FIXED. Dan Hartung has explained FIXED. Dan Hartung has explained to me why my perma-links did not work. Thanks Dan.

ISLAMIC REFORMATION? An article by ISLAMIC REFORMATION? An article by Yaroslav Trofimov in this morning's Wall Street Journal (no free link) has some some comments on possible anti-fundie effects of the war in Afghanistan:

[This] is most apparent in Kuwait. Just a few months ago, this oil-rich Persian Gulf emirate, liberated from Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, seemed on the verge of aligning its criminal code with Islamic law, or sharia . This would have meant replacing jail terms with public amputations for thieves, or death by stoning for adulteresses - as was the practice in Taliban Afghanistan and is often the case in next-door Saudi Arabia. With Kuwait's Islamic fundamentalist groups expanding their influence, the emirate's acting ruler, Sheikh Sabah al Ahmad al Sabah, backed the sharia project. But America's swift reaction to the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and the scenes of Afghan joy at abolishing the very same religious restrictions, quickly damped enthusiasm for the measure. [...] Shortly thereafter [a heated meeting last month]...Sheikh Sabah announced he no longer supprted the sharia legislation, effectively burying the plan.

Not everybody is happy about this - one ultraconservative leader said "We grieve about the defeat of the Taliban. Our people are depressed." (Woogie woogie.) And they should be depressed, if Ahmed Bishara, a leader of a liberal Kuwaiti political group, has his way:

The ultimate objective of the reinvigorated liberal movement...is "to reform Islam the way Martin Luther reformed the Catholic Church."

However, according to Trofimov, "[m]any Gulf liberals say U.S. pressure is indispensable to ensure the region's monarchies modernize their societies and marginalize radical Islamists". Let's hope we apply our pressure in the right direction here.

"B.S" SCREAMING FROM EVERY PIXEL. "B.S" SCREAMING FROM EVERY PIXEL. In synchronicity
with today's Mark Steyn Telegraph column (via Tim Blair), Al-Ahram has this week published Roger Owen's explication of why Arab and/or Muslim economies should not be compared with the rest of the world. Mark Steyn wrote:

Nothing is so certain as that, when a man appears on television with the words "Professor of Middle Eastern Studies" under his name, everything he says will prove to be utter rubbish.

Roger Owen is the director of the Arab Contemporary Studies Program at Harvard University. He is unhappy with comparisons of the economic development of Muslim nations with that of places like, say, South Korea. He contends that "..it is difficult not to see them as also part of the age-old polemic against the religion of Islam itself." It seems to me the point here would be to a) demonstrate that this is indeed what they are, and b) to demonstrate why using Islamic culture as a variable in their analysis leads to false conclusions. Instead he starts with a little Said-ian game of arguing that we cannot make such comparisons because nobody has defined what is meant by Arab or Muslim state:

If such comparisons are to make sense, however, we need to know what is being compared with what, and why. If not, to use a common expression, you run the risk of comparing two quite disparate entities, say apples with oranges. And what is the point of that except, perhaps, as an exercise in taste?

Working to discover why some eat and some starve is not an exercise in taste.

Even the briefest of surveys of the literature on the subject reveals at least three ways in which this basic requirement is usually avoided. First, there is a remarkable amount of imprecision about what the Middle East, or the Arab or Muslim, world consists of. In the New York Times article on "Getting at the roots of Arab poverty" just mentioned, the examples of alleged economic failure are drawn promiscuously from the Arab countries, Muslim countries and, in one case, sub-Saharan Africa. But many more academic studies fall into the same trap, with MENA [Middle East and North Africa] sometimes defined to include the oil-producing states of the Gulf and sometimes not, while at almost all times it implicitly excludes the pariah states, Libya, Sudan and Iraq, without ever explicitly saying why.

Because the analysts expect that their readers - people like Harvard program directors - would implicitly understand why a study that factors out the distortions produced by oil wealth might give a better idea of the strength and diversity of Arab/Muslim economies? Or realize that no creditable data is available from pariah states? What, is he suggesting that including the economies of Libya, the Sudan, and Iraq is going to burnish those league tables?

Second, the purpose of comparing this somewhat imprecisely defined region with some other region of the world is rarely explained.

Because it's self-evident?

What, for example, does Egypt have in common with South Korea in terms of economic structure, institutions or resources that make them comparable in any way?

That's the whole point, isn't it? To ferret out what aspects of "economic structure, institutions or resources" make for economic success or failure?

And why is the Middle East never compared with regions than which it has performed much better in recent decades, like sub-Saharan Africa, or at least as well, like South Asia?

I'd agree that a comparison with South Asia (I assume he means mainly India here) might be profitable. But what is the point of the sub-Saharan comparison? Exactly what is a comparison to a carefully selected, AIDS-ravaged, civil-war torn polity supposed to accomplish? "Our hell-hole isn't quite as bad as your hell-hole?" Wouldn't Egyptians like their country to be as economically successful as South Korea? Isn't the point to figure out how that might be done? Owen apparently believes that economic analysis is a self-esteem anodyne, rather than a tool used for finding solutions to problems. The bulk of the article (paragraphs 6-11) is essentially an exercise in issue-avoiding gobbledegook - you can see man burrowing through a steamin' heap o' stats, trying to find a pellet for face-saving spin. Owen argues not only that the only meaningful comparisons are local (previously undefinable MENA country to MENA country), but that an economy must be measured outside the vagaries of the global market: that the only proper benchmark is some mythical economic "normal" point, unaffected by oil prices, multinational hiring, emerging markets, and, bizarrely, better or worse economic management. As far as I can tell, his idea is to factor out just about everything that could be used for objective measurement and practical application. Unfortunately, the countries he doesn't want Middle Eastern nations compared to also struggled within the global market. South Korea was an impoverished country that has, over the last fifty years, obtained the status of a high-tech, economically resilient, First World nation. Instead of considering why this is so, he prefers "single-country historical comparisons designed to draw helpful lessons":

One obvious example from recent Egyptian history is that although the country experienced something of a "green revolution" between 1890 and 1914, there has been a constant refusal to evaluate the best use of the limited area of fertile soil and the optimal units for cultivating it most efficiently.

But that's the whole point - what is the source of this "constant refusal" to seek efficiency and optimality? But the finest moment is the first sentence of the last paragraph. It is perhaps the most exquisite specimen of sheer sparkling hooey that I have encountered since I first started blogging:

A last, and even more radical, suggestion might be to ask the governments and peoples of the MENA region to what they would like their economic performances compared.

Yeah, that'll feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

Earlier this month I mentioned Earlier this month I mentioned Mamoun Fandy's article
on how the American media (and the U.S. government) had bamboozled itself
into believing that al-Jazeera is some kind of bastion of journalistic objectivity
and free expression. Amir Taheri had a more extensive treatment of this issue in yesterday's Opinion Journal
. According to Taheri, the news outlet is emphatically the voice of the
minority (but vocal) Islamists and existing corrupt regimes, and that

In many Arab countries, a new urban middle class has taken shape
and is looking for an alternative to both the theo-paranoia of the Islamists
and the corrupt lethargy of the ruling cliques. Al Jazeera never offers this
new middle class a chance to express itself. It fails to give a tribune to
the rich diversity of opinion in the Arab world. The democratic left, the
democratic right and the moderate center are never represented on al Jazeera.
It may or may not be its intention, but by Islamicizing all issues, al Jazeera
plays the game of the ruling cliques, who have their own reasons to fear
normal politics. Key issues such as economic development, privatization,
educational reform and the eradication of corruption are never discussed
in political terms. Nor does al Jazeera look into such issues as the absence
of free elections throughout the Arab world, the status of women in Islamic
societies, or the emergence of growing numbers of "street children" in many
Arab capitals. [...] The Arab world needs an independent and professional
satellite news channel. It has the intellectual resources to conduct a serious
political debate on all aspects of its life and the Arab world's relationship
with the rest of the world. The state-owned channels that are frozen by a
pathological fear of politics exclude such a debate. Al Jazeera does not
fit the bill either because it aims at arousing passions rather than encouraging
a rational approach to politics. The solution will have to come from truly
private TV stations that compete by offering true democratic debate.

I notice that WBUR's "special coverage" of al-Jaz
is suspended December 20 to January 2. It would be nice to think they've
gotten the word, but I suspect it's just the translator's vacation or the
like.

SEX, LIES, AND POLYGRAPHY. SEX, LIES, AND POLYGRAPHY. Reader Claire Berlinski (whose work you may have enjoyed in the Weekly Standard and the National Review), has published the English-language version of her CIA novel online. I got Loose Lips yesterday and am about three-quarters of the way through, so I'll be careful not to give anything away - but check out the blurb, and you can download Chapter One (or read it online)
for free. The novel was written before 9/11, but you'll come across matters
far more topical now: terrorist mujahedeen, Indian nuclear-weapons capability,
and even the personal peeve - polygraphic pseudo-science and the CIA - that
I wrote about in my very first blog post. So far I've been cracking up at
the heroine's experiences in both academic and CIA culture (people who know
academic life or government bureaucracy will appreciate it), but it appears
that dark things are getting darker. I'll find out tonight. (The French
version of Claire's novel is Alias Selena Keller
. And I recommend the two journal articles I've linked above. They address,
respectively, the woeful language-skill deficiencies in our intelligence
services, and the failures of the United Nations Development Program.)

THE ZIONIST LOBBY. Mark Steyn's THE ZIONIST
LOBBY. Mark Steyn's Spectator article on European anti-Semitism (via Instapundit
) is well worth the read, but this bit bears repeating, in light of the "Jewish
lobby" arguments concerning American foreign policy:

America supports Israel not because it's Jewish but because
it's democratic. In fact, Republicans support Israel despite the Jews. American
Jews are urban liberals and one of the Democratic party's most reliable core
demographics. There is no political benefit whatsoever to Bush in taking
a 'hard pro-Israel line'.

Maybe I'll send a note to Arab News asking them to reprint Steyn.

DEMON DU JOUR. Mickey Kaus DEMON DU JOUR. Mickey Kaus has always supported the "it's about Israel, stupid
" view of bin Laden's and other terrorists' motivations, against those who
dismiss this angle in its entirety. But whatever your views on the subject,
Osama's videos, particularly the latest, hardly count as evidence. Right
now he'd be anathematizing monster truck-pulls if he thought it would fly.
(Though of course Kaus is making a point about possible sources of support
more than ultimate motivations.) But speaking of Osama, he is looking like
he could use a couple of weeks at Club Med. On the other hand, for a corpse,
he looks pretty damned good.

NOT MY JOB. Aid agencies NOT MY JOB. Aid agencies have not been covering
themselves in PR glory in the last months, but this Red Cross official, speaking on the failed attempt by refugees to storm the Channel Tunnel, sounds as if he's speaking in an Onion interview:

Michel Meriaux admits he knew the asylum seekers were assembling in the [Sangatte refugee] camp on Christmas Day, but he says it was not up to him to warn the authorities. [...] He said staff telephoned him on 25 December to say that camp residents had assembled in two waves - around 150 of them gathering at 9pm and another 400 after midnight. He said he did not have any duty to inform Eurotunnel of this as his organisation was not concerned with what took place outside the compound.

Mr. Meriaux later claimed his words were misreported and he had no advance knowledge of the incident.

BRIT-DECODER NEEDED. Perhaps some kind BRIT-DECODER NEEDED. Perhaps some kind UK reader
could explain to me their government's involvement in religious training.
I was reading a BBC article re Abdul Haqq Baker's complaints about the government's taking no actions against extremist recruiters. This item perplexed me:

...[Blunkett] said he had already changed the rules with regards people applying to be clerics in the UK. Previously, clerics had been chosen to run mosques who were invited in from outside the country while those already in the UK had to go back to their country of origin to apply. Instead he had changed the system so that those who were already in the UK and on training courses could be appointed without returning to their country.

This seems to say the the government regulates training and appointment of clerics - which sounds very very odd to this American, who can't imagine why the government would have any input beyond normal immigration concerns. Anybody care to educate me?

THE GENERAL'S APOLOGIST IN HER THE GENERAL'S APOLOGIST IN HER LABYRINTH. Alert
readers Eric Pobirs and Robert L. Martin noticed a howler that I overlooked,
in the article from Arab News discussed below (four posts down). The paragraph in question:

America is an incredibly fickle ally to have. They befriended the Taleban, supplying them with guns so that they could fight against the Soviets. Then they befriended the Northern Alliance in order to rid themselves of the CIA-endorsed monster, the Taleban.

Aside from the guffaw-inducing blindness toward Saudi and Pakistani support of the Taliban, Messrs. Pobirs and Martin point out that the Taliban did not arise until after the defeat of the Soviets.

CLARE SHORT BLASTS U.S. FOR CLARE SHORT BLASTS U.S. FOR NOT BEING SANTA CLAUS, GOD, ROLLED
INTO ONE. In this BBC report Clare Short demanded that the U.S. do something about bad things:

America had to realise a "major cause" of the criticism it attracted around the world was the unresolved Middle East conflict.

Ms Short said: "That hurts the hearts of people. If US tried harder, we could do better."

And:

Yet there were those on the "extreme right" in America who were uninterested in helping such countries [Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan] Ms Short said. "That is not a very caring attitude; I think it is also a very foolish attitude."

Caring=Talking. Thanks for the advice, Clare.

"DON'T CANT IN DEFENCE OF "DON'T CANT IN DEFENCE OF SAVAGES",
said Dr. Johnson. He was writing, if I recall correctly, of the Tahitians,
who had a higher culture than he was willing to acknowledge. But it's a
fine aphorism, and it inevitably came to me as I was reading Charles Lindholm's LA Times article on Pashtun culture. (It appeared in the Times
on December 16; it didn't show up in my local paper until last Sunday.)
I may be being unfair here. An attempt to scientifically describe and explain
a culture may, when translated to a popular venue, come across as more apologetic
than objective. But anthropological and sociological research can often
sound idiotically Panglossian, and Lindholm's does here. The piece starts
with this:

Some years ago, when my wife and I were conducting ethnographic
research in a village in northwestern Pakistan, I watched a little girl get
beaten by her brother while the children's mother, sitting nearby, laughed.
Later that night, the boy was slapped hard by his father, but not for beating
his sister. The slap came because the boy looked away when his father spoke
to him. The father was absent during the day and came home secretly after
dark, because, if seen, he would likely be shot by his cousin, whose brother
he had killed in a fight a few years earlier. The mother, meanwhile, lived
in seclusion, venturing onto village streets only in her enveloping burka.
If she did otherwise, her honor and that of her husband would be sullied,
and she would likely be killed by him or by his family--possibly even by
her own family.

...and ends with this:

Yet, despite this cruel necessity, and despite the devastation wrought by 20 years of dreadful proxy wars fought on their land by outside powers, the Pushtuns retain their ancient egalitarian social system and their standards of honor and justice. If we do not understand and respect this system and the morality it entails, our intervention in Afghanistan is bound to fail.

In between, Lindholm explains to us why the Pashtun do the things they do - and commits two sins of reader-irritation common to popular sociological exposition. The first is to write with the assumption that if we are given reasons for behaviors, we will not only understand, but will therefore develop sympathy and respect for their culture. This is deeply annoying. Of course there are reasons why people do the things they do. If we find the custom of purdah abhorrent, for example, it isn't because we can't for the life of us imagine for what reason other human beings would develop such a custom. Which leads to the second sin, a corollary of the first: dealing with behaviors that are quite obviously exaggerated responses of common human dispostions as if they were so alien we can't possibly see them for what they are without extensive expert help. Lindholm writes as if the imperative to make boys tough, and concerns with male sexual jealousy and female chastity, were peculiar to the Pashtuns instead of what they are - human universals. We simply don't believe that encouraging boys to beat up their sisters is the best way to achieve the former, or that placing severe restrictions on the liberty of women is the civilized response to the latter. These preferences arise from cultural notions of human dignity and human liberty that we cherish, and since we cherish them, we cannot "respect" people who violate them simply because they can proffer explanations for their actions. And what is this "intervention" in Afghanistan of which he speaks? As I've written before, we're there to kill or capture people who want to kill us. We're willing to shell out a lot of money and food to help out in Afghanistan, but we "fail" only if functional terrorist groups continue to find support among the Pashtun. It behooves us to understand them, but we don't have to "respect" squat to accomplish our ends. For what is supposed to be a sympathetic treatment, Lindholm makes the Pashtun out to be passive automatons, vessels of received culture rather than human beings who can think and decide:

The harsh reality of village life is what the Pushtuns have inherited, and it is what they must live with. They recognize its inequities and tragedies, even as they accept its rules. As one of their poets says: "The eyes of the dove are lovely, my son. But the hawk rules the skies, so cover your dove-like eyes and grow claws."

But this implies that stable and prosperous civilization is somehow a gift of nature for those groups that enjoy it, and people who live like the Pashtun do so because of ineradicable facts of nature and unchangeable rules of culture. "Generations ago, they devised these answers to the brutal questions of survival," the author seems to say, "and these answers cannot be changed." But all human groups faced, at some point, the "harsh realities" of village life or its equivalent, and the harsh reality of facing merciless nature. The fact is that some groups figured out better answers to the questions of survival, and generation upon generation has poured its energies into things more productive and life-enhancing than blood-feuds. As a poster at a bulletin board on this topic remarked: "The future for a low trust and low cooperation society is poverty." For all the emphasis on "hawk's claws" and personal honor and aggressiveness, an obvious fact is ignored here - the Pashtun are weak and poor. Great powers run them over at will with the proxy wars Lindholm decries. And the civilization that looks in disgust on its destructive and impoverishing honor codes, its harsh and restrictive treatment of women, has "hawk's claws" vastly more formidable than these vaunted tough-guys could even dream of possessing. A researcher might ponder that maybe, just maybe, refusing to develop a stable and productive political system, and obsessing about your sister bein' a ho', are not the most intelligent responses to the challenges of survival. The relative conditions of people who act like that, and people who don't act like that, ought to be food enough for thought.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF STEPHANIE SALTER. THE APOTHEOSIS OF STEPHANIE
SALTER. Joanne Jacobs does a great job today on Stephanie Salter's latest
. Always a pompous ass, Salter's now speaking for the Son of God. We could
have predicted this. I've been impressed by her deep understanding of and
compassion for human suffering ever since she compared her time on a picket line to Bosnia: "...while a strike is hardly an ethnic war, it is similar enough for me". Preach it, sister.

THE GREATNESS OF GENERAL MUSHARRAF. THE GREATNESS OF GENERAL MUSHARRAF. There are some interesting side-lights in this Arab news article
outlining why Musharraf has been a great leader for Pakistan. Consider
that it is written by a Pakistani for a government-controlled Saudi newspaper
(yes, I know, that's redundant), and relish this little offering:

America is an incredibly fickle ally to have. They befriended
the Taleban, supplying them with guns so that they could fight against the
Soviets. Then they befriended the Northern Alliance in order to rid themselves
of the CIA-endorsed monster, the Taleban.

No mention of Pakistan's
support of the Taliban, no mention of Saudi involvement in maintaining al-Qaeda
and the Taliban in enforcing Wahhabist fundamentalism in Afghanistan.

At the time [of Clinton's visit], America wanted to befriend
India, the world's largest democracy (population 1.2 billion), and remonstrate
with Pakistan for supporting "terrorism" in the disputed Kashmir region.

One man's terrorist...

Today, Bush continues to need Musharraf. America needs to ensure there is no pro-Taleban residue remaining in Central Asia, because Sept. 11 is still fresh in the minds and memories of US foreign policy makers. Likewise, Pakistan needs American support to eradicate the Al-Qaeda network because there is no way the country can defend two borders against unfriendly neighbors. It is enough that Pakistan must spend more than its budget allows on military maintenance on the India border, having to take similar precautions on the Afghan border would cripple our ailing economy indefinitely. It is in the interests of both countries that a friendly government be put into place in Afghanistan.

There's so much interesting stuff buried in this little paragraph, especially "Pakistan needs American support to eradicate the Al-Qaeda network because there is no way the country can defend two borders against unfriendly neighbors." It can be read both ways - that Pakistan must eradicate al-Qaeda locally because the new government in Afghanistan is hostile to its former (Pakistan-friendly) colonial overlords; or (more likely the way is intended to be read), that innocent Pakistan has always been the enemy of "unfriendly" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Then the author moves on to India:

No wonder India is so upset. One year ago, it was the darling of the West. Today it is a whiny little voice complaining about Pakistani-sponsored terrorism.

I suppose we shall see. Compare this article to a Stratfor analysis of December 21, entitled "U.S. on collision course with Pakistan? Al-Qaida can be broken only if war front moves next door".

VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS DANCE THROUGH VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS DANCE THROUGH HIS HEAD. I enjoyed this item on Fred Pruitt's holiday wish-list:

Rather than confiscating nail clippers, perhaps it would make more sense to allow airline passengers to carry knives, clubs, brass knuckles and guns under .32 caliber. I have a dream, a dream in which an American Airlines flight diverts to Logan. On Runway 4 the plane stops. The door opens. The bullet-riddled body of an attempted hijacker is tossed to the tarmac with a satisfying "splat." The door closes and the plane resumes its flight to Miami. Was the faint sound of cheering heard coming from inside the plane? Satisfying, isn't it? (Unless you're a jihadi.)

Peace on Earth. To men of good will.

ADVICE AND CONTEMPT. "Even Lord ADVICE AND CONTEMPT. "Even Lord Delamere had been
a champion of the Maasai, who have an unquenchable sense of their own aristocracy,
and won the admiration of the whites by looking down on them." The line
is from Peter Matthiessen's The Tree Where Man Was Born
, and provoked in me some stray thoughts on comments in two articles that
have already been discussed this week: James Woolsey's interview with the Jerusalem Post (thanks to Jonathan Gewirtz for the link), and Charles Krauthammer's Time article
on the wages of victory. Both articles touch obliquely on what I think
is a peculiarly American view of man and social relations, a view that led
to what Krauthammer describes as the hand-wringing worries about "why they
hate us", and misplaced anxiety about the "Arab street". In the European
press such predictions were the consequence of leftist dogma and anti-Americanism.
In America, I'll argue that they arose from the vice of niceness
. What I mean here is that, in general, Americans have no gift for contempt.
Contempt is an alien concept. Not always, of course. "Contemptible" was
certainly a word my parents used, and it had a great deal of force: "he
is contemptible", "that is contemptible". But it's a word that one hears
very rarely on the lips of an American. When Krauthammer writes that "[t]he
logic of victory often eludes the secular West", he is referring to our miscomprehension
of, and miscalculation regarding, religious motivations. But it is also
a good description of all the confused discussion about "arrogance", about
(here I go again, forgive me) "hearts and minds". I went round and round
with a friend in early October on the subject of American "arrogance". His
assumption was that they hate us because we are arrogant, and we are arrogant
because we do such things as lob missiles at whomever and wherever we please.
I argued that the paltry missile-lobbing was wrong not because it was arrogant
but because it was ineffectual - it accomplished nothing and its ineffectuality
earned contempt. It isn't American arrogance that's the problem, I claimed,
it's American shuffling aw-shucksness that gets us into trouble. (I don't
want to be arrogant, but I think current history is supporting me in this
argument.) My friend was arguing from the assumption of a universal "Americanness".
We operate not by more formal codes of manners but by a ritualized familiarity
and friendliness - which is often seen as "false" and phony in the way that
Americans can see traditional formal manners as "false". We think friendliness
and the effort to be inoffensive should be understood everywhere. But we're
not some regular guy on the block. We're an immensely rich and powerful
nation. And our own fundamentally egalitarian view of human relations (which
is a good thing, properly applied), seems to blind us to the simplest facts
of human nature. Woolsey quotes an unnamed scholar of the Middle East:

When this is over, either we are going to be held in contempt
in the Mideast as we are now, or we are going to be feared and respected.
There is nothing in between.

Such a statement, which I absolutely
believe to be true, utterly befuddles many Americans, particularly on the
left. They occupy a world of social relations not defined by the poles of
respect and contempt , and it disturbs them to contemplate one that is.
This niceness, this inability to judge and despise, has been condemned
as moral relativism (in the case, for example, of John Walker) - and it is.
But the loss of the gift for contempt defines perhaps the American form
of this relativism - what you get from people who are fat and happy and friendly
and...nice. Too nice to feel contempt, and therefore too nice to understand it.

DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR (NOT DISHONOUR). DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR (NOT DISHONOUR). So Damian that hyperborean halibut has suggested to Dr. Frank
that he should lie low and try to pass for Canadian in the UK (presumably
to avoid Guardianista irritations). I hope Dr. Frank maintains a keener
sense of his own dignity. I know whereof I speak, for I have lived the shame
of being taken for Canadian. For some reason the spouse and I were always
being accused of Canadian-ness when we were traveling in places like the
Marianas and New Zealand. (In Indonesia I was mistaken for Australian.
That would have been equally horrible, until I realized that this was an
honest mistake based on appearance. An Irish-looking haole in those parts is statistically very likely to be 'Strine.)

But why Canadian elsewhere? We were told that we were both far too reserved, polite, and low-key to be Americans. Damn stupid ignorant foreigners will not
understand that America is not all Texas or New York. (Now, mind you, this
isn't a general objection. Huge treasures of humor would be lost if we abjured
national stereotypes. But Canadian. Oh man, that hurts.)

However, once you get past Damian's ineffectual Newfie threats, he does provide a link to a good article criticising the U.S.'s buck-passing criticism of Canadian security. Criticism well-taken.

CREATIVE EDITING: Ken Goldstein has CREATIVE EDITING: Ken Goldstein has some interesting comments on creative ellipses-free editing at Harper's (and on the dreariness of Lewis Lapham). He compares the full text of Michael Howard's
widely-discussed criticism of a "war" on terror with Harper's edited version.
(I also learned this fun fact at Ken's blog: Washingtonians can get license
plates reading "Taxation without Representation".) UPDATE: Ken's analysis
was picked up by the Weekly Standard. Good on yer, Ken.

OF IMPOTENT PEACEKEEPING AND SECRET OF IMPOTENT PEACEKEEPING AND SECRET TRIALS. The Wall Street Journal today reported (no free link):

The first of what eventually may be a 5,000-strong contingent [of British peacekeepers] flew in after the U.N. approved the mission. Kabul's new defense minister insisted they would have no authority to use force.

Looks like another success looming for U.N. peacekeeping.

The Journal also carried a sobering article
by James Woolsey on the perils of secret trials. He warns of the grave
injustices perpetrated against innocent parties (particularly those with
poor English skills) who run afoul of incompetent INS and FBI officials.
Among the horror stories:

Some FBI agents assigned to the INS made devastating judgments
in secret about my clients - later disclosed when a portion of the record
was declassified - by confusing the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s with the Gulf
War of 1991, mixing up Iran and Iraq, and by blatant bias (e.g. "there is
no guilt in the Arab world"). One agent ludicrously alleged that my client,
Safa al-Batat, who had survived three assassination attempts by Saddam -
including one using the deadly rat poison thallium - had probably been taking
the poison "recreationally."

Most disturbing was Woolsey's anecdote
about being told that "You may have a security clearance, but you don't have
a need to know the charges against your client."

THE SILENCE OF THE BONES Kennewick Man's, that is. For reasons that are not clear, the Department of Interior has shut down its electronic communications in response to long-running legal problems concerning its mismanagement of Indian trust funds:

The Department of Interior and its many subagencies that criss-cross the West remain indefinitely tongue-tied by a federal court ruling that has shut down virtually the entire department's Internet and e-mail system. [...]

The lockdown is a result of a Dec. 5 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who ordered the Department of the Interior to immediately shut down Internet systems and agency computers that provide access to individual Indian trust data.

In consequence data previously online is no longer available except by fax, phone, or snailmail. The USGS is back online for public safety reasons (flood, volcano, etc., information), but people who need it no longer have access, for example, to stream flow and snow pack data. And archeological researchers can no longer use what was the sole source of government studies on Kennewick Man. I'm not sure depriving the public of stream data and archeological research is the right way to go about getting Interior to clean up its trust-fund mess.

(Links to Kennewick Man posts.)

IF ARAFAT SAYS SO IF ARAFAT SAYS SO AND IT'S IN THE NYT, IT MUST BE TRUE. Georgie Anne Geyer
does not always come across as a knee-jerk anti-Israel columnist, as this
anti-Durban column attests. But she does often write as if she's on PR retainer for, say, Egypt or Oman. She approvingly quotes
Oman's minister of informations saying "What we look to the United States
for is to save the Israeli leadership from its own mistakes". Her latest column
is a good example of her general thesis that Bush's brand of support for
Israel is due to pressure from "Israel-firsters", and that the Israel-Palestine
conflict is the prime, if not the only, source of friction with Arab states
and Arab populations. In an October 27 article she writes:

Usually the attacks [of the Israel-firsters] take the form of criticizing Egypt and Saudi Arabia for not taking a more active role in supporting the United States. Much of the pro-Israeli part of the campaign is directed at proving that this fall's terrorism was instigated not by "Arab street hatred" over the war in Israel and Palestine, but by "unrepresentative" and "oppressive" Arab governments.

One has to wonder at the quotation marks around "unrepresentative" and "oppressive". Wise and experienced diplomats, of course, concur with her dismissal of the relation between terrorism and the failures of governments. She criticizes all talk of confronting Saddam Hussein as deriving from the Israel-firsters (specifically Wolfowitz and Perle), who put Israel's interests ahead of America's, and whose goal is to destroy American relations with any Arab state:

The U.S. diplomats I have spoken to, most with long experience in the Middle East, are uniformly enraged by these campaigns. Next to the war, it is the main topic at receptions and meetings. "It's a very simple proposition," one former ambassador to the region told me. "Now's the chance for us to get rid of all of Israel's enemies in the Middle East." And another formerly high-ranking diplomat told me, "It's the old story, that Israel simply can't bear to see any Arab countries close to the United States."

She also writes under the assumption that the case against Iraq is about nothing but complicity in the anthrax mailings, and invokes the standard warnings about "moderate" Arab states leaving (all bow) "the coalition".

These other agendas, as they euphemistically call them, would drive the moderate Arabs away from the West. They point out, again privately, the fragility of this moment when the Arab masses are at best ambivalent about the anti-bin Laden campaign because of the war with the Palestinians.

In a November 22 article she dismisses as "political cant and an excuse to keep up the war against the Palestinians" Sharon's demand that:

..there will be seven full days in which no act of Palestinian violence occurs -- "including throwing stones." Even after that, he says, there would have to be another six-week "cooling-off period" in which virtually all acts of violence stop.

So Israelis are supposed to let themselves be nickel-and-dimed to death while the "peace process" continues. Her rationale for this?

As the most mediocre analyst of conflict knows [snideness alert], no movement, much less one as inwardly conflicted and divided as the PLO, can possibly control all of its members all the time. As Israel's courageous foreign minister and elder statesman Shimon Peres, who is waging a valiant fight against Sharon's transparent dictum inside the government coalition, has stressed, such false strategies only give every radical or madman veto power over every single move.

This from a commentator who this week is still taking Arafat at face (addresses to the English language press) value, who still thinks that Arafat speaks for the Palestinians against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Never does she once posit Arafat's failure as anything but the result of his victimization by Sharon and his band of extremists. On July 31 she was expressing satisfaction that the "orthodox view" of Camp David - that Barak offered the moon and Arafat rejected it - was being discredited. The sources she cites are Robert Malley and the NYT(see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in NYRB and Deborah Sontag's NYT article . Malley and Agha's article lays the blame for the failure of Camp David squarely on Israeli non-compliance with Oslo, and Barak's failures in negotiation. A thorough critique of Sontag's article was written by Robert Satloff.)

I assume Malley's and Sontag's interpretations are those she herself accepts when she complains, in her most recent column
, about Bush "accept[ing] a highly questionable historical interpretation
of events". Unfortunately she does not expand upon exactly what his "questionable
interpretation" is. I don't dismiss all her attacks on Sharon, nor her harsh
criticism of the handling of Israeli settlements. It is easy to imagine
Sharon hoping and planning for the present pass. But, as Robert Satloff
wrote concerning Deborah Sontag's NYT piece, Geyer is trying to write about
the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg. She writes as if there were
no intifada, as if Arafat was without question a trustworthy partner in the
"peace process" and demonstrably a victim of Israeli perfidy, as if Sharon
came to power in a vacuum, and that his writ has run in Israeli politics
and negotiations for the last decade. Her latest column is an one-sided
description of the current conflict as being nothing more than the fruition
of Sharon's long-pursued ambition to destroy the Palestinian Authority and
provoke a final conflict, where the extremists of both sides will get their
wish, while

Meanwhile, hapless and hopeless Yasser Arafat loses by the day,
and the vast majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians who still -- despite
all -- favor a peace settlement have no place to turn. Particularly when
"all-powerful" America takes such rigid stands behind -- indeed, subsumed
in -- the Sharon position.

This just doesn't square with a November 22 comment:

As for the Palestinians, they continue to live in a world torn between so many factions, such corrupt leadership and such a pitiful lack of strategy that one can only despair of their taking any really efficacious action.

Yet Israel is to blame for the failure of negotiations; the Palestinians are never anything but passive reactors. Her preferred response is apparently that Arafat, "hapless and hopeless", should have been sustained as a negotiating partner, while "so many factions" continued their depredations against Israel. She does make (most recent column ) true, if vague, statements about the importance of America defining and pursuing its own interests in the Middle East. Indeed, she often speaks of the need for the U.S. to use its power here, but only in the usual vague terms ("..monitor, toughmindedly, the compliance or noncompliance of both sides..."), which leads to an odd statement - odd in coming from one someone who has strongly opposed action against Iraq:

Strangely enough, it could carry him to the same situation his father faced after the Gulf War in 1991, when he won "the war" but lost the peace because he didn't act strongly enough.

BLACK BEANS AND RICE. Check BLACK BEANS AND RICE. Check out my fellow Floridian Andrea Harris's new blog. It precipitated for me a moment of intense pining over my lost world of Cuban food and Cuban coffee
. We'd no doubt have a difference of opinion on white vs. yellow rice with
our black beans, though, as she is a Miami girl and I am a Tampa native.
About those reasons for taking out Saddam
, Andrea. It's not the romance novels. Have you ever seen pictures of the
interior decoration in his palaces and reception rooms? Gawd. Let's not
even discuss the public sculpture. Nobody with taste that bad should be
left in power. Now I must gird my loins and head out once again to the...maaaall.
I hope I can get some more blogging done later. And I wish Andrea well
in her search for a decent bagel in Central Florida.

CHRISTMAS PREPARATION DAY. No blogging CHRISTMAS PREPARATION DAY.
No blogging today, as I have other happy duties. I'll leave you with a
couple of articles I haven't disposed of. The first is William Buckley's
on Angelo M. Codevilla's
prescription for defeating terrorists: why "homeland security" is a fool's
goal, why we cannot efficiently gather intelligence in terrorist states,
and why it all boils down to "It's the Regime, Stupid":

Second, we should know that attempts to appeal to moderation
don't work, and in fact, reach back to bite us. "'Extremist' is one of many
pejorative synonyms for 'loser.' The surest way to lose the support of 'moderates'
is to be ineffective. Might is mistaken for right everywhere -- but especially
in the Middle East." Don't try to reach for "root causes of resentment against
us." It will get you nowhere. Just identify the regimes that foster or permit
terrorism, use our might against them decisively, and turn the targeted countries
back to the people who live there. In the course of things, it is entirely
possible that they would discover that a root cause of legitimate discontent
is the lack of freedom, political and material.

An alternative is my naive hope that if we take care of one or two the rest
will take care of themselves - maybe with a little help on the side from
us. Y'all discuss and settle this in my absence and let me know what the
plan is for next year. Also, I took a look at Pakistan's Dawn, to compare it to the articles from the Times of India
I discussed yesterday (three posts down). As was to be expected, articles
covered denials by the Pakistani government of involvement by Pakistan-based
militant groups. But I also discovered a conspiracy theory I wasn't familiar with:

Farida Behanji [Jammu and Kashmir Mass Movement Chairperson ]asserted that Indian secret agencies "are behind the whole drama carried out at the parliament house." She added that India's own agencies were ultimately found to have been stage-managing such incidents in the past.

And the reason Pakistani and Kashmiri organizations should not be implicated in the attack?

They said as a believer of Islam no Muslim could involve in such a crime, saying Islam is a peaceful religion and forbids its followers from committing inhuman and brutal acts.

I guess that settles that.

Hasty banana, gentle readers. I'll probably be back tomorrow.

HEY CANUCK! To that idly HEY CANUCK! To that idly boasting Newfoundlander
, feebly brandishing a thrashing cod in a southerly direction: we had no
interest in Newfoundland, but now you're asking for it. My intelligence
sources tell me that many in Alberta and British Columbia are ready to join
our great Union, or at least secede, and would make short work of any recalcitrant
Newfies (or whatever you call yourselves) at Fort McMurray. Where are your rebel friends now, Damian?

ENGLAND, ENGLAND. Don't miss Iain ENGLAND, ENGLAND. Don't miss Iain Murray's passionate cry
against the Labour Party's continuing betrayal of the Mother of Democracies
into the maw of the Eurocrats. We think it would be nice if Britain would
take Kathy Kinsley's advice to chuck the EU and join NAFTA.

Not that we don't have our own gargoyles to run from, as this article on a National ID card illustrates. But even creepier is this proposal
for universal registration of human beings, "...put forward by Pascal Smet,
the head of Belgium's [natch] independent asylum review board":

"It's a basic rule of management that if you want to manage
something, you measure it. It's the same with human beings and migration.
"But instead of measuring it, you have to register them."

That sends icy shivers down my spine. Look, I don't even own a cellphone, because I don't want
people to be able to find me all the time. I like the feeling of sometimes
being anonymous, alone, unreachable. But maybe I'm just pathologically anti-social.
The Belgians would certainly think so.

"POLICEMAN BY DAY, THIEF BY "POLICEMAN BY DAY, THIEF BY NIGHT". That's
India's take on Pakistan's role in the war on terror, according to a Times of India
report. I do wonder how much Pakistan will contribute to obstructing the
development of a stable polity in Afghanistan - especially considering this
morning's reports about the deal-making that is allowing Taliban leaders to go free to fight another day:

The bartering of freedom for surrender has fostered tension in the anti-Taliban coalition, as many commanders and political leaders have objected to letting the enemy go free. Ultimately, the strategy could give the Taliban time to mount a challenge to the interim government of Hamid Karzai that takes power on Saturday. [...] "Whether Americans like it or not, the anti-Taliban forces have gained ground with implicit Taliban support all across the Afghan Pashtun belt," said a senior Pakistani official.

I'd say the Pashtun are going to have to make a choice. America has one goal and one goal only in Afghanistan, and that is to ensure that it is not a haven for terrorists who plot there to do us harm. One way that can be prevented is for a Afghanistan to become a reasonably stable, reasonably secure, reasonably productive nation - something American taxpayers are willing to help out with. The Pashtun leaders leaders can accept this and work toward this goal, or all those little warload divas can keep playing footsie with the ISI, restore the Taliban to power where they can, and ensure that Afghanistan remains a rat-hole for the next century. Their choice. Is the latter option Pakistan's choice?

Mosques and religious seminaries across Afghanistan that helped "spawn the Taliban" in the 1990s would continue to serve as its power base, Pakistani officials have said.

Note no mention of mosques and seminaries in Pakistan. Another article from the Times of India opines:

Pakistan, as the creator of the Taliban, analysts have pointed out, has a huge stake in its continued well-being even in defeat which it hopes will be temporary. Its ambitions in Kashmir and dreams of greater Pakistan are served by the Taliban remaining a viable entity and not by its destruction, it said.

Well, of course you'd expect this slant from the Indian papers. What with their own recent problems with Pakistani-supported terrorists, and this:

Militants belonging to Pakistan-backed Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), jailed by the Northern Alliance in this remote prison along with over 300 Taliban fighters, are hoping to get out on a general amnesty vowing to fight against India in Kashmir and the new regime in Afghanistan.

Finally the T of I carries this article outlining Washington's concern with the threat of nuclear war between Pakistan and India, and the contrast between what Washington claims for Musharraf and what Musharraf is delivering:

[Powell] revealed that Musharraf had said "he is taking action against the two organizations that have been tentatively identified as terrorist organizations and might have been responsible for this," - something that must be news to New Delhi. [...] But as far as India is concerned, the initial response from the Musharraf regime has not been propitious. Musharraf has declined to act against the two groups [Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed] without adequate proof and belligerently threatened a forceful response to an Indian strike against terrorist camps. [...] [T]here is voluminous evidence to show that leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed have publicly advocated and initiated terrorism against India, not just in Jammu and Kashmir but even in the Indian heartland.

Now I'll have to go check out the response in the Pakistan papers. Interesting times.

ISRAEL AND THE "DAISY-CUTTER EFFECT". ISRAEL AND THE "DAISY-CUTTER EFFECT". Barbara Amiel writes in today's Telegraph about the blithe anti-Semitism of London's chattering class. I wished she'd named names here:

Recently, the ambassador of a major EU country politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in the world were all because of "that shitty little country Israel".

But not a surprising statement. Even less surprising is this:

The editor [of a major British newspaper] is a decent man but his paper habitually blames Israel's "opposition to peace" for the problems in the Middle East and lectures them to negotiate. "But, look," he was asked, "Arafat does not believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state. How can the Israelis negotiate in that situation?" The editor replied with disarming honesty: "You have put your finger on the weak point in our argument."

I'd say "disarming honesty" is a remarkably charitable description. It's disgusting that the editor of a major newspaper is basically making a nonchalant assertion that it's not his paper's job to report, think, and analyze, but merely to strike fashionable poses. The rest of the article is an interesting read on why the European media has been so anti-Israel for the last 25 years, and why that might be changing due to "the Arab/Muslim world overplay[ing] its hand":

Their first wrong move was the rejection of prime minister Ehud Barak's offer in 2000. Even if you looked at that proposal from an Arab point of view and believed that a Palestinian state comprising 95 per cent of the West Bank and a shared Jerusalem was not sufficient, you couldn't possibly argue that such a deal should be rejected out of hand.

I don't know if I'd agree with her here that Arafat's rejection of Barak's offer had much effect on anti-Israel opinion. There are those in America who still blame Israel for the failure of that deal; it seems unlikely that this would have had any persuasive effect on European punditry. I think she's right about bin Laden, though:

The greatest error of all was when bin Laden, acting in the name of the Arab/Muslim world, decided - with a total incomprehension of what this would entail - to blow up Lower Manhattan and blow it up at a time when the American administration was in the hands of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld and not Clinton and Gore.

I've never found the "bin Laden, strategic genius" scenarios very compelling. I don't think he was maneuvering to bring about the Apocalypse. I think he misjudged America and miscalculated his position. (Though I'm inclined to agree with Fred Pruitt that he's now sipping tea with General Gul in Pakistan.) I also think Amiel is right when she attributes to the "daisy-cutter effect" the fact that Israelis are now starting to get a hearing in Euro media houses. (Though apparently not in London salons.)

NUTRITION UPDATE. I was ranting NUTRITION UPDATE. I was ranting away this afternoon re an
editorial in today's paper, by a Middle Eastern Studies Professor-type.
Then I became aware that I was typing "Edward Said", and then "Samuel Huntington",
and I realized that this would probably make innocent readers say "Oh God
she's doing it again" and run away screaming. So instead I will tell you
about my tangerine-lemon tart. I was preparing a tangerine-lemon tart, and
as I was getting into the zen of citrus-peel zesting, my eye chanced upon
a box of confectioner's sugar that was sitting sideways on the counter.
And the nutrition label said, in large clear letters:

SUGAR CONTAINS NO FAT

I just thought y'all needed
to know that. High seriousness will return when Blogger settles down.

COURTS-MARTIAL, ALPHA QUADRANT. I was COURTS-MARTIAL,
ALPHA QUADRANT. I was sitting here, enjoying a meditative first cup of rainy
Sunday morning coffee, when another Sadistic Bastard (I have a list) sends
me an Independent url. I ain't biting - well, at least not this early in the morning. Instead, I'd rather discuss more sober issues - like Perry de Havilland's
important essay on what a bunch of fascists the Feds are. The United Federation
of Planets, that is. One needn't, as Perry does, examine their economic
system. One encounter with intrusive, controlling Counselor Troi would convince
one of that. There would have been a place in the KGB for that woman. He
also brings up something I've always noticed - that there is no military
discipline in this militarized organization. Usually the existence of a
military code of justice is apparent only when some mentally-unbalanced high-ranking
Fed official goes on a McCarthyite binge. (Have you also noticed that all
the Fed "desk" pooh-bahs are corrupt, insane, infested with alien larvae,
or complete flaming pricks?) One mutters "court martial, court martial,
court martial" as the action unfolds in episode after episode, but nobody's
ever busted. They just get asked into the ready-room and lectured on inappropriate
non-commander-respecting behavior. Perry says he always roots for the Klingons,
and I have to confess to the same. But, people will use the Castro-health-care/Trains-
on-Time argument to defend the Feds against Klingon culture. I once wondered
aloud why all the Klingons but Worf seemed to have bad teeth. Said the spouse,
"Worf's got the Federation Dental Plan".

AN HONEST HAMAS. Steven Den AN HONEST HAMAS. Steven Den Beste ends
his comment on the lit powderkeg in the Middle East on a strangely hopeful note:

Hamas may be utterly hostile to Israel, but at least they're honest about what they want, and I'd rather deal with an honestly hostile man than with a friendly liar.

I agree. I've always believed that nothing could be acccomplished re Israel and Palestine until the Palestinians (and the Arabs in general) stopped lying about their real prerequisite for peace - i.e., that Israel crawl into a hole and die. And "peace processors" stopped pretending that this wasn't so.

REMEMBER, IT'S THE PROCESS THAT'S REMEMBER, IT'S THE PROCESS THAT'S IMPORTANT, NOT THE PRODUCT. "Peace
process" in one of those phrases that is wielded as a magic talisman, the
user believing it to have powers that transcend the quotidian world of cause
and effect. Here's a typical example from a BBC "analysis":

[James Baker's] dogged efforts paid off, resulting in a peace conference at Madrid where the foundations were laid for a process that came to be identified with the Norwegian capital, Oslo. But no such breakthrough looms this time.

One constantly comes across such invocations of Madrid and Oslo. "Foundations" implies solidity and permanence. "Breakthrough" means - breakthrough. For once I would like to see "analysts" describe the wonders of which they speak, rather than merely ritually naming them. The same article has this quirky take (my emphasis):

The Palestinians, for their part, lost confidence in the peace process a long time ago, convinced that a succession of Israeli leaders had exhibited bad faith. The second Palestinian uprising, which began almost a year earlier, had already exacted a terrible price in lives lost and property destroyed.

I would like to see a timeline indicating exactly where "peace processors" locate the reign of the great successes of Madrid and Oslo - and where that reign fell to the "long ago" of lost confidence and uprising. Puzzling bit of temporal overlap I'd like to see cleared up.

NEW CONTEST. Dan Hartung has NEW CONTEST. Dan Hartung
has announced the On-Time Trains Award, for best apology for fascism. Send
in your nominations. (Robert Fisk and Jonathan Steele are already up.)

NOT SOMALIA, NOT YEMEN, NOT NOT SOMALIA,
NOT YEMEN, NOT IRAQ...CANADA! Damian Penny is cheesed at Tony Adragna's
schemes for annexing Canada to the US. Adragna should be keeping quiet
about this, because the diabolical plan is coming to fruition. But he foolishly
goes so far as to mention, in the same post, the pretext we've been waiting
for patiently - as reported by the Xinhua news service
: Canada will harbor fleeing Taliban. This little news nugget was of course
planted by our operatives. And Adragna is all wrong about our needing Canada
for our Siberian-style gulags. What we're really after is, yes, the Athabaska Tar Sands! As reader John Kahn informs me:

In th[is] University of Alberta site ...it says that Athabaska's 1.7 trillion barrels is 1/3 of all known oil reserves worldwide. A staggering fact that is not really widely known in Canada, let alone the US.

Oh, we know. Weeee know.

All silliness aside, Mr. Kahn sent along some interesting links and comments when I was posting earlier about the "oil weapon myth". In addition to the University of Alberta link above, he provided a link to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum, and these comments:

Note that in the Syncrude site
...they quote their recovery cost as $18 a barrel, which sounds kinda steep
and must be Canadian "pesodollars", which converts to $12 US. A major paper
up here in a business article some weeks back quoted 9$ a barrel (US funds)
as the current production cost for the 300 billion barrels that can be dug
up with shovels today (by comparison Mideast oil costs $5). The other stuff
would have to be mined with other methods when the surface stuff runs out
in several decades. Mining oil sands used to be barely worth the effort
until the production cost of synthetic crude dropped sharply in recent years
after one of the lead companies got rid of their mondo bucket wheels and
simply started digging the stuff up and trucking it out (the CEO responsible
for that was a woman I believe). [...] Canada may have its problems (mainly
related to the lack of a strong federal political opposition because of the
splintering of conservative forces in the 90s, which will resolve itself
eventually), but hey, we're only 30 million people sitting on all that oil
and we have America for a neighbour. Can't complain!

(So you see, all that stuff you hear from anti-war
types about Caspian oil and an oil pipeline in Afghanistan is just disinformation.
It's Canadian oil we're really after. We had a hard enough time
finding Pashtun- and Dari-speaking agents. We monolingual Americans would
just be a lot better off invading people who speak English. And francophone
Canada is nowhere near Athabaska.)

Posted by Moira Breen at 08:49 PM

WORD FOR THE DAY: "BLOWHARDINESS". WORD FOR THE DAY: "BLOWHARDINESS". I just really
liked this bit from James Lileks today:

On the news I heard an Al-Jazeera spokeperson sniff that the tape might have made an impact earlier on when many Arabs doubted that bin Laden had masterminded the affair. To which one can only ask: why, then, is he lionized? Why are children named after him, and Bert-accented posters waved in his honor? Because he doesn't blow up embassies and ships and office buildings? O Tiger of Islam, we salute your blowhardiness! We ullulate in your general direction for your magnificent inaction! Verily, you are all talk and no walk - let us unspool our intestines and wave them around to celebrate your mighty example!

WITHDRAWAL UPDATE. So Ken Layne WITHDRAWAL UPDATE. So Ken Layne and some perverted Canuck think I should continue to degrade myself because they
enjoy watching me do it. Pigs. I'm clean and sober today; not a single
poncey pin-head columnist has besmirched my browser. Got to get off-line
and scrub my bathrooms. They're getting as dusty and moldy as a Guardipendent
columnist's cerebral cortex. (P.S. - apologies for the tardiness of my response
to all the kind letter-writers. Screwy mail-server only partially to blame.)

TAKING THE PLEDGE. OK, Tim TAKING
THE PLEDGE. OK, Tim Blair's blog update
implies that I should lay off the cheap stuff. (Topic: "Guardian expresses
displeasure with the war for the 5,937,863rd time".) No more whorish posts
slagging Guardipendent columnists. It's a filthy habit and I'll stop it.
Readers must help - no more enabling urls. You know who you are.

KENNEWICK MAN UPDATE A decision still hasn't been handed down on the Kennewick Man case. If you are asking yourself, "Whatever is this woman talking about?", check out the Kennewick Man Virtual Interpretive Center, Friends of America's Past, and Clovis and Beyond.

(Links to Kennewick Man posts.)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING BRIT NIGHT
OF THE LIVING BRIT ANTI-WAR COLUMNISTS. It's just dawned on me that when
you hear people saying "...you can't kill them, they'll just become martyrs
and more will spring up in their place", they're not talking about terrorists.
They're talking about the anti-American columnists of the Guardian and the Independent. Reader Ben Sheriff, thoughtfully looking out to keep me offended, proffered Natasha Walter's latest
for my gnashing pleasure. So I began reading and picking it apart. Then
I thought, hey, you pick apart one of these clowns, you've done for them
all. After a time, what's the point? They're like those annelids you get
in grade school, that keep on squirming along after you've cut them in half.
They never address counter-arguments, they just bleat the same lines over
and over and over and over. Take a look; it's all here: Mindless triumphalism!
Stupid, childish Americans! Arab rage! Tortured prisoners! Strained historical
analogies! Dead and hungry civilians, which only the author and her kind
have any awareness of and have any compassion for! Robert Fisk's profound
insights! Medecins Sans Frontieres! Hearts and minds! And, for good measure,
she impugns the courage of American soldiers. (Wait, that's hardly original.)
I will add one side comment, though, re this paragraph:

We might also remember that, with the massive humanitarian
crisis that is still going on, many ordinary Afghans do not yet have much
reason to thank the West. One spokesperson from Médecins Sans Frontières
was quoted this week saying that less aid was entering Afghanistan now than
before 11 September. In just one refugee camp on the outskirts of Herat,
in western Afghanistan, about 20 children and old people were dying every
day of hunger and cold, The Economist reported last week.

I just happen to remember that this Economist
article she cites (I checked online - no free link) is titled "Death by
bureaucracy", and subtitled "The starving are kept waiting for want of official
registration" - at camps where there is enough food available to get through
the winter. The unregistered are not given food. At one camp, registration
was restarted after the fall of Herat,

...[b]ut foreign staff trained for such work have not yet received
security clearance from their UN bosses to go to Herat. The registration
was held up by fears that among the genuinely displaced people were "cheats"
from Herat itself.

The Iranian Red Crescent encouraged refugees
at their camps to go home, when home was the besieged city of Kandahar, and
refused to register new arrivals.

It was only after the death of two children...that the Red Crescent
at last allowed foreign organisations to provide limited food supplies, for
just a week, to people who had not been registered.

It is interesting
that Walter neglects to mention the cause of the deaths she deplores. (Though
I'm she would absolve the bureaucrats and stick with blaming the war.) She
exits this way:

Perhaps it is merely unfounded anti-Americanism to think that
George Bush and his friends are prepared to bomb and walk away, not just
in Afghanistan but in other countries in Africa and the Middle East, leaving
millions of civilians to try to rebuild their ruined lives without help.

No perhaps about it, darlin'.

I hope so. I hope there are no grounds for these fears.

Oh horseshit, Natasha. Horseshit horseshit horseshit. You have no fonder hope, you cretinous, ignorant, sanctimonious bipedal manifestation of pond-scum, than to see George Bush drinking blood out of a baby's skull. Well, enough. As my uncle advised about such people: "Let the bastards live. There's too many of them. You can't kill them all". (Unlike al Qaeda fighters.)

I'VE NEVER SEEN THAT MAN I'VE
NEVER SEEN THAT MAN BEFORE IN MY LIFE. Reader Tom Roberts writes:

Re: Jonathan Steele at the Guardian article [down two posts],
one factoid you may have missed concerning how OBL and Mullah Omar ought
to have known about each others' activities is that they are both married
to each others' daughters. Whether these marriages are ones of affection
or politics, their activities are "all in the family" in the manner of the
Costra Nostra. See "fun fact of the day".

The fun fact is that Omar and Osama are both father- and son-in-law to one
another. But Steele thinks Donald Rumsfeld is on much more intimate terms
with Osama.

DISCOUNT IDEOLOGY OUTLET. Like material DISCOUNT IDEOLOGY OUTLET. Like material goods, a lot of second-rate,
marked down intellectual product seems to make its way to the retailers of
the Third World. In one of the chunks of funk laid down yesterday by Charles Johnson, he links to what he accurately describes as a "hilariously incoherent rant
" by the chairman of the Jordanian Physicians' Association. It's all about
how degraded and oppressed Western women are. Aside from the loopy indictment
of burgers, cola, and "legal" pedophilia, what struck me was the way he trotted
out a veritable AAUW's pamphlet's worth of discredited ac-fem dogma: the
epidemic of rape on college campuses, exploitative beauty pageants, widespread
domestic violence. I particularly liked the final grace note on this one:

"Where are women's rights, when their statistics show that one
in every three American women is raped - in addition to sexual harassment
in the workplace, and even on the part of generals in the military, during
their hours of rest from bombing Iraq and Afghanistan?"

Is there
some kind of scientific law about lame dogma and discredited statistics not
being created or destroyed? After they pass their "sell-by" date in a particular
market, do they undergo some minor transformation and re-materialize on the
other side of the world, say, in the offices of the Jordanian Physicians'
Association? Could any of you physics-types out there fill me in on how
this works?

HERE'S THE AP STORY on HERE'S THE AP STORY on the just-released bin Laden tape.

A MAN OF "NUANCED JUDGMENTS". A MAN OF "NUANCED JUDGMENTS". According to Jonathan Steele at the Guardian, the war, though possibly a good thing in the end for the Afghans (or possibly not), has been a failure for the U.S.:

The toppling of the Taliban may eventually prove to be the best thing to have happened in Afghanistan for a decade. But it was not an initial aim of the US-led war. In the wake of their departure from Kandahar, that point cannot be stressed enough, before the drumbeat of triumpalism deafens us all. Victory over the wrong opponent is not much of a victory.

The argument is that the Taliban never held any power in Afghanistan, and were "easy meat", attacked out of the "desperation and cynicism" arising from an inability to find bin Laden. (Though he does contradict himself a few paragraphs down by lauding them for having "produced order". How one produces order without effective political power is not explained.)

There has been much indignant talk about "people who harbour terrorists". Unload the emotion, and this is not much more useful than describing European states which decline to deport murder suspects to the US as "people who harbour killers".

Of course, Europe "harbours killers" by imprisoning them, thus reducing their lethality. Other than that, you've got a fine analogy there, Jon. (Is he suggesting that Spain, for example, is simply letting those terrorist suspects ply their trade while refusing to extradite them?)

More importantly, the Taliban had no way of enforcing their will on Bin Laden. If Donald Rumsfeld, with his infra-red laser-guided heat-seeking cave-buster bombs, cannot find Bin Laden after nine weeks on the job, how does he expect the Taliban to have done better?

Um, they were working with him and knew where he was? No, the Taliban weren't joined at the hip with al-Qaeda, they were its helpless victims. Steele further argues for the Taliban's powerlessness by pointing out that they provided no services to the impoverished population. He also plays the irritating games of presenting common knowledge as opinion-shattering revelation ("The total veiling of women did not begin with the Taliban, and has not ended with their demise") and, well, just flat-out talking shit - "Not much of this [the refugee crisis] has reached the world's attention". Yeah Jon. Ya just never see anything in the papers about the refugee crisis in Afghanistan. His meditation on this topic produces this priceless "nuanced" negative comparison of the U.S. to Milosevic:

The air strikes have driven at least 600,000 people from their homes. This is comparable with Milosevic's deportations from Kosovo during the Nato bombardment. But while he committed his crimes in springtime, with a host of agencies to help the refugees as they crossed the border, the US launched its Afghan assault in winter, in a situation where neighbouring countries would only grudgingly open their gates.

Got that? Milosevic was a better class of criminal than Bush.

Finally, here's his gracious admission re his mis-calls on the war:

OK, I was wrong. On October 6, I wrote: "Missile strikes will just be the hors d'oeuvre. The main meal will be a sustained campaign to arm the Taliban's opponents, the Northern Alliance, so that they can seize Kabul and take power." I am truly sorry - I never thought the air war would be so off target, and bring so much misery to so many innocent Afghans.

Swamp-thing.

AND YOU THOUGHT FISK WAS AND YOU THOUGHT FISK WAS SELF-IMPORTANT. Fred Pruitt sent this Independent
article along with the suggestion that I could have "immense fun" with it.
Heh. There's no way in hell I can improve on the straight story (which
the writer, Julia Stewart, does a good job of telling). It's about Yvonne
Ridley's new book. You remember Yvonne, don't you - the flibbertigibbet
who got herself arrested in Afghanistan, and whose parents complained that
the allies wouldn't put the war on hold until their daughter was safely out?
Now she's revealing that it was not only the bombs that were after her personally:

But what puts the book into a league of its own is Ridley's
claim that Western intelligence agencies tried to get her killed while she
was imprisoned to bolster public support for the air strikes on Afghanistan.
She claims that within days, her captors were in possession of a file of
doctored personal papers that suggested she was a spy, which thus made her
highly likely to be killed. She also claims the locks on her Soho flat were
tampered with. "It would make a really good newspaper investigation, but
quite frankly, I've seen this sort of thing happen to other people, and the
first thing that's done to them is they are marginalised and made out to
be total crackpots. All I know is that somebody tried to cause me serious
harm. If I had been tortured, murdered and my body sent home, this would
have sent a clear message about this reviled regime. It would have been great
propaganda for the war machine. The Taliban don't mess around with spies."
Who does she think is out to get her? "The contacts I've got say it's got
the clumsy hands of the Americans all over it," she says darkly. "But then
those contacts would say that. Other people think it's Mossad. I've got no
idea. "I feel very, very betrayed, and very, very sad that someone was prepared
to sacrifice my life, for whatever reason, although I have been told by a
contact in Whitehall not to take it personally."

AL THAT JAZ. I just AL THAT JAZ. I just got my Washington Post Weekly, and found I'd missed Mamoun Fandy's
December 2 article on the puzzlement felt by sympathetic Arab journalists
toward the administration's efforts to sell America on all-out anti-American
al-Jazeera:

Many other Arab journalists have said they are equally baffled
by the United States having lent its prestige to al-Jazeera, a channel that
many in the region consider to be controlled by Islamic fundamentalists and
Arab nationalist demagogues. But in this country, seemingly overnight, the
network has been perceived as an oasis of free speech. Everything I read
in the American press about al-Jazeera -- that it is independent and unbiased
-- sounds as if it is taken word for word from a pamphlet put out by the
Einstein Consulting Group, a London public relations firm hired by Qatar
to promote the network. Americans have taken the bait. "It is the American
naivete that gets [it] in trouble" in the Arab world, said Rida Hilal, a
liberal columnist for Al-Ahram. Competing with bin Laden on al-Jazeera --
which refers to American forces in Afghanistan as "the enemy" -- is a no-win
situation.

This makes Boston NPR affiliate WBUR's fawning special coverage link ("the CNN of the Arab world") to Al-Jazeera even funnier. (I was first directed there by Instapundit.)

THAT SOLENT WOMAN is accusing THAT SOLENT WOMAN is accusing me of eating her brain
. Not hardly. If I can ever once show myself equal to describing someone
as being "such a swamp-thing of moral relativism that any part of him you
want to grab on to liquefies as soon as you reach out", she'll have a case.

BLOGGER ENRAGED. Me, that is, BLOGGER
ENRAGED. Me, that is, about this motherless machine I've been kicking all
day. I apologize to anyone who's done me the courtesy of viewing this site
the last day or so, and finding precious little new content.

FISK-AL IRRESPONSIBILITY. Reader Ben Sheriff FISK-AL IRRESPONSIBILITY.
Reader Ben Sheriff points out a misquote in a line I used from The Simpsons (below, re Johnny Taliban). He justly scolds:

...use the web to fact check or you'll start to lose the reputation for hard-edged news bloggers have gained and become a "renowned foreign correspondent" like Mr Fisk.

If that doesn't put the fear of the quote-checking god into me, I am dead to the workings of grace.

The line is: "We've tried nothin' and we're all out of ideas."

A moment's thought would have led me to realize that all Simpsons dialogue must be archived somewhere on the web, and indeed Mr. Sheriff sends me the exact information: this site has the dialogue I was thinking of. He also wonders about the appropriateness of posting this, to which I say: Tosh! Is there any topic to which Ned Flanders is irrelevant?

BLOGGER UP. A thoughtful reader BLOGGER UP. A thoughtful reader has let me know that Natalie's back - and she's bitch-slapping Edward Said
. Looks like it's going to be a very good day. The article she's referencing
is a transcript of Said's responses, at a PEN lecture, to questions from
pious dullards. He's still doin' his tired schtick about everybody else's
inability to understand that the world is entirely too complex for anybody
to venture a testable opinion about what's going on. (A pose dropped like
a hot-potato, however, at the first mention of Israel.) The first part
is Said's meandering attempt to conflate the meanings of "sceptical and doubting"
with "woolly-minded and evasive", and to imply that he is writing in the
sceptical and "sermoniser"-puncturing tradition of Swift and Conrad. (I'm
sure you've noticed the parallel.) Here's vintage Said:

Look at how Bush speaks - it sends me round the bend because it's so assured.

I believe "assurance" is a requirement for those leader-type positions,
Eduardo. Particularly those big-name leadership positions, like President
of the USA. Next comes garden-variety lumpen-lefty political analysis:

Well, to be fair to him... actually, why should we be fair to
him? To be fair to him, there's a little bit of the scoundrel about him;
he's always looking around shiftily to check his minders are still there.
The other day he said, "Those that do business with terrorists will not
do business with America." The fact that anyone can talk in such huge abstractions
- "America" or "Islam" - makes me want to puncture their pomposity.

Disregard the fact that "Islam" is not mentioned in the quote. What, exactly,
is so "pompous" about "will not do business with America", and in what way,
in this context, is America a "huge abstraction"? In this context "America"
is a nation-state with banks, universities, businesses, charities, etc.,
which are physical institutions run by flesh-and-blood people, and which
can be subjected to regulations which can, as a matter of concrete fact,
prevent people who do business with terrorists from doing business with America.
(What does Mr. Said think is so "abstract" about a Palestinian mother not
being able to collect a regular pension from the Holy Land Foundation, because
its assets have been frozen in, yes, that huge abstraction, America?) At
bottom I think Said simply doesn't understand what an abstraction is, what
a model is, what these words mean and how the concepts they describe are
used. This is particularly clear in his continued whining about Samuel Huntington.
He and his half-wit interlocuters can't seem to grasp that Huntington's
thesis is an attempt to put together a useful, predictive model. The idea
is that alliances and conflicts of the post-Cold War world will be defined
by loyalties to cultural traditions - Orthodox, Islamic, Western, Sinic,
etc. Not an implausible idea. One would think that a critic of this model
would offer facts contradicting the thesis, or present an alternative model
that better explained the facts, no? Said's "counter-argument" is to engage
in petulant insult and to compare Huntington to bin Laden and his model to
fundamentalism. (I kid you not.)

Yes, Huntington's an interesting case. He had a great career
as a cold war theorist; but he strikes me as someone who suddenly panicked
at the end of the cold war - "there's nothing more for me to do". He had
to invent something, so he came up with this. Like every bad student, the
more he wrote, the worse it got. He knows nothing about culture, he knows
nothing about civilisation, he knows nothing about history.

I had to reread the rest several times, thinking that surely he had been done dirty by an editor, because no one, no one could possibly be this freakin' stupid:

I suppose he knows something about politics, but these large designations like "the West" or "Islam" or "Confucianism"... He actually tells us to be very careful - and this is something you should watch out for as you walk out of the theatre - he says, "Beware the conjuncture of Confucianism and Islam." Well, that's deadly. You see these characters called "Confucianism" wandering around the street with a yellow hat on...

Is this for real? Huntington is talking about the concrete reality of China's relations (China defined as the core state of Confucian culture) with Iran and Pakistan, for example, and its tendency to align with Islamic states against Western and Indian interests. What is the "abstraction" he is having so much difficulty wrapping his head around? For that matter, would Said seriously believe that it is "deadly" to talk about Islamic or Confucian culture when discussing, say, the situation of Uighurs in Xinjiang? Exactly what are you clarifying by refusing to address cultural conflict and instead limiting yourself to endless analyses of cultural "interpenetration"? Everybody knows that cultures influence one another. There's what you'd expect about Israel, but I did note this:

There is a kind of blindness there that is so relentless; it is the exact opposite of what so many Israelis actually want, which is a normal life in a secure environment. But they seem to have a penchant for picking leaders who will deliver exactly the opposite.

I suggest tucking away the rest of his comments re Sharon and Arafat, to be pulled out sometime in the near future to see what history has had to say about them. In closing, I note an odd little mistake, in a part of the talk concerning Tarzan and "the manufacture of exoticism". Said twice mentions "Wiseman" where he obviously means Johnny Weissmuller: "Wiseman, who was a champion swimmer, played the part perfectly..."; "Poor old Wiseman, who was a great hero of mine...ended his life as the curator of The Swimming Hall of Fame in Florida."

BLOGGER DOWN. I am bummed BLOGGER DOWN. I am bummed that Natalie Solent's computer is apparently still broken.

THE EJUCASHUN OF JOHN WALKER. THE EJUCASHUN OF JOHN WALKER. Read all about Walker's "journey" from Newsweek. His father's previously reported comment on his son's approval for the attack on the USS Cole stands out even more in the context of this article:

His son's message "raised my concerns," Frank told NEWSWEEK, "but my days of molding him were over."

The overwhelming impression I got is that "days of molding" never began for Johnny Walker - an adolescence in an "elite alternative high school where students were allowed to shape their own studies and had to check in with their teacher only once a week", approval for (and financing of) any flaky whim. "They were 'proud of John for pursuing an alternative course,' says his father. They did not object when he dropped out and took the high-school-diploma equivalency exam." "In Bannu, Walker turned down the offer of an air conditioner as decadent, but he took an additional $1,200 from his father" while searching for Islamic "purity". (He was apparently put out by the lack of fanaticism in the Islamic communities he encountered before running off to the Taliban.) I kept thinking of that Simpson's episode where Ned Flanders' beatnik parents complain to a psychiatrist about little Ned's unruly behavior. Don't remember it verbatim, but Flanders pere says something like "We've tried just about nothin' and we've reached the end of our rope!"

NO NEWS, ALL THE TIME. NO NEWS, ALL THE TIME. TNR's Peter Beinart
writes on the foolishness of "the crawl" being used to announce non-news,
and CNN's Attention Deficit Disorder format. (Somehow he stole that description
from the spouse, who came up with it as soon as the new format came out.)
As blogger Dr. Frank aptly stated:

Incidentally, what exactly is the point of 24 hour news stations when they just repeat the same "breaking news" reports over and over again?...It appears they don't really understand the meaning of the terms "breaking," "latest," nor indeed even "news."

That's the dirty little secret behind all the bells-and-whistles graphics: To delude the audience into believing that information is being conveyed when there's absolutely nothing there . I just don't get it. It's possible that a visual medium of TV's nature is inherently less able to convey as much information as a text medium. But even if that is so, it is only relatively true. Every hour of every day there is important and interesting information to be had out in the world - and a quick log on proves that it's not difficult to make it available. Why does tee-vee news fail so drastically here? I sometimes switch on CNN when I have to fold piles of laundry or clean the kitchen, and thus can't use my preferred sources. And the niggardly amount of information given is stale, more often than not. Certainly they have the resources to do better than this. Exactly what demographic are these people trying to reach?

THE APOLOGY FOR TREASON, CONT'D. THE APOLOGY
FOR TREASON, CONT'D. James Lilek
had this comment on the argument that we ought to go easy on Johnny Walker
Rat because we were all as stupid as he when we were young (via Matt Welch):

Yes. I wince when I think of the time I went with a friend to
some guy's house, and it turned out he was a drug dealer with Hefty 20-gallon
garbage sacks of weed in the closet. But I never managed to make it to, say,
El Salvador to shoot US advisors in the head.

And even if I had been that far gone, my parents would hardly have financed the goddamned expedition.

KAMA ADO, AGAIN. You can KAMA ADO, AGAIN. You can ignore this article's
snide editorializing: "[The bombed village] could be a world away from
the high-technology war America is fighting from the air to avoid casualties
among its own troops"; and the fact that it reads essentially as a re-write
of last week's reports from the Independent and the Associated Press
. (Which I discussed below.) The point is, as far as I have seen, that
the Pentagon has had no further response concerning these bombed villages:
"But they still have reacted as if the bombing of civilians in Nangarhar
never happened." As far as know, the author is right about that. And there
should be a response, if only to 'fess up to a tragic failure of intelligence.

QALA-I-JANGHI, AGAIN. Amnesty International, Human QALA-I-JANGHI,
AGAIN. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Independent are still pushing hard to exonerate Taliban fighters and convict the allied forces and two CIA agents of war-crimes
, in regard to the Qala-i-Janghi prison revolt. (All emphasis in quotations
from article mine.) (If you just want a quick summary of the article, the
comment that "human rights groups...have called for a full inquiry into the
massacre" pretty much says it all. If they're already satisfied it was a massacre, why waste time on an inquiry?)

The first claim is that

Video evidence has emerged that CIA operatives were threatening Taliban prisoners they would be left to die if they did not co-operate under interrogation.

- though three paragraphs down the author admits that "[t]he precise nature of the threat - raised by Mr Spann and a CIA colleague called Dave - is unclear...". Here's the description of the agents' behavior taken from the video transcript:

Mr Spann, 32, wearing jeans and a black jumper and with an AK47 assault rifle strapped across his back [the big bully], is seen nodding towards Mr Walker, 20, and then saying to Dave: "I explained to him what the deal is". The video shows Mr Walker [the innocent martyr] kneeling on the ground, emaciated, filthy, wearing loose black trousers and a tunic, with his elbows tied behind his back, and cowering as Mr Spann remonstrates with him. Mr Walker stares at the ground throughout. [Gee, wonder how he came to such a pass.] [...] "Dave" then replies: "The problem is, he's got to decide if he wants to live or die. If he wants to die, he's going to die here. Or he's going to f****** spend the rest of his short f****** life in prison. It's his decision, man. "We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys." [...] Later Mr Spann is heard to say to Mr Walker: "The [the 11 September hijackers] killed other Muslims. There were several hundred other Muslims killed in the bombing. Are you going to talk to us?" When there is no reply, "Dave" says to Mr Spann: "This guy got his chance. He got his chance."

A spokesman for Amnesty International interprets this exchange in the following way: "The CIA operatives should be fully aware of the inernational law and that they cannot execute prisoners." Kenneth Ross,executive director of Human Rights Watch, says it "could amount to torture". [Correction: the article misidentifies Kenneth Roth as Kenneth Ross.] Now, the purpose of the CIA men was, I assume, to get useful information about al Qaeda. Eviscerating al Qaeda is what we came for, no? How, one wonders, does one go about questioning hardened, murderous fanatics (and let's not be stupid about this) to get this desired information; what kinds of carrots and sticks of persuasion would be available in this situation? Let's see: give us information, and we can help you out here; refuse to co-operate, and we'll leave you right where you are (rotting in a nasty Afghan prison - and you've done much worse to plenty of Afghans in your reign of peace, my gentle Taliban friend). We'd rather move along to find somebody who might give us what we want, thenkyouveddymuch. So tough talk toward hardened, murderous fanatics constitutes "torture". So the only acceptable way to get vital information from the thugs who have it, is to get it without attaching any negative consequences to its being withheld. Hooo-kay.

The exchange on the video raises the prospect that the prisoners revolted because they feared they could be killed if they did not co-operate with the coalition forces.

Possibly - if you assume that hardened murderous fanatics are rattled by mild-end-of-the-spectrum tough talk about being left to rot in prison. Or one might consider the prospect that the riot was of a piece with recent, local Taliban behavior - like pretending to surrender but blowing up the people to whom you'd "surrendered" instead. I'm not dismissing the important function of these organizations. The world needs organizations like Amnesty International, just like the U.S. needs the ACLU - no matter how foolish and ideologically biased their chosen crusades might appear to some. By all means they should continue poking their noses into events - we want to be kept honest. (Unlike our enemies, whom these groups know well don't give a rat's ass about human rights and violations thereof, else they'd be using up all their resources condemning and investigating them.) The problem here is that groups complaining about suggestions of, and speculations about, summary justice are busy passing summary judgments themselves. (See "massacre")

It's not clear what the CIA man was threatening but if he was threatening to leave him to rot to death it would be utterly inappropriate.

"Inappropriate". (You may have already guessed how much I hate that word.) Here is a man supposedly deeply disturbed by an alleged atrocity. Does he call the agents' (alleged) actions "barbaric", or "atrocious", or even a milder "unconscionable"? No. The so-called "torture" is "inappropriate". Torture is "inappropriate"? Wearing sneaks with a ball-gown is "inappropriate". This is the vocabulary not of heartfelt indignation and thirst for justice but of benumbed and self-serving bureaucracy. If they are truly on a disinterested search for truth and justice, why have they been enthusiastically smearing the reputation of a dead man, with hear-say and speculation, before any inquiry has been undertaken?

NO COMMENT NECESSARY about this NO COMMENT NECESSARY about this report:

Saudi Arabia has refused a U.S. appeal to release more than a dozen Christians accused of practicing their faith. [...] The practice of any other religion is banned by Saudi law. Over the last decade, Saudi authorities had allowed private prayer but have cracked down on non-Islamic practice during the current Muslim fast month of Ramadan.

PEOPLE WHO NEED TO BE PEOPLE WHO NEED TO BE BEATEN SEVERELY ABOUT THE HEAD AND NECK WITH A CLUE-CROWBAR. Steven Den Beste has his usual fine commentary this morning, including a word or two on this molly-coddling of little Johnny Taliban. I'll just add a comment on this pearl:

The Bay Area is also a place that encourages critical thinking about the U. S. role in the world. That may have played a part in his vulnerability to the Taliban's extreme propaganda.

I'd just love to ask the author for his definition of "critical thinking". We could safely bet large sums of money that it is completely wrong-headed and bass-ackward, because children whose guardians take the trouble to train them in critical thinking are more, not less resistant to "extreme propaganda".

TRAVAILS IN ARABIA DESERTA, PART TRAVAILS IN ARABIA DESERTA,
PART TWO. A couple of kind readers responded to my request for comments
on "the oil weapon myth", (below). Jonathan Gewirtz writes:

The Taylor/VanDoren argument is exactly right. (It is more or less duplicated in Amity Shlaes's Dec. 6 column at [this link]
.) We send them money, they send us oil. If they refuse to sell us oil, we
can buy it from someone they will sell it to. They have to stop selling to
everyone in order to affect us, in which case they hurt themselves far more
than they hurt us. They also have to recycle the money we send them, by spending
it in our economy (otherwise we would be sending them cheap green paper and
receiving valuable oil in return). The one thing they have going for themselves
is the economic ignorance of American pols and bureaucrats. The way I see
it, why stockpile oil in this country, or invest big resources in top-down
conservation schemes (essentially another form of stockpiling), when we can
rely on the Saudis to stockpile oil for us? It'll be there when we're ready
to buy it, and the Saudis especially -- with their huge reserves -- have
strong incentives to sell as much as they can before technological advances
permanently reduce demand. (They're no fools. Whatever they may say to intimidate
consumers, they know that sooner or later technology is going to make petroleum
go the way of whale oil, and they don't want to be left sitting on a huge
pile of unsold inventory when it happens.)

Re the real danger of the "oil myth", Amity Shlaes (from above link) comments:

The bigger danger is that old-fashioned oil diplomacy will deter the U.S. and its allies from combating the threat posed by many Middle Eastern regimes: that they will be ready to deploy nuclear or biological weapons in a period shorter than the average lifetime of a sport-utility vehicle. [...] ...U.S. national security policy is seemingly being shaped in important ways by a perception that is incorrect. If the U.S., alone or with its allies, manages to set aside its preoccupation with a phantom oil weapon, it can evaluate whether it need uproot the regimes doing the frightening stockpiling.

Another reader sent some interesting comments about the Athabaska Tar Fields with this link. (Hey Canada guy! Canada reference!) I would like to quote and credit this gentleman but he had an unreachable email address. I will get around to putting that "letters assumed for publication unless otherwise requested" disclaimer next to my email link.

THE MORNING SNICKER. I was THE MORNING SNICKER. I was checking out this link concerning the latest on Saint Mary Robinson (via the Überblogger), and having a snicker at this line, concerning the current state of Israeli-Palestinian relations:

None of this bodes well for the wildly mishandled attempts to use diplomacy to solve this crisis.

The spouse came by to see what I was snickering about and remarked: "The way some people think of diplomacy is like that apology for Communism: it really works, but no one's done it right yet." (Aside from the fact that the comment really makes no sense, if you attempt to parse it.)

TRAVAILS IN ARABIA DESERTA. When TRAVAILS IN ARABIA
DESERTA. When I mentioned the Saudi news dripping honey (directly below),
I meant it in a relative way - relative to America. The line on the Whore
of Zion hasn't softened. A December 6 article datelined "Geneva/Occupied Jerusalem", states "World demands Israel respect rights":

Since Israel has ignored every plea that has ever been made of it to respect the human rights of the Palestinians, there is little chance it will heed the latest call. Still, there is a moral duty to keep making them[...] Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said that the foreign ministers of the 22 members of the organization will hold an urgent meeting in Cairo on Sunday to discuss the situation in the Middle East. "This meeting hopes to adopt a unified Arab position concerning the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and their national institutions," Moussa declared to the press

This is blandly followed by:

A Palestinian blew himself up outside a Jerusalem luxury hotel meanwhile, wounding three people.

Meanwhile, Middle East Newsline reports that Saudi Arabia is reassessing the presence of U.S. troops there:

"The kingdom is weak and there's tremendous pressure from a range of sectors," a diplomat based in the Persian Gulf said. "But the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia seems to be a rallying cry that unites various interests against the royal family."

I rather like the idea of our packing up everything and quietly slipping out of Arabia in the dead of night, with no warning. Tee hee. (Putting aside for the moment the imprudence of doing anything that would appear to fulfill OBL's desires. Not that he matters anymore.) As for the oily repercussions of trouble in Saudi Land, Jerry Taylor & Peter VanDoren have an article today on the "Oil Weapon Myth":

Of course, there's debate about how best to take this potential weapon away from our enemies - kill caribou, kill SUVs, subsidize renewables, take your pick - but there's no debate from either the Left or Right about the economic firepower of the oil weapon or the need to disarm it. And that's too bad because, in fact, the oil weapon is a myth and belief in that myth is crippling U.S. foreign policy.

The gist of the article is that, since there is really only one, global, oil market, no oil producer can effectively restrict U.S. imports, and "energy independence" cannot protect a nation from prices set by th