Back of the Envelope

Now this is interesting. It's supposedly a press release from the Jews living in Iran in support of their government (hat tip Michael Rubin in The Corner):

The Association of Iranian Jews…renewed its commitment in a message issued on the threshold of the Jewish religious festival of the Passover, which starts Monday night.

"In obedience to the instructions of Jesus, in the new Iranian year, which has been declared year of national unity and Islamic solidarity, Iranian Jews voice their readiness to defend all national interests of Iranians and to observe the guidelines set by Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei) for the sake of strengthening national unity and solidarity in the fight against present-day pharaohs," the message said.

Notice the reference to Jesus. Now, I'm hardly an expert on Iranian Jews, but to quote Jesus not just approvingly, but as a source of authority who should be obeyed, does not represent orthodox Jewish beliefs. While there could very well be Christian Jews in Iran, I doubt they're in charge of the Association of Iranian Jews. So what can we make of this? Pure propaganda written by the Iranian government, whose knowledge of Judaism and Christianity is equally abysmal, or, as Michael Rubin suggests, are "Iranian Jews living in the Islamic Republic (there are still around 20,000) ... signaling that something is very wrong"? Either way, it fails to convincingly demonstrate the support of Iranian Jews for the revolutionary government.

With all the talk about the surge in Iraq, you may be wondering how I'm feeling. I've always been cautiously optimistic about Iraq, since the very first stages of the war. Even when things seemed to be going very well right afterwards, and after the first couple of elections, my optimism was still cautious. And when thigns were going bad and violence was surging, I was still optimistic, if more subdued. You have to look at the long-term trends rather than get bogged down in the day-to-day events. It's difficult to make sense of the day-to-day events, with the media calling Iraq a failure no matter what happens, and the military putting its own spin on things.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people are wondering why Bush is only doing this now, after the midterm elections, when he should have done it a long time ago. And frankly, I think it's because Bush's attitude is close to mine. Through 2005, things seemed to be going pretty well in Iraq. Granted, there was still violence, but Iraq had its own government, and it looked like soon the Iraqis would be able to take charge. Things only turned nasty in 2006, and while Bush may have wanted to try a different approach, Rumsfeld and the generals on the ground didn't. Bush had put his trust in these folks, and they had been pretty successful so far, and they were there and knew the situation better than anyone, so I can understand his reluctance to get rid of them. An uptick in violence for a few months did not make Iraq a catastrophe any more than the previous upticks had. Only when the long-term trends made it clear that Rumseld's and the generals' methods weren't working, and they showed no sign of being willing to change them, did he make the decision to replace them with people who would get the job done. Unfortunately, midterm elections probably had a role in this, and for numerous reasons, Bush didn't want to be seen as changing tactics right before the election. For one, it would have been seen as a political ploy rather than a serious bid to change the course of events in Iraq. And maybe he did fear it would cost Republicans some votes, although everyone else was arguing the opposite. I still don't know whether it's such a bad thing that the Republicans lost big. I think that, to some degree, having an opposition government has made Bush freer. He doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected, and now he doesn't have to worry about keeping his party in power by not doing anything to offend the "moderates" whose votes they depended on. Granted, the Democrats will try to stop this, but they're pretty limited in what they can do. It's one thing to call for troops to return, but they lack the Constitutional authority to actually force that to happen, and not too many will be willing to actually stop funding the war. It's one thing to oppose sending troops, another thing entirely to abandon those now there.

Anyway, that's the political side. Do I think we should be doing this? Ever since we caught Saddam, I've believed we were doing the right thing in Iraq. Before the war started, I wasn't so sure, as I was always a bit iffy on the whole WMD issue. But once Saddam was caught and we'd completed our initial mission, the question was do we just leave and let a society rent apart by a tyrannical dictator further destroy itself, or do we stay and try to help them create a new society. We had what we wanted, and what we had to gain by staying was very idealistic: a civil society in the Middle East that would hopefully be a model for others. That's all. For all the talk of blood for oil, I don't see it. We decided to stay, and it was the right thing to do. A very hard thing, true, but the right thing. And if we're going to do it, we need to do it right, and that means winning. I don't think our former strategy could accomplish that, but I think this one might. It's not guaranteed, but let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.

Well, all the hawks on Iraq are feeling mighty depressed this week. The Democrats won Congress, and in response, Bush fired Rumsfeld, and seems to be replacing him, and much of the rest of his inner circule, with a bunch of realpolitik, deal-making-with-Middle-Eastern-despots Bush 41 guys. And now the Democrats are planning to vote for withdrawal the moment they're sworn in. Mark Steyn's particularly pessimistic, saying that the American Moment is over, and we'll soon be joining Europe in the long slide into irrelevancy.

They may be right. Then again, they may not. One thing I've always admired about Bush is his ability to stick with his guns. The firing of Rumsfeld was far from his greatest moment (the day after the election, just a couple of weeks after saying Rumsfeld would stay), but the same crowd that's now condemning how it was done were calling from Rumsfeld's resignation just a week ago (before the election, not after). The bottom line, though, is that Rumsfeld had to go. Now, I liked Rumsfeld. However, he couldn't have survived this Congress, which is going to start the year looking for a head (Democrats have been promising impeachment hearings for years now), and Rumsfeld would have spent the next two years testifying before Congress. That is less important, though, than the fact that he wasn't getting the job done in Iraq. That may not be a fair criticism--it may be that, if given free reign, he could have done it. However, more than once he's stood in the way of getting things done in the manner the president wanted them done. He's been one of the most vociferous opponents of more troops, arguing most strongly for the need to let the Iraqis handle things, when at the end of the day, the Iraqis have proven themselves incapable of doing so. Now, ultimately, the Iraqis will have to take over, but for now the brunt of the work needs to be done by US forces, and the Iraqi forces will have to operate under US supervision, and Rumsfeld wasn't managing that. So I think there's good reason to believe that replacing Rumsfeld is a step in the right direction.

As for Congress forcing us to withdraw from Iraq--I don't think that's likely. The Democratic leadership is planning for the Senate to vote on a nonbinding resolution calling for withdrawal from Iraq in 2007. The last time this was brought up for a vote it was defeated overwhelmingly. But the mood of the electorate has changed, and the large number of Senators who follow the polls rather than their own consciences may be enough to turn the vote around, despite the exit polls saying that 70% of the voters were voting against corruption, not against the war. In the end, though, it's a nonbinding resolution, not a law, which means it's little more than a statement of opinion. And if it were a law, even if there are enough votes to pass it, there aren't enough votes to override a Presidential veto. Of more immediate concern is the House, which may cut funding for the war effort. That would be politically risky, though. Even if most people want us out of Iraq (which isn't proven), they don't want to cut off funding to our troops while they're still there.

So the bottom line is not what Congress wants, or what his advisors are saying, but rather what Bush wants. From everything I've seen, Bush still intends to win this war. Until that changes, I won't give up hope just yet.

I find this sort of news encouraging (via Captain's Quarters):

For three years, the Bush administration has waged a campaign to choke off North Korea's access to the world's financial system, where U.S. officials say the nation launders money from criminal enterprises to fuel its trade in missile technology and its efforts to build a nuclear arsenal.

That effort has started to pay off.

U.S. pressure forced Macao this year to freeze North Korean assets in one of its banks, then foiled North Korea's panicky attempts to find friendly bankers in Vietnam, Mongolia, Singapore and Europe. And after North Korea's Oct. 9 nuclear test, China ordered some of its major banks to cease financial transactions with the country.

The cash crunch appears to have played a key role in North Korea's decision Tuesday to return to six-nation talks over its nuclear ambitions. North Korean officials said that as part of the talks, they wanted to raise the issue of lifting financial sanctions.

"They're not coming back because they want to give up nuclear weapons," said David L. Asher, the U.S. State Department's point man on North Korea until last year. "They are feeling the financial pressure and the cutoff from the international financial system, so they are trying to make nice."

The article goes on to explain that as long as Russia and China refuse to cooperate (more than they've done here), the effort will never be fully successful. Still, it's good to see that the US is involved in doing more than waving carrots in front of North Korea and hoping they'll cooperate. It's been obvious for years that North Korea's greatest weakness is it's economy--it has somehow managed to create one of the world's least successful command economies, for which there is no lack of competition. Its people are starving, it can't produce enough electricity to power even its capital city after dark, and its attempts at ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons have proven incompetent (thankfully). I'm beginning to think that the great fear, war on the Korean peninsula, is overrated, since if the rest of their society is anything to go by, their army is largely for show. But that shouldn't be necessary. If enough pressure is applied to their economy, North Korea will collapse, and it looks like the Bush administration is making every effort to do that behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, while China and Russia want to rein in North Korea, neither of them want it to collapse. First, because a collapsing North Korea will cause trouble on their borders, with a possible war, millions of refugees, and potentially nuclear weapons. Second, because a collapsed North Korea will look like a victory for the US, and greater esteem for the US is against their national interest. Third, because the ultimate fate of a collapsed North Korea is reunion with South Korea, which moves it outside of China's sphere of influence.

China sees itself as a burgeoning superpower, but it faces the difficulty that relatively few nations accept its leadership. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea have strong economies, and benefit from a strong relation with the US. In fact, they depend on the US for protection, and therein lies our leverage with China. If North Korea does develop nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, then there's every reason to believe that we will arm our allies within range of those weapons. A nuclear armed South Korea and Japan are bad for China, a nuclear armed Taiwan is a nightmare. One thing China still dreams about is reuniting the tiny island with the mainland, by conquest if necessary, and nuclear weapons take conquest off the table. That is why they're applying as much pressure as they can to North Korea, trying to get it to back off its nuclear weapons development without breaking the country.

North Korea detonating nukes, Iran trying to get them, terrorists looking for a chance to use them against us. Some people think that it's not a case of if, but when, an American city will be struck by a nuclear weapon. Most people don't worry about it, though. I wonder why.

I know why I'm not overly worried, as I explained in this post on asteroid strikes, but not everyone shares my faith. Is everyone just so confident in God (whatever version they believe in), or are we overly complacent?

This article by Jonah Goldberg seems depressingly correct:

The West is surely indebted to Protestantism. But the idea that liberal secularism was born from it steals a few bases. Protestantism lent itself to being a state religion even more than Catholicism did. And while Christianity has long recognized the distinction between secular and religious authority, the reality is that secularism rests on a foundation of blood, not theology. The Reformation inaugurated an era of relentless religious wars. French Catholics slaughtered Protestant French Huguenots. Calvinists and Lutherans beat the stuffing out of each other. The bloodshed continued until, as British historian Herbert Butterfield put it, religious tolerance became “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer.” Secular tolerance, in other words, defined the terms of cease-fire.

Now, obviously, as a Protestant evangelical Christian, I think the Reformation was a good thing. While the Pope made a good argument about the need for Classical thought in Christianity in his much maligned speech (and while sympathetic, I'm not completely convinced by that argument), I think the Church in Luther's time had strayed far from the right path and needed correction. After all, I believe that Christianity is at its core a true religion, and thus anything that makes its doctrine and practice more pure makes it more true. That said, purity is not something to be sought at any cost. While a worthwhile goal, it needs to be sought in humility, acknowledging that there is much that I do not know, and even when I know for a certainty, I should be teaching the truth in love. My goal is not to force anyone to believe anything, but to convince them, and to be willing to learn where I am mistaken.

As Jonah's Jewish, I don't expect him to agree that Christianity needs to be pure, so it's understandable that he's more interested in the practical results of the Reformation. Likewise, I'm less concerned with Islam's purity than the practical effects of what Muslim believes. So is it hypocritical for me to believe that Christianity should be more pure, while I'm all for Islam being less pure? Well, from my perspective, it makes perfect sense, as simply put, I believe Christianity is true and Islam is false.

Here the Pope and I agree, as is clear in this column by Michael Ledeen:

The combination of this crackpot toleration with a general contempt for religion made it difficult for us to comprehend the nature of the current war. Everyone from W. on down has been at great pains to assure us and themselves that we have no basic conflict with Islam, that our battle is with some lunatics who say falsely that they speak in the name of Islam. So we feel quite uncomfortable when the pope — quite deliberately — poses a question about Islam itself: Is it capable of responding to reason, or is it, as he put it, completely transcendent, beyond the reach of man, and hence unchallengeable by man under any circumstances?

It’s a big question, not easily reduced to newspeak like “did the pope anticipate the reaction?” Or “did the pope go too far?” That sort of banter is embarrassingly silly. Of course the pope anticipated the reaction, he’s one of the smartest and most learned men in the world, and he’s spent a lot of time studying Islam. He wanted to draw a line. He is not prepared to extend total, blind toleration to people who use violence in the name of faith, and he’s challenging the Muslims to answer the real questions. That quotation he chose — the one that asks, Is there anything positive that has emerged from the expansion of the domain of Islam? — wasn’t generated at random. He picked it quite wittingly. Of course he knows that, for several centuries, Islam conserved the wisdom of the West, the same “Greek” wisdom he invoked as the indispensable partner of Christian faith. He’s defying the Muslims to admit that, because he knows that the jihadis don’t want to hear about it, and that an open debate about it may undermine the sway of so many dogmatic mosques, schools, TV stations, and Internet sites.

Simply put, Christians are called to Evangelize. If I believe that Islam is wrong, then it is my duty to convince Muslims of this. As a Christian, I am not just opposed to radical Islam or fundamentalist Islam or Islamic fascism. I am opposed to Islam itself. Most Christians would just as soon shirk this responsibility. Calling on people to repent and convert doesn't come easily. It's never easy to evangelize, and even moreso with people who respond violently when you do so. That doesn't make it any less a Christian responsibility.

Having said that, here's what I don't believe it is my, or anyone else's responsibility, to do. I should not be trying to outlaw Islam, or to force people to convert, or ridiculing Muslims. I believe it's possible to respect Muslims, and even their beliefs, while opposing those beliefs. I'm not trying to force them to change their beliefs, but to convince them through reasoned arguments.

And this is not America's responsibility. It's not something our government or our military should be trying to do. They need to, and do, oppose the radical, violent ideology of Islamic fascism, trying to encourage more moderate versions of Islam. That is indeed what they should be doing. It is not up to them, but up to us, the Christian community, to oppose Islam itself, to say that it is false and force it to defend itself. I think it is highly unlikely that Islam will be destroyed in this confrontation, but there are several possible beneficial results:

1. It will win Muslim believers to Christianity. This is a real, and in a spiritual sense, the most important benefit.


2. It will force Muslim scholars to defend their faith, and encourage in them a more reasoned, and hopefully more moderate faith.


3. When forced to acknowledge other beliefs within their society, it will hopefully require Muslim countries to adopt a more tolerant attitude towards other religions, and finally acknowledge the freedom to conversion.

Are these benefits likely to happen? In the short term, no. If the reaction to the Pope's speech is any indicator, the immediate response will be close-mindedness and violence. That does not make it any less worthwhile. While most Muslim leaders probably don't agree, I believe that Islam has to move past this. If it doesn't, it will implode. If belief needs to be enforced by the sword, it will collapse the same way Communism did the moment the sword-arm shows any weakness. Applying pressure only accelerates this.

John Podhoretz thinks that Bush may be ready to use force against Iran:

George W. Bush just delivered what may be the most important speech of his presidency since he went before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, and declared his intention to seek regime change in Iraq.

The time has come, the president all but said yesterday, to take the gloves off with Iran.

"The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon," he said flatly. He prefaced those words by saying that efforts were being made to find a diplomatic solution to the problem. Nonetheless, Bush has now said in the strongest sentence he has yet spoken on the matter that Iran will not go nuclear. He is unconditional about it.

Captain Ed takes a different view of the whole situation:

The White House and senior Republican leadership in Congress have little enthusiasm for a war resolution at this time targeting Iran, the New York Sun reports this morning. After a suggestion by William Kristol that such a piece of legislation would put more pressure on Teheran to comply with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the Bush administration and Congress distanced themselves from any such talk...

At best, such a resolution would be a big bluff, providing authority for little more than air strikes that might damage Iran's nuclear program but would also likely turn their population against us. And the last thing we need in that region is to issue more empty threats.

The political situation in Iran is far different than it was in Iraq, and there is much greater hope that an internal movement could collapse the mullahcracy. Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council do not exercise the same kind of oppression that Saddam Hussein did on Iraqis. The Iranians would not stand for it, and the mullahs have to tread carefully to maintain their power, which is why they stage elections for the Assembly and the presidency, even though they retain veto power over all that either do. (They may have forgotten this, as my post below notes.)

If the US could help Iranian democracy activists gain momentum, especially starting with the trade unions and university professors, the Iranians themselves could overthrow the mullahcracy and replace it with a much more rational government. Iran's history is not one of radicalism, with the exception of the last thirty years, but of educated, Western-looking sophisticates. They may not replace the mullahs with a carbon-copy Western democracy, but any rational form of representative government will make a huge difference.

How do I feel about this? While, like Captain Ed, I long for an internal revolution that overthrows the mullahs, I just don't know whether that will happen quickly enough. I'm worried that a nuclear weapon will be in Hezbollah's or Hamas's or even al Qaeda's hands before that can happen, and airstrikes to set back Iran's nuclear program by a couple of years is starting to sound like a good idea. If Iran's population is truly looking for a liberal democracy, they won't change their minds because we knock out such a dire threat.

Mario Loyola makes the argument that Israel came out on top in the ceasefire with Hezbollah deal, even if mostly by accident. The general consensus of everyone except Olmert (the Israeli Prime Minister) is that Israel messed up the war, losing out on a golden opportunity to cripple Hezbollah by lashing out blindly. I guess I have to give more credit to all the complaints about Israel's "disproportionate response" than I did before, although it was less "disproportionate" than "poorly aimed." Of course, even a poorly aimed response can have some benefits, as Loyola notes:

Despite appearances, things are shaping up in some ways quite favorably for Israel — insofar as this is possible. Israel may not have much ground truth to show for its military efforts in south Lebanon, but it did make a very important point, or rather two: Namely, that it will destroy half of Lebanon in the blink of an eye before it will permit Lebanon to be used as a missile platform to terrorize Israelis, and that it will blow right through anybody that Hezbollah tries to use as a human shield.

In effect, Israel has transcended its image problem. Agree with Israel or disagree with it, everybody now knows that if Hezbollah uses you as a human shield, you are dead. This creates a huge disincentive to being used as human shields—at least for Europeans, who are generally happy with the abundant supply of virgins (etc.) right here on planet Earth and feel no need to go seeking them anyplace else.

A rather cold analysis, but a useful one. Our enemies' tactics are based on their high estimation of our humane behavior. They may accuse us of murdering women and children, but if they really believed that, they wouldn't be hiding behind them. Israel has made it clear that there is a limit to how far that strategy can take you. They know that they will be accused of killing innocents no matter how careful they are, so they are free to pursue their military objectives without regard for how it plays on TV. Although I don't commend that attitude (you don't avoid killing civilians just to avoid the press's condemnation), it is nevertheless satisfying to see Hezbollah's own strategy working against them. The modern West's paranoia of civilian casualties is often unhealthy anyway, making it impossible to wage war to the full extent and thus dragging out the fighting, and ultimately resulting in greater civilian casualties.

Mario has a bit more to say about how the new UN force is larger and more effective than the previous one, and he concludes with

The most immediate effect of a robust European-led presence may indeed be to chill Hezbollah activity in south Lebanon. The current ceasefire could turn out to be a lasting interregnum. But with our without the fighting, one thing is increasingly clear. In seeking deviously to outsmart the Israelis and the Americans, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan may have outsmarted themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Cynthia Lo talks a bit about the issue of proportionality in war, specifically as applied to the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict, over at Iron Chef. She quotes a lot of people without really giving her own opinion, but I think I'll go ahead and give my opinion on the matter.

The idea of proportionality has been misrepresented a lot recently. In just war, proportionality is not about doing no more damage to your enemy than they do to you. That is not a reasonable way to conduct war, as by its very nature it precludes victory. No, proportionality is about doing no more damage than necessary in order to achieve your objectives. The question, then, is whether the objective of the Israeli military is just, and whether the damage they've done is proportional to their objective. Proportionality in this sense is very technology dependent. In World War 2, you basically had to destroy a city if you wanted to take out a military factory. Precision bombing is a vast improvement over that.

So, we're faced with three questions: What is the Israeli military's objective? Is it just? And is the damage they are doing proportionate to their objective? The objective is, and I think most people are agreed on this, to cripple Hezbollah's capability to wage war against them, even destroying the organization if possible. Is this a just objective? Well, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It is not possible for Israel and Hezbollah to coexist, because Hezbollah's entire reason for being is to eliminate Israel. Some folks say that Hezbollah is now a legitimate political party, which provides social services and builds schools and hospitals. This is true only in the sense that Hezbollah is a political party dedicated to the destruction of Israel. I can't speak for the hospitals, but the schools are propaganda mills teaching a new generation of martyrs to hate Jews. And political parties, as a rule, are not also armed militias which control some territory so thoroughly that the legitimate elected government doesn't dare send police or troops there. So I think that there is a strong argument that the destruction, or at least disarmament (as called for in Security Council Resolution 1559), of Hezbollah is a just cause. Ideally, the Lebanese army would do it. It's their country, and Hezbollah is a threat to their authority as much as Israel's existence, but Lebanon is either unable or unwilling to do it. The leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, claims that he controls Lebanon's government, and some of what they're saying seems to conform with that.

So the final question is whether Israel's use of force is proportionate with their objective. I believe it is, but that is an argument that has to be decided by people who better understand the military situation. As I understand it, Israel has taken action to cut off Hezbollah from Syria and Iran, and then has bombed the location of known Hezbollah hideouts. They've tried to clear the civilian population away from the area, which is probably a mistake. First, it warns Hezbollah so it can leave the area. Second, the civilians are unable to leave since Hezbollah is keeping them in place by force. Civilian casualties on either side works to Hezbollah's benefit, and they will attempt to maximize them and inflate the numbers. There have been reports of firefights between civilians attempting to leave the area and Hezbollah fighters.

Ideally, Israel would so weaken Hezbollah that the Lebanese government could send its troops in and sweep away the remnants. It would be difficult for Lebanon to publicly cooperate with Israel, though, which is why I'm hoping that there is more going on behind the scenes than there appears to be.

Many conservatives are chomping at the bit, feeling that Bush has been too soft when he should have been more aggressive in going after North Korea and Iran. Captain Ed disagrees:

Most of this comes from a short attention span. This effort will take decades, not months, and Bush knows it. One cannot hope to transform all tyrannies into democracies overnight. It takes time to build up the momentum, and it will ebb and flow as world events unfold. The crisis in North Korea has been years in coming, and Bush started off with a lousy hand, as the Jimmy Carter-imposed Agreed Framework allowed Pyongyang to do as it pleased for eight years. Unless we want to start another ground war in Asia, we cannot simply bomb the Kim regime into non-existence. The Kim regime is committing slow suicide as it is, and the Bush policy of multilateral engagement is the correct one to contain Kim and to contain the damage from the ultimate collapse that will inevitably come.

On Iran, Bush allowed the Europeans to take the lead for a number of good reasons. Primarily, the White House wanted to focus on consolidating the Iraqi victory, and the mere presence of Americans on Iraq's Western border made it clear that we had a big stake in the outcome. It also made sense to have the EU-3 handle the negotiations, since neither Iran or the US wanted diplomatic relations with each other. Europe, which had convinced itself of the folly of American unilateralism, wanted the chance to strike a deal with Iran, and since they had more at risk with a nuclear Teheran, it made sense to allow them to do so. After all, we do not run the world.

Now we know that the EU failed, and the EU knows that it failed. We still have the big military in place in the region, and the Iranians know that we will not stand idly by while Iran threatens our position. If they had not realized it by now, they certainly understand it in our refusal to rein in Israel in Lebanon. We cannot simply start attacking Iran simply because their leader makes nutty statements about the Holocaust and has abrogated a treaty on non-proliferation. We need to build up as much of a consensus as possible to take action -- just as we did with Iraq -- and then strike if necessary.

I believe in a strong defense and pre-emption when necessary. I don't see the necessity at the moment, and in fact I see Israel's action as putting off that day for a while longer. If Israel crushes Iran's proxy and chases the Islamists out of Lebanon, Iran will find itself isolated even further -- and then they will want to cut a deal that makes sense.

Captain Ed makes some good points, but I really do not know whether he is right or not. There is too much I don't know about Iran and North Korea, and unfortunately, I'm not sure anyone knows. I hope we're taking the right approach, but I don't feel qualified to judge.

Mark Steyn has a book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. The book's premise is that anthropologists have whitewashed the violence in primitive societies, allowing the myth of civilization's evils and the primitive man as peaceful and in tune with nature to thrive in the popular mind, despite it's lack of a factual basis:

But the passage that really stopped me short was this:

"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."

That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction."

Anyone who's studied ancient history should have little trouble seeing the lie. War, slavery, and oppression are not inventions of Western culture. They've been practiced by just about every culture man has come up with.

Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? ... We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.

Genocide was considered the normal way of war in the ancient world. The rightness or wrongness of war was not considered, only whether you were strong enough to take what you want from the neighboring village, city, or nation. Aside from the high points of a few ancient civilizations (the Greeks, for example, often practiced limited warfare between professional armies for limited gain--and ultimately lost to the Romans, who did not practice limited war), it is only recently, in the last few hundred years, that we've come to believe wiping out the opposing nation is wrong, to believe that civilians are not legitimate targets in war, that it is not permitted to start a war simply to conquer another nation. Is it any wonder that large numbers of people have not been convinced yet? They'll take advantage of our distinction between combatant and civilain, but they won't follow it.

Mankind is fallen, given to sin and violence. Peace is the aberration, not war. It won't survive on its own.

From Jonah Goldberg:

It seems an obvious point to me that flying space Marines would be a valuable contribution to the arsenal of democracy.

There's simply no way I can follow that.

It's an act of provocation any way you look at it. North Korea launched seven missiles yesterday:

All of the seven missiles fired by North Korea early Wednesday local time — six short-range variants of the Soviet-era Scud and one long-range rocket — fell into the Sea of Japan.

The long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, failed about 40 seconds after it was fired, U.S. officials said. Some analysts believe the Taepodong-2 is capable of hitting the western United States.

As might be expected, diplomats are talking about imposing sanctions, which of course are opposed by China and Russia, who may have contributed to North Korea's missile capablities in the first place. If that is the case, I vote for sanctions against China and Russia and permanent removal from the security council (and can we get rid of France as well?), but there's no mechanism to do that.

The question on everyone's mind is why the Taepodong-2 crashed into the sea. Was it defective? That would be good news, but not that good. Did the US shoot it down? That would be better, but it's unlikely. Was it only supposed to go a short way? That's not good.

Despite all this bluster, North Korea is desperate. Its economy is falling apart, its people are starving, its infrastructure is non-existent. It is reduced to stealing trains to keep its railroads running. At heart, North Korea is a thug which has nothing but the threat of violence to get what it wants. The smart thing to do would be to stop giving it what it wants. It couldn't survive long without international support, but the fear is that it will lash out in its death throes and kill millions, either with nuclear weapons (which it may or may not have) or with a massive ground assault on South Korea. It's doubtful it could win--it doesn't have the infrastructure to support a prolonged war. Even the Western will isn't so weak that it couldn't outlast them. However, even in losing, North Korea could kill thousands, perhaps even millions. The Western nations would rather just appease it until it collapses, while Russia and China see it as a useful tool against the US. But my guess is that propping up a dying regime is only delaying the inevitable, and meanwhile millions of North Koreans are suffering and, yes, dying, in Kim Jong Il's war on his own people. And every year Kim Jong Il extorts food and money from the West with his thuggery, more dictators are convinced they can do the same.

I certainly hope this is true:

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been virtually wiped out by the loss of an address book. The death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was not as important as the capture of his address book and other planning documents in the wake of the June 7th bombing. U.S. troops are trained to quickly search for names and addresses when they stage a raid, pass that data on to a special intelligence cell, which then quickly sorts out which of the addresses should be raided immediately, before the enemy there can be warned that their identity has been compromised. More information is obtained in those raids, and that generates more raids. So far, the June 7th strike has led to over 500 more raids. There have been so many raids, that there are not enough U.S. troops to handle it, and over 30 percent of the raids have been carried by Iraqi troops or police, with no U.S. involvement. Nearly a thousand terrorist suspects have been killed or captured. The amount of information captured has overwhelmed intelligence organizations in Iraq, and more translators and analysts are assisting, via satellite link, from the United States and other locations.
...
Zarqawi considered al Qaeda's situation in Iraq as "bleak." The most worrisome development was the growing number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police. These were able to easily spot the foreigners who made up so much of al Qaeda's strength. Moreover, more police and soldiers in an area meant some local civilians would feel safe enough to report al Qaeda activity. The result of all this is that there are far fewer foreign Arabs in Iraq fighting for al Qaeda. The terrorist organization has basically been taken over anti-government Sunni Arabs. That made the capture of Zarqawi even more valuable, as his address book contained a who's who of the anti-government Sunni Arab forces. This group has been hurt badly by last week's raids.

We won't really know how successful these raids have been for months, and we see whether we've really crippled their abilities to conduct attacks. Even so, it sounds like Zarqawi's death has proved to be more of a victory than I dared hope.

Of course, you don't need me to tell you that. It's being played all over the Internet: Instapundit, The Corner, Dean Esmay, and Captain Ed are all over this. This is definitely good news for Iraq and the war on terror. Of course, some of al Qaeda considers it good news as well. Information about his location was leaked by his associates. Zarqawi was becoming a liability, instigating problems with Hezbollah and Iran (which is al Qaeda's main state supporter these days), and alienating Iraq's population with his killing of civilians and especially Shi'ites. It would have been better for al Qaeda if his death had looked like a suicide attack, but being killed by US forces is better than nothing. From our perspective, it would have been better to capture him, interrogate him, try him, and then execute him. Even so, killing him has a number of beneficial effects. It doesn't destroy, but it does harm the terrorist network in Iraq, doubly so as we got not just Zarqawi but a number of his top aides. It's also a psychological boost to both Iraq and the US, which has grown weary of this war with a steady (though small) stream of casualties and few clear victories. Zarqawi's death also provided a positive backdrop for the Iraqi Prime minister, al-Maliki, to announce the new appointments which complete his cabinet.

Not everyone is celebrating Zarqawi's death. Michael Berg, the father of beheaded civilian Nick Berg, is not happy at all:

I'm sorry when any human being dies...and I feel bad for that. His death will reignite yet another wave of revenge. It's an endless cycle as long as people use violence to fight violence...When Nick was killed I felt that I had nothing left to lose...I was not a risk-taking person, but I've done things that have endangered me. I have been shot at...Every time we kill an Iraqi...we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. When are we ever gonna learn that that doesn't work?

I can't say I agree with Michael Berg, as I believe Zarqawi's death does more to end the "cycle of violence" than his life, but his words got me thinking. As a Christian, I'm supposed to be praying for my enemies and blessing those who persecute me. Is it right for me to celebrate anyone's death, even someone as evil as Zarqawi? Much better for him, and for me, if he had come to repentance, to recognize the evil of his own deeds and reform. Consider Paul as an example of what a reformed sinner can accomplish. However, he was a murderer, daily assisting in the killing of men, women, and children, trying to incite a civil war which would have killed thousands, maybe millions, more. It is right and just that I celebrate that such evil has been stopped. That Zarqawi no longer has a chance to repent is a price lighter than the thousands of others whose chances he cut short.

At some point, the bland multi-culti banalisms lose their appeal, and people yearn for harsh truths, especially when those truths are obvious. Mark Steyn doesn't shy away from that:

The line here is "respect." Everybody's busy professing their "respect": We all "respect" Islam; presidents and prime ministers and foreign ministers, lapsing so routinely into the deep-respect-for-the-religion-of-peace routine they forget that cumulatively it begins to sound less like "Let's roll!" and too often like "Let's roll over!"

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, gave a typical Western government official's speech the other day explaining that "a large number of Muslims in this country were -- understandably -- upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomized the learned, peaceful religion of Islam."

"The learned, peaceful religion of Islam"? And that would be the guys marching through London with placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM" and "FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM" and promising to rain down a new Holocaust on Europe? This is geopolitics as the Aretha Franklin Doctrine: The more the world professes its R-E-S-P-E-C-T, the more the Islamists sock it to us.

At a basic level the foreign secretary's rhetoric does not match reality. Government leaders are essentially telling their citizens: Who ya gonna believe -- my platitudinous speechwriters or your lyin' eyes?

To win a war, you don't spin a war. Millions of ordinary citizens are not going to stick with a "long war" (as the administration now calls it) if they feel they're being dissembled to about its nature. One reason we regard Churchill as a great man is that his speeches about the nature of the enemy don't require unspinning or detriangulating.

We all want to believe Islam is the religion of peace, but while we've been giving it the benefit of the doubt for the past four and a half years, many of its adherents have been busy chipping away that doubt. I really want to see some evidence.

Given all the brouhaha over the Danish cartoons, the Palestinian elections, and the sectarian struggles (still well short of a Civil War) in Iraq, many on the Right are starting to question their assumptions. We have argued for a while that there is nothing barbaric about Muslims or Islam, that the vast majority want to live in peace and let us do the same. The main difficulty is not the religion, but the totalitarian regimes under which they live, which squelch their political will and radicalize their religion in service to the despot. We still want to believe this, and indeed, Dean Esmay will argue for it quite emphatically. But quietly, many on the Right, Left, and Middle, including millions of voters who don't identify themselves with any of those groups, are beginning to wonder whether we can really peacefully co-exist with the Muslim Middle East. The cartoon controversy put things in stark relief, forcing us to realize that many Muslims don't accept a live and let live mentality, but they want to force their way of life on us. It's that realization, along with the spectacle of watching Western politicians and media elites tripping over each other in their rush to knuckle under, which set off a backlash that sank the Dubai port deal. Are these Muslims who threatened violence in order to silence us representative? I pray that they aren't. So where are the moderate Muslims who are supposed to be the majority. Mark Steyn offers a theory (reg required):

Meanwhile, we prattle on about "moderate Muslims," telling ourselves that the "vast majority" of Muslims aren't terrorists, don't support terrorists, etc. Okay, why don't we hear from them then?

Because they live in communities where the ideological bullies set the pace, where the price of speaking out is too high, and so they find it easier to say nothing, keep their heads down. And why would we expect them to do any differently when the mighty BBC and CNN do the same? If there is such a thing as a "moderate Muslim," he's surely thinking, "Well, if the CBC and the Toronto Star have to knuckle under to the imams, there's no point me tossing in my two bits."

That is my second most preferred theory--that they're out there but afraid to speak up given their oppressive communities, especially when no one in the West has the courage to back them. My first most preferred theory is that they did speak up, but the BBC and CNN were so busy not offending the radical Muslims that they didn't have time for those who were offended by the violence. The third theory, the one I hope and pray is wrong, is that there really aren't that many "moderate Muslims" after all.

I haven't said much on the cartoons which are causing such an outcry in the Muslim world. I have some thoughts of my own, but I've been pretty busy writing, so instead I'll just borrow someone else's, namely John O'Sullivan:

As riots spread through the Islamic world, the British foreign secretary, the U.S. State Department, the U.N. secretary general, various responsible Muslim organizations and many commentators in Europe and America are calling for restraint on both sides.

What both sides would those be? Well, one side has published a handful of cartoons, arguably blasphemous and certainly insulting to the Prophet Mohammed, and the other side has burned embassies, taken hostages, murdered three people suspected of being Christians and/or Danes, shot at Danish soldiers helping children in Iraq, marched through London with banners threatening further bomb attacks on the city, and attacked and beaten people whom they suspected of some vague connection with, well, with Europe or Christianity.

Suppose both sides listen to these calls for restraint. What would happen? I suppose that one side would stop burning embassies and murdering people and the other side would no longer publish cartoons to which the murderers might object. That would mean the murderers had obtained their objective and the Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons had been defeated in its campaign against the unofficial Islamist censorship that in recent years has spread across Europe by murder and intimidation.

As uncomfortable as it is, he certainly has a point.

Update (2/10/2006): Link fixed.

...and it's not afraid to use them. Three guesses whom Chirac's talking about:

France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent.
...
"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part," Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in northwestern France.

"This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind."

Chirac, who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, said all of France's nuclear forces had been configured with the new strategy in mind and the number of nuclear warheads on French nuclear submarines had been reduced to allow targeted strikes.

It was the first time he had so clearly linked the threat of a nuclear response to a terrorist attack.

Chirac, 73, did not say whether France would be prepared to use pre-emptive strikes against a country it saw as a threat.

So is France willing to use force to protect a third party, such as Israel? Doubtful, but it's actually encouraging to see that some fire's left in France. (Hat tip to Clayton Cramer.)

It seems that great minds do indeed think alike, and Jonah Goldberg has joined the anti-mullah party:

Iranians are a proud, nationalistic people and would probably rally around their government — or any government — were it threatened from without. That's one reason Ahmadinejad has been rattling his sabers so much lately: It's an attempt to bolster his unpopular regime.

A coup by sophisticated and serious members of the military would be great news. Even better would be a popular uprising. And best of all would be a combination of the two. An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East. That would go a long way toward guaranteeing success in Iraq and would neutralize the threat of the Iran's nuclear ambitions, even if they decided to pursue a bomb. After all, the argument about nuclear weapons is no different than the argument about guns. The threat is from the people who have them, not from the weapons themselves. Lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs.

Alas, while there's reason to believe the White House shares this view in theory, there's less reason to believe it's doing that much about it in practice.

Let's do it.

Mark Steyn proposes something I suggested a long time ago:

So what can be done? Right now, Iran can count on at least two Security Council vetoes against any meaningful action by the "international community". As for the unilaterally inclined, the difficulty for the US and Israel is that there's really no Osirak-type resolution of the problem - a quick surgical strike, in and out. By most counts, there are upwards of a couple of hundred potential sites spread across a wide range of diverse terrain, from remote mountain fastnesses to residential suburbs.
...
But, granted the Iranian destabilisation of Iraq and their sponsorship of terror groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, surely it shouldn't be difficult to give them a taste of their own medicine. Who, after all, likes the Teheran regime? The Russian and Chinese and North Korean governments and the fulsome Mr Straw appear to, but there's less evidence that the Iranian people do.

The majority of Iran's population is younger than the revolution: whether or not they're as "pro-American" as is sometimes claimed, they have no memory of the Shah; all they've ever known is their ramshackle Islamic republic where the unemployment rate is currently 25 per cent. If war breaks out, those surplus young men will be in uniform and defending their homeland.

Why not tap into their excess energy right now? As the foreign terrorists have demonstrated in Iraq, you don't need a lot of local support to give the impression (at least to Tariq Ali and John Pilger) of a popular insurgency. Would it not be feasible to turn the tables and upgrade Iran's somewhat lethargic dissidents into something a little livelier? A Teheran preoccupied by internal suppression will find it harder to pull off its pretensions to regional superpower status.

Back in Novermber of 2004, in a post on Bush's foreign agenda for his second term, I said:

Iran. Iran needs to be dealt with, and there isn't a whole lot of time to do it. The military option may be possible in two years, once things settle down in Iraq, but right now it'd be a stretch. Oh sure, we could bomb the living daylights out of them, that's easy, but if we could get regime change from a bombing campaign Saddam would've been gone in '91. My personal preference is direct and indirect support for the democratic movement in Iran. We already know that Iran is supporting the Islamist movement in Iraq, so I think we need to return the favor. Overt moral support and covert monetary and military support would be my preference. I don't know whether Bush is planning on doing this. So far it seems to be let the UN and the EU-3 do its thing, but we've seen how effective that is, and I think Bush will take a more proactive role. At the least, expect him to talk up the democratic movement in Iran.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to propose this.

Mark Steyn urges feminists to take on Islamists, arguing that they're more of a threat to feminism than George W. Bush will ever be. His last line is priceless:

C'mon, gals! Anyone can beat up post-feminist neutered Western males. Why not pick on a target worth the effort?

Read it all.

Mark Steyn has a very depressing article in the New Criterion:

In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
...
Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

Not good.

“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.

He's been saying this a lot. I hope he's wrong, but it doesn't look good.

A number of bloggers have been asserting that the leaks to the press about the NSA program to monitor communications between terrorists outside and inside of the US amounts to treason. It is indeed illegal to leak classified information, but bloggers, such as Dean Esmay and Doc Rampage, are saying that execution is an appropriate punishment.

It is rare that people are executed for spying in the US, even when they are selling classified information to our enemy. See, for example, this list from CNN. A few examples:

• 1984 — Richard William Miller
  
  Miller was a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who was arrested for passing classified documents to two pro-Soviet immigrants, who also were arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Miller pleaded innocent, saying he was trying to infiltrate the KGB. His first trial ended in a mistrial, but he was found guilty in second trial in 1986. That verdict was overturned in 1989 on a technicality. In a third trial, he was convicted again and sentenced to 20 years in 1991. He was released in 1994 after a federal judge reduced his sentence.



• 1985 — Jonathan Jay Pollard
  
  A civilian employee at the Naval Investigative Service, Pollard was arrested for selling classified information to Israeli intelligence. Convicted of espionage on June 4, 1986, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. His wife, Anne Louise Henderson Pollard, was also convicted of espionage and received a five-year prison term. Israel, which granted Pollard citizenship, has lobbied former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to pardon Pollard. Clinton considered doing so in the midst of the Wye River peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 1998. Clinton pulled back after CIA Director George Tenet threatened to resign if Pollard was pardoned.



• 1985 — Walker family
  
  John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy warrant officer charged with selling information to the Soviets for 18 years, including data on U.S. encryption devices that compromised U.S. communications. Once out of the Navy, Walker recruited his son, Michael Walker, a petty officer aboard the USS Nimitz; his brother, ex-Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur James Walker; and Jerry Alfred Whitworth, a retired Navy communications specialist, to procure classified documents that the elder Walker paid for and then sold to the Soviets. John Walker's ex-wife tipped the FBI to his activities, and he was arrested in May 1985. The three others were apprehended around the same time.
  
  In late 1985, John Walker Jr. pleaded guilty to espionage charges as part of a plea agreement to testify at Whitworth's trial and provide full details on what he gave to the Soviets in exchange for a lesser sentence for his son. The elder Walker was sentenced to two life terms plus 10 years, and his son, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 25 years. Arthur James Walker was convicted of seven counts of espionage in late 1985 and was sentenced to life in prison. Whitworth was convicted of espionage and tax charges in 1986 and sentenced to 365 years.



• 1994 — Aldrich Ames
  
  Ames was characterized as probably the most damaging turncoat in U.S. history. A career agency official, Ames began selling U.S. secrets to the KGB in 1985, when he was head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence unit. Within a decade he had revealed more than 100 covert operations and betrayed at least 30 agents. Ten of the spies revealed by Ames were later executed by the Soviets, including Dmitri Polyakov, the top CIA informer inside Soviet military intelligence. Ames' activities also may have allowed the Soviets to dupe the CIA by sending fake intelligence to the agency through the agents whom Ames compromised.
  
  Along with his co-conspirator and wife, Rosario, Ames was paid more than $2.7 million for the information before he was arrested in 1994. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole, while his wife, under the terms of a plea agreement, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for conspiring to commit espionage and evading taxes.



• 1997 — Squillacote, Stand and Clark
  
  Theresa Marie Squillacote, husband Kurt Alan Stand and friend James Michael Clark were college buddies who spied on behalf of East Germany. Prosecutors said Stand began his spying activities in 1972 when East Germany recruited him to line up spies in Washington. Stand enlisted Clark in 1976 while the two were members of a radical leftist group at the University of Wisconsin and recruited his wife about the time the couple married in 1980. Stand was a labor union official, while Squillacote was a lawyer who later worked as the senior staff attorney in the office of the deputy undersecretary of defense. Clark was a civilian analyst for the Army.
  
  U.S. authorities learned of the past activities of the spy ring from German files following the collapse of the communist East Berlin government. A U.S. agent contacted Squillacote in 1997 claiming to be a South African official and Communist Party member. She then produced secret Pentagon documents describing arms transactions and assessing U.S. troop strength and one document about U.S. nuclear weapons.
  
  All three were arrested in October 1997. Clark pleaded guilty in June 1998 to conspiracy to commit espionage and received a reduced sentence of 12 years and seven months in prison in exchange for testifying against Squillacote and Stand. The couple were convicted in 1998 of conspiracy and espionage charges, and Squillacote received 21 years in prison and her husband 17 years.

Given these examples, and the seriousness of the crimes committed by these traitors, execution for leaking damaging information to the New York Times is disproportionate. The leakers are undoubtedly guilty of a crime, but I think twenty years to life is a more appropriate sentence.

Every time I hear about the outrageous expansion of surveillance powers under the current administration, I end up thinking the same thing, "Wait a minute! You mean our intelligence services weren't doing that before 9/11? What the heck did we even have them for?" That, ultimately, is why the Democrats won't make any headway in this line of attack. I, and most Americans, grew up on a steady diet of spy thrillers, both in novels and movies. In them, the all-powerful CIA, NSA, or even intelligence organizations whom the government didn't publicly acknowledge the existence of, ran all sorts of crazy operations in order to protect US citizens. In their desperate efforts to counter the terrorists, torture, warrantless searches, and assassinations were the norm. In the context of killing the enemy before he could set off a nuclear device in New York City, all this was considered justified. And if occasional mistakes were made and the wrong person died, or if laws were broken, that was acceptable collateral damage in this shadowy war. True, this attitude towards the intelligence services made us feel a little bit paranoid about big brother, but ultimately we felt better for the knowledge that such powerful organizations were out there, protecting us from the terrorists.

Of course, it turns out that the real organizations aren't anywhwere near as powerful or effective as we had been led to believe. And when we hear this outcry over them listening in on conversations between terrorists outside and inside of America, what bothers us most is not that they were doing it without a warrant after 9/11--we didn't even know that they needed a warrant for that--but that they apparently weren't doing it at all before.

I dunno. However, if you look at bin Laden's public statements, you can see what he really wants:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals, bar women from appearing in the press and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

Professor Bruce Lawrence did us the great favor of translating bin Laden's speeches for us. It's hard to appease someone like this, so I really think we ought to quit trying. (Thanks to Tim Blair for pointing this one out.)

If I didn't know better, I'd think that this Iraq country I keep hearing about might actually succeed:

Iraq's landmark constitution was adopted by a majority in a fair vote during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, as Sunni Arab opponents failed to muster enough support to defeat it, election officials said Tuesday. A prominent Sunni politician called the balloting "a farce."
...
The vote on the constitution was 78.59 percent in favor of ratification and 21.41 percent against, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (search ) said. The charter required a simple majority nationwide with the provision that if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, the constitution would be defeated.

The referendum results, announced after a 10-day audit following allegations of fraud, confirmed previous indications that Sunni Arabs (search) failed to produce the two-thirds "no" vote they would have needed in at least three of Iraq's 18 provinces to defeat the constitution.

Slowly but surely, Iraq is making progress. I think that in ten years' time, no one will question whether this was the right thing to do.

Apparently, al Qaeda's hiring (from Wired):

The London-based Asharq al-Awsat said on its website this week that al-Qaida had "vacant positions" for video production and for editing statements, footage and international media coverage about militants in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and other conflict zones where militants are active.

The paper said the Global Islamic Media Front, an al-Qaida-linked, web-based organization, would "follow up with members interested in joining and contact them via e-mail."

The paper did not say how applicants should contact the Global Islamic Media Front.

Okay, there's a problem when the world's most famous terrorist organization can openly advertise for positions. I just hope this presents an intelligence opportunity for us.

CENTCOM has a webpage where they post translations of what the Islamic extremists are saying. They've recently posted a statement by Zarqawi's al'Qaeda organization in Iraq, taking credit for the attack last week and promising more. Most of it's fairly typical, but I found this part telling:

Approach us, O paradise. O brigade of martyrdom-seeker: Celebrate and sing the praise of God, for tomorrow you will meet the beloved ones, Muhammad and his companions. You have never accepted injustice, O lions of monotheism. This is your day. Go after the heads of the infidels, the Jews, the Crusaders, and the descendants of Ibn al-Alqami [derogatory term for Shia named after Ibn-al-Alqami, a Shia minister who was accused of betraying the last Abbasid caliph Al-Musta'ism during Hulugu's attack on Baghdad in 1258]. Do not show any mercy toward them.

Infidels, Jews, and Crusaders are the usual targets of the terrorists, but the fact that al'Qaeda specifically mention the Shi'ites, and in such a derogatory manner, indicates that they're still pursuing the strategy they've been attempting to implement for at least the past year. They know they have no support among the Kurds, and while there are Shi'ite extremists, they don't play too well with the Sunnis. So rather than trying to win support among those groups, they're targeting them. They're hoping that they can increase tensions between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites to the point of starting a civil war. I'm not sure whether they still believe that will work, but they may be able to keep the animosity running at a high enough level that building a successful democracy is impossible.

Whether or not a civil war happens, the failure to create a democracy will most likely result in three independent nations rather than one. Al'Qaeda will have succeeded in creating the impression of a failed attempt at nation-building by the US, but whether the Sunni nation will be friendly to them is an open question. They'd still have to duke it out with the Ba'athist secularists, and the results will be bloody. The thing to remember is that this is not the result that most of the Sunnis want. There's a reason they fought so hard against federalism in the Iraqi constitution. They know that if Iraq's three ethnic groups go their separate ways, they'll be the weak one, without most of the oil wealth their cousins possess. The Shi'ites and the Kurds wouldn't be sorry to see this happen, so the only two groups with a vested interest in a united Iraq are the Sunnis and the US. At this point the Sunnis want it both ways, turning a blind eye to the terrorists among them while certain that the US, whom they still hate, will prevent the worst case scenario from happening. I think maybe it's time for the US to start saying that splitting Iraq into three nations wouldn't be such a bad thing. If the Sunnis start to realize that they're the ones who will lose the most should al'Qaeda succeed, they might just turn against the terrorists.

(Thanks to SPC Claude Flowers for the heads up!)

So, what's new in Mauritania recently? Here's what a search of the news shows:

• The President of the African Union has some tough words for the military junta, asking it to abolish slavery and help fight terrorism. It's good to hear that the African Union isn't quite as uncritical of the junta as earlier articles suggested.


• The junta has banned its members from running for elections. It had said they wouldn't run, but this step does seem to indicate that they're serious about that. We'll see whether this holds until the elections.


• A pro-democracy group, Democrats without Borders, has called for the return of President Taya, with a number of conditions:
  

  It suggested that upon resuming duties, Ould Taya should step down as chairman of his party, promise to no longer lead, support or be a member of any political party, and appoint a transitional government with a Prime Minister who is not a member of any political party.
  
  Chaired by Ahmed Ould Saleck, DWB maintained that its proposals were based on the "universally accepted principle that putsches [coups] can in no way, whatever the motives, be a means to access and devolve power."

  
  They seem sincere enough, if a bit naive believing that it's possible to let Taya back into power. No one's suggesting we return Saddam to power with promises that he step down in a few years.


• And the junta has succeeded in winning more people to supporting the transition, including the OIF (the International Francophone Organization) and the RDU (the Rally for Unity and Democracy), both organizations whose Acronyms get all scrambled in translation.


• I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that the junta is expanding oil exploration. It's too soon to tell what to make of it.


• Qatar, which you will remember offered asylum to Mauritania's ex-President Taya, is praising the military junta as well. Hmm, whose side are they on?

And that's all for today. I'll report more next week.