Jews, Catholics and others, have suffered.

“Khatami pretends to be a moderate, but he is not. My hope is that the United States will find and work with real voices of moderation inside Iran. But we will never make progress in the region if we deal with wolves in sheep’s clothing,” said Romney.

The Atlantic Monthly's Robert Kaplan has a piece (sub req’d), “Hostage to Fortune,” worth reading in today’s Wall Street Journal. He makes one point that Republicans hardly ever talk about nowadays:

[I]magine how Saddam might have dominated the Arab masses – with rising oil prices, the $50-billion ongoing Oil for Food coverup, a leading-nowhere regimen of no-fly zones, and European and Chinese intrigues to restore his legitimacy in return for energy concessions. Saddam as the new Nasser is a plausible alternative history in Iraq.

Kaplan also notes that inadequate troop levels in Iraq have damaged our effort to stabilize the country. Others have made the same point going back to post-invasion 2003. For example, in a speech on November 5, 2003, Sen. McCain, who strongly opposes current Democratic cut and run plans, stated:

The United States will fail in Iraq if our adversaries believe they can outlast us. If our troop deployment schedules are more important than our staying power, we embolden our enemies and make it harder for our friends to take risks on our behalf. When the United States announces a schedule for training and deploying Iraqi security officers, then announces the acceleration of that schedule, then accelerates it again, it sends a signal of desperation, not certitude…. When we do this as our forces are coming under increasing attack, we suggest to friends and allies alike that our ultimate goal in Iraq is leaving as soon as possible - not meeting our strategic objective of building a free and democratic country in the heart of the Arab world.

There can be little political or economic progress in Iraq until the United States creates a stable and secure environment there. Prematurely placing the burden of security on Iraqis is not the answer. Hastily trained Iraqi security forces cannot be expected to accomplish what U.S. forces have not yet succeeded in doing: defeating the Baathists and international terrorists inside Iraq. It is irresponsible to suggest that it is up to Iraqis to win this war.

To win in Iraq, we should increase the number of forces in-country, including Marines and Special Forces, to conduct offensive operations. I believe we must deploy at least another full division, giving us the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search and destroy missions, and holds territory.

Security is the precondition for everything else we want to accomplish in Iraq. We will not get good intelligence until we provide a level of public safety and a commitment to stay that encourages Iraqis to cast their lot with us, rather than wait to see whether we or the Baathists prevail. Local Iraqis need to have enough confidence in our strength and staying power to collaborate with us. Absent improved security, acts of sabotage will hold back economic progress. Without better security, political progress will be difficult because the Iraqi people will not trust an Iraqi political authority that cannot protect them. By all means increase the number of Iraqis involved in security…. But given the time it will take to train and deploy sufficient numbers of Iraqi forces and the competence required to root out a hardened foe, for the foreseeable future, Iraqi forces aren't a substitute for adequate levels of American troops.

The result? See here, here, here, and here.

Tom Jocelyn has some interesting stuff on his blog regarding a Q & A exchange Time columnist Joe Klein had yesterday on the magazine’s web site.

PS-- Klein also writes: "I think Murtha's plan is to withdraw to neighboring countries, so we can move in and out of Iraq in case of emergencies—and operations like the Zarqawi kill. I'm against that because I believe that if you're a citizen of Baghdad, every day is an emergency—and we have a moral requirement to provide all the security those folks need (which we have failed in doing, miserably)." I entirely agree.

(The Times in Britain reports that the war with Hezbollah has led to a “strategic rethink in Israel” that focuses on “the two biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the region, who pose a far greater danger to Israel’s existence.”)

Posted on July 18, 2006:

If the world flinches and the Iranian regime is allowed to move forward with its nuclear weapons plans, does anyone honestly believe the Israelis won’t act at some point to stop or degrade Tehran’s ability to produce a bomb – even if it takes weeks to do it? I doubt they want to go down this road and would prefer a Security Council-imposed solution. But I also doubt the Israeli government will be convinced by op-ed writers making the case for a policy of containment of a nuclear-armed Iran. After experiencing the result of the Iranian-supplied Hezbollah arms buildup and dodging a bullet with the capture of the ship the Karine A (in 2002 the Iranians sought to consolidate another beachhead against Israel by smuggling 50 tons of weapons, including Katyusha rockets, into Gaza), it’s unlikely they’ll sit idly by as Iran goes nuclear while most of the world shrugs its shoulders. All of this is why a failure of the UN Security Council to act forcefully in the face of Tehran’s continued defiance will likely set the stage for a far larger conflict down the road. Unfortunately, the Iranian regime is banking on the continued protection of Russia and China from UN-imposed sanctions – sanctions that would likely wreck havoc with Iran’s economy and put pressure on the government to forgo its nuclear weapons plans. That said, today's Wall Street Journal editorial explains all this much better than I can:

The war between Hezbollah and Israel is a tragedy for its victims, but it could also be a clarifying moment if the world draws the proper lessons. To wit, this is a preview of what the Middle East will look like if Iran succeeds in going nuclear.

The threat of a nuclear Iran isn't primarily that the mullahs might actually use such a weapon if they got one. The more immediate threat is that Iran would use the weapon as a shield to pursue its hegemonic ambitions throughout the Middle East, promoting terrorist attacks on its enemies and intimidating anyone with the nerve to fight back. The Hamas-Hezbollah double assault on Israel is a portent of things to come unless the world gets serious about Iran's radicalism….

The question going forward is whether the Bush Administration will acknowledge this Lebanon conflict as the strategic threat it is and fight back accordingly. That means at a minimum allowing our ally in the region, Israel, the time and diplomatic support to deal Iran's Hezbollah proxies a heavy blow. Israel has already cut off supply lines from Syria by land and air. And now it is working systematically to destroy the military force that Hezbollah has accumulated, especially its missiles, which now include radars that can hit a warship and perhaps have the range to reach Tel Aviv….

The better and necessary response is to let Israel's counterattacks continue until Hezbollah's military power is substantially degraded. As for the G-8 and the U.N., they can be constructive by moving swiftly to impose sanctions on Iran for rejecting the generous offer to negotiate directly with the U.S….

Iran is testing the world right now. And if there is to be any hope at all of a diplomatic solution to its nuclear program, the mullahs have to see that their military option won't be tolerated.

The Globe and Mail in Canada has more on the plot to destroy a British landmark using 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate.

She started out looking for a husband. Instead, the young Carleton University student became a key conduit for thousands of dollars that, police say, was financing terrorism.

Zenab Armend Pisheh, an Ottawa-area chemistry student in her early 20s, says she was used by young, aspiring jihadists in Britain and Canada and that she was handpicked because "sisters don't get caught -- brothers get caught if they send money.

Paul Marshall's piece, "A Conversion You Can't Refuse," in the current Weekly Standard provides some useful context to an Associated Press report, “Palestinian group to target non-Muslims,” that ran on Saturday. From AP:

Palestinian militants who held two Fox News journalists hostage for nearly two weeks threatened in a statement posted online Saturday to abduct non-Muslims visiting the Palestinian territories and kill them unless their demands were met….

"Any infidel blood will have no sanctity," the group said in the statement.

It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the statement, which was dated August 27 — the day militants released American journalist Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36. They were seized Aug. 14 in Gaza City….

During their captivity, the journalists were forced at gunpoint to declare that they had converted to Islam, Centanni told Fox News after he was released. The group said in its statement that the journalists' declaration saved their lives.

"Nothing but Islam gave their blood sanctity and prevented their slaughter," the group said.

It added, "We are not the sort of people who are fooled ... but only God knows intentions."

Call it a twofer. In conservative circles, bashing Khatami and Harvard is never bad politics. Thus, the Romney folks just put out this press release:

ROMNEY DENOUNCES KHATAMI VISIT TO HARVARD

Governor Mitt Romney today ordered all Massachusetts state government agencies to decline support, if asked, for former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s September 10 visit to the Boston area, where he is scheduled to speak at Harvard University.

“State taxpayers should not be providing special treatment to an individual who supports violent jihad and the destruction of Israel,” said Romney.

Romney’s action means that Khatami will be denied an official police escort and other VIP treatment when he is in town. The federal government provides security through the U.S. State Department.

Romney criticized Harvard for honoring Khatami by inviting him to speak, calling it “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists, especially on the eve of the five-year anniversary of 9/11.”

Said Romney: “The U.S. State Department listed Khatami’s Iran as the number one state sponsor of terrorism. Within his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of dissidents who spoke out for freedom and democracy. For him to lecture Americans about tolerance and violence is propaganda, pure and simple.”

Romney cited a litany of hateful actions by Khatami, including his support for violent jihadist activities:

During the period of time he was in office, from 1997 to 2005, Khatami presided over Iran’s secret nuclear program. Currently, the Iranian Government under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is snubbing the international community’s request to cease nuclear weapons production.

In the recent conflict along the Israel-Lebanon border, Khatami described the terrorist group Hezbollah as a “shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims and supporters of freedom in the world.”

Khatami has endorsed Ahmadinejad’s call for the annihilation of Israel.

During Khatami’s presidency, Iran refused to hand over the Iranian intelligence officials who were responsible for the attack on the Khobar Towers that killed 19 U.S. military personnel.

In his own country, Khatami oversaw the torture and murder of Iranian students, journalists, and others who spoke out for freedom and democracy. Khatami relaxed freedom of speech laws giving democracy reformers a false sense of security only to engage in one of the largest crackdowns in the country’s history.

In Khatami’s Iran, there was no religious tolerance. According to the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom, Iran was one of the worst offenders of religious persecutions. Minorities, such as Evangelicals, Jews, Catholics and others, have suffered.

“Khatami pretends to be a moderate, but he is not. My hope is that the United States will find and work with real voices of moderation inside Iran. But we will never make progress in the region if we deal with wolves in sheep’s clothing,” said Romney.

David Lynch has a very interesting piece in today’s USA Today. It suggests that that the conventional wisdom on Iran – that it holds all the economic cards in the nuclear showdown – is largely wrong. The regime may be much more vulnerable to comprehensive sanctions than many realize. Lynch notes that foreign direct investment in Iran is one-tenth that of Turkey, unemployment hovers in the double digits, and, since Ahmadinejad took office, Iran’s stock market has plummeted 32 percent. He writes:

As Iran hurtles toward a confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program, the nation's economy remains a dysfunctional wreck….

The official unemployment rate is 11%, although economists such as London Metropolitan University's Parvin Alizadeh say the actual total is twice that figure. Even government ministers acknowledge jobless rates as high as 18% in some provinces….

Foreign direct investment in the current year is expected to reach just $1.5 billion; neighboring Turkey, of comparable size, anticipates $11 billion. For the Iranian year that ended in March, the economy grew an estimated 6%, but that mostly reflects the impact of surging oil revenue and expansionary government spending, which has doubled in four years, says the International Monetary Fund.

Three years of confrontation between Iran and the U.S. over the nuclear issue have chilled domestic businesses that depend upon the outside world. Near the ancient ruins at Persepolis, about 30 miles outside Shiraz, restaurateur Rasoul Azeemzadeh mourns lost opportunities….

Likewise, in the lobby of the Tehran Stock Exchange, glum investors gather to stare at the overhead screens displaying sinking share prices. Since Ahmadinejad's election, the market has dropped 32%….

Ahmadinejad's surprise victory in last year's presidential election, however, was fueled by public dissatisfaction with the clerical regime's economic track record. During the campaign, the former Tehran mayor denounced soaring inequality and widespread corruption among Iran's clerical elite. He also attacked the "oil mafia" running the country's key industry and vowed to spread the wealth.

From Tehran's venerable central bazaar, with its smells of coriander and cumin, to the Internet cafes where young Iranians gather, there is talk of a turn to the East. To many Iranians, China and India appear as both potential business partners and economic models for their country, with its well-educated population and strategic location, to emulate. That explains why some of the political "carrots" the U.S. and Europe are offering in return for a halt to Iran's uranium enrichment program may not sway Ahmadinejad.

Iran is vulnerable to a cutoff of international bank loans and gasoline imports, which make up around 38% of domestic consumption. Iranian officials insist that, given Russian and Chinese reluctance to act, real punishment may never materialize.

Other reports have also touched on Iran's shaky economy.

In May, the Washington Post pointed out: "Experts on Iran point to a number of reasons it might be reluctant to cut oil exports. Oil accounts for 85 percent of Iran's exports, according to an International Monetary Fund report issued last month. Revenue from those exports makes up 65 percent of government income. And Iran uses a good chunk of that money to raise public-sector wages and to subsidize its own gasoline prices, one way to keep domestic discontent in check when unemployment is running at more than 12 percent and inflation at 13 percent."

And in April, Radio Free Europe reported that Iran's president had been traveling around the country reassuring people on the economy:

President Ahmadinejad has discussed the issue of unemployment -- estimated to be at least 11 percent and closer to 20 percent -- in several recent speeches, hinting at his recognition that he must satisfy voters' most immediate concerns. He announced in the northeastern town of Quchan on April 11 that 180 trillion rials (approximately $200 million) will be distributed in the provinces for job creation, IRNA reported. In a speech in Mashhad on April 10, he said, "Employment is one of the most important issues to be tackled by the nation and the government," state television reported. "There are so many young people who have a specialization. They have learned and studied but there is no employment opportunity for them."

All this suggests that the regime’s stability would be highly vulnerable to UN Security Council-imposed sanctions. But passing Chapter 7 sanctions would require Russia and China to act responsibly, which is why John Bolton is making alternative plans on the sanctions front.

Christopher Hitchens isn't a fan of making September 11 a national holiday:

I don't care that I am no longer able - because of the supposed "sensitivities" of people who were only involved at random - to watch the graphic pictures of what really happened. I have those pictures in my head, and can see them at any time. I think about the images of New York, and of my hometown of Washington, and most especially of United Airlines Flight 93 and of Shanksville, Pa., every day. I denounce the depraved ideology that organized the murders and that organizes similar murders in Iraq and Spain and Turkey and Egypt, and I carry a knife in my heart for the degenerated fanatics who carry out such deeds.

This is not a matter of sentiment or commemoration: Memorials and holidays are for when the war is over - in the sense of being won. In the meantime, who needs yet another day off from school? Better to have the children taught what is at stake, if we can find enough teachers to do it.

The Georgian interior ministry revealed Monday that an attempt had been made on August 28 to down the helicopter carrying US ally [Georgian president] Saakashvili and a team of US senators led by influential Republican lawmaker John McCain.

"A Strela-2 anti-aircraft missile was fired at the helicopter over the (Ossetian) village of Avnevi," it said in a statement. "The shell exploded a short distance from the helicopter."

The interior ministry said that fragments of the Russian-made surface-to-air rocket had been found and handed over to US officials.

(Vets for Freedom has released a new television ad, reports the New York Times, featuring Connecticut veterans:

“When we were over there, it was important to know that someone had our back,’’ one veteran says. “Like Senator Lieberman,” adds a second. The ad continues with four phrases, with each veteran saying one: “No matter how complicated it got,’ “He was there for us.’’ “Now that we’re home, we’re here for him.” “He stood with troops and their mission.”)

Posted on August 11, 2006:

Two Iraq War veterans, Wade Zirkle and Connecticut native Josh Clark, make the case for Joe Lieberman in today’s Wall Street Journal. They write:

Joseph Lieberman's primary loss might be a satisfying victory for the partisan extremes, but it is a sharp blow to bipartisan efforts to prevail in a global war that may span generations.

The political gamesmanship is heard by the troops on the front lines. Many in the media tend to portray our warriors as mindless pawns who are unaffected by debates on the home front. This misperception is largely a result of troops unwilling to openly talk politics with the press. But as American servicemen who together served three tours in Iraq, we can attest to the discouragement those in battle endure in the face of a domestic politics that has a seemingly singular focus on controversy and negativism.

Our troops are witness to the 24-hour news cycles, as American television is beamed into the "chow halls." Military base Internet portals also provide access to sound-bites from Washington in real time -- a phenomenon that did not exist in earlier wars. Our troops are watching and they need tempered, constructive leadership on how we will proceed. Ultimately, the wartime politics of partisan destruction is corrosive to troop morale.

Sen. Lieberman made it clear that a nation cannot effectively fight a war by looking in the rearview mirror. Too often it appears we are fighting a war among ourselves instead of against the enemy.

This is all the more reason why Joe Lieberman is needed now as an independent voice to represent America's troops and their interests abroad in the war on terror. This is not to suggest that our troops do not welcome healthy debate about the direction of the war, or serious accountability of our leaders. But supporting our troops, understanding the stakes of the mission, and still constructively questioning military and civilian leadership is a difficult balance to strike -- and one on which Joe Lieberman has repeatedly risen to the occasion. This should be the model. Our national security agenda must never be borne out of divisive domestic campaigns that champion partisan vindictiveness. Semper Fi.

Click here for more information.

(Bloomberg news reports: "Danish authorities arrested nine people suspected of involvement in planning a terrorist attack, the country's police intelligence service said…. The arrests were made after police uncovered evidence that a number of the suspects had 'materials that can be used for the construction of explosives in connection with preparation for an act of terror,' [intelligence] service head Lars Findsen said in the statement."

From AP:

The prime suspects in the failed attempt to blow up two German trains were partly motivated by anger over the publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons, a leading investigator said in an interview released Saturday. (Bloomberg news reports: Danish authorities arrested nine people suspected of involvement in planning a terrorist attack, the country's police intelligence service said…. The arrests were made after police uncovered evidence that a number of the suspects had ``materials that can be used for the construction of explosives in connection with preparation for an act of terror,'' [intelligence] service head Lars Findsen said in the statement.

The cartoons were first printed last September in a Danish newspaper and then republished in other European media months later, setting off protests across the Muslim world.

One suspect in the failed bombing, Jihad Hamad, 20, told Lebanese interrogators that a fellow suspect, Youssef Muhammad el-Hajdib, 21, considered the publications “an attack of the Western world on Islam,” Jörg Ziercke, the chief of Germany’s Federal Crime Office, told the magazine Focus in an interview released in advance of publication.

The men are suspected of planting crude bombs July 31 on two trains at the Cologne station. The bombs were found later in the day on regional trains in Koblenz and Dortmund. Authorities have said that the detonators went off but failed to ignite the devices.

It's always interesting to read Sen. John Warner's take on what is going on in Iraq today. But missing from the piece is exactly what George Will would do (not just what he wouldn't do) now in Iraq. After all, before the war he advanced straightforward arguments making the case for removing Saddam from power. Some examples:

[O]pposition to the war against Iraq rests on and sometimes does not rise above a truism, the fact that war costs lives. Opponents say if we leave Saddam in power but continue today's policy of containment, lives will be saved. But that is not true…. Under the UN sanctions, Saddam is allowed to sell enough oil to purchase food and medicine to meet the basic needs of the Iraqi people, but Saddam uses the money to fuel his war machine and lets the babies die. So another ten years of containment would involve the slaughter of at least another 360,000 Iraqis, 240,000 of them children under five. Walter Russell Mead says those are the low estimates. If the UN's numbers are right, another decade of containment would kill one million Iraqi civilians, including 600,000 children. So as Americans debate the morality of the war against Iraq, remember these numbers and remember this picture of an Iraqi child suffering the effects of the current policy of containment.

And:

[T]he demonstrators must know that if they turn President Bush into "the noble Duke of York" (who "had ten-thousand men, he marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again"), Saddam will bestride the Middle East, and emulators -- and weapons of mass destruction -- will proliferate....

(New Hampshire tax dollars at work. From Reuters: A University of New Hampshire professor has come under fire from state politicians for teaching his unconventional view that a U.S. government conspiracy allowed the September 11, 2001 attacks to occur…. "What we learn in the mainstream is not the full story," [William] Woodward said in an interview. "To label this as extreme is really a frame that the mainstream media has promulgated to the exclusion of scientific views.")

Posted on June 21, 2006:

The U.S government murdered thousands of its own citizens on September 11, 2001. That theory has been circulating among an assortment of America haters, Jew haters, paranoids … and a few professors at U.S. universities. An upcoming cover story in The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at a group called “Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors – more in the humanities than in the sciences – from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.” The co-chair of the group, Steven E. Jones, is from, of all places, Brigham Young University and has been roundly denounced by his colleagues at the Utah campus. Jones and the others believe preplanted explosives took down the World Trade Centers. Why? In order to “manipulate Americans” into supporting policies, as the conspiracy thinking goes, that seek world domination through the barrel of a gun and to fatten the profits of the oil companies and weapons manufactures. Another “scholar,” David Ray Griffin, wrote the book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, “exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11.” A blurb on the book’s jacket reads:

The most persuasive argument I have seen for further investigation on the Bush administration’s relationship to that historic and troubling event.

The blurb’s author isn’t some obscure academic. It’s Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, best-selling author and frequent speaker at American universities across the country. The good news is that unlike Zinn most other academics in the U.S. believe “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” are just a bunch of crackpots.

Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, held a press conference late this afternoon on the successful anti-missile test conducted earlier today.

I believe that the course that we've taken overall has been the right one, which is -- remember, we had no defense against these weapons. We had no defense in the United States against a long-range missile that was launched at the United States, we had no defense for many, many years. And so this is the first time that we've been able to demonstrate a capability that we do have, in fact, using the operational configurations of the interceptors, the operational radars, the operational fire control system.

The entire transcript may be found here.

Containment advocates oppose military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, arguing that a strike won’t work, that the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is exaggerated, and that Iran can be contained. Others argue that Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, that all options should remain on the table, and that a Soviet-like containment policy is full of holes. Then there’s Newt Gingrich. Today’s Washington Times reports:

In an impromptu speech during a Mediterranean cruise that hosted scores of conservative donors and activists, the Georgia Republican expressed unexpected skepticism about prospects of military intervention to halt Iran's nuclear program….

"I am opposed to a military strike on Iran because I don't think it accomplishes very much in the long run," said Mr. Gingrich, who supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has been a strong defender of Israel.

"I think if this regime [in Iran] is so dangerous that we can't afford to let them have nuclear weapons, we need a strategy to replace the regime," Mr. Gingrich said. "And the first place you start is where Ronald Reagan did in Eastern Europe with a comprehensive strategy that relied on economic, political, diplomatic, information and intelligence" means.

The statement represented a significant modification of one of his most hawkish foreign-policy views.

Earlier this year, he said, "A nonviolent solution that allows the terrorists to become better trained, better organized, more numerous and better armed is a defeat. A nonviolent solution that leads to North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons threatening us across the planet is a defeat."

…After saying he opposed military action against Iran, he said that "in North Korea and Iran, we should have a conscious strategy that starts from a simple premise" that many residents of both countries hate their leaders and political system.

"I think our position should be that we don't expect Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be around for very long," he said. "But we think the Iranians are going to get rid of him. We're not. But then I would do everything I could to make that possible."

Gingrich is pushing what is essentially a containment plus strategy. Reagan came into office in 1981; the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Does anyone believe that Iran won’t acquire a nuclear weapon in the next, say, 3-8 years? He’s right that regime change would be desirable, but we have no idea whether the implementation of such a policy would bear fruit before the Ahmadinejad regime acquired a weapon. And even if one harbors doubts about the efficacy of military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, it’s hard to imagine how foreclosing the option so publicly strengthens the diplomatic hand of those trying to compel Iran’s compliance with UN Security Council resolutions. President Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schulz, makes precisely this point in the latest Policy Review:

Iran seems convinced that its actions, as in restarting its enrichment facilities, will have no adverse consequences. It sees no strength behind the diplomacy. We must be ready to summon the will — and persuade others to join us — to use economic and political strength — and ultimately force — to deal with this situation if multilateral diplomacy and collective security are to be credible…

But the option for military action on even a large scale, such as a sustained air campaign to cripple Iran’s nuclear weapons program, must remain alive as a last resort. The more alive it is in the minds of our adversaries, the more likely it is that we never will have to use that military option.

I half suspect that one reason behind Gingrich’s latest remarks is that he has concluded that the kind of military campaign that would be needed to cripple Iran’s nuclear program (should it come to that) won’t be pursued. Stay tuned….