AN IMPORTANT POST BY JUAN COLE

Professor Cole has an analysis of the al Qaida doomsday document of the 9/11 highjackers on his blog that he presented recently at a genocide conference.

My own research into genocide leads me to speculate that Juan Cole has identified an important psychological aspect common to spectacular episodes of mass-murder, democide and genocide- that a lenghthy process of repetitive ideation precedes and may be required for action.

Take for example the case of Adolf Hitler. The earliest anti-semitic document historians can connect to Adolf Hitler was in 1919 in a letter he wrote while still employed as a Reichswehr spy in tumultuous Bavaria. Subsequent to that, Hitler's enunciations of hatred and a desire for elimination of the Jews in public speeches run into the thousands, not including private monologues among Nazi party comrades or thoughts expressed within the confines of his own head. Twenty-two years of such internalized, repetitive hatred would be - to use Juan Cole's term - "autohypnotic ".

It would be interesting to take a look at the training of the suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers, of the pre-Khmer Rouge activities of Pol Pot and psychological profiles of apolitical serial killers to see if an obsessive idea or repetitive mental rehearsal is truly a constant in such atrocities and their perpetrators.   ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

  NEW TO THE BLOGROLL

A big Zenpundit welcome to Jay Solo, Mithras, Daniel Drezner and Dr. Milt Rosenberg of WGN Extension720 fame ( and occasional H-Diplo poster). And much overdue for Earl, I finally corrected the Prometheus6's link to reflect the move he made...oh...ages ago.  ¶ 8:19 PM 0 comments

  CHINA'S COMMUNIST RULERS MOURN CHIANG KAI-SHEK'S WIDOW

In a sign of how far China has moved since the Cultural Revolution, China's government allows nostalgic praise for one of the supreme anti-Communist figures of the old " China Lobby ".  ¶ 10:01 AM 0 comments

  MORE ON ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

Go here ( be warned, it's long !)  ¶ 7:52 PM 0 comments

  THE RACE AND GENDER STALINISTS OF ACADEMIA

Academic star KC Johnson testifies before Congress on how a cabal of leftist zealots attempted ideologically cleanse him out of a job ( and how they trying to destroy subfields of history to boot ).  ¶ 7:42 PM 0 comments

  RUMSFELD ON TERROR STRATEGY

His WaPo op-ed ( I now write like Bob Dole speaks !) piece. Rumsfeld is attempting to have the chattering classes come to grips with both the nature of the Islamist threat and the fact that terrorism is a tool of asymmetric warfare.

Good luck. This is a much needed political effort by the administration because much of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that has been writing endless " What is the new role for NATO ? " articles for Foreign Affairs for the last 12 years is in a deep psychological denial not since the MP's who jeered Winston Churchill in parliament in 1938.  ¶ 8:53 AM 0 comments

  THE TWO BEST STUDENT COMMENTS I'VE HEARD IN A WHILE

" Well then...what would John Locke have thought of the French Revolution ? "

and:

" Polybius wanted a good government but John Locke wanted a good society "

I suddenly felt like my time as an educator was well-spent.
  ¶ 6:08 PM 0 comments

  GROVER NORQUIST NEEDS TO COME CLEAN

The highly influential conservative activist Grover Norquist is in jeopardy of becoming a liability to the GOP and President Bush as some of his close Muslim political associates are now legally implicated as major fundraisers for terrorist groups Hamas and al Qaida. More ominously, these associates have infiltrated the Pentagon to secure a position approving the credentials of Muslim chaplains, some of whom like Captain Yee stand accused of espionage helping the enemy at Guantanamo.

Norquist needs to take action now to formally extricate himself from his political and financial ties to Islamists, regardless of their cover stories, and turn over what he knows to the FBI.

No excuses or hesitations.  ¶ 10:39 AM 0 comments

  A WRITER IN NEED OF SYNDICATION

The Chicago Tribune has recently been running a free-lancer - Colonel E.W. Chamberlain III. - in their Perspective section of their Sunday edition whose analytical pieces have been excellent. In the last two weeks he has taken the Bush administration to task for its impossible troop to mission ratio and last Sunday he dismantled the media's reporting of troop morale as not a result of bias so much as a general ignorance of military life in a combat zone. Here's a few samples:

"...Reuters news agency reported Oct. 20 that Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had complained that he is only allowed to see "all the happy folks" when he visits a unit, which is an incredibly disingenuous remark by the man who can see whatever he wants whenever he wants as the most senior military official in the land. ("Hey, I want to go over there and talk to that soldier. Make it happen." Simple.) "

and

" How did Stars and Stripes get such bad information? The first hint of it is in the statement that reporters went to 50 camps and asked questions about morale. First of all, you don't go to camps and ask the folks who are sitting around pulling guard duty or emptying trash, or burning half-barrels of feces or any of the other housekeeping chores required in a camp of deployed soldiers how their morale is...they don't want to be in camp pulling duty because it's incredibly boring and makes the time drag out interminably. They don't want to be away from home stirring the latrine buckets as they burn......No, the Stripes reporters needed to ask soldiers on patrol how their morale was, or soldiers who have just defeated an ambush how their morale is or soldiers who have just helped an Iraqi village get running water for the first time in 50 years (or ever) how their morale is. If you ask the wrong people the wrong questions at the wrong time, you're guaranteed to come up with whatever response you were looking for."

Indeed.




  ¶ 9:51 AM 0 comments

  THE PRESIDENTIAL " DROP-BY"

Drudge is reporting a White House finesse of a particularly grim foreign visitor:

"Communist China's defense minister Gen. Cao Gangchuan, most associated with nuclear, chemical, biological and missile proliferation to terrorist countries, set for DC meeting with Condi Rice tomorrow; split over Oval Office greet by President Bush, Congress may get involved, say sources... Developing... "

Longtime observers will recall during the first Bush administration when Boris Yeltsin, then newly elected president of the Russian S.S.R. and rival to Soviet president and CPSU General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, visited the United States, his White house visit was handled in a similar manner by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft ( Condi Rice's boss at the time). The reason was to avoid the perception of " favoring " Yeltsin and undermining Gorbachev's position by according Yeltsin honors more suitable for a head of state.

General Cao is, unlike Yeltsin, a sinister figure. If there's an Axis of Evil he's one of the guys spinning the wheel. However it's a mistake to attribute much personal responsibility to Cao - he represents a factional element of the Chinese leadership ( unlike the Soviets, the guerilla warfare origin of the Chinese revolution in 1949 left the PLA generals and the CP Party apparatchiks far more integrated in each other's domains than was the case in the USSR where the Red Army was third in the pecking order behind Party and KGB and institutionally segregated from the Party upper echelon). China may have sent him because he has the competence and authority to explore a serious deal on proliferation with the U.S. the way a Foreign ministry diplomat might not.

The delicate way General Cao is being handled may reflect not only Bush concern for domestic criticism but the potential effects the meeting could have on the power struggle between outgoing senior leader Jiang Zemin, and his successor Hu Jintao. Jiang, who is close to the PLA top leadership, still controls one of the three most powerful posts in China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, and he has resisted the mandatory, gradual retirement system for top officials instituted by Deng Xiaoping to preclude the continuation of the geriatric oligarchy of the early post-Mao years .
  ¶ 8:38 AM 0 comments

  INTELLECTUALLY BANKRUPT AND ENAMORED WITH SURRENDER AND RETREAT - THE DEMOCRATIC VISION OF FOREIGN POLICY

This crew is just unbelievable. They just want to make assertions - a few of them plainly idiotic - and hope the rest of the world goes away in the meantime. Understandably they have criticisms of George Bush and Iraq - that's their job right now - but shouldn't they be offering at least something that would form the rough outlines of a comprehensive strategy to deal with Terror and Rogue states ? Isn't that at least slightly important?

Bill Clinton, in 1992, with his total disinterest in the subject, was far more coherent and realistic on foreign affairs than this bunch.

Addendum: Speaking of Iraq critics, the CIA, led by Clinton era appointee and FOB, George Tenet, just blasted the Senate report on prewar intelligence.  ¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments

  WILL THEY OR WON'T THEY ?

The internal political struggle over Iran's nuclear program between hardline fanatics in the Rafsanjani-Khameini-Pasdaran clique and- well...everyone else in Iran continues. Plus a skeptical analysis from the International Herald Tribune ( links via Iranexpert.com)  ¶ 10:04 AM 0 comments

  WHO IS HOJESTOLESLAM ROWHANI ?

And did he broker an honest nuclear deal between Iran the IAEA ? UN diplomats are taking a hard line on the missing nuclear information:

"One diplomat said information on the origin of the centrifuges was "critical" for the agency to test Iran's claims, and that if it wasn't part of the file given to ElBaradei, "I don't think it bodes well," for Iran at the Nov. 20 board meeting. "


"  ¶ 9:31 AM 0 comments

  CHECK OUT SEBASTIAN AND MITHRAS

Calpundit's resident conservative poster is in the blogging business. For pretty much the opposite view on life, visit Mithras  ¶ 9:10 AM 0 comments

  BLOGFRIENDS

Now that things have stabilized at work I've been fairly active in the last few days visiting other sites and exchanging views on various foreign policy topics, particularly with P6 and Geitner Simmons, two versatile minds who have introduced me to many perspectives and issues I might not otherwise have profited from. This is is one of the greatest things about the rise of blogging - the emergence of the intelligent public in national policy conversations formerly dominated by the elites of government and the media.

Geitner, BTW, gave me a nice nod today over at ROM, something I always appreciate !  ¶ 9:07 AM 0 comments

  IRAN STILL HEDGING ON NUKES

After a major last minute concession to accept IAEA additional protocol inspections, Iran witholds key information regarding its nuclear weapons program from the IAEA.  ¶ 11:58 AM 0 comments

  Rumsfeld Rules !

The recent leak of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memo may have well been a purposefully executed trial balloon to test the elite response to the idea of a sweeping reorg of the DoD. It may have been leaked by the staff officers of the Joint Chiefs in an ongoing effort to kill off such a prospective " Revolution in Military Affairs " that threaten bureaucratic empires in the armed services.

In any event, if this represent's Rumsfeld's real thinking I'm very glad that he's the Secretary of Defense because at a critical time of transition to asymmetric warfare ( the strategic position of the United States is such that all foes - separately or in combination - are in an asymmetric position and will wage war and diplomacy accordingly). Not being a captive of the Pentagon bureaucracy Rumsfeld has the vision to try to change the DoD rather than be changed by it to become yet another guardian of the status quo.

Rumsfeld has asked his chief advisers some pointed questions. here are the answers they should give:


Q: Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?

Absolutely. The American political-ideological response to Islamism has been the least effective and amateurish aspect of the War on Terror while the creative use of Special Operations and high tech have been the most effective. This is a war of tracking,surveillance, stealth and attacks of surgical precision punctuated by bursts of larger, conventional force actions.

A large percentage of the world's population is sitting on the sidelines, afraid to offend Islamist terrorists, apprehensive of our ultimate intentions and in the case of Europe, resentful that our response was not simply to passively absorb the effects of terror as the price of " leadership " but to dare to do something about the root causes - Islamist totalitarianism and rogue state actors. We have hedged regarding the nature of the threat too often and only intermittantly emphasized our own ideals as competiting memes, which even many of our critics admit might be beneficial if enacted in the Arab world as political reforms. The move by President Bush to invest in Indonesian schools today before Saudi Arabia can radicalize them as they did in Pakistan should be the precedent for a greater " Hearts and Minds " effort.

Q:Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Yes. Timidity and inertia work against us. The assumption should be that the next administration will not have the will to initiate major changes in terror policy and might even retreat from the battle. Strategy needs to be " locked in" today in an aggressive posture.

Q:Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

The last part begs the question of the issue of " clerical command and control ". When radical imams and mullahs issue fatwas that result in their organizations initiating paramilitary and terrorist operations against American targets they cross the line from noncombatant to military commander. As such, they would become legitimate military targets for the United States. We are not yet treating such figures or those who act as financiers of terror as targets.

Secondly, getting caught up in a " body count " attrition mentality may be able to offer up yardsticks of bureaucratic measurement but doing so plays to the enemy's numerical strengths. We might as well be passing out contraceptives in Pakistan if we are going to look at the Terror War in that fashion. This perspective could also distract us from the need to think in terms of employing a strategy that seeks a disruption of networks, denial of critical resources, ideological delegitimization and retention of the intiative over the enemy. More Sun Tzu and less McNamara please.

Q:Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.

Yes. One relatively cost-effective option we have ignored is defining and enshrining terrorism as a crime against humanity comparable to genocide, slavery, ethnic cleansing and use of biochemical WMD. A Terrorism Convention would be a useful club with which to beat rogue state supporters of terrorism and coerce some terrorist groups into lawful guerilla armies obeying the Geneva Convention.

A comprehensive strategy has to disrupt or moderate the Madrassas to end their role as the " SS Order Castles " of Islamism. Much cheaper than hunting down their graduates or preventing the carnage they can wreck. This means confronting the Saudis ( and the Egyptian radical scholars) as the ideological fountainhead of Islamism

Do we need a new organization?

Yes. Upgrade and expand Special Operations to a service on par with the Marines and divide tasks with CIA Special Tasks clandestine paramilitaries

Q:How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?

Some of those who finance Madrassas also contribute to al Qaida and Islamic Jihad. Those folks are themselves terrorists who use a checkbook instead of a gun or bomb. They're liable to be captured and tried or killed like any other al Qaida operative. We should make a point of *not* lumping those who finance more moderate or apolitical educational institutions with the radicals. The poor in Pakistan and Indonesia right now see these schools as their only gateway to an education so we have to be discriminating.

Q:Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?

No. The less we do the behinder we get and the stronger terrorists become. Inaction does not begat moderation.

Q:Does CIA need a new finding?

Probably, if their military capabilities and role are expanding.

Q:Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?

Yes. Concentrate on Indonesia, India and African Muslims where the Wahhabists have yet to reach critical mass as they have in Pakistan.

Q:What else should we be considering?

The formation of an idea-generating, creative -thinking organization with experts from a broad cross-section of fields to do for the ideological and " soft power " realm what DARPA does in technology and science.

  ¶ 7:57 AM 0 comments

  A PAKISTANI-SAUDI DEAL ON NUKES ?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports.  ¶ 12:45 PM 0 comments

  BREMER AND UN RECONSTRUCTION AID

Juan Cole has observations on the recent vote in the UN and Paul Bremer's role in convincing the administration to concede a role to the UN in reconstructing Iraq. Here is a quote:

"[ NYT quote] "A key factor in the change of heart may have been the lobbying by Paul Bremer, the US administrator for post-war Iraq, for a swift release of much-needed funds. "We had to act because the international community was stonewalling us on aid," an administration official told the New York Times. The official added that Mr Bremer said: "I need the money so bad we have to move off our principled opposition to the international community being in charge."

In other words, these arrogant hawks are very, very desperate, so desperate that they will even let the UN have a seat at the table of Iraq reconstruction. Why does Bremer think that excluding everyone but the US from Iraq rebuilding is "principled"? "

Bremer probably understands, as do the hawks, that the intention of some European states in Iraq is to use the UN as a wedge to prevent the decentralization of Iraq's statist economy and adoption of free-market reforms - an eventuality that Professor Cole himself regards with some degree of consternation. A second concern would be the delay of truly democratic governance in Iraq ( not that we have been terribly vigorous ourselves in that regard but France wants a Baathist lite dictatorship in Iraq and the U.S. out with undue haste). A third concern, to which I would give much credence given the history of EU reluctance to recognize that their financial aid to the Palestinian Authority ended up funding suicide bombing operations -is the UN obstructing American security operations in Iraq.

Objecting to letting bad faith actors muck things up in Iraq worse than they are already might be more practical than principled opposition I admit but he concerns of the hawks are legitimate. The French aren't there to be helpful.  ¶ 9:00 AM 0 comments

  HYPERSONIC SUBORBITAL FIGHTER JETS?

Holy Cats ! Who are we fighting ? Darth Vader ? From Samizdata.

In all seriousness, I'm completely in favor of increasing the technological edge the West has over the barbarians in military projection capabilities. I'd even pony up more on April 15 if need be.   ¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments

  NIETZSCHE AFTER DARK

My bedside reading is the new Nietzsche bio by Rudiger Safranski, the German writer who previously received acclaim for his studies on Heidegger and Schopenhauer. I've just begun so I have no substantive comments to make as of yet but I figured when the author had such an impressive surname the book had to be good !  ¶ 10:06 PM 0 comments

  THE COLD WAR WAS MORE OF A WAR THAN WE KNEW

Geitner Simmons examines East German assassins and a trail of dead men in Europe.  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments

  WAS " SHOCK AND AWE " INTENDED AS A COUP D'ETAT ?

There is much commentary in the blogosphere about Bush administration failure to anticipate the difficulties of occupying Iraq. Certainly, the critics have a point since the occupation was clearly bungled from the start - the Jay Garner " what, me administrator ? "fiasco; the failure to occupy the WMD sites; the widespread looting, the failure to round up the goons of the SSO, Mukhabarat and Feydayeen Saddam. All this however is mystifying in light of the otherwise excellent military planning for the offensive or the skill by which the administration moved the Congress to vote for war.

I was re-reading an old article from September when it struck me - what if the entire intention of " Shock and Awe " was not an invasion but a coup ? Here is a key point the media has overlooked, seemingly minor but in retrospect very strange:

"The former defense minister, Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmad (search), gave up to Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Brigade (search) and the senior U.S. officer in the north, at the U.S. headquarters in Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad.

Dawood Bagistani (search), the Kurdish mediator who arranged the surrender, said Ahmad was received with "with great respect" as part of a deal in which the Americans agreed to remove the ex-defense minister from their list of the 55 most-wanted regime figures. That means Ahmad would be released after he finishes questioning and would not face prolonged captivity or trial, Bagistani said.

Could you imagine General Eisenhower telling Field Marshal Keitel that he was free to leave after a few questions ? $ 600 million dollars to search for WMD and Saddam's ex-Defense Minister is going to go home ???

What if the entire war plan was to surgically kill Saddam and his two psychopathic sons so a " moderate " Baathist like Defense Minister Sultan Ahmad could sieze power and welcome the coalition forces to help him manage a " transitional " regime to a democratic Iraq? Such a secret collaborator would of course, not dare to move unless he was certain that Saddam was dead and everyone else in Iraq knew that fact too. However once in power, heading a large armed organization such as the Army or security troops, an Iraqi collaborator would be in a position to help Coalition forces with keeping public order and guarding hundreds of suspect sites. It would have been in the self-interest of the collaborator to quickly crush the die-hard Saddamists before they became organized enough to retaliate. The chaos that ensued in the wake of Saddam's vanishing act would not have commenced.

If such a plan did indeed exist and had it worked out the strike would have been hailed as a brilliant success. The world would have indeed experienced both awe and shock at the results and relief that minimal harm was inflicted. However if a coup was the plan, the odds against it succeeding should have caused decision makers enough qualms that a " Plan B " option of invasion would provide for a more " robust " occupational force than we have since seen.

Something went wrong with the initial occupation of Iraq. Perhaps my speculation is merely that but I find it hard to believe that senior officials - men experienced from navigating the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the disintegration of Yugoslavia - simply decided to " wing " the occupation and see what happened.

  ¶ 9:45 PM 0 comments

  NO MAN OF STRAW

The British Foreign Minister takes a tough position on Iran's nuclear weapons program  ¶ 10:46 AM 0 comments

  THE FUNGIBILITY OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM

The Washington Post had a story yesterday on the complicity of " Jerusalem Force" -an Iranian intelligence unit loyal the hardline Khameini-Rafsanjani-Pasdaran clique that misrules Iran in protecting high level al Qaida operatives on Iran's border with Afghanistan, including Saad bin Laden. Money quote:

"The group is "a state within a state, and that is why they are able to offer protection to al Qaeda," one European intelligence analyst said. "The Force's senior leaders have long-standing ties to al Qaeda, and, since the fall of Afghanistan, have provided some al Qaeda leaders with travel documents and safe haven."

Moreover, a second WaPo article points to the Lebanese terrorist mastermind Imad Mugniyah as the link between the radical Sunni Islamists of al Qaida and the radical Shiite Islamists of Iran's Pasdaran security-intelligence network. While a suspected senior leader of Hezbollah's armed wing, Mugniyah is suspected of having shared his expertise and advice with other Islamist groups such as Islamic Jihad. Hezbollah is a client group of Iran and it has recently limited it's terrorist or military activities to ejecting Israel from a tiny section of disputed land on the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Tactical cooperation between Sunni and Shiite radicals is a matter of controversy among experts on terrorism and Mideastern studies. Religious conflict mitigates against such cooperation but the isolation of both the Iranian hardliners and the sinking fortunes of al Qaida, both suffering from American pressure would make such cooperation tempting. The presence of large numbers of al Qaida operatives, including senior figures, has already been admitted by the elected reformist government of Iran of President Khatami. The security services and militant groups of Islamist thugs in Iran answer only to Ayatollah Khameini, the Supreme Guide and are beyond the elected government's authority..
  ¶ 5:16 PM 0 comments

  BOOK RECOMMENDATION

Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. I have to warn those of a conservative bent that Berman, a self-described social-democrat, is no fan of the Bush administration but his book is a lucid explanation of the twentieth century totalitarian roots of Islamist terror and the intellectual cowardice of much of the Left in facing up to the challenge of Islamism.

My primary criticism is that while Berman has correctly identified the centrality of nihilism in Islamism and traced the antiwar Left back to the antiwar segment of the Old Left of the 1930's who opposed getting tough with Hitler and Mussolini, Berman fails to identify the inherent nihilism that drives the antiwar position to fight anti-Terror measures and policies.

A concise argument worth reading.  ¶ 9:48 AM 0 comments

  WHAT'S URDU FOR "WE'RE SCREWED" ?

Is the title of a story by the Chicago Reader based primarily upon interviews with Dr. Steven Poulos of the American Institute of Bangladeshi Studies reveal that two years after 9/11 American military and intelligence agencies face critical bottlenecks in language training. According to Poulos, Pashto, the language of the Taliban, is barely taught in North America. Likewise languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi represent about " one percent " of foreign languages taught in the United States according to Alex Dunkel of the Critical Languages Program of the University of Arizona.

For want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost.....  ¶ 7:50 AM 0 comments

  THE NOBEL COMMITTEE STRIKES A BLOW AGAINST TYRANNY

Returning to the tradition of naming fighters against totalitarian oppression like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa as winners of their prestigious prizes, the Nobel Committee has awarded the Peace Prize to a female Iranian jurist, Shirin Ebadi.

Ayatollah Khomeini must be rolling over in his grave. Increasingly it is the Iranian hardliners against the judgement of the world.  ¶ 10:03 AM 0 comments

  QUOTE OF THE DAY

" But we are guided by the fact that, if, as the Iranian leadership states, they have no plans to produce weapons of mass destruction, nuclear arms,then we see no grounds not to allow the IAEA to all of Iran's programs in the nuclear sphere. "

Russian President Vladmir Putin

Iraq did change some things after all it seems.  ¶ 12:02 PM 0 comments

  WHAT ARNOLD SHOULD DO NOW

After a richly deserved victory cigar my advice would be to revise the California Constitution so that the state can function fiscally in the event of a downturn. This might mean putting some restrictions on the power of voter initiatives (like...the one Arnold sponsored) to send the budget spiralling out of wack. It's really the only direction that offers hope of compromise with the Democrats by appealing to their political self-interest without conceding too much on taxes  ¶ 10:12 AM 0 comments

  AN EXAMPLE OF WHY IRAQ IS COSTING BUSH SUPPORT

Juan Cole has a post up about rioting former Iraqi secret police in Baghdad who want their jobs back.

Err...why are these characters not rotting in jail awaiting an international tribunal to try them for crimes against humanity ? If there is any group in Iraq for which justice could be served expeditiously by the use of rope and a handy tree it's the gruesome torturers and thugs of Saddam's Mukhabarat and Amn. These are the guys who fed people into woodchippers and ran toddler prisons not long ago.

That these Baathist murderers are walking around free, much less having the temerity to riot is nothing less than a declaration of sheer incompetence on the part of the Occupational government and whomever in the Bush administration has been running things behind the scenes. I am completely disgusted.  ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments

  SOME PROGRESS ON THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM

The Iranians begin to release nuclear data.  ¶ 9:13 PM 0 comments

  GRAY DAVIS IS....TERMINATED

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The next " star " GOP candidate from California will be Condi Rice. Just wait and see.   ¶ 9:09 PM 0 comments

  THE " CHARTERS OF FREEDOM "

Those who love Constitutional history will enjoy what the National Archives has to offer online.  ¶ 9:35 PM 0 comments

  KUWAIT CLAIMS TO HAVE INTERCEPTED IRAQI BIOLOGICAL WARHEADS

And chemical weapons too. If true, this story lends credence to the pre-war DEBKA assertion that Iraqi WMDs were headed out of country to places like Syria and the Bekaa valley. Speaking of both the DEBKA file and Bashar Assad's Baathist dictatorship, here's their latest on Syrian aid to foreign terrorists in Iraq.in   ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments

  THE ROAD YET TO BE TAKEN: TEN POSSIBLE FUTURES FOR INDONESIA

This excerpt from a RAND study outlines possible scenarios for the post-Suharto evolution of the world's largest Muslim nation.

While I root for the success of liberal democracy and market capitalism everywhere, the track record for multicultural polyglot states, outside of the Switzerland, is not a terribly impressive one. If the Czechs and Slovaks cannot hold a nation the size of
a midwestern state together I have my doubts about the durability of Indonesia, India, Nigeria, the Congo and a collection of already failed states like Liberia, Somalia and Sierra Leone.  ¶ 8:36 PM 0 comments

  GEE, THESE DEMOCRATS SOUND PRETTY NEOCONSERVATIVE TO ME

A collection of quotes compiled by Frontpagemag.com.   ¶ 8:25 PM 0 comments