Daniel Drezner recently looked at the current state of Islam in light of Mahathir's speech, and the widespread agreement it generated from all Muslim leaders present. As Robi Sen notes today in his S. Asia Briefing, Mahathir's speech made quite an impression. I'll grant that it was certainly attention-grabbing. In truth, however, it was neither new nor surprising. At best, it was a clarifying moment within the current situation.

If you're interested in my personal view of that situation, it goes something like this. To paraphrase Clinton's election strategist James Carville:

"It's the hate, stupid!"

read the rest...

Yes, there has been another suicide bombing in Iraq.

At least six people, including school children, were killed Tuesday when a car bomb exploded near a police station in this flashpoint town west of Baghdad, an AFP correspondent at the scene reported.

The bomb was set off within 100 yards of a school.

Sorry, but this is not some disgruntled Iraqi citizens telling the U.S. to get out of Iraq. If that were true, they would not be killing their own children.

These are terrorists - not just Iraqis, but Syrians and others - who are all backed by extremist Muslim countries and their terrorist organizations. Their message is clear: They want to rule, and they want to do it their way. With Sharia law and all the things that were expected under Saddam's regime; torture, rape, murder, etc.

We are doing a good thing in Iraq and there will be moments like this when people will give pause and think we should pull out the troops and come home.

Imagine that. Today there were six people killed. Should we pull our troops out now, there will likely be six people killed an hour. And most of those murders will take place in dank, dark cells below the ground and they will never be reported by any media.

The resistance parties in Iraq, the ones who are doing all of this damage, are aligned with terrorists. This much is obvious. Which makes Iraq part of the War on Terror.

These people need to be stopped and we have the power to do it. If we don't stop them, they will just spread, like an army in a game of Risk. They are in France. They are in Gaza. They are all over Europe, spreading hate and lies and death.

Let them all gather in Iraq. Let Iraq be the breeding ground for the new alliance of terrorists. It will just be easier for us when they are all in one place to take them out, one by one.

"Angered citizens" do not kill their own children. These people did. That makes them more than just people opposing a war. They are people opposing freedom. And that makes it our business, and our war to fight.

Unless, of course, you'd rather wait for them to start gathering in your country.

Zayed, blogging from Iraq, understands who the real enemy is. Go read the rest.

In a shocking development, an American General admits that he's ...

... a Christian.

* * *

IN AN EMERGING scandal, NBC News has produced tapes proving beyond deniability that the new deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence is ... a Christian. Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin has been captured on a series of grainy tapes, attesting to his faith at churches and prayer breakfasts. Having driven the Judeo-Christian value system out of the public square, the classrooms and the Alabama Supreme Court, liberals now want to drive it out of church.

In one "inflammatory" remark, Boykin said that the enemy was not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, but "is a spiritual enemy. He's called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan."

* * *

Sen. Kerry said Boykin's remarks were "un-American." The only people you can't call un-American are the ones burning the American flag or demanding an apology from a man who called Osama bin Laden satanic.

Howard Dean said the American flag "does not belong to Gen. Boykin," it belongs to all Americans. Could someone rustle up a liberal who actually owns a flag?

In the most pathetic case of pandering in recorded history, Sen. Joe Lieberman called for Boykin's resignation before the group, but still got booed. Lieberman said "the war on terror is a war on terrorists, not religion." Who is Lieberman standing up for here? Is he upset because Boykin compared the terrorists to Satan or Satan to the terrorists?

Boykin is a highly decorated officer who has participated in nearly every major military operation for the past 25 years – from Jimmy Carter's failed attempt to rescue hostages in Iran, to Reagan's successful invasion of Grenada, to Clinton's disastrous "Black Hawk Down" episode in Somalia. (Say, anyone notice a pattern?) No one has questioned the general's job qualifications. Liberals want him fired because he spoke in a church. If Gen. Boykin had been caught giving talks to NAMBLA instead of church groups, Democrats would be hailing him as a patriot for exercising his First Amendment rights.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., demanded that Boykin be reprimanded or reassigned, saying his views were "extreme," "closed-minded" and "zealous." We should be more open-minded toward people trying to kill us.

Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said Boykin's remarks "fly in the face of the pleas of the president and violate the basic principles of tolerance and inclusion that are implicit in the culture of this nation." Uh-oh. If liberals don't like what Boykin said about the terrorists, wait until they find out about the MOAB bombs the U.S. military has been dropping on them.

* * *

A few things that CBS and Leslie Moonves won't tell you about President Ronald Reagan. From "The Heart of Ronald Reagan" by Michael Reagan:

* * *

The Heart of Ronald Reagan

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Ronald Reagan, about to be portrayed as an unfeeling, forgetful conservative, had the biggest heart of any President in America’s history – so big that CBS had no trouble finding it when they decided to plunge a dagger into it.

The liberal network had the gall to allow a scriptwriter to put words in my father’s mouth he never spoke – words that pictured him as having no sympathy for AIDS victims.

Now CBS’s defenders are trying to excuse the network for its shameful fictionalization of my dad’s life by noting that the miniseries "The Reagans" gives him credit for many of the great things he did, such as winning the cold war, but they cannot gloss over the fact that the Ronald Reagan shown in the miniseries is not the real Ronald Reagan.

They want to talk about his forgetfulness, but he never forgot the people of this country. He gave us all a tax break, created tens of thousands of jobs, and restored our faith in ourselves. He never forgot the hostages in Iran who were freed the day that he was sworn in as president.

He never forgot the suffering people behind the Iron Curtain, living in squalor and poverty and under the gun for all those many years and he did everything he could to free them.

And he never forgot who he was, and where he had come from. He remembered being poor. He remembered struggling.

The important things he needed to know he never forgot.

On the day he took office, right after he was told that the hostages in Iran had been freed, he called former President Carter and told him, "You’re the one who did the work, you’re the one that did so much to free those hostages. You are the one who should get the credit." And he gave the former president Air Force One and sent him to Germany to welcome the hostages. That was the heart of Ronald Reagan. That story, like so many others, was never told because my Dad didn’t trumpet his good deeds.

The miniseries won’t tell you the whole story about my dad’s visit to Japan when he learned that on the 747 jet he was traveling only the first class section would be occupied. He went out and got families of service men and women serving in Japan and filled up the back of the plane with them so they could visit their loved ones they hadn’t seen for over a year. They won’t tell you how he took them to Japan and brought them back home on the plane without it costing them one cent.
That was also the heart of Ronald Reagan.

There are so many stories you don’t hear from the people who are hateful, the people who are spiteful, the people who are jealous, the people who never liked Ronald Reagan.

In a column last July I wrote that CBS was planning to produce a miniseries on my father, and noted that while I hadn’t seen the script, I understood it had been leaked around Hollywood and was anything but friendly to my dad.

After all, Hollywood has never warmed up to him, even when he went to bat for actors as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild and won them the right to get residual payments when their movies were rerun – a right he refused to give to himself because he thought that this would be a conflict of interest. So his movies alone are exempt from residuals. They also forgot that they elected him president of the Guild nine times.

Moreover, not once – ever – did Hollywood even think about giving my dad an award in recognition of his many services to the film industry and the people who work in it. So I wouldn’t expect them to do a positive miniseries about somebody who gave them residuals so they could take the summers off.

And they also forgot to go to the people who knew him best – his family. Nobody at CBS came near any of us. They were probably afraid we’d tell the truth about the heart of Ronald Reagan and that would have spoiled their plans to show him as they wanted to see him and not as he was a wonderful caring human being and one of the greatest and kindest men ever to serve as President of the United States.

* * *

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Premiere Radio Network. Comments to mereagan@hotmail.com for Mike.

Via Curmudgeonly & Skeptical.

See, also, Michael Reagan's web site.

See, also, Reagan: A Life in Letters. From amazon.com:

* * *

Whether discussing economic policy with a political foe, dispensing marital advice, or sharing a joke with a pen pal, Reagan comes across as gracious, caring, and inquisitive. Even when responding to blistering criticism, he remained fair and thoughtful. As one would expect, many of the letters are addressed to world leaders, well-known American politicians, pundits, and journalists, and these are certainly interesting for their historical relevance and insights into Reagan's diplomatic style. Among the more fascinating notes, however, are those sent to private citizens, some of which are quite long and detailed. That Reagan would spend the time, as both governor of California and President, to respond to the concerns and inquiries of constituents reveals that he never forgot how he got to his positions of leadership in the first place. He even went so far on occasions to help make business connections for people he had never met in person. He also sent many letters to children. In one, he encouraged a young student to turn off the TV and grab a book instead: "Reading is a magic carpet and you can never be lonely if you learn to enjoy a good book." Taken as a whole, these revealing, well-written, and entertaining letters trace the story of Reagan's life and times as well as any standard biography. They also offer further proof of why he was dubbed "The Great Communicator."

* * *

See No Evil, Stop No Evil (washingtonpost.com)
It seems everywhere I look these days there's evil of some sort. It's tough to be an optimist in the world we live in. Saudi Arabia is a state-sponsor of terrorism, though they're not on the State Department's list. Iraq is hopeful, but it will be several months before we see real results and possibly years before we find out if we have really created a free country. Then there's North Korea.

Anne Applebaum has written a column on North Korea that could be a companion piece to her book, Gulag, that provides some detail on the horror of being a North Korean. The DPRK is the last Stalinist country on earth and it's not surprising that she would write on it.

It's also not surprising that she looks at North Korea, sees evil, and concludes that any democracy worthy of the name would make regime change their official policy with regard to North Korea. We currently don't have the means to take North Korea, nor would it be advisable to do so, but it is tempting. They have advanced missile technology and at least a couple of nuclear warheads. They have enough missiles pointed at South Korea to kill hundreds of thousands and we have 37,000 troops stationed there in perpetuity for no good reason. They're hostages more than anything else.

We could make regime change in North Korea an official policy without acting on it in the immediate future. We did the same with Iraq in 1998 and didn't act on it until this year. However, Kim Jong Il is not Saddam Hussein. Mr. Kim is extremely paranoid whereas Saddam thought he could hold us off indefinitely.

I don't know how to handle this. One possibility is to treat North Korea the way we've treated China and Taiwan since 1979: intentional ambiguity. With the Taiwan Relations act of that year we left open the possibility that the President could attack China if they move against Taiwan. In practice, we've supplied advanced weaponry to Taiwan, deployed carrier groups to the area when the Chinese held military exercises too close to Taiwan, but have always been coy as to whether we would actually attack. The reasoning is fairly simple: Taiwan is, for all practical purposes, a free nation. It's not in our interest for them to outwardly declare their independence and irritate China. By remaining ambiguous we have kept a lid on both parties leaving neither feeling comfortable, thus unwilling to make any big moves.

Would a similar strategy work with North Korea? Kim Jong Il, more than anything, wants to know his country is secure from an attack by the United States. Some ambiguity that keeps him ill-at-ease might work, but it might also set him off. He's not the world's most psychologically secure leader. He's a psychopath.

We can't promise an attack because we don't have the troops right now, unless we limited our participation to air raids and made the South Korean army put their troops on the line, which they'll have to do in any case. Hundreds of thousands will die in the process unless we have managed to sneak many, many Patriot anti-missile batteries into Seoul.

We've tried appeasement -- the Jimmy Carter agreements of 1994 -- and found that we can't trust a word the DPRK says. If their lips are moving, they're probably lying. They either never stopped their nuclear program or resumed it within a couple of years of the Carter accords.

That leaves only one alternative that I can think of: a nuclear standoff. We place enough short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in South Korea and Japan to make sure there is no North Korea left if they ever fire a nuclear weapon. Not a particularly pleasant option, but it may be all we have if they refuse to end their nuclear program. Having the DPRK as a significant nuclear power should not be an option.

The piece by Anne Applebaum is excellent and I suggest you read the whole thing. North Korea is a potential horror story for the rest of the world and a present horror story for the people unfortunate enough to live there.

In the immediate future, it isn't likely that the publication of these photographs will have much bearing on the talks in Bangkok or on any diplomatic discussions of North Korea. The Chinese, who have more influence over North Korea's future than any other nation, would prefer not to know about them, not least because they have their own camps to conceal. The South Koreans, who -- it would seem -- have a direct interest in this subject, have actually resisted efforts to publicize the camps, for fear of harming whatever mildly improved relations they have with the North. For the record, the South Korean government did not provide the photographs that will be published today, although it surely has access to the same satellite sources.

But the problem is not only one for immediate neighbors. In fact, if any of the democratic participants -- the United States, South Korea, Japan -- were to absorb fully the information the images convey, the knowledge would make it impossible for that country to conduct any policy toward North Korea that did not make regime change its central tenet. The more that is known about terrible human rights violations, the harder it is to do nothing about it. Yet at the moment, few of the countries involved in the debate about North Korea feel able to do much about it. As a result, we all probably prefer not to know.

But will these photographs have any impact in North Korea itself? That's a question that requires a longer answer. Stories of human rights violations, if they filter back into the country after being published abroad, will not cause this dictatorship or any other to collapse overnight. Yet they will make it more difficult for North Korean leaders and North Korean police to justify what they do, both to themselves and their families, and more difficult to claim that they bear no responsibility for what is happening in their country. Pictures and testimony will also help to chip away at whatever support, feigned or genuine, remains for Kim Jong Il's government.

No regime can remain legitimate indefinitely if its citizens know that thousands of their compatriots are being unjustly tortured.

Pictures and testimony are also important to collect now because they will, eventually, become part of whatever recovery process North Korea goes through, if and when its totalitarian system ever collapses. In recent years, documents testifying to past human rights abuses have played a role in the collapse of dictatorships and the restoration of more open societies in Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Argentina and Cambodia -- and in all of these places, even today, there are still people who feel that more information, more testimony, more public knowledge, would improve matters further.

Yes, it's naive to expect photographs to create a revolution. But yes, it also matters that they now exist. No one can say, ever again, that "we didn't know."

True enough, but what can we do? That's what I would like to know.

OpinionJournal: North Korea's Gulags: Even babies aren't spared from Pyongyang's regime of torture and murder.
The article below covers much of the same territory and is critical of President Bush for apparently buying into the idea that we need to make Kim Jong Il feel more comfortable. I'm sympathetic to that point of view, but my concern is what Mr. Kim might do if he were made to feel more uncomfortable.

Believe it or not, I'm fairly happy with the approach President Bush has taken thus far. He's insisted on six-way talks that exclude the UN and the EU -- a good move, as I see it -- and we don't know what will come of those talks. The first round failed and another round is set for December. If an agreement is reached that ends the DPRK's nuclear program and has the U.S. acting as a monitor, from the ground, it might be worthwhile.

Consequences should be spelled out in the event of a failure to comply. The first thing that comes to mind is a war resolution passed by Congress in conjunction with any agreement, though, again, we are limited as to what we can do at the moment. It won't end the suffering of the North Korean people, but it will enhance world security and possibly open the door to a more open and benign North Korea.

The latest hallucination of geopolitics has it that if only we can make North Korea's Great Leader Kim Jong Il feel safe from the fate of Saddam Hussein, maybe he'll stop testing missiles and making nuclear bombs. So the experts--whose ranks have now swelled to include, alas, even President George W. Bush--have been scrambling for ways to make Kim feel more secure.

Bad mistake. Even in the exquisitely complex realms of geopolitics, there comes a point at which right and wrong really do matter. Ensuring the safety of monsters is not only an invitation to even more trouble ahead, it is also wrong. Before Mr. Bush says another word about security for North Korea's regime, before any more policy makers suggest any more deals to gratify Kim Jong Il's deep appetite for his own ease and longevity, there's a report the entire civilized world needs to read--released today by the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. In landmark depth and detail, this report documents the filthiest of all Kim's backroom projects: North Korea's vast system of political prisons, which underpin Kim's precious security right there in his own home.

Not that North Korea's longstanding gulag has been a complete secret. Though Kim's regime denies its existence, and foreign observers have no access to it whatever, enough people have escaped North Korea in recent years to provide substantial testimony about conditions inside the country, and even inside the prison camps. A handful of defectors have told their tales to U.S. congressional committees, some have published books, and dozens have given interviews here and there. In the past year, as Kim's nuclear industry has bumped him up in the headlines, Western journalists have been piecing together damning portraits of Kim and his regime. Information has at last stacked up high enough to suggest that in North Korea, existence as a political prisoner is a particularly hideous business.

But the sources have been scattered. The picture has been murky. The 3,000 or so defectors who over the past decade or so have found asylum have almost all been funneled to South Korea, where the "sunshine" policy of appeasement shoves their awful stories into the shadows. In the West, the general sense has been that somewhere, in nameless places in that area of darkness called North Korea, faceless people may be suffering and dying. But individual accounts invite suspicions that North Korean defectors may be prone to exaggerate, especially given the excesses they describe of deliberately inflicted starvation and routine torture, execution and infanticide in the camps. Hanging over the entire scene is the question, how can we be sure?

South Korea's "sunshine policy" is simply appeasement by another name. Another Nobel Peace Prize that had nothing to do with ensuring peace.

The report mentioned in both stories is located here, for those with strong stomachs.

In an earlier post that degenerated into name-calling I received a very thoughtful comment from someone of the Leftist persuasion and it merits a response, rather than languishing in the archives. I particularly like that the response didn't degenerate into invective and instead asks a series of thoughtful questions. I will answer them to the best of my ability. Thoughtful comments deserve thoughtful answers.

Came cruising through another site and saw this one... I don't post much on blogs, but this one kind of struck a chord.

I should note here -- I'm liberal, quite so in fact. The 20th-century meaning of the term, not the Adam Smith one. Just to get that out of the way.

Not a problem. I deal with leftists on a regular basis and even admire a few.

I think that the soldier who wrote the letter was probably just using hyperbole, though. Like saying "It's cold as hell today" -- clearly, the statement isn't intended as a literal one.

Agreed. The soldier was defamed and his integrity questioned over a matter of hyperbole.

Nonetheless, I think it's important to ask some questions. Some of them are old, but still worth asking. First, why did the US choose Iraq at the time it did? Why not other wars? Why specifically Iraq? Many other countries have WMD's. Personally, I think disarming Pakistan and India of their nukes would do far more for world safety than disarming Iraq. As another example, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding areas, for example, has been and continues to be very bloody. Maybe because there isn't a clear leader to depose in this case? Or perhaps the US should eventually impose peace on the DR of Congo. If this is the argument, I could possibly agree. (Not that you need care, of course. :) )

First the issue of Pakistan and India: it's a regional nuclear standoff, not unlike the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The only scenario in which I can imagine them using the nuclear weapons is if India invades Pakistan. I doubt Pakistan would fire nuclear weapons over Kashmir, which is a disputed territory.

They would, however, fire nuclear weapons against India if India invaded them and overwhelmed their military -- India could easily do so by sheer numbers -- leaving them with a choice between conquest and going down fighting. I doubt this will happen, though tempers flared a little over a year ago and things looked a little shaky.

There's also the problem of how to go about disarming Pakistan and India. If you have any ideas, please share them.

Why Iraq? Well, the war was fought in the security interests of the United States. The list of potential targets would include any member of the State Department's list of state-sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. Note that the only one to leave the list is Iraq.

Of those states, three are the biggest threat to U.S. and world security: North Korea, Iraq and Iran. President Bush's famous axis of evil. Iran because it is THE leading state-sponsor of terrorism and has the oil wealth to fund terror indefinitely and has been very proactive in doing so. North Korea because it is a state sponsor of terrorism, has advanced missile technology and, we now know, a couple of nuclear warheads. Iraq because it was a state-sponsor of terrorism, had active programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and had demonstrated a desire to control much, if not all of the Arab Peninsula. Kuwait was simply a first step and they fired on Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. There's a reason that Saudi Arabia picked up much of the cost of the first Gulf War: if Iraq had been allowed to take Kuwait they would have likely moved on Saudi Arabia as well. Saddam had dreams of pan-Arab nationalism and imagined himself as the head of a pan-Arabic state.

Why not Iran? Well, they have an active opposition movement within the country with students agitating for democracy and 60% of the population is under the age of 25, meaning they don't remember the Islamist overthrow of the Shah -- no piker, himself -- and don't seem to have much allegiance to the mullahs.

Why not North Korea? As I've mentioned ad nauseum on the site, it would be a bloodbath because of the missiles the DPRK has pointed at Seoul. The carnage would be too much to deal with, though we would win a war against them in a relatively short period of time. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only solution, if they refuse to dismantle their nuclear program, is a standoff such as the one between India and Pakistan. We supply Japan and South Korea with short- and intermediate-range missiles to ensure North Korea never fires a missile. Not pretty, but effective.

Why Iraq? We needed casus belli -- a reason to attack -- and they provided us with one 90 days after signing the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War. They never met the conditions of the ceasefire in spite of twelve years of active diplomacy to get them to do so. Iraq is, hopefully, the beginning of a remaking of the Middle East along friendlier lines. If not that, at least an oasis of freedom in the Arab Peninsula.

Second, what are/were the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda? Did Bush have evidence when he declared war? Or was the war purely based on fighting against regimes that harbor terrorists, regardless of relations with Al Qaeda? Again, this seems much more reasonable to me, but it doesn't explain why the US chose Iraq as a target. Syria was a much bigger haven for terrorists than Iraq, wasn't it?

You didn't mention it, but I'll address it anyway: there's no reliable link, that I'm aware of, between Iraq and the events of 9/11.

However, there have been links between Iraq and al Qaeda, both before and after the war. To me, this was never a major concern. The "use of force resolution" that authorized the war didn't mention it, other than to require the President to report back to Congress and affirm that the Iraqi war wouldn't distract from the war against al Qaeda.

I don't think al Qaeda figured in the choice of Iraq as a first target. As I stated above, I think the casus belli was more important, not to mention the strategic positioning of American troops on the border of Iran -- two sides if you count Afghanistan -- and the border of Syria. The strategic positioning of Iraq was fortuitous, to say the least.

Third, was the US invasion of Iraq actually legal? Did it stand in accord with or violate UN resolutions? I note, Mr. Prather, that on other posts you've said that you don't see the UN as a legitimate limiter of US foreign policy. I can certainly see your argument. However, I would say that, as with problems in the US government, someone who has opted into UN membership (as the US has) should work within the system to make things better. If the US wants to be seen as a respectful member of the international community, it should work within the international system and work to improve that system.

You're right about my feelings towards the UN. I would love to see meaningful reform of the UN, but my definition of meaningful would exclude 90% of the countries on earth. I would limit it to liberal democracies.

Was the war legal? By any acceptable definition, yes. Consider the following arguments:

• The UN is the final arbiter of the just use of force. I don't agree with this, but let's pretend for a moment. The Security Council passed 1441 and specified there would be consequences to a failure to comply. I think it said "serious" consequences, or something similar. What else could that have meant other than war? Iraq was already under strict economic sanctions, leaving only harsh language as an alternative.
• The US Constitution is the ultimate law of the land. This is my interpretation, but it leaves one question unanswered: all treaties are considered "the highest law of the land" along with the Constitution, as spelled out by the Constitution itself. The UN Charter is a treaty we entered into, so we should be bound by it, right? After all, treaties are the highest law of the land along with the Constitution.

  The problem with that: Congress has an open-ended, enumerated power in the Constitution to declare war for whatever reason it chooses.

  Which should prevail? Congress's enumerated power, of course. Allowing a treaty to supersede an enumerated power amounts to allowing the Constitution to be amended via treaty, and the provisions for amendment don't allow for that. In short: Congress can declare war -- or authorize a use of force, which is no different -- for whatever reason it chooses without restriction.

Fourth, why didn't the US plan better for the invasion? It seems that we are seeing a lot of reports that were ignored prior to the invasion. While I don't support the invasion itself, if the US had to go in, why not wait a few more months and try to prepare an interim government that could really win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis? If such a plan were made public, maybe the people of the US would've supported (for example) greater expense to get the Iraqi reconstruction effort off the ground faster. As it stands, many Iraqis who were expecting the US to liberate them have been hugely disappointed. Many are turning to extreme forms of Islam in their desperation. Unmet expectations may turn into more harm. Not to say that the US has done nothing, but that the US hasn't done enough yet. Or perhaps the goal is pacification rather than winning of sentiments? That seems reasonable, but surely long-term pacification must include making for positive (or at least not so negative) US-Iraq relations? I personally think that the US has to win over Iraq or watch it become a huge center for anti-US sentiment and terrorism. And as for what the people of Iraq think of the US... well, I really don't think anyone has a full enough picture. Anecdotes support many viewpoints (liberal and conservative), but

The planning for the aftermath of war was handled pretty badly, it appears. However, it's also not as bad as it sounds. The same things were being said in Germany two full years after we defeated them in WW2 and we've only been in Iraq for seven months.

The Iraqi people, to the extent they are discontented, are being unreasonable. We're trying to rebuild their country -- not from our destruction, because we went out of our way to avoid destroying their infrastructure -- on our own nickel and putting our troops at risk in doing so. They need to be patient and as helpful as possible. They have freedom now and will be drafting a constitution next year and having elections sometime after that. What more can we do?

Fifth, why was Afghanistan deemphasized so quickly? Why not put more effort into getting Afghanistan stabilised before going after Iraq? Get the farmers planting something other than opium, get the Loya Jirga running solidly, etc. as an added bonus, this would've meant less of the US budget would've gone to rebuilding other countries, at least for a while. (Not that I think the US shouldn't try to rebuild other countries, but I know a lot of people in the US would rather not spend money rebuilding foreign countries when the US itself has so many problems.) Of course, as a liberal, I'm tempted to believe that Bush's real target was Iraq all along and he shifted his focus from Afghanistan as quickly as he possibly could.

I disagree with that last statement. Regime change in Iraq has been official policy in the U.S. since 1998, but I think Afghanistan was de-emphasized for other reasons.

After the Taliban fell I thought we should have occupied Afghanistan, but have since changed my mind. It would have put a lot of troops in danger when a better alternative was available: rotate a few thousand light infantry and special forces troops through the mountains of Afghanistan and plan on continuing this rotation for years. The reason: it takes soldiers with a specific skill-set to engage in the type of warfare that's going on in Afghanistan and placing a bunch of infantrymen who were not trained for it would only lead to deaths.

I think the Bush Administration knew that, no matter what, we would be fighting al Qaeda for several years and rotating soldiers in with the right skill-sets was the best way to go about it. It brings fresh troops in every six months to fight very tired terrorists. It also allows for the fact that more terrorists will emerge and creates a permanent front with them. Well, permanent until they are all captured or killed. Eventually Afghanistan will throw off the warlords -- our troops have been relying on them less, if at all, recently -- and we will probably help them do it. You're seeing nation-building in slow motion and I think that's the right strategy given the terrain of Afghanistan and the fact that we only have so many troops with the requisite skills to fight in that terrain.

Sixth, was it all for oil? I think that, if Bush's main goal was oil and he had been honest about that, well, I still wouldn't have supported the war, but I'd at least respect him more. As it stands, it seems that a big motivating factor was in fact securing oil reserves (thus why the US isn't interested in making peace in the DR of Congo).

I won't insult your intelligence and say that oil had nothing to do with it. Most of the wars in history have been fought over commercial concerns. Either that or women. Even Thomas Jefferson, who initially opposed the U.S. having a standing army, sent our Navy off to fight an undeclared war with the Barbary Pirates that lasted several years over commercial concerns.

Even so, I think it was a secondary concern, or to the extent that it was a concern, it was to weaken Saudi Arabia's position in the world oil markets. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world and will eventually be able to produce at prices that approach those of Saudi Arabia.

I still think the primary reason was to fight terrorism and those who sponsor it. Was oil a concern? Yes. Was it decisive? No. If we wanted Iraq's oil all we had to do was lift the sanctions and let them pump away. There's something much larger in the works here and transformation of the Middle East is the end goal, I believe.

As for The Congo, I actually have some of the same inclinations as you. I would love to be able to pick a country that is in horrid conditions and turn it into an example of peace and prosperity in Africa. That continent could definitely use some role models. However, as a frequent commenter of mine noted, the British colonized Rhodesia for a century and left it as a prosperous country with a solid government and the rule of law in tact. It didn't last. Africa lacks the intellectual foundation to support a developed civilization on its own and colonization is very expensive. Even worse when it will likely have to be permanent. If Rhodesia couldn't be transformed with 100 years of British influence, I don't know that we could do any better.

I don't mean to sidetrack the issue; I know these points have been brought up in many other places, and on this site. Seriously, please just ignore this post if it's just too far off topic. But, well, they seem to be core issues in the issue. Also, although I read the Economist, I don't get a lot of exposure to conservative views and you seem to argue pretty cogently, and I have all these little fantasies about cross-ideology consensus. :)

Well, I don't know if we have a consensus, but I enjoyed the post. Excellent mental exercise. As long as you are as thoughtful as you were in that comment, you'll always have a place to comment, if you like.

The full text of Secretary Rumsfeld's memo to senior staff is provided below. It clearly shows that Secretary Rumsfeld is ... doing his job.

It's a short, relatively informal memo to senior staff, exhorting them to work harder on long-range ideas in the war on terrorism. The only thing this memo reveals is that Secretary Rumsfeld deserves praise for his vigilence and long-range vision. We should be glad we have a Secretary of Defense who takes his job very seriously - and is constantly "thinking outside the box" to protect America's security.

Lefty (and mainstream media) commentators have said that Rumsfeld's memo is proof that the war on terrorism is not going as well as the Administration has said. This is, not surprisingly, a double lie by the left. Or rather, the setting up of yet another straw-man just to knock it down - a tactic much loved by the left.

The Administration has repeatedly, mind-numbingly, said that the war on terror would be a long, difficult undertaking. This is consistent with the Rumsfeld memo. Recently, the Administration (and most of the righty blogosphere) have correctly complained that the news coverage from Iraq has been far too slanted to the negative - that there's lots of good being done in Iraq. The Rumsfeld memo says nothing inconsistent with this view. Lastly, the Rumsfeld memo does not say things are going badly in Iraq, as the lefties spin it, it just exhorts the senior staff to continue to remain aggressive in finding and disrupting terrorism. This exhortation, on the part of Secretary Rumsfeld, might fairly be characterized as: doing his job.

The following is the full text of the Rumsfeld memo to senior staff re: Global War on Terrorism:

* * *

TO: Gen. Dick Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Pete Pace, Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere - one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be: We are having mixed results with Al Qaeda, although we have put considerable pressure on them - nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis. USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban - Omar, Hekmatyar, etc. With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started. Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the U.S.? Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror? Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental?

My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us? Does the U.S. need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?

The U.S. is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools? Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?

It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog. Does CIA need a new finding? Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course? What else should we be considering?

Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday. Thanks.

* * *

Keep up the good work, Rummy.

CBS - and Clinton-buddy Leslie Moonves - are poised to smear ailing ex-President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan.

[The Scene: An early script-writing session deep in the liberal bowels of CBS. The project: a movie on that admitted Republican, Ronald Reagan. NPR is playing in the background. CNN's Aaron Brown is droning-on about something on the tube. A partially-consumed vegetarian platter sits on a nearby table. A discussion between some CBS writers and Leslie Moonves ensues....]

* * *

WRITER JIM: How about the Reagan economic recovery? Should we talk about that?

LESLIE MOONVES: Never heard of it!

WRITER JIM: How about winning the Cold War? We can use some special effects for ratings. How about that?

LESLIE MOONVES: Huh?

WRITER JIM: How about that Berlin speech. You know: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Maybe we could go on location!

LESLIE MOONVES: Oh, he didn't say that!

WRITER BOB: Here's your angle, sir: Reagan was an ultra-conservative, Republican, Nazi, Fascist, evil genius. And he was really dumb. And he used his illegitimately-obtained power to to kill people with AIDS. Oh yeah - and Nancy was a druggie - just like Rush!

LESLIE MOONVES: Yes! Yes! That's our story! We have to be honest!

WRITER JIM: But Mr. Moonves, you're a liberal Democrat - and a major supporter of the Clintons. Don't you remember how you compared President George W. Bush to Hitler? I mean - President Clinton appointed you to the Gore Commission, for Pete's sake! If you run this project, won't it be seen as biased?

LESLIE MOONVES: Who said that?! Jim - you're fired! Bob - run with your script! I love it! We have to be honest!

BARBARA STEISAND: Leslie!! Hey, Moonves!! Get your butt in here! And what the heck kind of name is Leslie Moonves anyway?! I've got your California employment contract right here, pal! Don't screw around with Babs or Mr. Streisand - er, Brolin - baby! Wake up, Les! I'm doing the soundtrack...

ALEC BALDWIN: Who ate all the darned cauliflower?! Man! What I wouldn't do for one of those Baghdad Whoppers! Talk about Meet your Meat! Heh. Les!!

* * *

UPDATE (October 21, 2003. 7:05 p.m.):

CBS writer Elizabeth Egloff admits that the Reagan "quote"...

"They that live in sin shall die in sin" [after Nancy allegedly asked him about AIDS victims]...

... used in the upcoming CBS movie on President Reagan, was fabricated. In short: CBS has lied again. (This, of course, will be no surprise to Elizabeth Smart's family).

Via Curmudgeonly & Skeptical.

This is only due to constant pressure from groups who think NPR is biased toward one side or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Transcripts are available FREE! for all stories related to this Middle East hot spot.

Normally, NPR charges $4.95 for individual story transcripts.

Highlights include:
a Cornell West commentary
A Remebrance of Edward Said
and various breaking news stories.

Interestingly, at least one story about Iraq and Intelligence made it into this archive.

From The Australian :

Jews rule the world, getting others to fight and die for them, but will not be able to defeat the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has told a major Islamic summit.

"The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them," Mahathir said, adding, "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews."

Ummm... does the year 1967 ring any bells?

The veteran Malaysian premier, who has become notorious for his controversial speeches during his 22 years as leader of this moderate Muslim country, was addressing the opening session of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) summit.

Some would use a phrase other than "controversial"."Somewhat Reality-challenged" perhaps. "Deranged" maybe. "Stark Staring Bonkers" even. Malaysia truly is a "moderate" Muslim country. It's just their premier who's a few bottles short of a crate, a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

He told the biggest gathering of Muslim leaders since the 2001 attacks on the United States that all Muslims were suffering "oppression and humiliation", with their religion accused of promoting terrorism.

I wonder why...

Acknowledging weakness and division in the organisation's ranks, Mahathir said they could at least take a common stand on the Palestinian struggle against Israel and it was time to plan a "counter-attack" against the enemies of Islam who treated Muslims with "contempt and dishonour".

Not all Muslims, not even most. Just a sizeable proportion like him who are both contemptible and dishonourable.

He called on Muslims to emulate the Jewish response to oppression, saying the Jews had "survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking".

He has a point : nobody can say that radical Islam is very big on Thought of any description. It's anathema to them, contrary to everything they stand for. I mean, look at the stupidity it would take to believe the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

"They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.

Riiiight. Okay. So Democracy and Human Rights are concepts invented by Jews. For the nefarious purpose of giving themselves equal rights to others.

"With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.

"We cannot fight them through brawn alone, we must use our brains also," he said.

Earth to Mahatir: First you have to either find them, or grow one.

"Of late because of their power and their apparent success they have become arrogant. And arrogant people like angry people will make mistakes, will forget to think.

Yes, Oil wealth has gone to their head. Oh wait, you were talking about the Joos not the Arabs. Sorry.

"They are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the future. We must seize these opportunities."

Mahathir, however, who has in the past condemned Palestinian suicide bombers as "terrorists", appeared to suggest that it was time for an end to violence against the Israelis.

"Over the past 50 years of fighting in Palestine we have not achieved any result. We have in fact worsened our situation."

So they should stop blowing up busses full of toddlers not because it's wrong, but because it doesn't work. Interesting morailty, but as long as the busses aren't blown up, I won't complain.

He said the Koran "tells us that when the enemy sues for peace we must react positively. True the treaty offered is not favourable to us. But we can negotiate".

Not with us. The planet isn't big enough for both radical Islam and ourselves to exist on. Much as we wish it otherwise, the Islamofascists have proven that, time and again.

He said he was aware that this proposal could not be popular and its opponents "would want to send more young men and women to make the supreme sacrifice. But where will all these lead to? Certainly not victory."

However, he did call on Muslims to match their studies of religion with attention to science and mathematics because "we need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defence".

This was apparently a reference to what he sees as a broader assault on Muslims by the Western world in the guise of the war on terrorism. He said enemies of Islam "attack and kill us, invade our lands, bring down our governments".

Among the more than 30 Muslim leaders present for the summit are Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia and Megawati Sukarnoputri, the president of the world's largest Muslim country Indonesia.

The last time someone spoke like this, over 50 million people died as the result. A little thing called the "Second World War". Because the world's democracies waited too long, and let the Nazis arm themselves. Now Malaysia is a fairly civilised place. Jews aren't persecuted there, any more than Parsis are persecuted in California. But Mahatir isn't speaking for Malaysia. His audience is wider.

I can't help it, I have to vent my replies to Andy Rooney's October 12th commentary.

You might not think so from listening to me, but I like to be liked. Not only that, I like my country to be liked around the world and it isn't. I wish President Bush would try to make this country less hated. He could do it if he set his mind to it.

He is doing it--you just didn't notice. If we're so hated, why are so many millions of people so desperate to enter, stay, and become American citizens?

To begin with, we should change our attitude toward the United Nations. There has to be some power in the world superior to our own - for our own sake. Iraq isn't our problem. It's the world's problem.

Not any more. Iraq was a problem, but now it's an opportunity--ours and the world's. An incredible opportunity, in fact: Iraq is now on its way to becoming a free-trading, open democracy with an educated, diverse population sharing oil revenues among all its citizens and grateful to the US for its liberation.

When the president spoke at the United Nations, he came off as arrogant and it made all of us seem arrogant. We are a little arrogant, of course, and we ought to watch that.

Did you have those translation headphones on? Maybe the time delay threw you off. The arrogance I saw and heard at the UN came from Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac. But if you're right, maybe the solution is to stop going there. In fact, maybe the UN would be better off moving to Geneva, Bruges or Paris.

The United States can't force its ideas on the whole world.

You're right, ideas like freedom, democracy, human rights, and pluralism can't be forced. The best we can do is prevent their suppression by tyranny.

We have great military power and a store of nuclear and biological weapons that would send us running to the U.N. for help if any other country had as many.

Other countries have had as many or more, and the UN was no help. In fact, believe it or not, our having them kept others from using theirs.

The dialogue continues....

The trouble with our weapons is they don't work against one terrorist with a jar of anthrax or a religious nut with a truckload of dynamite. We're wasting our money on weapons we can't use.

Wait--you really want to use these weapons? So far, just having them was worth the cost. But please don't be so quick to use them.

It doesn't matter what I think, but I think like millions of Americans and they do matter.

Let's read that again, Andy, a couple times. OK, you're right: they do matter. But what they think (right or wrong) doesn't. That's why we elect leaders.

I was opposed to going into Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Things went well at first and I decided I was wrong and apologized. Now I want to apologize again. I want to apologize for apologizing.

Andy, are you working for Wesley Clark?

We should not have attacked Iraq without the OK of the United Nations. It wasn't all President Bush's fault. U.N. delegates were infuriating - sitting on their hands. It's an ineffective, namby-pamby organization. The French and the Germans were against attacking Iraq because they do a lot of business there.

The UN didn't just sit on its hands--it profited from supporting a tyrant with its Oil For Palaces program.

The president made the mistake though of deciding to attack anyway and now we have to live with that mistake. We're living with it and too many of our guys are dying with it.

Thousands of Iraqis are grateful they can live at all thanks to that "mistake." Many of our guys have died, but nowhere near as many as would die in the next 9/11.

I hope we remain the strongest country in the world but it isn't a sure thing that we'll always be what we are today. Look what's happened to Great Britain, France, and Germany. They aren't what they were. Things change in the world. It could happen to us - may be happening. It happened to the great Greek and Roman civilizations. They didn't disappear because there was anything wrong with the ideals on which those civilizations were based. They disappeared because there got to be fewer and fewer Greeks and Romans who believed in those ideals, and they were taken over by people who didn't believe in them at all.

Like the UN? They certainly don't believe in them. Do you? Listen to yourself: all you want is for us to be liked, but the world hates us, we're arrogant, we shouldn't force our ideas on the world, and the UN should take over approval of our military operations. So what ideals do you believe, Andy?

We've got some people who don't believe in our American ideals -- so watch out.

I'm watching. I watched you, didn't I?

Dear Mr. Qaeda,
Are you....
-- mad that your travel agent can't use Visa Express any more?
-- frustrated by visa hassles every time you need to visit the US?
-- wasting too much cash on visa baksheeh?
-- tired of going through inconvenient unmanned border spots?
-- from a "state sponsor of terrorism" (CUBA, IRAN, IRAQ, NORTH KOREA, SYRIA, SUDAN) or one of sixty or more countries where terrorists operate*?

Then enter the Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery!

That's right--we said IMMIGRANT Visa. Forget those visas good for only one trip. If you have one of the 50,000 winning entries for 2005, you AND YOUR FAMILY will soon be a Permanent Resident well on your way to becoming a US Citizen, free to come and go as you please! Diversity Visa Lottery winners are chosen AT RANDOM by a computer-generated drawing.

TIMING IS CRITICAL! Entries for the Diversity Visa Lottery must be submitted electronically at http://www.dvlottery.state.gov between Saturday, November 1 and Tuesday, December 30, 2003 (the web site address will not work before November 1). Check out all the rules at http://travel.state.gov/dv2005.html.

*The only people not eligible for the Diversity Visa Lottery are natives of Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, or the United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam. These countries already sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the US in the last five years.

Not all of the French hate America and George W. Bush. Sabine Herold leads the group Liberte j'ecris ton nom. This new French libertarian organization sprang up when people, long frustrated with union thugs shutting down the French economy to force the government to bend to their wishes, took to the streets in massive numbers in May and June of 2003. Twenty-two year-old Sabine Herold is the best thing happening in France today.

Here are some excerpts from an article in the Daily Telegraph on Ms. Herold:

* * *

Dubbed France's Lady Thatcher by the newspapers, Mademoiselle Herold has been leading the rallies against the unions who have been crippling her country. Standing on a telephone box in her pearl earrings and high heels, she addresses crowds of 80,000, urging them to rise up against the striking teachers, Metro workers, rubbish collectors and air traffic controllers who are ruining people's lives. With her student friends, she has set up an organisation: Liberte J'Ecris Ton Nom, which has thousands of members, demanding that France reforms.

* * *

Here, she has been called Joan of Arc. "That is stupid," she says. "I love Britain. I love Margaret Thatcher. I love the way you have overcome the unions and are not afraid to privatise. I love the way you work so hard. In France, we have become lazy and staid. We think only of weekends, holidays and how great we once were. We need a dose of Thatcherism."

She doesn't want to go to Wimbledon. "No, I am here to work. Margaret Thatcher lived on five hours' sleep; so can I."

* * *

Back on Oxford Street, she wants to go to the cheapest stores. "Our Left-wing newspapers say that I must be rich not to champion the workers. They say I dress only in Hermes. But my coat is from Etam. My mother is a school teacher who refuses to strike, my father a professor. My brother is a table-tennis player. We are from a small village near Reims. We work hard but I have no family money."

* * *

At supper, she meets three of the youngest high-flying Tory MPs: Boris Johnson, MP for Henley; David Cameron, MP for Witney; and George Osborne, MP for Tatton. She is smitten. They start talking about the 48-hour working week. "In France, it is 35 hours - ludicrous, no?" George Orwell's Animal Farm, she tells them, was the first political tract she ever read. "It blew me away. In France, communism is not a dirty word - many of the trade unions are openly communist. Being Right-wing and libertarian is considered dangerous."

* * *

We arrive at the paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Waterloo. "It is a pity that France and England still fight," she says. "President Chirac was spineless over the war. I led a pro-war rally. I almost collapsed in shock when I heard he was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was Saddam Hussein's regime, not President Bush's, that was despicable. I adore France. I will never leave - I love my cafes too much - but that does not mean I hate Britain or America."

* * *

The stories in our newspapers fascinate her. "What is this anti-smacking law? What is wrong with a quick smack? I thought only the French liked these silly laws. In Finland, men are made to do 40 per cent of the housework. Libertarians in every country should rise up against this madness."

She wants to go to a bookshop. We pass the pile of Harry Potters, but she heads straight for Wilkes and Burke: "Your great writers about freedom". She is surprised by the amount of books that are anti-American. "I thought it was just us. In France, we are taught in school about American imperialism, that all Americans are either fat or work in sweatshops."

* * *

As we head for the Eurostar, she is wistful. "I would love to live here, but my place is in France. I want to make us great again."

* * *

Sabine Herold is also featured in this month's Reason Magazine, in an article by blogger Matt Welch.

Today's New York Times editorial withholds its breaking news until the last sentence:

..."the fallibility of intelligence evaluations has become all too apparent."

This astonishing discovery prompted the editors to call for independent experts to inspect the inspectors. In a surprise move, however, the editors did not insist on unanimous UN (aka UUN) approval and control of the inspector inspectors.

From J.David Chadwick Dot Com :

JDC -- Mr. Secretary, I'm [J. David Chadwick]. My question is, considering that we still have troops in every area that we have conducted operations during the Clinton administration, why is this operation in Iraq viewed negatively in the press as a Vietnam- style quagmire?

Secretary Rumsfeld: Give that man an "A".

I'll tell you, it's beyond me. I just had a hearing before the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee on an emergency supplemental budget. And that very day, 17 members of the United States Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, had just arrived back from Iraq. And six of them were on that committee. And they went right down the line, every single one of them, saying that what they see and read about Iraq in the United States and in the region does not compare with what they personally saw and experienced with their own eyes. These people went right down -- they were stunned by the difference between what they experienced in that country and what they saw and what they were being told in the press.

Now, it should not surprise you that the next day there was not a single word in the press about that hearing. Not one of those first eyewitness comments by seven members -- six or seven members of the United States House of Representatives of both parties -- not a single word of what they said about what was taking place in Iraq appeared, to my knowledge, in -- at least in the Washington press.

...and the article has a lot more besides. Worth reading the whole thing. Now, if he'd only left a permalink...

As for the title of this piece on the Command Post? Well, if the mainstream media had reported it, that would have been the headline. Or worse :

"Rumsfeld Confesses Iraqi Situation is Beyond Him"
[...]
"...it isn't like it's one problem, it's like that it's 24 problems, one every hour, " the Defence Secretary admitted publically.
[...]
"We've been in there for five months since the end of major combat operations." Secreatary Rumsfeld said, "... a quagmire".

A visibly emotional Rumsfeld then retreated, and refused to answer more questions. "I'm told there's time for two more questions, but I'm inclined to quit on that one." he said.

Maybe someone should remind him that a winner never quits, and a quitter never wins.

(I should make it crystal clear that the above 'quote' is not from the BBC, despite all appearances to the contrary. Just me pretending I'm a writer for the New York Times.)

Bill Whittle writes an essay about America facing up to its power in the world. He's on his game again, which means it rocks. I figured that most of you have read it already, but if not then what are you waiting for?

"I've been thinking about Power. Thinking about what real power entails, and more importantly, wondering if there is a way to defeat that ancient and highly reliable adage and perhaps find a way for a nation – mine -- to wield power, enormous power, without being corrupted -- enormously."

Good luck on your speaking tour, Bill!
 

It's time to STOP this ridiculous soap opera known as the Wilson/Plame Affair.

The media is guilty of a coverup and should be forced to perform real journalism.

As Glenn Reynolds says:

This isn't a "whistleblower" leak, where somebody exposes government misconduct on condition of anonymity. Here, it's the leak itself that's the misconduct, and it's the anonymity that let it happen, and that is keeping the leaker from being punished for conduct that everyone seems to regard as wrong.

In an earlier post, Glenn eloquently points out three key reasons why...

...the White House has a lot to gain by subpoenaing reporters who know about the Plame leaks. Doing that serves several useful purposes. First, once the press clams up and starts going on about protecting sources, it becomes extremely hard for it to claim that the White House is covering things up. "Who's stonewalling now?" can be the response.

Second, the press's complaints will look like special pleading (which they are). "If you leak this you're a traitor, but if we publish it, we're being great Americans," won't wash.

Third, subpoenaing reporters will likely reduce the number of leaks in the future. And that's a good thing, right? We keep hearing that these leaks were disastrous for national security. If that's true, we certainly want people to think twice before leaking in this fashion again, or publishing the results of such leaks.

And as Howard Kurtz notes:

There are at least six people in Washington who know the answer to the city's most politically charged mystery in years. And they're not talking.

That's because they're journalists.

Whether they should maintain their silence -- and whether they might be legally compelled to break it -- lies at the heart of a burgeoning debate about media ethics and the whispered transactions with government officials that shape the daily flow of news and opinion.

President Bush should demand, and The Justice Department should immediately subpeona and demand, that Robert Novak and all reporters who have publicly quoted an anonymous source linking Wilson's wife to the CIA, identify their source or risk criminal charges.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs says it better than me, and quite rightly references the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists to buttress our argument. As Bill says, "So, if the reporters don't reveal the name of the leaker, you'd almost be tempted to think they want a scandal involving the Bush White House to drag on and and on... "

I have a column in today's Mobile Register on the general subject of recall elections, which touhces on both CA's process, but also the recent radio ads in Alabama calling for a recall of Governor Riley. You can access the coumn al.com: Opinion">here.

Today's OpinionJournal posts an Op/Ed titled "I Think We Can Do This," which provides favorable accounts of recent bipartisan congressional visits to Iraq. Read it here, and here's the lead:

"I Think We Can Do This."

This is the informed opinion of Washington Democrat Norman Dicks, just back from visiting Iraq, as expressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a House hearing last week on the Bush Administration's request for $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan. Given most reporting on these subjects of late, his optimism struck us as news.

From The Australian :

The US is planning a $250million joint offensive with Indonesia to curb the drift of students to Islamist boarding schools that breed terrorism and preach hatred of the West.

Australia, which contributes $12million to assist the formal school system in Indonesia, may also follow the US example in boosting its spending, pending the outcome of aid reviews by the World Bank and Asia Development Bank.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said there was a growing recognition that donors, including Australia, would have to focus more on education in Indonesia.

Diplomatic sources suggested the US package to help Indonesia's 178,000 underfunded state and 12,000 West-tolerant Muslim-run schools was designed to improve the quality of teachers and education.

The US wants to make so-called radical Islamist boarding schools, or pesantren - which are often cheaper than other kinds of schools and play strong roles in supporting local communities - less attractive to Indonesian parents.

The extent of the problem at some schools was highlighted this week when Zakaria, principal of the Al-Islam School - one of the Jemaah Islamiah-linked schools where Bali bombers Ali Imron and Mubarok once taught - told The Australian the Bali bombings were "good", convicted terrorist Amrozi was a hero and the West was corrupt.

And from a post on Slashdot, written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, on 19th September, 2001 :

Finally, as our long-term strategy, we must try to convert at least the children of our enemies into our friends. Our weapons here are more likely to be solar-powered radios, food drops (imagine a raid on Baghdad that fought through heavy defences to drop a few thousand tonnes of baby food), education (so when Baghdad announces that the baby food is all poisoned and millions have died, it's not believed), and stern action to counter the Bad Hats. We may not be able to pick any "Good Guys" to support, but we can sure identify and destroy the torturers of the Secret Police, the thieves who take the foreign aid money, and those who terrorise their own populace. For very often there are many who remain silent out of fear.
We must bolster their courage, and give them a reasonable choice of behaviour other than to join the Enemy camp.

The poster of this last? Some State Department mover-and-shaker? Perhaps a shadowy NeoCon or Elder of the Zionist Entity? The Bavarian Illuminatus in charge of the US section? No, it's by an obscure Australian Software Engineer and sometime contributor to The Command Post. This strategy is not Rocket Science. I know, one thing I am is a Rocket Scientist.

OpinionJournal: On Being a 'Clinton-Hater': Why I lost faith in the man I backed in 1992.
A continuation of an earlier post on the hatred that is today's politics.

I have no use for this type of politics. Bill Clinton is one of my least favorite Presidents, but the hatred of him just blew me away. There was actually a lot of good that came out of the Clinton years, though it wasn't by his design. Our government seems to work best when Republicans control the Congress and a Democrat is President. The pathology aside, Republicans behave more like Republicans are supposed to behave when they have a Democratic President to play against. With a Republican in the White House they actually behave more like Democrats, like supporting an ill-conceived prescription drug benefit for Medicare. I don't know why, but it's like they are trying to get the votes of people who will never vote for them.

The hatred for sitting Presidents seems completely out of proportion. I will never understand why the left hates Bush as much as they do and I will never understand that same dynamic from the right towards Clinton.

I saw Bill Clinton the other night, at the "after party" for Shimon Peres's 80th birthday. Little wooden doves of peace were mounted on poles; colored lights lit exotic foliage. Everyone was there: F.W. De Klerk and Pnina Rosenblum; Terje Roed-Larsen and Ron Lauder; Lord Levy and Achinoam Nini. Also, there was a young lady in a J-Lo number with glitter sprinkled suggestively from her sternum to her navel. But I didn't catch her name.

Anyway, Mr. Clinton was there. Already he had brought the crowd to its feet at the Mann auditorium in Tel Aviv, singing John Lennon's "Imagine" with a group of Arab and Israeli schoolchildren ("Imagine there's no countries / It isn't hard to do . . ."). Now he had something personal to say. He had been in Srebrenica the day before, he said. There he had met a woman who was burying her husband and six children. He told us to be mindful that ours was not the only country visited by horror. He told us that Mr. Peres was a man who knew that vengeance belonged to God, not man.

He said all this in a hoarse and mournful and significant tone of voice. I wanted to puke.

I belong to that camp of Americans known as "Clinton-haters." At The Wall Street Journal, I wrote Clinton-unfriendly editorials. On the day of his impeachment, I radiated joy. Once, over dinner at New York's Metropolitan Club, Jean Kennedy Smith told me I was mentally ill. Others have told me that Clinton-hatred is a sexual thing, mixing frustration, envy and dysfunction.

Maybe this is true, although the Lewinsky business never bothered me; there's something endearing about Bill's taste for zaftig women. But perjury is no less a crime than burglary, and there's no question Mr. Clinton perjured himself in his deposition to Paula Jones's lawyers. If you think Nixon deserved to go down, then so too did Mr. Clinton.

But that's hardly why Clinton-haters hate Mr. Clinton. The Clinton-lovers are right; l'affaire Lewinsky was just something we could nail him with. With a different president, a different man, we might have been tempted to join the camp of apologists in saying: It's just sex, and everyone lies about sex.

As I was mentioning earlier, it's not limited to hatred of Clinton:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert Novak described it as a "hatred ... that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching."

I don't have any big answers to the pathos of American politics, all I know is I don't like it. I have my problems with President Bush -- his inconsistency on Israel, support for the ethanol subsidy, support for agricultural subsidies, steel tariffs -- but I don't hate him by any stretch.

In some ways I miss his father, who, in retrospect, was not nearly as bad as I thought him to be in 1992. He vetoed more than 40 bills in one term against a hostile Democratic Congress but was seen as weak by Republicans. He had the class to keep silent when his time was up and a President from the other party was in office. I don't recall him ever speaking out against Clinton, even during the impeachment. He seems to me to be a dignified man, a statesman, and more of his kind are needed today. Minus some of his internationalist -- read pro-U.N. -- inclinations.

On August 8 I posted the third Numbers Game, in which we saw how many stories a Google News search generated for various search terms. Now for another benchmark:

* Iraq + Victory: 2,930 stories then, 3,670 stories now

* Iraq + Defeat: 1,650 stories then, 3,050 stories now

* Iraq + Failure: 4,050 stories then, 5,180 stories now

* Iraq + Liberation: 924 stories then, 1,490 stories now

* Iraq + Occupation: 9,650 stories then, 9,530 stories now

* Economy + 2004 + Election: 1,280 stories then, 1,960 stories now

* Iraq + 2004 + Election: 1,880 stories then, 2,020 stories now

* Iraq + Quagmire: 440 stories then, 842 stories now

* Howard + Dean + Lose: 276 stories then, 351 stories now

* Howard + Dean + Win: 1,230 stories then, 1,690 stories now

And two new items:

* Wesley + Clark + Lose: 380 stories

* Wesley + Clark + Win: 1,260 stories

(Cross-posted here)

An Op-Ed where the article speaks for itself.

From The Australian :

Politicians play hard to win, even when they are playing rugby.

Tough tackling replaced roughhouse debating at the Parliamentary World Cup began in Sydney today, leaving some politicians bloodied or gasping for breath.

On a rain-sodden Manly Oval, Australia's parliamentary team out-muscled France's parliamentarians and diplomatic staff by 22-0.
[...]

...perhaps the most damage done to the French was by a former ACT MP, Paul Osborne, who also happens to have played in the Canberra Raiders 1994 premiership winning team.

One Frenchman, a security guard, tried to tackle the imposing Osborne and was left bloodied and in need of medical treatment.

His teammates were unhappy that the incident was caught on photographers' cameras and tried to get them to erase the pictures.

Another Frenchman was left badly winded, although spectators were heard to refer to "French histrionics".

"It was very competitive," said cup organiser Andy Turnbull.

[...]

He may have been playing as prop, but the well-built Minister for Small Business and Tourism Joe Hockey popped up on the wing to score.

"I'm a happy man today - I haven't scored a try for 30 years," a wet and exhausted Hockey told ABC radio.

"I'm a bit sore actually, but I wouldn't miss a game of rugby."

Also among the scorers was Employment Services Minister Mal Brough, while Australian Democrats Senator Aden Ridgeway - "a leaguey from way back" - played with conviction before sustaining a hamstring injury.

Missing today was Howard hardman Tony Abbott, although the new Minister for Health has trained with the team and may appear in later matches.