Petrified Truth

Just desserts

President Bush delivered a good State of the Union address tonight. We were struck by how relaxed he seemed. It ended on an inspirational note:

Fellow citizens, we have been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We have entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite. We see great changes in science and commerce that will influence all our lives. And sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore.

Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma, and achieved only half a victory over segregation. The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: Will we turn back, or finish well?

Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Like Americans before us, we will show that courage and we will finish well. We will lead freedom’s advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land. And so we move forward – optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause, and confident of victories to come.

The success of the speech was improved even more by the news that embittered leftie rabblerouser Cindy Sheehan was removed forcibly from the Capitol beforehand. It was more than justified.

Sheehan, who was invited to attend the speech by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., was charged with demonstrating in the Capitol building, said Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. The charge was later changed to unlawful conduct, Schneider said. Both charges are misdemeanors.

Sheehan was taken in handcuffs from the Capitol to police headquarters a few blocks away. Her case was processed as Bush spoke.

Schneider said Sheehan had worn a T-shirt with an anti-war slogan to the speech and covered it up until she took her seat. Police warned her that such displays were not allowed, but she did not respond, the spokeswoman said.

Police handcuffed Sheehan and removed her from the gallery before Bush arrived. Sheehan was to be released on her own recognizance, Schneider said.

Clumsy

Is a rogue Inspector Clouseau on the loose in Cambridge?

A visitor to a British museum tripped on his shoelace, stumbled down a stairway and fell into a display of centuries-old Chinese vases, shattering them into "very small pieces," officials said Monday.

The three Qing dynasty vases, dating from the late 17th or early 18th century, had been donated to the Fitzwilliam Museum in the university city of Cambridge in 1948 and were among its best-known artifacts. They sat on the window sill beside the staircase for 40 years.

Trail of blood

Debra Burlingame, sister of the pilot of the American Airlines flight which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, is shocked by the mindless political exploitation of the NSA's anti-terrorist surveillance program.

More Americans should not die because the peace-at-any-cost fringe and antigovernment paranoids still fighting the ghost of Nixon hate George Bush more than they fear al Qaeda. Ask the American people what they want. They will say that they want the commander in chief to use all reasonable means to catch the people who are trying to rain terror on our cities. Those who cite the soaring principle of individual liberty do not appear to appreciate that our enemies are not seeking to destroy individuals, but whole populations.

...

The public has listened to years of stinging revelations detailing how the government tied its own hands in stopping the devastating attacks of September 11. It is an irresponsible violation of the public trust for members of Congress to weaken the Patriot Act or jeopardize the NSA terrorist surveillance program because of the same illusory theories that cost us so dearly before, or worse, for rank partisan advantage. If they do, and our country sustains yet another catastrophic attack that these antiterrorism tools could have prevented, the phrase "connect the dots" will resonate again--but this time it will refer to the trail of innocent American blood which leads directly to the Senate floor.

Worshipping at the altar of FISA has, and will, cost American lives. Read the whole thing.

What the head said

If your mind has not been boggled recently, you can always count on the education industry. Here's a pathetic milestone: no more student hands in the air, at least in one school near London, where the experts tremble on behalf of the little tykes' self-esteem.

Pupils have been stopped from putting their hands up to answer questions because their school believes it leads to feelings of victimisation.

"No hands up" notices have been posted in every room at the Jo Richardson comprehensive in Dagenham, east London, as a reminder that the teachers will decide who should answer.

The head, Andrew Buck, says it is always the same children who wave their arms in the air, while the rest of the class sits back. When teachers try to involve less adventurous pupils by choosing them instead, that leads to feelings of victimisation.

Mr Buck believes that it can also cause panic in children who are picked but do not know the answer while others around them are straining to give it. To spare the embarrassment of those who do not know the answer, the school uses a "phone a friend" system, allowing one child to nominate another to take the question instead.

Surely such inanity will be hooted down? Not so...

Mick Brookes, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said it was the first time he had heard of such a policy.

"The habit will be hard to break but when you listen to what the head says there may be method in what at first appears to be madness."

When books are an enemy of the state

As discussed earlier, writer Andrei Codrescu recently dropped a verbal bombshell on the leadership of the American Library Association, assailing them for their morally corrupt silence concerning the arrest and torture of independent librarians in Cuba.

Now, via activist Robert Kent, we can read excerpts from Codrescu's powerful address.

I went to Cuba in 1997, just before a papal visit later that year, and I was appalled by the lack of books. I was reminded of my poor, sad Romania in the 1950's, a dismal prison where food for body and mind were nearly inexistent. Cubans were literally starving physically and intellectually. Looking through the desultory pages of the Communist Party’s official paper, Granma, reminded me also of the pathetic simulacra of phony writing that stained the pages of Romania’s official papers during the years of the dictatorship....

I also hope that, in keeping with its tradition and charter of defending the freedom to read and freedom of expression, the American Library Association will immediately pass a resolution condemning the Castro regime for flagrant violations of basic human rights. To not do so is self-defeating and wipes out any credibility the ALA might have in fighting the much milder provisions of the Patriot Act. Not to speak of the fact that it’s much easier to fight for freedom to read in a country where every book is available, while it is much more difficult to make meaningful a statement in a place where books are an enemy of the state.

Librarian blogger Jack Stephens notes acidic comments by ALA councilors. Typical.

There is an indication that C-SPAN may have recorded the session, so we may get the see it replayed.

Political hygiene

Inimitable Mark Steyn is pleased, but still realistic, about the election of a new Conservative government in his native Canada.

[T]hese days anti-Americanism is the first refuge of the scoundrel, and it's usually a reliable indicator that you're not up to the challenges of the modern world or of your own country.

...

Canadians have been reluctant in the last four years to accept that we no longer live in an "it's probably nothing" world. Many Continentals feel the same way. Unlike his hollow predecessor, Stephen Harper is a thoughtful man who understands the gulf between self-mythologizing and the harder realities. You can't change a free country unless you persuade free people to change their minds, and he will at least start that tough job. He doesn't have to be George Bush's best friend, and he may even be more effective at opposing him on trade and agriculture disputes. But he could try being Tony Blair's and John Howard's best friend and reconnecting us with other traditional pals from whom Canada's become increasingly estranged. He could honor our small but brave contribution to Afghanistan by flying out and meeting them on the ground.

But even if he does nothing else, he'll bring to an end a decade of self-defeating sneering. The ayatollahs at least flatter America as a seducer--the Great Satan--which is a more accurate and sophisticated construct than deriding her as the Great Moron. The difference between sniping at the Taliban and sniping at Washington is that in the latter case we're firing blanks.

ALA's shame continues unabated

Mordant intellectual Andrei Codrescu, familiar to both readers of contemporary literature and listeners to NPR, tangled with Michael Gorman, the apparently dimwitted president of the American Library Association, while speaking at ALA's mindwinter conference.

Check out the deadpan summary reported in ALA's own Library Journal.

Condrescu addressed freedom of expression, citing his youth in Communist Romania, where "my good luck was to meet Dr. Martin, a retired professor, who had all the poets who were blacklisted." Because of ALA's record in opposing excesses in the USA PATRIOT ACT, Codrescu said he felt "great dismay" that the organization "has taken no action to condemn the imprisonment of librarians," the banning of books, and repression in Cuba. He mentioned that other international figures, including U.S. leftists like Noam Chomsky, have joined in such condemnation. "Cuba today is the Romania of my growing up," he said. Codrescu's speech earned strong, if not unanimous applause, which suggests that the audience, at least, may have a less measured approach toward the Cuba issue than the ALA Council.

Gorman did not immediately respond, first offering his prepared remarks raising questions about the definition of the profession and how ALA might have a greater impact on LIS curricula. He said he thought that Cuba's policies "are reprehensible," but contrasted that posture with "getting involved in a political to-and-fro about the status of people who claim to be librarians... that grows up around the exile community, the Republican Party, Cuba, and the Cuban government." He added that the imprisoned Cubans "should never have been in prison." ("I was mugged," Gorman said afterward. "He did not deliver the speech he told us ten days earlier that he would deliver." ) Codresco said he didn't see why the Cubans should be termed "so-called librarians."

Gorman said there was a dispute about whether the activity of lending books "is being a librarian" and that "there is some dispute about the funding of these people who claim to set up libraries." Gorman also added that ALA's Council had "condemned the imprisonment" of the Cubans [actually, the phrase was "deep concern"], and that the stance had been misrepresented by columnist Nat Hentoff and Robert Kent of Friends of Cuban Libraries. Codrescu intoned, "The man who lent us books was a librarian, and he was our librarian. I think ALA should make a stronger point in solidarity with these disseminators of books."

So Andrei Codrescu has joined Ray Bradbury, Nat Hentoff, and other writers in trying unsuccessfully to awaken ALA's moral conscience.

• Andrei Codrescu - official site
• Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
• Cuba's independent libraries
• Friends of Cuban Libraries

Persian reality?

Newsweek pundit Fareed Zakaria says it's "time to face reality on Iran" -- that Iran will go nuke and we can't stop it without a military strike that will cause even more trouble.

This is not a best-case outcome, but it has its virtues. The existence of a clear and present danger in Iran will keep the international community galvanized. Already, the Western alliance has been strengthened in response to Iran's belligerence, and cooperation with India, Russia and China seems a stronger possibility than ever before.

Threats usually have the effect of sobering up the neighborhood. If Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries see that they face a serious problem in Iran, they might recognize that they could use outside allies. American influence in the region could become stronger and be used to push for cooperation on other foreign-policy issues, as well as economic and political reform. Notice how the rise of China has Japan and India moving closer to the United States. The Soviet threat brought Western Europe closer to the United States. It's not inconceivable that a similar dynamic could work in the Middle East.

Properly handled, Iran's threat might even improve the situation in Iraq. One of the grave problems facing Iraq is the rampant and destabilizing Iranian influence in its politics and government. If Iran continues down a nuclear path, politicians in Iraq—of all stripes—will begin to view this as a threat to their national security. It's tough to say that Iran is just a friendly neighbor helping out if it is actively pursuing the military capacity to obliterate you.

Maybe a sound strategy... for us, ten thousand miles away. Maybe not for tiny, beleaguered Israel.

Double dare ya

Interesting: White House strategist Karl Rove, along with RNC chief Ken Mehlman, came out swinging in an appearance this week before the Republican National Committee, previewing their plans to win the 2006 off-year elections.

Far from ducking the controversy about a secret domestic spying program authorized by President Bush, top White House political strategist Karl Rove signaled Friday that Republicans plan a full-throated run on the issue in fall congressional elections.

"Let me be as clear as I can: President Bush believes if al-Qaida is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," the White House deputy chief of staff told the Republican National Committee winter meeting. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Rove's speech, along with similar remarks by RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman and Vice President Dick Cheney, demonstrated a clear shift in strategy by the party and the White House, away from trying to defend the program toward embracing and promoting it.

"I think one of the big choices before the people in 2006 is, where do you stand on this important tool," Mehlman said. "We know that these kinds of tools would have been critical before 9/11, and so that's an important issue that we absolutely are going to talk about."

"Republicans have a post- 9/11 worldview, and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview," Rove said. "That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."

Too true.

Related:
• Video via C-SPAN (Real) - Karl Rove's remarks at 1:16 mark.
• Republican National Committee

Nuclear theocrats in our future

Former CIA man Reuel Marc Gerecht reviews what's happening with Iran. Read this insightful article to better understand why things are what they are, and options for avoiding catastrophe.

It's a very good bet that the U.S. officials now running America's Iran policy would rather see the clerics go nuclear than deal with the world the day after Washington begins bombing Iran's atomic-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities.

...

A more serious American-European approach to clerical Iran's quest for nuclear weapons would cast the administration more conspicuously as the bad cop. The entire EU-3 approach to Tehran, more thoughtful European diplomats will tell you, is premised on Washington's playing the imperfectly restrained cowboy: The Iranians need to know that over the horizon waits George W. Bush, the mad bomber. More often, senior American officials, and especially the president, need to remind Iran's ruling clergy, connoisseurs of machtpolitik--and the Europeans who are ever ready to appease them--that the United States is quite capable of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and simultaneously, if need be, launching airstrikes against the clerics' nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile facilities. The Iranians and the Europeans both thought the Americans were capable of such actions in 2003; the president and the vice president are surely capable, since many abroad view them as fundamentally unstable, of sending the signal that if the will exists, the United States will find the means. The objective is not to sound crudely bellicose, but to underscore that American patience is finite. The president used just the right language in his recent comments that the Islamic Republic's uranium enrichment program is "intolerable" and a "grave threat." Senior administration officials, and American ambassadors in the Middle East, should use such words more often, especially when any member of the ruling elite in Iran starts to thump his chest, envisioning Armageddon for Jews or anyone else.

Off to Pluto

NASA's New Horizons space probe lifted off successfully a few minutes ago.

Bad guys out

Despite large quantities of naive hand-wringing and faux outrage earlier this week, it turns out that airstrike in Pakistan capped (count 'em) four senior al Qaeda commanders. So reports ABC News:

ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week's U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan.

Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning.

The United States had posted a $5 million reward for Mursi's capture. He is described by authorities as the man who ran al Qaeda's infamous Derunta training camp in Afghanistan, where he used dogs and other animals as subjects for experiments with poison and chemicals. His explosives training manual is still regarded as the bible for al Qaeda terrorists around the world.

Pakistani officials also said that Khalid Habib, the al Qaeda operations chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi, a senior operations commander for al Qaeda, were killed in the Damadola attack. Authorities tell ABC News that the terror summit was called to funnel new money into attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

"Pakistani intelligence says this was a very important planning session involving the very top levels of al Qaeda as they get ready for a new spring offensive," explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry and now an ABC News consultant.

That's some good intel work.

Wishing for war

Stratfor's George Friedman tries to puzzle out what the Iranian regime is up to with its feints, jabs, and provocations.

The Iranians have broken the International Atomic Energy Agency seals on some of their nuclear facilities. They did this very deliberately and publicly to make certain that everyone knew that Tehran was proceeding with its nuclear program. Prior to this, and in parallel, the Iranians began to -- among other things -- systematically bait the Israelis, threatening to wipe them from the face of the earth.

The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the Iranians seem to be doing, so we need to sort this out.

There are four possibilities:

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane and wants to be attacked because of a bad childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this is part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons -- and a deterrent to Israel -- before the Israelis attack.
4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli -- or for that matter, American -- air strike.

Let's begin with the insanity issue, just to get it out of the way...

One of the ways to avoid thinking seriously about foreign policy is to dismiss as a nutcase anyone who does not behave as you yourself would. As such, he is unpredictable and, while scary, cannot be controlled. You are therefore relieved of the burden of doing anything about him. In foreign policy, it is sometimes useful to appear to be insane, as it is in poker: The less predictable you are, the more power you have -- and insanity is a great tool of unpredictability. Some leaders cultivate an aura of insanity.

However, people who climb to the leadership of nations containing many millions of people must be highly disciplined, with insight into others and the ability to plan carefully. Lunatics rarely have those characteristics. Certainly, there have been sociopaths -- like Hitler -- but at the same time, he was a very able, insightful, meticulous man. He might have been crazy, but dismissing him because he was crazy -- as many did -- was a massive mistake. Moreover, leaders do not rise alone. They are surrounded by other ambitious people. In the case of Ahmadinejad, he is answerable to others above him (in this case, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), alongside him and below him. He did not get to where he is by being nuts -- and even if we think what he says is insane, it clearly doesn't strike the rest of his audience as insane. Thinking of him as insane is neither helpful nor clarifying.

The Three-Player Game

So what is happening?

First, the Iranians obviously are responding to the Americans. Tehran's position in Iraq is not what the Iranians had hoped it would be. U.S. maneuvers with the Sunnis in Iraq and the behavior of Iraqi Shiite leaders clearly have created a situation in which the outcome will not be the creation of an Iranian satellite state. At best, Iraq will be influenced by Iran or neutral. At worst, it will drift back into opposition to Iran -- which has been Iraq's traditional geopolitical position. This is not satisfactory. Iran's Iraq policy has not failed, but it is not the outcome Tehran dreamt of in 2003.

There is a much larger issue. The United States has managed its position in Iraq -- to the extent that it has been managed -- by manipulating the Sunni-Shiite fault line in the Muslim world. In the same way that Richard Nixon manipulated the Sino-Soviet split, the fundamental fault line in the Communist world, to keep the Soviets contained and off-balance late in the Vietnam War, so the Bush administration has used the primordial fault line in the Islamic world, the Sunni-Shiite split, to manipulate the situation in Iraq.

Washington did this on a broader scale as well. Having enticed Iran with new opportunities -- both for Iran as a nation and as the leading Shiite power in a post-Saddam world -- the administration turned to Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation with the United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an ascended Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington used that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in Afghanistan's Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United States, however, attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It became the swing player between Sunnis and Shia.

This was not what the Iranians had hoped for.

Reclaiming the Banner

There is yet another dimension to this. In 1979, when the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran, Iran was the center of revolutionary Islamism. It both stood against the United States and positioned itself as the standard-bearer for radical Islamist youth. It was Iran, through its creation, Hezbollah, that pioneered suicide bombings. It championed the principle of revolutionary Islamism against both collaborationist states like Saudi Arabia and secular revolutionaries like Yasser Arafat. It positioned Shi'ism as the protector of the faith and the hope of the future.

In having to defend against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, and the resulting containment battle, Iran became ensnared in a range of necessary but compromising relationships. Recall, if you will, that the Iran-Contra affair revealed not only that the United States used Israel to send weapons to Iran, but also that Iran accepted weapons from Israel. Iran did what it had to in order to survive, but the complexity of its operations led to serious compromises. By the late 1990s, Iran had lost any pretense of revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world. It had been flanked by the Sunni Wahhabi movement, al Qaeda.

The Iranians always saw al Qaeda as an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through Shiite and Iranian eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al Qaeda to usurp the position of primary challenger to the West. Under any circumstances, it did not want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a challenge. First, it had to reduce al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the Sunnis had taken the banner from Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to reclaim its place. Third, it had to do this without undermining its geopolitical interests.

Tehran spent the time from 2003 through 2005 maximizing what it could from the Iraq situation. It also quietly participated in the reduction of al Qaeda's network and global reach. In doing so, it appeared to much of the Islamic world as clever and capable, but not particularly principled. Tehran's clear willingness to collaborate on some level with the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the war on al Qaeda made it appear as collaborationist as it had accused the Kuwaitis or Saudis of being in the past. By the end of 2005, Iran had secured its western frontier as well as it could, had achieved what influence it could in Baghdad, had seen al Qaeda weakened. It was time for the next phase. It had to reclaim its position as the leader of the Islamic revolutionary movement for itself and for Shi'ism.

Thus, the selection of the new president was, in retrospect, carefully engineered. After President Mohammed Khatami's term, all moderates were excluded from the electoral process by decree, and the election came down to a struggle between former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- an heir to Khomeini's tradition, but also an heir to the tactical pragmatism of the 1980s and 1990s -- and Ahmadinejad, the clearest descendent of the Khomeini revolution that there was in Iran, and someone who in many ways had avoided the worst taints of compromise.

Ahmadinejad was set loose to reclaim Iran's position in the Muslim world. Since Iran had collaborated with Israel during the 1980s, and since Iranian money in Lebanon had mingled with Israeli money, the first thing he had to do was to reassert Iran's anti-Zionist credentials. He did that by threatening Israel's existence and denying the Holocaust. Whether he believed what he was saying is immaterial. Ahmadinejad used the Holocaust issue to do two things: First, he established himself as intellectually both anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, taking the far flank among Islamic leaders; and second, he signaled a massive breach with Khatami's approach.

Khatami was focused on splitting the Western world by dividing the Americans from the Europeans. In carrying out this policy, he had to manipulate the Europeans. The Europeans were always open to the claim that the Americans were being rigid and were delighted to serve the role of sophisticated mediator. Khatami used the Europeans' vanity brilliantly, sucking them into endless discussions and turning the Iran situation into a problem the Europeans were having with the United States.

But Tehran paid a price for this in the Muslim world. In drawing close to the Europeans, the Iranians simply appeared to be up to their old game of unprincipled realpolitik with people -- Europeans -- who were no better than the Americans. The Europeans were simply Americans who were weaker. Ahmadinejad could not carry out his strategy of flanking the Wahhabis and still continue the minuet with Europe. So he ended Khatami's game with a bang, with a massive diatribe on the Holocaust and by arguing that if there had been one, the Europeans bore the blame. That froze Germany out of any further dealings with Tehran, and even the French had to back off. Iran's stock in the Islamic world started to rise.

The Nuclear Gambit

The second phase was for Iran to very publicly resume -- or very publicly claim to be resuming -- development of a nuclear weapon. This signaled three things:

1. Iran's policy of accommodation with the West was over.
2. Iran intended to get a nuclear weapon in order to become the only real challenge to Israel and, not incidentally, a regional power that Sunni states would have to deal with.
3. Iran was prepared to take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared to take. Al Qaeda was a piker.

The fundamental fact is that Ahmadinejad knows that, except in the case of extreme luck, Iran will not be able to get nuclear weapons. First, building a nuclear device is not the same thing as building a nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon must be sufficiently small, robust and reliable to deliver to a target. A nuclear device has to sit there and go boom. The key technologies here are not the ones that build a device but the ones that turn a device into a weapon -- and then there is the delivery system to worry about: range, reliability, payload, accuracy. Iran has a way to go.

A lot of countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The United States is another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans into this, and there are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb. However, there are only two countries that can do something about it. The Israelis don't want to get the grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid action because they are the most vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon. The United States doesn't want Israel to strike at Iran, as that would massively complicate the U.S. situation in the region, but it doesn't want to carry out the strike itself either.

This, by the way, is a good place to pause and explain to readers who will write in wondering why the United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear force but not an Iranian one. The answer is simple. Israel will probably not blow up New York. That's why the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes and does mind Iran having them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not sharing time in preschool. End of digression.

Intra-Islamic Diplomacy

If the Iranians are seen as getting too close to a weapon, either the United States or Israel will take them out, and there is an outside chance that the facilities could not be taken out with a high degree of assurance unless nukes are used. In the past, our view was that the Iranians would move carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United States. That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United States. It would burnish Iran's credentials as the true martyr and fighter of Islam.

Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be reaching out to the Sunnis on a number of levels. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a radical Shiite group in Iraq with ties to Iran, visited Saudi Arabia recently. There are contacts between radical Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon as well. The Iranians appear to be engaged in an attempt to create the kind of coalition in the Muslim world that al Qaeda failed to create. From Tehran's point of view, if they get a deliverable nuclear device, that's great -- but if they are attacked by Israel or the United States, that's not a bad outcome either.

In short, the diplomacy that Iran practiced from the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war until after the U.S. invasion of Iraq appears to be ended. Iran is making a play for ownership of revolutionary Islamism on behalf of itself and the Shia. Thus, Tehran will continue to make provocative moves, while hoping to avoid counterstrikes. On the other hand, if there are counterstrikes, the Iranians will probably be able to live with that as well.

© Copyright 2006 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved.

This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com.

Posted by Alan at 08:00 AM

Bored traveling in a car?

Video via Google Video. Tech tip via John Little.

Gorish still

Al Gore, still pathetically lusting to be considered relevant, ripped into President Bush yesterday before a sycophantic audience.

Former Vice President Al Gore accused President Bush of breaking the law by authorizing wiretaps on U.S. citizens without court warrants and called on Congress Monday to reassert its oversight responsibilities on a "shameful exercise of power" by the White House.

"The president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently," Gore said in a speech at Constitution Hall in Washington. "A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government."

NR's Byron York listened to the whole overheated rant (so you don't have to), but James Taranto had the best insight into Gore's tiresome performance.

We've heard a lot about the problems of congressional Republicans, in terms of both corruption and ideological drift away from the small-government philosophy that brought the party to power in 1994. There is much validity to these criticisms. Power corrupts.

Gore, however, exemplifies how powerlessness also corrupts: by producing paranoia, persecution fantasies and a generally irresponsible politics. Republicans ought to pay a price for their shortcomings, but given the choice between Democratic paranoia and Republican profligacy, voters very well may decide that the latter is the lesser evil.

See for yourself via C-SPAN (Real format) if you've a strong tolerance for bluster and BS.

New Horizons

NASA's New Horizons space probe is due to launch later today, on its way to study Pluto, its moon Charon, and the primordial Kuiper Belt.

NASA prepared to launch an unmanned, piano-sized probe that will fly by Pluto, the solar system's last unexplored planet, and also study a mysterious zone of icy objects that surrounds the frosty planet at the outer edges of the planetary system.

"What we know about Pluto today could fit on the back of a postage stamp," said Colleen Hartman, a deputy associate administrator at NASA. "The textbooks will be rewritten after this mission is completed."

The New Horizons spacecraft will lift off on an Atlas V rocket and speed away from Earth at 36,000 mph, the fastest spacecraft ever launched. It will reach Earth's moon in about nine hours and arrive in 13 months at Jupiter, where it will use the giant planet's gravity as a slingshot, shaving five year off the 3-billion-mile trip.

Some NASA safety managers had raised concerns about a fuel tank similar to the one expected to be used on the rocket during launch since the test tank had failed a pressure evaluation at the factory. The decision ultimately was made to fly since the flight tank was in pristine condition and had no signs of any defects like the ones found on the tank that had undergone "brutal" tests, said NASA launch director Omar Baez.

The launch had drawn protests from anti-nuclear activists because the spacecraft will be powered by 24 pounds of plutonium, which will produce energy from natural radioactive decay.

Related:

• NASA - New Horizons mission site
• Johns Hopkins APL - New Horizons project site
• The Planetary Society - New Horizons: Explore the Cosmos

UPDATE: Today's launch aborted due to high winds both at the pad and aloft. Re-scheduled for tomorrow.

More "24"

Episodes 3-4 of "24" did not disappoint; the pace is typically breakneck. Grade: A.

Not watching yet? Read Fox's detailed plot summaries here.

Jack's back

Well, "24" rocked tonite. Can't wait until tomorrow for episodes 3-4.

The music of the years gone by

NASA's Stardust probe has returned to Earth, apparently intact and carrying precious cargo: primordial dust particles snatched from the tail of a comet.

The Stardust mission capsule landed two minutes ahead of schedule at the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City.

"We traveled almost 3 billion miles in space," principal investigator Don Brownlee said from nearby Dugway Proving Grounds. "We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and it landed here this morning. It's an incredible thrill."

The canister containing the samples was taken to a "clean room" at the proving grounds; it will be shipped to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, this week. Complete analysis of the material, some of which will be conducted on the molecular level, should take years.

Brownlee has said scientists would have some results, such as the number of particles recovered, within days and more detailed findings within weeks.

Related:

• Landing video via CNN
• NASA - Stardust mission site

Out of it

Empty-headed and morally bankrupt Democrats are in a funk over both their failure to derail the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and the success of President Bush in remaking the judiciary overall.

Disheartened by the administration's success with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.

In interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.

Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.

Republicans say that Mr. Bush, in making conservative judicial choices, has been doing precisely what he said he would do in both of his presidential campaigns. Indeed, they say, his re-election, and the election of a Republican Congress, meant that the choices reflected the views of much of the American public.

Republicans rejected Democratic assertions that Judge Alito was out of the mainstream. "The American people see Judge Alito and say, that's exactly the sort of person we want to see on the Supreme Court," said Steve Schmidt, the White House official who managed the nomination.

Now,, several Democrats said, even at a time when many of his other initiatives seem in doubt, and though he was forced by conservatives to withdraw his first choice for the seat, Mr. Bush appears on the verge of achieving what he had set as a primary goal of his presidency: a fundamental reshaping of the federal judiciary along more conservative lines.

Only a political party completely divorced from reality could believe that across-the-board election losses really mean that they own "the mainstream."

And only this kind of ineptitude is saving the Republican Party from itself right now. It won't last forever.

Come and see the violence inherent in the system

Uh oh -- The Times in London reports that globe-trotting raconteur Michael Palin has offended his green friends.

Michael Palin is facing moves to oust him as president of a leading environmental group because of his passion for long-distance air travel.

The Times has learnt that senior members of Transport 2000, which campaigns for sustainable travel and against growth in flights, believe that Palin sets a poor example.

He has flown more than a quarter of a million miles in the past 17 years while making his six TV series, which began in 1988 with his attempt to retrace the fictional footsteps of Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days. He has travelled across every continent, visited both poles and, most recently, climbed the Himalayas.

On screen he is seen riding dog sleds, camels, elephants and hot-air balloons. But few viewers will have realised how many air miles he clocked up making the programmes. For the Himalayas series alone, Palin made seven return trips between London and Asia. His share of the carbon dioxide emissions of those flights was 24 tonnes, 12 times more than the average car emits in a year.

Palin recently admitted that he had spent the past 17 years “busy polluting this environment on almost every conceiv- able form of carbon-emitting vehicle”. But he also claimed that his adventures reduced overall greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging people to remain on their sofas.

He told a recent environmental conference: “I shall continue to make travel programmes, secure in the knowledge that the food I’m seen eating, the sanitary arrangements I’m seen experiencing and the coughing attacks that strike me halfway up high mountains are doing more than any government could to persuade people to stay at home.”

However, travel firms use the phrase the “Palin effect to describe the surge in bookings for each destination he visits.

Next, in will come the Spanish Inquisition.

Really new leadership essential in the House

The often mundane selection of a majority leader has now become vital if anything is to be done to re-integrate the Republican majority in the House of Representatives with the conservative ideals for which they were elected. Count me in.

An Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Via The Truth Laid Bear and the omniscient Instapundit. They and others are good company.

Sign up here to show your support.

The numbers don't lie, but senators...

In case you doubt that the Alito hearings were political theater vs. anything substantial, check out this from the ABC News team at The Note:

ABC News' Ed O'Keefe reports that Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. took 677 questions during three days in the witness chair; but, for a majority of those 18 hours, the Judge was listening, not talking, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee tally.

The monologue awards go to . . .

Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), speaking for 24 minutes and leaving 6 for Alito on Tuesday, gabbing for 12:54 versus 6:06 for Alito on Wednesday, and concluding with 13:25 versus 6:41 on Thursday.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), taking 22:50 for himself and leaving 7:10 for Alito on Tuesday, repeating the pattern by chatting for 15:43 versus 5:19 for Alito on Wednesday, and concluding with 19:38 against 10:22 on Thursday.

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), spending a Biden-beating 25:44 for his own purposes and leaving only 5:59 for Alito on Monday and doing the same by defending Alito for 18:44 on Wednesday while allowing the Judge 1:58 to speak for himself on Wednesday.

And, amazingly, in 46 separate exchanges with the 18 members of the Judiciary Committee, Judge Alito's time responding exceeded that of the Senators' time asking only 9 times i.e., attempting to discover the Judge's views on the issues, Senators overwhelmingly spent more time talking than listening.

No Borking

WSJ editor Daniel Henninger sums up the week's pathetic exercise in Washington political theater: the Alito hearings.

The grand hulk of Ted Kennedy ranted that he wanted to subpoena the papers of former National Review publisher William Rusher to get to the bottom of Samuel Alito's membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. At this moment, one sensed that perhaps at last the ghost of Robert Bork had finally been laid to rest. Borking was once a Democratic smear tactic. This week--amid intellectually exhausted and politically befuddled Democrats--it became a laugh track.

It appears that the liberal legal critique of conservative jurisprudence is largely incoherent. "Out of the mainstream" is a phrase and nothing more. Interesting notions of the individual's relationship to the state surfaced in the preprinted opening statements of Sens. Kennedy and Leahy, then disappeared. Judge Alito's most thoughtful remarks on justice and the law emerged in exchanges with Sens. Grassley and Sessions. Why do the Democrats seem flat-lined? Because in the 20 years that such liberal opposition leaders as Ralph Neas and Nan Aron taught them to contest nominees with propaganda, their Senate students have largely stopped thinking about the content of the Supreme Court.

They should have kept up. Thanks in large part to a half-century of judicial decisions based on no consistent standard, constitutional law today is a dense and tangled thicket understood only by practicing specialists like Samuel Alito. No surprise, then, that when a Sen. Durbin or Feinstein recited a staff-written question on some point of law and got a careful parsing back from Judge Alito on Bray or Rybar or stare decisis, their follow-up was generally of a piece with Sen. Feinstein's after discussing the machine-gun case: "That's a difficult extrapolation for me to understand, but it's not dispositive." Joe Biden shrewdly avoided this trap by using his time for magical mystery tours through his own life.

The left-wing opposition groups are reported to be frustrated that their standard-bearers are "letting Alito off the hook." What hook? Neither Sam Alito nor John Roberts remotely represents Ted Kennedy's famous "Robert Bork's America" speech. Reasonable people can disagree on the views of these conservative jurists, but first we need reasonable people.

The Dems are doomed on this one.

Agca going free, but for how long?

It was inevitable, but it's still disconcerting: the man who shot Pope John Paul II will be released from a Turkish prison after completing his sentences. However, the dark forces who set him in motion have not forgotten what he knows.

The Italian judge who investigated the 1981 murder attempt on John Paul II has warned the Turkish would-be assassin that his life will be "in grave danger" when he is released from jail because he "knows too much".

Mehmet Ali Agca, 48, is to be released from Kartal high security jail in Turkey for good behaviour, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

Ferdinando Imposimato, the retired judge who led the initial inquiry and has since conducted his own research, said that 25 years after the shooting in St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, "many mysteries remain".

He... [remains] "120 per cent convinced" that the murder had been "planned in Moscow".

"The Kremlin started to plot the Pope’s murder the moment he was elected in October 1978," Signor Imposimato said.

The untold secrets however included the alleged involvement in the conspiracy of East European agents in the Vatican as well as of their Bulgarian and Turkish accomplices, and the alleged presence on the square of other gunmen. "I am convinced that once he is free, Agca’s life will be in grave danger because he knows many truths about the plot," the judge said.

As noted here previously, the complicity of the USSR and its East European henchmen was corroborated just last year.

New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian and East German agents.

Man vs. mouse

Just rewards: I could never, ever root for the rodent, but in this case I can't help but root against the human in New Mexico.

A mouse got its revenge against a homeowner who tried to dispose of it in a pile of burning leaves. The blazing creature ran back to the man's house and set it on fire.

Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner said he caught the mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it.

"I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house," Mares said from a motel room Saturday.

No was hurt inside, but the home and everything in it was destroyed.

The Da Vinci Code - secrets

Hollywood's take on Dan Brown's mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, is coming, inexorably. Newsweek has a preview and this tantalizing what-might-have-been from producer Brian Grazer:

"The Da Vinci Code" is a different kind of project for Grazer and Howard, whose previous films, including "Apollo 13," "The Grinch" and "A Beautiful Mind," have grossed billions around the world and collected nine Oscars. The two usually develop their own projects for Imagine and shop them to a studio; this time, Sony brought them in as hired guns. Grazer tried to buy the rights to "The Da Vinci Code" for Imagine, with the idea of using the book as a template for the third season of his company's hit TV series, "24," but he got outfoxed by another bidder. "I just didn't know the right people," he says. "I didn't know Dan's people—the book people."

Related:

• Technorati - da vinci code
• Dan Brown - official site
• The Da Vinci Code movie - Sony official site - IMDB - Yahoo - Apple.com trailers

Tiny-brained in Austin

Camille at Book Moot is all over our blow-dried governor Rick Perry and his empty-headed "65% solution" for spending on Texas public education.

As noted earlier, this stoopid idea counts football as "classroom instruction" (i.e., essential) but not libraries, librarians, counselors, or school nurses.

Librarians and libraries serve and teach EVERY SINGLE student in a school. How many people fit into the football team's locker room??

Unlike classroom teachers who change annually as a student progresses, a librarian is with a student for as long as he/she is at the school. We get to know their interests, their highs and woes. A great many of us have an uncanny ability to put the right book at the right time into a child's hands and make them a lifelong reader.

Librarians instruct students in online safety and good searching techniques. As kids spend more and more time online, it is interesting to realize this kind of education is considered "supplemental."

At its very core, this rule pits educators against each other. We are fighting among ourselves for money. School nurses are a vital part of student safety but under this provision, they too are considered "supplemental" and will have to fight it out with counselors, janitors and the school bus fuel budget for funding.

Posted by Alan at 11:32 AM

The "Oriental Gatsby" caught

Apparently once was not nearly enough for an old hand at official corruption: bagman Tongsun Park is back in the news and under arrest, this time here in Houston.

A key figure in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food scandal was arrested Friday by FBI officials at Bush Intercontinental Airport, federal officials said.

South Korean-born Tongsun Park is accused of secretly working for Saddam Hussein's regime as part of a bribery scheme designed to get the United Nations to ease the economic sanctions imposed after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

"Saddam Hussein's government paid off Tongsun Park to corrupt the Oil-for-Food Program from its inception," said Michael Garcia, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office has been handling the Oil-for-Food inquiry.

Park first gained notoriety back in the 1970s for his involvement in a congressional bribery scandal known as "Koreagate." Park was granted immunity in exchange for testimony against members of Congress.

Federal prosecutors first unveiled criminal charges against Park last April. A new criminal complaint was filed under seal Dec. 22. It was made public Friday in federal court in Manhattan. Park is accused of conspiring to commit wire fraud, acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. government, and money laundering.

The Washington Post had more details last April.

"An American success story" was how Tongsun Park described himself when he first came to the attention of the media and the FBI, in 1977, with gifts of hundreds of thousands of dollars to prominent politicians in an influence-peddling scandal that came to be known as "Koreagate."

More than a quarter of a century later, the South Korean businessman is back in the news, the subject of a federal arrest warrant that alleges he acted as an intermediary with corrupt U.N. officials in an oil-for-food conspiracy orchestrated by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The criminal complaint charges that Park received at least $2 million from Iraq, much of it in cash delivered by diplomatic pouch from Baghdad.

Dubbed the "Oriental Gatsby" by the media because of his lavish Georgetown parties, Park put together an impressive list of friends and clients over the years, including former Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. His charm was legendary, as was his habit of disbursing white envelopes stuffed with as much as $20,000 in cash to congressmen as part of a lobbying campaign financed by South Korean intelligence.

"Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me," he told the House ethics committee in April 1978. "Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do?"

After the Koreagate scandal, Park continued to cultivate politicians, in the United States and abroad. He also kept in touch with friends such as Edwards, whom federal authorities accused of accepting $10,000 from Park. Park exported 1 million tons of Louisiana rice to Korea between 1966 and 1976.

In 2000, Park was spotted at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. At that time, he was reported to be living in the Dominican Republic, where he had petroleum and shipping interests. But he continued to travel to Washington, and was here as recently as last December, according to the FBI.

Smoking guns

Stephen F. Hayes has finally hit paydirt in his relentless efforts to garner information about what the U.S. military found in Saddam Hussein's archives.

The former Iraqi resime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

The future is arriving

Zefram Cochrane, call your office - warp drive may be coming for real.

An extraordinary "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.

The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, ... said the engine would enable spaceships to travel to different solar systems. "If the theory is correct then this is not science fiction, it is science fact," Prof Hauser said.

"NASA have contacted me and next week I'm going to see someone from the [US] air force to talk about it further, but it is at a very early stage. I think the best-case scenario would be within the next five years [to build a test device] if the technology works."

Related:
• New Scientist - Take a Leap Into Hyperspace
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics - Best Papers 2005

Tip via Slashdot

Iran seeks the Bomb

Here's more evidence about Iran's aggressive nuclear ambitions. Note the date of the referenced report.

Iran has been combing Europe and former Soviet states for materials and expertise for potential use in making atomic bombs, according to a leaked intelligence report likely to heighten tensions over Tehran's nuclear drive.

British, French, German and Belgian agencies pooled findings in a 55-page report used to brief governments of the European Union, three of which are conducting talks with Iran in an effort to rein in its nuclear-fuel development program.

The intelligence document, dated July 1, said a large and sophisticated web of Iranian straw companies, academic institutes and middlemen were focusing on Europe and ex-Soviet republics to acquire nuclear technology and know-how.

Where's the evidence that the EU countries haved wised up in the last six months?

The real suicide bomb

Mark Steyn really is contemplating the apocalypse, in an article written for readers with "strong stomachs."

Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

...

[I]f we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb.

Read the whole thing.

King Kong

Almost forgot to note: we saw Peter Jackson's King Kong on Sunday. It was stunning: incredible visuals, effective acting, great storytelling. Three hours flew by.

Grade: A

The Professor

Today is the anniversary of the birth in 1892 of scholar, teacher, soldier and author J.R.R. Tolkien. As suggested by the Tolkien Society and practiced around the world, we will drink a toast to him at 9:00 p.m. in the traditional way: "To the Professor."

Many thanks to the creator of Middle Earth and a man of abiding faith.

Happy New Year 2006

Here's to President Bush and his New Year's resolutions. For example:

Learn New Languages: Specifically learn how to say “I accept your unconditional surrender” in Arabic, Korean, Farsi and Liberalese.