As Claudia Rossett points out: bq. "One might be tempted to conclude, then, that our only window for intervening in the quest of a threatening, terrorist-linked regime dabbling in WMDs is in that precise time window when there is irrefutable evidence that the rulers are developing WMD capability, but before the wares are ready to be handed out to terrorists or brandished in jelly jars as a "deterrent" to extort concessions from the free world. Except that this seems to be precisely the turf occupied at the moment by Iran, with its nuclear program, and while the clerics there are obviously rushing to get their bombs into production, no one genuinely seems to be preparing to stop that, either." Yeah, I've kind of noticed that. For some people, there never seems to be a good time to take a stand. But of course, they'll assure you of their firmness. They're just waiting for the right moment. Like, maybe sometime around 2150 A.D. or so. bq. "We seem to be heading for the surreal conclusion that it is all right to be a murderous tyrant who only thinks he is pursuing weapons of mass destruction--even if he apparently believes it himself strongly enough to take the risk of kicking out U.N. arms inspectors for four years. Somehow, I am not comforted by the vision of a Saddam presiding over a country where he is allocating resources for WMD, terrorists are traipsing through, and whatever is really going on is anyone's guess, including Saddam's." Me neither - but it seems that many Democratic Party Presidential candidates have a different comfort threshold for foreign dictators with ties to terrorism, a long history of diastrous miscalculations, and sons even worse than he is poised to succeed him. After all, our excellent intelligence organizations would tell us if sanctions et. al. were failing, so we'd still have time to protect ourselves... oh, wait. Of course, these same candidates and their apologists get very indignant if people accuse them of being less than serious about protecting their fellow citizens. Can't think why.

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The New Great Game * Russia is in the midst of a policy debate over what approach to take to its former Soviet neighbors, especially towards Georgia. A focus of this debate is the question of how to react to Georgia's sudden move to the West, and the United States, seeking to protect its gains in the Caucasus, is warily keeping an eye on Russian officials and politicians. With nationalist parties having made gains in December's parliamentary elections, U.S. officials fear the "imperial nostalgia" will encourage increased Russian aggression. In regards to the specifics of Russian policy towards the Caucasus, nationalists see Saakashvili as an avowed enemy of Russia who should be undermined. Cooler heads see nothing to gain from geopolitical competition with the United States and call for cooperation with the new Georgian government. Regardless of the path chosen, few expect any significant changes until after Russia's presidential elections in May. * The new leadership in Georgia complicates US-Russian relations and there is a diversity of opinion in the US government over how best to protect gains in Georgia without damaging relations with Russia. For the time-being, Secretary Powell is being very blunt with Russia. * Under agreements made as a member of the OSCE, Russia is obligated to remove its troops from bases in Georgia. Russia says the removal will take 11 years. Georgia wants them out in 3. The United States, trying to help the Russians along, has offered to pay for the withdrawal. * The Russian military has an entirely different point of view on the base issue, informed by a belief in its total innocence. * The United States has decided that its troop presence in Georgia will be permanent, offering important security guarantees to the new Saakashvili government. Because this permanent presence is a small group of trainers, I guess it is technically accurate to say that the US has no plans for bases in Georgia. * Relations between Georgia, Russia, and the United States are certainly fraught with danger, but the realism and perspective of Georgian interim Foreign Minister Tepo Japaridze give reason for optimism. It's heartening to hear a politician say that there are bitter pills that must be swallowed by all parties, including his own. * Reasonable Georgian proposals such as joint Russian and Georgian patrols of the Chechen border give further reason for optimism that current tensions will soon pass. * Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya's Russian-backed President, recently visited Saudi Arabia. Despite vocal criticism of the Russian campaign in Chechnya in the past, the visit gave political and religious authority to Putin and Kadyrov and legitimized their view that Chechnya's separatists are terrorists. Judging from the response of the separatists, the visit was quite a blow. * American and Azeri forces kicked off a ten day training exercise designed to teach the Azeri Navy to protect sea-based oil and gas facilities in the Caspian Sea. * India got into the Great Game action in the past month as well. India has a 20-year plan to become a major power in Asia that involves increased military and economic cooperation with Central Asian states. One firm step came at the recent South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation Summit (SAARC) summit in Islamabad, where India proposed adding Central Asian states to a proposed free trade bloc in South Asia. Focus: Afghanistan * Carlos of Kandahar Chronicles gives his two cents on the constitution and mentions that he thinks there will be a backlash against the Afghan government. * There is some fear that the same ethnic difficulties that hampered the passage of the constitution will haunt Afghanistan for years to come and hamper stabilization efforts. A number of delegates to the Loya Jirga "generously sacrificed interests" in the name of national unity and may not continue to do so in the future. * A number of problems, including difficulties in registering voters, threaten to delay Afghanistan's elections for parliament and president, slated originally for June. * After a lull in violence due to the ambitious Operation Avalanche, which drew violence away from the constitutional Loya Jirga in Kabul, Taliban attacks renewed shortly after the new constitution was passed. * A suicide attack killed a Canadian peacekeeper, an Afghan civilian, and injured many more. The attack also signalled a possible change in Taliban tactics. Canadian troops are the largest contingent in NATO's peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. * The NATO force is slated to expand to Kunduz as well as Kabul. The alliance's top general is criticizing members for not providing enough troops to adequately expand the force. * Again from Kandahar Chronicles, Carlos details the difficulties for aid workers created by security concerns. * For the first time since the fall of communist President Najibullah in 1992, Afghan television has broadcast a female singer, prompting protests from conservative judges that led Kabul TV to again stop showing female musicians. Focus: Georgia * Secretary Powell visited Tbilisi for Saakashvili's inauguration and stopped to take questions with the new President. * Mary Neal of Living With Caucasians was also on hand for the inauguration and files her report. She mentions rose petals raining down on jubilant crowds from helicopters, an image I'd like to see. She also says that there have already been a significant crackdown on corruption in all sectors of society; business, police, military, and government. * Ajaria, which had threatened to boycott Georgia's presidential election, did, in fact, end up participating. Following Saakashvili's victory, the region's President Aslan Abashidze re-imposed a state of emergency, claiming that "certain forces" were trying to foment tension and commit terrorist acts. The state of emergency tightens controls on Ajaria's borders and increases the rights of police to interrogate citizens on the street. Georgia responded by warning Ajaria that it will not tolerate persecution of political activists * Ajaria presents one of Saakashvili's first and most pressing challenges. At the same time, Aslan Abashidze is in the difficult position of trying to adapt to the new Georgia. Saakashvili is unwilling to tolerate the continued domination of Ajaria by Abashidze, and is taking steps to try to guarantee free and fair elections in this spring's national parliamentary elections. The new government is also supporting Ajarian opposition groups, who want to remove Abashidze at the ballot box. They warn that they are ready to take to the streets though should Abashidze crack down on democratic activists. * In an interview with Radio Free Europe, overthrown President Eduard Shevardnadze comes off as a man at peace with history but also skeptical about the ability of Georgia's new leadership to turn the country around quickly. However, to the BBC, Sheverdnadze presents a different story of his fall. * President Saakashvili took questions from BBC listeners recently and talks about the wide range of issues facing Georgia. Focus: Human Rights and Responses in Turkmenistan & Uzbekistan * Turkmenistan's President Niyazov recently appeared on 60 Minutes, giving a rare glimpse of one of the world's nuttiest dictators. Among the stranger revelations to come out of the report is that Niyazov doesn't want pictures and statues of him up all over the place, but he also doesn't want to stop the people from expressing their love for their leader. Out of touch with reality is an understatement. * Turkmenistan has lifted exit visa requirements for its citizens. While Turkmen citizens will still need an "invitation" from another country, the new policy is a huge improvement over the past rules, under which Turkmen citizen denied exit permission three times essentially became prisoners in their country. * The United Nations has issued a rare condemnation of Turkmenistan over its human rights record, supported by Russia due to its concern for the treatment of dual Russian-Turkmen citizens. President Niyazov/Turkmenbashi, perhaps to soften the blow of the condemnation, lifted the requirement for exit visas for citizens to leave the country. In response to this international criticism, the breakdown in relations with Russian, and even the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Turkmenbashi has made the decision to strengthen his armed forces and present a tougher face to the world. * The Uzbek practice of talking up a commitment to human rights while backpedaling and an unresponsiveness to U.S. concerns has caused significant frustration for the State Department, leading to increasingly intense criticism of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states that included warnings over electoral practices. The remainder of US aid to Uzbekistan will be reviewed in April. To continue receiving any aid after April, Uzbekistan must show a credible commitment to human rights. * Uzbekistan looks like it is committed to failing its aid review. Karimov's government, fearing that international human rights and democracy groups are fomenting a Georgia-style revolution, has decided to tighten controls over these groups. Some of the groups that Uzbekistan is most concerned with are The International Republican Institute, the Open Society Institute, the National Democratic Institute--all because of their operations in Georgia. Also suffering from the policy is IWPR (International War & Peace Reporters), one of the few sources of objective reporting from Uzbekistan. In response, US officials have informed Uzbekistan that it now risks sanctions should the new policy actually go into effect, partially because the policy would violate a 1994 agreement concerning US-supported groups in Uzbekistan. * Uzbekistan marked Constitution Day by releasing 3,000 prisoners, many of whom had chilling reports of torture and abuse. Etceterastan * The International Crisis Group has in important and illuminating report on rising extremism in Central Asia with an impressive list of reccomendations to roll back the tide of extremism. * The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is one such extremist group. It is believed to have been nearly eliminated by the United States during the campaign against the Taliban, but there have been periodic rumors of its return. Eurasianet looks into the extent of the IMU's threat to regional security. It is believed that the IMU will not be able resurface as anything more than a political opposition group. * Kyrgyz activists are pressuring their government not to extradite Uighurs to China, where they face torture and execution. Uighur populations live all over Central Asia and refugees from Chinese oppression occasionally escape to Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan. Dungans, who are ethnic Chinese Muslims, apparently do not face similar scrutiny from either China or the Central Asian states. * Gulnora Karimova, daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, is a fugitive from New Jersey justice related to custody of the children she had with her former husband, Mansur Maqsudi. The fallout from the divorce is strange, with Uzbekistan having filed criminal charges against Maqsudi that have landed him on the Interpol wanted list. Criminal charges filed against Karimova in New Jersey may land her on the list as well. I have a little more to say about the situation, including its impact on Coca-Cola in Uzbekistan, over at The Argus. * On January 13th, a Yak-40 crashed at Tashkent's airport, killing all 37 on board, including the highest-ranking United Nations official in Uzbekistan, Richard Conroy. Uzbekistan Airways is actually one of the best national airlines from the developing world. At least it is on its international routes, for which the airline uses Western aircraft and places a premium on providing good service. For regional flights, Uzbekistan Airways still uses aging, Soviet-manufactured aircraft such as the Yak-40 that are nearing the end of their operational lifespans. * Russia has forgiven $10 billion of Mongolia's debts built up under the Soviet Union. As Joel at Far Outliers points out that there's more than meets the eye to this story. * China is taking advantage of a variety of problems that Kazakstan is currently having with western oil companies and has become an increasing presence on Kazak oil fields. * In other petroleum news, Kazak President Nursultan Nazarbayev is mulling a Caspian oil organization to offset OPEC's power. * Far Outliers has a fascinating post on Central Asia's Korean and German populations, the two exile nationalities that adjusted well to Central Asian life. * Kyrgyzstan's largest mosque, which was allowed to fall into disrepair by the Soviets, has undergone significant renovations, and Eurasianet has photos of the completed project. * In Central Asia, the new year brings with it Presidential Speeches, a collection of absurd reflections on the (fictional) achievement of the year that was(n't) and provides a look forward at wonderful policies that will never see the light of day. * Sheila O'Malley took a sweeping look at Uzbekistan with a collection of essays. She looks at the people and the history and gives a great summary of the strange stew of identity that Uzbekistan is. * Modern Central Asia is enough of a mystery for most people, but before the Bolsheviks, official atheism, Russification, and the Virgin Lands campaign forever changed the face of Inner Asia forever, life in "Russian Turkestan" was much like it had been for hundreds of years. The Library of Congress offers an amazing look at Central Asia and the rest of the Russian Empire in the years before the the revolution with The Empire That Was Russia, photos of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the Tsar.

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He harks back to the united country of the early 70's, and the hope brought by affirmative action, and the civil rights struggle...which suggests that in his rarified circles of Park Avenue and Aspen that he went through a different 70's than I did, in which those struggles led to deep divisions which are as yet unresolved. It's an interesting side note that he's spending so much time and focus appealing directly to what I called 'the fantasy ideology of the Democrats' - the last great pure victory, which was the Civil Rights movement. Sadly, it is a fantasy ideology, and it's certainly not a winning electoral strategy, particularly when tied to a tin tongue such as Dean displayed today. He defended quotas, and then shouted out to his peeps from San Francisco - I mean come on, guy, 75% of the country wants to saw San Francisco off and tow it out to sea. I mean c'mon, guy, weren't there any volunteers from Nebraska or Ohio you could point out? And I'm the guy who keep defending redistribution, and has some affection for affirmative action, and I was wincing when he stood up and defended - to huge cheers - quotas, abortion rights, and rights for gays. To some extent, I believe in all those things. But I'm also aware that those are serious issues on which people who ought to support the Democratic economic and other policies choke. Hey, Howard, remember your 'Confederate Flag' speech? Those guys just wrote you off. And, simply put, there aren't enough folks like my aunt and uncle to replace them. Kerry's speech was decently Presidential, and while he seemed less awkward than Dean, there's still something missing for me. But I think he's got the high ground, particularly given Edwards' poor showing, and the fact (as noted by CNN) that Kerry won among both voters angry at Bush and those opposed to the war - which should have been Dean's core constituents. Bummer about Edwards, though. And is it cold, or what?

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Cue the standard leftist litany from Ross Judson, of the aptly-named Ministry of Minor Perfidity. First in our comments section and then on his blog:

"If a man is without hope, full of anger, fueled by religious fire, I can see where suicide bombing is something that would be a consideration. Right now I don't think it's something I could possibly ever do, personally, but I think I understand the objective factors that would lead to it." ...Here's what really bothers me about such knee-jerk "you're a terrorist too" responses. We all sit here living with our shiny veneer of civilization, working hard at our information technology jobs, driving our SUVs, and cluck-clucking at the foibles of those crazy foreigners from the televised comfort of our suburban living rooms. If you're someone surrounded by that kind of comfort and you pass judgement on someone else because terrorism is "inconceivable", you're forgetting one thing: You don't know what you'd do if you were in the same situation. We all want to believe that we wouldn't do it. It's inhuman, it's inconceivable, it's abhorrent. Not a chance…. But I'm not going to pass judgement on those who try to understand, when doing so means pretending that I know my true self, when faced with the same situation."

So, the main difference between Mr. Judson and Ms. Tonge is that she's pretty sure she could do it, while he's not sure. Lovely. Ross goes on in a later comment: bq. "Joe, you don't seem to be able to draw a distinction between the words "understand" and "condone". I can objectively understand the factors that lead to an action I do not agree with. For each of those factors, I can decide whether I believe it to be justification, or not." Ross, I don't draw the distinction because Ms. Tonge clearly doesn't, and frankly I wonder about you too. Your post reads like a parody of the bleeding-heart liberal position on crime as extended to terrorism, and its effect is to remove the moral equation from discussion via "understanding" that quickly turns into "judge not" without even breaking stride. Blowing up grandmothers, children and other innocents as a matter of calculated, deliberate policy is not an unadulterated mortal evil to British MP and Party Spokeswoman for Children Jenny Tonge. No, it's "understandable." And so she refuses to judge the suicide bombers, just as Ross refuses to judge her. Morality? Standards? Requiring that others live up to them? Never heard of it. This attitude is worse than wrong. If acts really are " inhuman… inconceivable… abhorrent…" then their moral content remains regardless. Whether or not you could be persuaded to commit them is irrelevant. To say "judge not" in response to acts of evil provides cover and implicit endorsement for those who promote and commit those acts, by removing them from moral sanction. One becomes, in short, an enabler. I'm sorry if you find that word unpleasant, Ross, but it's accurate. Suicide bombers, NKVD officers in Lubyanka, concentration camp guards - all have or had their excuses and justifications. So what? The truth is that there's no excuse, no justification adequate to their acts. The only way to use the word "understandable" in conjunction with their actions, is to believe that excuses exist in the first place. Ross, you said it yourself when you used the words: bq. "… For each of those factors, I can decide whether I believe it to be justification, or not." If you're sitting there deciding in this case, then you concede there are factors you would consider to be a justification for suicide bombing. If there weren't any, after all, you wouldn't have a decision to make. Would you? The difference between us here is that I don’t have a decision to make here - and you, apparently, do. Hence the responses that so distress you, from people who perceive these links even if you yourself do not. "Of course, I'm not condoning..." says the familiar ritual tone. Yet this obligatory preface of disintersted understanding is often less than believable. Ms. Tonge seems unwilling to extend the same courtesy of 'understanding' to the Israelis, for instance, but they're just Jews so it's par for the course. Mr. Judson's political opponents right here also seem to be another story. As Mary summed up so neatly later in the discussions: bq. "Ross - You don’t know anything about Qtub, you haven’t researched the motivations of the suicide bombers, you don't know about their philosophies or beliefs – but you know that people like me are fuel "for that fire". I dunno, Ross - are you sure you couldn't be pushed into the same position? Maybe it's all understandable. Such a pity that Mr. Judson's desire for 'understanding' doesn’t seem to extend to a point that might actually be constructive. Unfortunately, without that kind of deeper grounding, what's left is little more than a cocktail of chance impressions, projection, and political prejudices loudly expressed. "Know Thyself," indeed. To use the word again: enabler. That's what MP Jenny Tonge is - and a line that you, Ross, are treading very close to. Jenny Tonge, MP, is simply an extension of your stated worldview, not a departure from it. That ought to disturb you. Someone raised outside of a systemic environment of hatred, with all of her advantages and privileges, implicitly sanctioning the deliberate murder of children by implying that it might be OK under current circumstances... and all this as a Spokeswoman for Children in Britain's Parliament. "But who's to judge?" you say. Who, indeed. At least the Liberal Democrats retained enough good sense to still value judgment, and to exercise it. A terrible pity, sir, that you did neither. I fervently hope that you might take some time, and give the matter some thought, and reformulate your position. UPDATE: Ross Judson responds. Let's just say that I don't see a lot of rethinking going on.

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Pakistan and India * The Stratgeypage notes that India claimed that infiltrations into Kashmir from Pakistan are down this year with 93 such events. These events resulted in the killing of 300 of the infiltrators and the current cease fire is said to be responsible for the low death toll. * As we have noted before Pakistan some times seems schizophrenic, on one hand talking peace and or helping in the War On Terror, on the other actively assisting insurgents and terrorists groups. In part, this lies in Pakistan’s history of using terrorist groups as cheap proxies against India, the former Soviet Union, the United States as well as other countries. Now though as Musharraff has tried to bring Pakistan into the modern world, make peace with India, condemn terrorism, and work with the United States those very same groups which Pakistan encouraged and help create have turned against them recently staging numerous assassination attempts against Musharraff himself as well as general terrorist actions in Pakistan. Like many Muslim countries that have supported radical Muslim extremists, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has found it much harder to stop the terrorists than it was to create them in the first place. * The last few years we have heard much about the idea of Rogue Nations and Rogue States that might develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons headless of the rest of the world but what is as worrisome is the idea of Rogue Scientists who are willing to provide knowledge of how to develop these weapons to the most radical and freighting groups based on ideological and religious reasons. This seems to be the case with Paksitan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan who is suspected in assisting nations such as North Korea, Iran, and Libya acquire nuclear weapons technology and information. * The American thinker notes India and Israel continue growing their relationship by signing a historic scientific and technology agreement this last Christmas. * The United States has also agreed to provide India with nuclear and space related technologies ending decades of wariness on by the U.S. towards India. When you realize that many of the technologies have sophisticated military applications, that the U.S. has traditionally barred Israel from sharing these technologies with all but the closest of U.S. allies, it seems clear that the U.S. is encouraging the Indian-Israeli-U.S. alliance. As Suman Palit points out we are fighting the same enemy. * Its important to note that this month Pakistan has seriously cracked down on terrorists in its own borders with a series of major raids. Dan Darling has a excellent post on the subject here noting the a whose who of terrorist groups and there members have been arrested in these raids. South and South East Asia * Apparently Hambali wanted to attack Australia but was unable to because of a lack of a local network of operatives. * Sadly things don’t seem to ever get better in Sri Lanka and it seems the Tamil Tigers have started increasing the number children they are using as soliders. * Rantburg notes Thailand’s Prime Ministers creative way to deal with young hoodlums. Book Review * Niraj posts an excellent and in depth review the book Pakistan: Eye of the Storm.

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* Another meeting of heads of state from the Americas laced with high hopes and grandiloquence was left with very little in the way of accomplishments. Much posturing took place: President Carlos Mesa of Bolivia complained about Chile's acquiring Bolivia's coastline in the War of the Pacific, President Kirchner again stated that he would not pay Argentina's debts on the backs of Argentina's citizens, President Bush condemns Castro (however correct he is in this case) and got an earful from the other nations to his south about neoliberalism. A promising measure to address corruption was defeated as the US insisted on accused nations being banned from future summits and the other participating nations not being comfortable with the possibility of having the US use this measure as a cudgel against its rivals. * Marcela Sánchez probably had the best idea: ban the media from these meetings. With no visible audience to play to, they might actually accomplish something. HUGO CHÁVEZ, EL INTRUSO * Hugo Chávez, caudillo wannabee of Venezuela decided to intrude into the dispute regarding Bolivia's loss of its seacoast 120+ years ago in The War of the Pacific. Chávez odiously accused Chile's President Lagos of defending (retired dictator and former Chilean general) Augusto Pinochet's position on this issue . If Chávez knew anything about history he would know that Lagos was imprisoned under Pinochet's regime and that Lagos was one of the few to openly and publicly chastise Pinochet on national television. * Chile, for its part, regards the matter as a bilateral issue to be dealt with diplomatically and not in the media. This has become an issue that has unified Bolivia, albeit tenuously. Bolivian blogger, Miguel Centellas is unimpressed, however. * Chávez, for his part should be more concerned about allegations of sabotage in the signature verification process for the possible referendum for his recall. Anything less than a completely transparent process will only backfire on him and increase the divisiveness in Venezuela. Is that what he really wants? BRAZIL * Is Brazil attempting to become the regional heavyweight for Latin America? Quite possibly. The New York Times noted the Brazilian government is leading the fight in the World Trade Organization (WTO) on cotton subsidies for US farmers lobbying for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and despite losing twenty-one of its leading rocket scientists in a horrific accident last year, still has an ambitious space program. * Should Washington be worried? I don't think so, unless it is concerned about the status quo changing. Despite the recent dust-up on fingerprinting visitors (which showed misbehavior on both sides), Lula has pleased the markets and money institutions with his fiscal stewardship, interest rates have declined in Brazil without inflation skyorcketing, the economy is projected to grow by 4% this year and unemployment has dropped. He has also led the signing of a free trade agreement between India and the Mercosur trade pact. What does President Bush have to fear from free traders and responsible stewardship of a nation's economy? COLOMBIA * Secretary of State Colin Powell has certified that Colombia is meeting congressional standards for protecting human rights. This will result in some $34 million in aid being released to Colombian security forces. Human Rights Watch is objecting to the ties that the military has with the brutal paramilitary organizations in Colombia, some of the leaders of which (like Carlos Castaño, leader of the AUC) are under indictment in the US for drug trafficking, whose brutality led them to refer to themselves as "the headsplitters" and who have been active in extorting land from rich and poor. * The EU has also put President Uribe on notice that he will have tough questions awaiting him on human rights issues when he goes there next month seeking aid. I have nothing but contempt for the FARC, the AUC and the ELN and my sympathies lie squarely and firmly with the victims of their brutality and all of the majority of decent Colombians trying desperately to lead normal lives. I don't think that the military should receive this aid unless they purge officers with ties to the AUC. CUBA * Yes, Godless Communist Fidel Castro has financed the construction of a new Eastern Orthodox Church in Cuba and presided at the consecration of the church. The Orthodox Patriarch spoke out against the US embargo of Cuba after the consecration. Is that all it takes to get a new church built in Cuba? Ignore your conscience? Make an unholy alliance? NEW LATIN AMERICAN WEBZINE * Southern Exposure, the new group blog I mentioned in my last briefing has now been incorporated into a larger webzine called Living in Latin America. There are plenty of issues being discussed and a number of contributors. Come over and visit. The next installment of Randinho's Latin America Briefing will be February 24. Meanwhile, regular updates concerning Latin American events can be found at Beautiful Horizons.

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IRAQ REPORT * At the World Economic Forum, UK foreign minister Jack Straw eloquently defended the decision to invade Iraq. Tony Blair, ahead of the Hutton report on David Kelly's death, firmly stated he has "absolutely no doubt" the intelligence about Iraqi WMD that prompted the invasion was genuine. * Powell acknowledged we may not find WMD in Iraq. Meanwhile, David Kay turned over leadership of the Iraq Survey Group, then said that while he doubted Iraqi WMD would be found in large quantities, he had uncovered evidence that certain WMD-related materials were moved to Syria in the weeks before the Coalition invaded. * MAJ Gen Odierno, commander of the 4th ID, say the US Army has brought Sadaam loyalists "to their knees". * His boss, LT Gen Sanchez says there are signs of increased cooperation between al Qaeda and the Baathist remnants. However, an al Qaeda magazine has reportedly urged jihadis to leave Iraq and fight the US elsewhere because the large number of Muslim deaths from their attacks have created a backlash. * A new Iraqi battalion completed training last week, including the first company of a new Coastal Defence Force patterned on the US Marines. * As religious leaders push to base Iraqi law on sharia, the role and status of women in Iraq threatens to retrograde significantly. Zayed of Healing Iraq has some comments on this. Don't miss his post on a recent survey showing Iraqi top priorities as their country and society are reconstructed. 74% of respondents say the Coalition presence is necessary and 61% say that Coalition forces attitudes towards Iraqis are "cordial". * Which "cards" have we captured so far? The CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." * The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops: American, Australian, British, Canadian & Polish [updated Jan. 15, 2004] * Don't forget Chief Wiggles' Toys for Iraq drive! IRAN UPDATE * The IAEA warned Iran of "serious consequences" if it did not cooperate with a probe into its nuclear program. The mullah's stalling game continues, however. Meanwhile, Iran and the EU are cementing closer ties. * Iran announced the start of production for its new R'ad missile and DM-3B radar system. * The battle for political control between hardliners and moderates continues. An emergency session of parliament voted to overturn the disqualification by clerics of hundreds of candidates for next month's elections, but the Guardian Council reportedly has vetoed the measure. * Amir Taheri, on the other hand, points out that there is no meaningful distinction between the moderates and hardliners in terms of their policy aims. He says it's more like a feud among insiders for the spoils. (Hat Tip: Blog Iran!) ISRAEL AND HER NEIGHBORS * Sharon agreed to a prisoner exchange with Hizbollah, but Nasrallah proclaimed that kidnappings of IDF members will continue, The complex deal was negotiated by German mediators. (hat tip: lgf) * Jordan's foreign minister calls on Arab states to denounce suicide bombings. * Yassir Arafat's wife has been granted French citizenship, raising speculation that Arafat may receive a French passport as a result. * 2/3 of Americans polled say that Palestinians have not fulfilled their obligations as agreed and therefore do not deserve their own state at this time. (hat tip: Europundit Nelson Ascher) HOMELAND SECURITY * A federal grand jury indicted a Minnesota man for conspiracy to provide material support for al Qaeda. Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, a Canadian citizen of Somali descent, trained in Afghan camps during 2000 and 2001, when bin Laden was the area. * The Iranian-American Society of Northern Virginia is holding a "solidarity" fund-raiser for survivors of the Bam earthquake in Iran, but Rep. Robert Ney, R-Ohio, has asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate whether some of the event's sponsors are tied to Mujahedin-e Khalq, the MEK, or People's Mujaheddin, a known terrorist group which was supported by Saddam's regime. * The US and Saudi Arabia announced a joint effort to crack down on four branches of the huge Saudi-based charity Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, charging that its offices in Africa and Asia are being used to funnel money, arms and personnel to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. THE WIDER WAR * Are we at war? Armed Liberal thinks so, but just to be sure he re-examines the issue. * Malaysia is host to factories creating precision centrifuges and other equipment for the nuclear black market. The country has agreed to work with the US to stop the flow of nuclear technology after its role in supplying Libya was uncovered. * Three Thai Buddhist monks were killed by Muslims in two days. * Police in Pakistan have arrested a former Taliban governor, Maulvi Abdul Mannan Khawajazai. * A Jewish school bus was set on fire in France.France considers outlawing beards as well as headscarves, crosses and skullcaps. Much easier than addressing the real issues, I guess. * A huge proposed mosque in Germany is being funded by Islamacist radicals. with links to terror groups, according to federal investigators in Berlin. * The President of China is about to visit Paris and the French are rolling out a year-long celebration of French/Chinese ties. Both France and Germany hope to sell weapons systems to China, whom the French hope will provide an alternative to US power. * As Britain considers whether to mothball some of its older destroyers, the Guardian suggests it might be better to do without a navy at all - that way, the UK couldn't be asked to join the US in future operations. And besides, big surface ships are really only needed for operations away from Britain's shores and why on earth would the need ever arise for that? Lord Nelson would be rolling in his grave, if he were the type to read the Guardian. Not likely he would have been, though. * Germany is restructuring its armed forces for peacekeeping roles. Martin Walker notes that this means Germany will need to rely on its allies for serious defense against armed threats. Will that ally be the US and NATO, I wonder, or the proposed EU defense force? The answer is clear, at least for the immediate future. (hat tip: Regions of Mind) * We try to close on a lighter note if possible. A maintenance worker on Long Island turned in $12,400 left behind by Brinks when an ATM was serviced. It's good to know that there are honest people living in our communities. Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think womething important, use the Comments section to let us know.

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ODDS N' SODS * Small Dead Animals: Small Live Animals Week 1 Puppies are growing nicely, demonstrating that all can indeed survive and thrive in a competitive free mammary economy. Pictures included. * Master of None: Illegal Analysis How about a French court ruling that a stock analyst who predicted an increase in the price of a particular company's stock owes the company money, because her predicted increase wasn't as large as the company wanted it to be? No wonder the French economy is ailing. * Leads and Gold: "Winner's Curse" Synergy Fest has a series of interesting posts on Winner's Curse (a form of buyer's remorse). I especially liked this one that relates the author's first hand experience with the phenomenon and its causes... * Interested Participant: Professors Paid Better for Good Looks It's clearly recognized that success in a high profile career is affected to a great degree by an individual's physical appearance. Good looks equates to faster advancement and higher salaries. What's not clearly recognized is that good looks also appears to have a significant impact on the salaries in academia, typically a less than high profile career. * Catallarchy.net: The Economics of Cannibalism "But putting aside all of the questions of consent, there is another argument in favor of permitting consensual cannibalism to take place..." * Big Picture: Iowa and Prediction Markets So, how did mock "prediction markets" do in the Iowa Primaries? INNOVATION & ENTREPRENEURSHIP * StartupSkills.com, Why You're Not Selling Software - Understanding the Early Market Part 2 in an article about software entrepreneurship. * The Entrepreneurial Mind: International Agenda for Entrepreneurial Economic Development. A report published by the Kauffman Foundation provides some fascinating data on entrepreneurial activity worldwide and a compelling agenda to help in the entrepreneurial revolution taking place around the world. THE TECH SECTOR * Wordlab: Media Wonk Wordlab takes a peek and a poke at Nick Denton's online nanopublishing media empire, Gawker Media Inc. * d-42: On new ads that will take over your browser, and the implications thereof. * Dispatches from the Frozen North: More Evidence of a Maturing Software Industry The software industry is maturing, with the old rapid-growth days behind. Microsoft has to adapt, and it will be more-or-less painful depending on how they approach it. * Blog Business World: Google Goes to the Dance Google is the dominant internet search engine. There is unrest, in the ranks of the search engine optimization (SEO) community, however. MARKETING * A Penny For Your Thoughts: Super Bowl Party - Marketer's Dream Superbowl ads are now a viewer draw all by themselves. Why not extend the idea beyond the Super Bowl? * CRM Mastery, Inc: A Potpourri of Knowledge for CRM Aficionados Over the past several weeks, I've come across a number of excellent weblog posts and articles about Customer Relationship Management that I just haven't had the opportunity to write about. So, I thought that this would be as good a time as any to pass them along to you. * The Calico Cat: From Information Economy To Marketing Economy The economy has moved from agricultural to manufacturing, then to information, and now I reveal the next great shift as we move from an information economy to a marketing economy. CORPORATIONS & SOCIETY * Dr. Smolira: Average Returns Should investors be concerned when they see company's post "average return" figures? * Outside the Beltway: Wal-Mart * BusinessPundit: Corporate Social Responsibility The Economist has a great article called "Two Faced Capitalism." It addresses the rise in demands for corporate social responsibility... ECONOMICS AND POLICY * Soapbox Senate: Free Money Fallacy Every dollar the government gives out must come from somewhere, and the government has only four basic sources of funds... * Roth & Co. P.C: State of the Union - Tax Section A look at the tax proposals in President Bush's 2004 State of the Union Address. Note that the items are informational only and are not meant as tax advice. * Hobbs Online: The Jobless Recovery Isn't Jobless Analysis from economists at Bear Stearns finds evidence of a growing economic recovery in the household employment survey. * Goobage: Competing for Mediocrity Nashville schools aren't posting honor rolls because it may embarrass underachievers. Should businesses be concerned? (N.B. Blogger permalinks don't work, you have to scroll to Jan. 24th) * EconLog: Social Security Privatization, January 21, 2004. In this piece, I argue that the "transition cost" argument against privatizing Social Security is bogus. I also make my usual case against what I call the Stock Market Scenario. Finally, I conclude by saying that privatization is the ultimate lockbox. * The Business Word: Uwe Rheinhardt: Little hope for the uninsured Princeton economist, Uwe Rheinhardt, a widely followed left-leaning health care economist, uses this guest column to try to shame Americans into supporting failed socialistic strategies for solving the problems of the uninsured. * Armed Liberal: I'm a Liberal, Not An Idiot A.L. criticizes Steve Lopez, an L.A. Times columnist with a "progressive" tax plan that would drive down tax revenues and make The State of California's revenue base more unstable all at the same time. ECONOMICS & POLICY: IMMIGRATION * Patterico's Pontifications: Sweatshops And Illegal Immigration Yesterday I linked to a post by Radley Balko regarding a Nick Kristof column on foreign "sweatshops." I think that post has lessons for Americans regarding illegal immigration. * The American Mind: My entry deals with the questions surrounding President Bush's immigration plan. (note: A.L. reference edited for clarity)

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In the Times, William Arkin criticizes the Democrats from the left:

From none of the candidates have we heard anything approaching a strikingly new vision of how the United States should think about national security in a post-Cold War era marked by terrorism. And that's not because no such vision is conceivable. Rather, it's because the major Democrats ... like a herd of dairy cows trundling across a pasture ... have unthinkingly fallen in behind the tinkling bell of establishment assumptions about the world and how the United States should deal with it. ... With so little argument on the broad principles, it's no wonder Bush feels he owns the national security debate, especially at a time when America is "at war." And to me, that is precisely where the Democratic candidates for president, including Dean, have failed: They have not challenged the central premise of the Bush doctrine on national security — the endlessly repeated assertion that the United States is "at war." Initially, the "war on terrorism" was a figure of speech — like the "war on poverty" and the "war on drugs." To the extent that the "war on terrorism" has become more than that, it's because the Bush administration has elected to initiate military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines and other countries of Southeast Asia, the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus and elsewhere. If the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon can be likened to Pearl Harbor, there has been nothing to match the subsequent wholesale advances of Japanese forces across Asia. And there has been no mobilization of American society — except for how the Bush administration allowed Al Qaeda's puny army to keep the American public spooked and worried about the future.

Wow. Pretty strong words. The suggestion, as I understand it, is that the conflict we find ourselves in is a creature of our own making - that we're sending troops to battle the phantoms of our own fears. He's suggesting two theses with which I disagree pretty strongly: First, that 'Al Quieda's puny army' posed no real threat to us; and second, following from the first, that our military actions abroad are starting a war where there was none before.

But Americans need to seriously consider whether the long-term threat to our civil liberties is justified by the protections we may (or may not) be afforded against terrorist attacks. Reasonable people could argue for different strategies. There are alternatives that might be equally effective in reducing threats but less alarming to the public, less divisive among our allies, less go-it-alone, less in-your-face. Subtler strategies are possible. Borrowing a page from stealth technology, for instance, the United States could lower its profile as a target even as it strikes at the heart of specific terrorist groups. There's nothing soft or dovish about the punch of a Stealth B-2 bomber; it's just harder to strike back at.

Well, we probably agree that the Homeland security steps taken by this administration (and largely planned in the last Congress) do more to limit our civil liberties than they do to limit our exposure to centrally-planned, large scale terrorism. His last notion, that somehow America can "lower it's profile" in a world where its existence is seen as a triumph of mercantilist colonialism is kind of a challenge, and calls out for elaboration. I'll assume that we embrace Kyoto and push away Israel; hand over our troops to the ICC (which recently was offered a case that the British use of cluster munitions in Iraq was a war crime). But maybe he means something else...and I continue to fascinated by the left's support of covert action and assassination ('Subtler strategies...') in this conflict.

"As commander in chief of the U.S. military, I will never hesitate to send troops anywhere in the world to defend the U.S.," Dean says. He might as well be Bush if this is what he really thinks.

I'm inclined at this point to toss the author out as someone I should read with a serious eye. If the President of the United States isn't supposed to send troops anywhere else in the world to defend the U.S., what's the point of the job? To appeal to the U.N. for assistance, like the Rwandans, so that a decade later, they can hold hearings on what went wrong?

In the end, it comes down to the Democratic Party assertion that it could run the same war and execute many of the same policies more competently. "Me too" didn't work for Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. And Franklin D. Roosevelt argued successfully during World War II election campaigns that it was unwise "to change horses in midstream." Today, Democrats need to ask themselves: If we are in fact "at war" and facing such high stakes, why would the American public want to risk changing the White House leadership now? Seeking a penetrating answer to that question might be good politics. It would certainly be a public service.

Here's the $64,000 question, indeed. I strongly dislike most of Bush's domestic policies, and think that he's doing substantial damage to our economy and polity by implementing them. In a world where 9/11 had never happened, I wouldn't for a moment be considering supporting him. And I'd be looking at other issues in choosing someone in the Democratic field than "do they have a coherent response to this?" So here's my research and thinking project for this week, as I'm travelling: Is my perception that this is a serious war wrong? Obviously, I don't think so, but every so often it's good to check. UPDATES: * The Times gave a bio of Arkin: "William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail: warkin@igc .org". I went over to the www.igc.org website, and you should too, to help put some perspective around his writings. I'm still going to chew on the question, however. * Calpundit responds.

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DELTAS * Bluto: Emperor Misha I, hands down. * Boon: Stephen Green of Vodkapundit. * D-Day. Mike "Cold Fury" Hendrix fits this to an absolte 'T'. If he loses, it's a major injustice. * Flounder: Moe Freedman of Occam's Toothbrush. * Hoover: I've been nominated by Laughingwolf. Really wanted Sutherland's role as Professor Jennings, but no chance of that against Instapundit. So Hoover it is! Go vote! * Otter: I had voted for The Yeti of Tales of a Yeti Suit, based on This series. That was before Blackfive's latest update, which has has Armed Liberal strongly in the running. Gotta support my buddy on this one - A.L. it is! Vote! * Stork: Jeff Quinton of Backcountry Conservative, ya mo-rons! * Blake "LaughingWolf" Powers is trying to be D-Day, but I think he has the wrong character. We need a character who is looking for the right person, shows honour when tempted but enjoys the Delta's adventures, and winds up with a happy ending. Blake, Pinto is you. ZE WEEMIN * Babs Jensen & Mandy Pepperidge: Lori & Maripat of Right We Are! * Clorette DePasto: Da Goddess. If you've seen her pic, you know why. * Katy: Venomous Kate. Got the look, and the name. OMEGAS ET. AL. * Dean Wormer: Dave Winer, Scripting News. * Chip Diller: Wil Wheaton, still unable to live down Wesley Crusher. "Remain calm! All is well!" Oh, yeah, I can sooooo see it. Says Blackfive, in his mid-term update: bq. "The strangest thing is that Instapundit is now in the lead for both Professor Dave Jennings (no surprise there) and Greg Marmalard...he also got a vote for Mandy Pepperidge (?)..." Greg "honey, is it supposed to be this soft?" Marmalard! Owwwwch! Instaman does NOT deserve that. No, no, no. Instead: * Greg Marmalard: Andrew Sullivan. Girlfriend, there's a reason it ain't workin'. And finally... * Douglass Niedermeyer: Blackfive informs us that Kos of Daily Kos is in the lead. Well, he is a military veteran. Speaking of Commander Douglass Niedermeyer, his final fate is revealed via ACME Animal House Trivia: bq. "At the end of Animal House a subtitle says that Doug Neidermeyer went to Vietnam where he was "killed by his own troops." John Landis' segment of Twilight Zone - The Movie (1983), about racial bigotry, has a scene in a swamp in Vietnam. One of the American soldiers says, "I told you we shouldn't have fragged Neidermeyer." Heh. And now you know the rest of the story.

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In 2000, according to Wong's numbers, 784 Californians with incomes above $200,000 paid no income tax at all. What's the point of having an action hero as governor if he isn't going to track those people down, put them in headlocks and grab their wallets? Two professors ... John Bachar of Cal State Long Beach and Paul O'Lague of UCLA ... sent me a proposal that would raise enough money in two years to wipe out all our bills, and it wouldn't cost 97.3% of Californians a nickel.

And damn, does he love that idea. He goes on to extol it more in his Jan 21 column:

...let me give you the background. "When we heard Arnold Schwarzenegger say the only way to do this was with a $15-billion bond measure, we wanted to come up with an alternative that wouldn't substantially change the lifestyle of any Californian," says Paul O'Lague, who teaches molecular biology at UCLA. O'Lague and his pal John Bachar, who teaches statistics and probability at Cal State Long Beach, have been studying income taxes and wealth distribution for years, and hosting salons to hash out their ideas. They came up with a proposal that puts a surcharge on California residents with an income above $200,000, including a joint filing in which husband and wife make that much combined. The surcharge would start at 0.5% for light heavyweights making $200,000, and climb to 7% for bombers hauling in $5 million a year or more. All told, this $200k-plus group accounts for just 3.1% of all tax returns, but has 35.9% of total personal income in the state. The surcharge would generate a fat $13 billion a year, because California has more millionaires per capita than any state. (And Golden State billionaires, who account for more than one-fifth of the nation's billionaires, have a net worth of $102.9 billion.) "How much money can you spend on yourself?" asked Bachar. He echoed his colleague's point that for the state's aristocracy, the hardship of a surcharge could mean having to settle for a $9.5-million mansion instead of a $10-million estate.

Now let me point out two teeny problems with this notion. The first one is theoretical, but has been pretty well borne out in recent tax policy history. I'm willing to spend all the money I can raise by taxing you, and maybe a little more. When it doesn't cost me anything, why not? The notion that the variable tax burden can be shifted to someone else - whether higher income taxpayers, or those who make their living from wages and not dividends - makes raising those taxes and spending pretty damn attractive. To put it terms that 300K might understand, it's like giving your kid a credit card you make the payments on. it might work out, but in most cases, it will end badly. So the politics of it get messy. And then there's the little problem that it doesn't work. Somehow, the Sacramento Bee got Dan Weintraub, and we got stuck with 300K. It's just not fair. Here's Weintraub's Sunday column on the subject:

Why should we care? Because California's skewed income distribution, combined with progressive tax rates, means that the people at the very top of the income heap pay a very high percentage of the personal income tax collected in this state. Their extraordinary, onetime income surge at the end of the last century provided most of the new tax revenue that legislators and former Gov. Gray Davis used to raise teacher salaries, increase welfare benefits and expand eligibility to state-provided health care. But the decline that followed also accounted for most of the revenue drop that contributed to the state's fiscal crisis. And as of the most recent tax year, they hadn't hit bottom yet. The million-dollar earners peaked in 2000, when 44,000 of them -- about enough to fill your average baseball stadium -- reported incomes totaling $172 billion and paid more than $15 billion in taxes. The tax take from that relative handful of returns accounted for more than one-third of all income tax paid in the state. The next year, the number of returns reporting incomes that high slumped to 29,000. Their combined income also declined, by nearly half, to $95 billion. And here was the killer: Their tax liability dropped from $15 billion to just under $8 billion. The money lost to the treasury that year would have been enough to pay for the state's entire commitment to higher education, or most of the cost of the Medi-Cal system that provides health care to six million of California's poorest residents.

The volatility in income and behavior mean that it's damn hard for the state to rely on stable revenues from the ever-shrinking group of people deemed rich enough to be taxed. When I talk about behavior, I mean two things: many of them move away (cf Jim Clark), and most of them (even me) can 'engineer' their income around tax policy to minimize taxes. Now, remember that I'm the guy who explicitly supports redistribution. I have no ideological bias against the idea that the rich should pay proportionately more, even a lot more. But I have this funny quirk. I believe that whatever the tax policy is, it has to work. That's because I'm a part of the future Party of the Sensible, one that believes that policies should be judged on more than their good intentions. I dinked around with an idea which I may try and get into the Hope Street competition if I can get some time to do research (or if I can find a volunteer to help out).

Sales taxes are anathema to progressives, because they are inherently regressive...lower-income household have to spend most of their income to survive, and so wind up paying a far higher percentage of their income in sales taxes. But they are stable, and more importantly, they are the means whereby those who earn in the cash economy contribute their share. Simply put, we ought to bump the state sales tax by a fairly significant amount, and rebate it back to lower- and middle-income taxpayers, possibly by covering some portion of their payroll taxes with it. Note that some burden will fall on lower- and middle- income taxpayers; that can't be avoided, although it can be meliorated. Further note that those who live in the cash economy - who include illegal immigrants - will be disproportionately affected. Good; they need to pay their share, too.

Here's a set of notions that might actually work:

1) Raise sales taxes statewide by .5%;

2) Arrange for the state government to pay 100% of the payroll taxes to the Federal Gov't equal to that on the first $24,000 of income of California workers, phasing down to 0% at $36,000 - paid for from the sales tax revenues.

3) Add a state payroll tax that starts at the income levels where the Federal taxes end;

4) Devise policies that reassess commercial property held in corporations or partnerships when 51% of the corp or partnership changes hands;

I need to do the math more exactly, but it seems that we'd pick up a few billion in more-stable state revenues that way.

And it wouldn't result in a policy that resulted in a very few high-income taxpayers being the sole revenue source for the state.

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North Korea's Man-Made Famine

• The Big Hominid has a three part (so far) review of Andrew Natsios's book The Great North Korean Famine -- definitely worth the time going through. Part I Part II Part III
• In the Asia Times, Jim Lobe discusses starvation in North Korea, including the way in which the DPRK may be distributing food according to political loyalty.
• For the Lunar New Year holiday, meanwhile, South Korea's MBC TV is airing a special on North Korean cuisine during which they visit cooking schools in the [starving] nation and discuss some of the country's regional dishes [but probably not including grass and tree bark]. I only wish I could tell you I'm making this up.

North Korea's Nukes

• An unofficial delegation visited North Korea in order to peak around its reactor site at Yongbyon, and one of its members, former special envoy to North Korea, Jack Pritchard, writes about what he saw in the NYT. Pritchard feels that "time is not on the American side," but Barry Briggs disagrees. Kirk of It Makes a Difference to the Sheep offers his comments on this as well.
• The Flying Yangban gives us (and Fred Kaplan in particular) some advice on dealing with the North Koreans.
• North Korea may have offered a "bold concession" to freeze it's nuclear program (see here and here, too). I offer some brief comments on this over at the Marmot's Hole, as well.
• Also at Free North Korea, take a look at this critique of Richard Perle and the neocon's position on North Korea. BTW, it goes without saying that Free North Korea is an outstanding source of information on the DPRK -- you'd be wise to take advantage of it.
• North Korea's Most Wanted Playing Cards?

US-ROK issues

• Tom Rathbone, new to the English-language blogging world, tells us why the Yongsan move will not weaken South Korea's security.
• South Korea's Foreign Minister, Yun Yeong-gwan, turned in his resignation after a scandal involving "inappropriate statements" racked his ministry. President Noh's foreign policy adviser, Ban Gi-moon, was named as his replacement. The resignation sparked much concern, as it began to take on the overtones of an ideological struggle within the Noh Blue House for control of South Korean policy toward the United States. The Oranckay has some good stuff on this (look here, too), and the Yangban discusses the problem of "diplomats going native." The Rathbone press deals with the Yun resignation as well.
• David Scofield discusses Korea-centrism and the foreign 'threat' in the Asia Times -- makes for an interesting read.

Asian Affairs

• If you are at all interested in Asia and not reading Far Outliers, you're missing something. Your missing a lot, actually.
• STAMP WARS! Learn all about the Dokdo Islets, two rocks in the middle of the Sea of Japan that are claimed by both Korea and Japan, and how printing stamps can be hazardous to bilateral relations. The Oranckay tells us why we should avoid calling the islets "disputed territories."
• INTERNET WARS! This is what happens when stamp wars grow out of control.
• HISTORY WARS! Learn all about how Chinese attempts to make incorporate the history of the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo is causing quite a fuss in Northeast Asia. David Scofield discusses the MURAL WARS (in reality, only a front in the greater HISTORY WAR), and I discuss the South Korea's rather muted response to the Chinese historical claims at the Marmot's Hole. And check out some of those protest threads (and here), baby!
• Kirk of It Makes a Difference to the Sheep gives us an excellent (and expert!) history of the relations between Korea and Qing Dynasty China, and the Yangban offers some of his insight into this as well.
• Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro ushered in the New Year with a visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, drawing nasty responses from the South Korean government (and even nastier comments left on a number of blogs) -- check out my my post (more for the comments), Shuxie (excellent commentary and links on this issue), the Oriental Redneck (more great stuff), and Solomonia.

South Korea

• After spending 50 years as a POW in North Korea, Chon Yong-il finally made it home to South Korea. But Conrad of the Gweilo Diaries asks, "where's the outrage?"
• In a sign that the South Korean government is finally planning to get tough with North Korea (not), the Noh Administration is considering pardons for those involved in transferring tons of cash to Pyongyang right before Kim Dae-jung's summit meeting with Kim Jong-il in 2000. [sarcasm off]
• Between 1968 and 1971, the South Koreans were training a military unit with the purpose of sending it up North to assassinate then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, only to see the unit eventually revolt. A movie about the unit is now setting Box Office records in South Korea -- the KimchiGI gives us some background and his own thoughts on the film.
• The Flying Yangban takes a look at some of the, uh, security personnel that will be tagging along to Iraq.
• South Korean politics are as ugly as ever -- as the Oranckay writes, this says it all. Run through my South Korea archive at the Marmot's Hole for more stuff and links. Seeing Eye Blog also makes many an acerbic observation -- just visit his blog and start scrolling down.
• The Hankyoreh Shinmun -- the South Korean left-leaning daily -- now translates their editorials into English. For an excellent fisking of one of them, take a look at this Seeing Eye Blog offering.
• Kevin of Incestuous Amplifications, back from a long blogging break, steps back into the ring with a post that's literally all over the map.
• An American expat in China visits Korea (and blogs his tale), and an American expat in Korea visits China (and blogs his tale).
• As always, those wanting to get a look at everyday life in Korea (through some outstanding photographs) should stop by Korea Life Blog.

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IRAQ BRIEFING * The US is agreeing with Iraqi leaders that the UN needs to be integrated into the process of selecting an interim government for the country. Towards that end, Bremer seems to be revising US plans for Iraqi self-rule and the UN seems willing to participate. * The two major Kurdish parties PUK and KDP are moving closer towards a merger according to al-Jazeera. * Defenselink has a nice round-up of the progress that has been made in Iraq's reconstruction since the fall of the Baathist regime nearly a year ago. * The US is developing a clearer picture of the Baathist insurgents and their operations. * Western citizens are reportedly among those members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq captured in Iran. * An Iraqi car bombing in Baquba has killed 8. * Some disturbing reports are emerging about the murder of Iraqi liquor salesmen, likely by representatives of the radical Shi'ite leader Moqtada Sadr. * The IAEA has confirmed that the yellowcake found in Rotterdam likely came from Iraq, possibly from a known mine that was active before the Gulf War. * The late British scientist David Kelly apparently believed that Iraq both possessed WMDs and that it posed an immediate threat, according to newly released video footage. * Which "cards" have we captured so far? The CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." * The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops: American, Australian, British, Canadian and Polish. Anyone out there with more information, please let us know [updated January 15, 2004] IRAN REPORTS * Did Iran assist al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks? According to a witness in the case of accused Hamburg cell member Abdelghani Mzoudi as reported in Der Spiegel, that indeed appears to be the case. I'm still looking for a better translation, but in the meantime you can read my own translation via Alta Vista. Rantburg poster True German Ally (who lives up every bit to his screen name) has his own translation - it's very chilling and a lot better than my own. Still, take a deep breath and remember the "7-day rule" for news like this. * Western diplomats are expressing concern that Iran has reneged on its promise to suspend uranium enrichment. * Amir Taheri takes a long look at Iran's "sort of democracy" and finds it rather lacking. And in a bid to lessen the poison as Taheri puts it, the Guardian Council will allow 200 reformists of the 3,500 blacklisted on the ballot in next month's elections. * Hassan Rowhani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, is claiming that Iran has extradited al-Qaeda members back to Saudi Arabia (a claim I would take with a whole shaker of salt). Rowhani, who is in France on a diplomatic mission, is announcing that Iran will expand its ties with the European Union, likely as part of a plan to counter any US moves against it. * The death toll from the Bam earthquake has topped 41,000, according to Mohammed Mohammedi Golpayegani, a close aid to Ayatollah Khamenei. THE WIDER WAR * Al-Qaeda military command Saif al-Adel has launched an online terrorist manual in an effort to provide expertise to would-be jihadis who are unable to attend formal terrorist training camps. How thoughtful. * Al-Qaeda ran quite an interesting operation in Spain that should serve as an example of how al-Qaeda operates under the radar in Western nations. * The CIA is claiming that Mullah Krekar was ordering suicide bombings via the Internet - so much for him "no longer being affiliated with Ansar al-Islam." When will Norway get serious about him? * Turkish al-Qaeda suspects arrested in Gebze are detailing their jihadi careers, as well as those of the other 450 Turks who received training in Afghanistan. * Saudi authorities have just discovered a network of terrorist training camps spread throughout the Kingdom. The Saudi authorities, as Spartacus notes, seem to be channeling the spirit of Police Captain Paul Renault in Casablanca. * Fred Pruitt weighs in on Russian claims that no large armed groups remain in Chechnya, though there still seems to be quite a bit of violence in the region. Meanwhile, Chechen al-Qaeda leader Shamil Basayev weighs in on the Chechen war with his usual calm and rational manner ... * Russia has identified the mastermind of the Victory Day bombing in Kaspiysk, Dagestan in May 2002 as Chechen field commander Rappani Khalilov, who is still at large. * The Algerian Islamic party FIS, whose election wins over a decade ago served as the catalyst for the nation's civil war, is now unveiling a blueprint for peace in the troubled African nation. No word on whether or not the GIA or GSPC will follow suit ... * The Filippino communist group New People's Army has forged an alliance with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Thank God we all know that secular and religious totalitarians would never cooperate, or this might worry us... * We try to end on a lighter note if possible. Russia has seemingly called in the army to bolster a week-long struggle to rescue 10 tons of beer trapped under Siberian ice. But did the operation have U.N. permission?

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Her story got the council's attention. Councilman Gerard Bisignano said the matter will be taken up within six weeks. ... "People do get hit and I don't deny that," Freschi said. "But to my knowledge no one has been seriously hurt. It stings and it smarts. But no blood, no broken bones." He makes an analogy that dogs bite and bicycles run into people. But these beach activities aren't banned; laws are passed to make the activities safer.

First, I need to disclose that I do not and have never flown remote controlled airplanes. My sons have not flown remote controlled airplanes. I do often use the Esplanade and bike path near there, so I ought to be on the side of the angels and support banning the damn things. And hell, I'm a liberal, so regulation must be good, no? In this case, no. Boy, I have so many problems with this. First of all, it fits nicely in with my view of the SkyBox nature of our process. A planning commissioner gets hit - and her feelings, not her scalp are wounded. So A Law Must Be Passed So That They Learn A Lesson. Bull. Second, I've got to ask, where's the real risk? Kids play frisbee on the beach all the time, and the wind catches them...I've been hit by those. I've been clocked by an errant volleyball. Should we ban those? Of course not. Third, the notion that the city would ban the activity - rather than make any effort to reasonably figure out how to make it workable, when it's been done there for 40 years or more - sticks in my throat. The City Attorney says:

"City Attorney Jerry Goddard said enforcing such restrictions could be costly and difficult. Banning the gliders would be the easiest, cheapest alternative. "I have to say, reluctantly, that the level of use of The Esplanade and beach area has reached the congestion point where regulation is necessary," Goddard said. "I'm saddened by that. Mainly because I'm disappointed at the ever growing level of government regulations over citizens' lives. And I'm also disappointed in the irresponsibility of people to do anything from walking their dog on a leash to flying a model airplane in a responsible fashion." Goddard said that in his 11 years as city attorney an adult or child, car or house has been hit by a glider about every two years.

Sorry, Jerry, but one reported accident every two years isn't evidence of irresponsibility, and while I think you're on the right track about intrusive regulation, saying you're against it while proposing it seems kind of disingenuous. Personally, I think there are probably some simple and easily enforceable rules - like don't fly on summer weekends or holidays after 9 or 10:00 am - which would lessen the chances of conflict and keep the pilots flying. Personally, I think Redondo is a small enough town that those affected by the flying could walk up the hill and personally interact with the glider pilots and work something out informally. But that might be too simple. Mayor Greg Hill, Councilmember Gerard Bistango, and City Manager Lou Garcia are the ones who ought to think about this. One might hope that they'd come to the conclusion that this is silly and embarrassing, and that the City has more pressing business.

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As any sports fan understands, the order in which things are done is a huge part of strategy. A good strategy creates openings, and suddenly a move which would have been disastrous in early play becomes possible - or even powerful - in later play. Which is what I think we're looking at here. A successful Iraqi invasion has created important openings, allowing America to finally be explicit about its war aims and pursue the larger war of ideas more openly throughout the Middle East. Before the invasion of Iraq, Bush's strategy statement would have greatly complicated America's war aims by endangering support from key allies. Now fast-forward to the aftermath. With Saddam gone and a significant base for American combat power located in the region's heart, the picture changes. The rulers face a reduced regional threat level. Their people, meanwhile, are stirring with sense of both renewed possibilities (note the Shi'ites insistence on more rights in Saudi Arabia, for instance) and bruised illusions (the exposure of Arab war coverage delusions in the fall of Baghdad was profoundly embarassing). These factors give states in the region a bit more breathing room to accept such statements - and a lot less leverage if they don't. Hence Bush's November speech at the National Endowment for Democracy. Hence this clear statement of his aims in the 2004 State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the war continues - and our desires in this matter are frankly irrelevant. It only takes one to fight, and significant sections of the Islamic world have chosen. Banagor's point bears repeating: bq. "The reason we are fighting this war is not because nineteen hijackers crashed into a burning building and a handful of others cheered, but because the entire Muslim world not only cheered, but then turned around, pointed at "The Jews" and said that it was their fault, denied they ever did it, denied that it ever could be them, screamed that they hated us anyway, danced in the streets, printed up posters about the heroes who did the deed all while denying they ever really did, and then increased their threats to tell us that if they didn't get more capitulations that it would happen yet again." As I noted in an earlier article, "it's the hate, stupid!" Unfortunately, the concrete benefits of hatred's incitement are too significant for to the Islamic world's theocrats, dictators, and demagogues to give it up - unless and until the cost of their behaviour is raised to a level that makes it unprofitable. Only then can the hatred begin to recede. Only then will we be able to say that we can glimpse victory in the war of ideas. Until then, however, that carefully cultivated hatred makes war inevitable - whether we wish it or no. Bravo to President Bush for making these points so clearly, and for confronting the fundamental evasions of those who still refuse to grasp these truths. Yes, winning this war will be difficult. We grope toward a solution that seeks to change the course of an entire civilization by means short of total war, an endeavour with few historical precedents. There is no one plan guaranteed to work, and despite all our strategizing nobody really knows what the future will bring. The way forward will surely feature setbacks and surprises, many of which will be measured in blood and horror. Yet I retain hope. We come from a culture skilled in war, seductive in peace, and formidable beyond words when aroused. The determination and flexibility of free peoples harnessed to a worthy goal is a force that has achieved great things in the world. Perhaps we will indeed find the right way forward, and succeed, and sit with pride in the company of those who have gone before us and built all that we have. What is certain, is that we must try. The terrorists and their supporters have declared war on the United States - and in many places, war is indeed what they have received. Yet the clock is still ticking, and the dynamics behind the danger have not changed. The technology curve is inexorable, and the Islamic world's underlying pathologies of hatred are not going away. Until they do, victory will continue to be our only option. Otherwise, the looming alternatives of catastrophe and/or genocide are too terrible to contemplate.

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REPORTS FROM THE FIELD * CNN report: A terrorist attack involving a car bomb with 1,000 lbs. of TNT has killed at least 18 civilians in Iraq. It was a close call, but Chief Wiggles survived. Let the Iraqi Toy Drive continue! * On-the-scene report of a recent attack on an A300 at Baghdad airport, including pictures. No casualties. * Another attack that was foiled on Saturday, this one was 3 anti-aircraft missile warheads joined into a roadside bomb. * Oxblog points to an article about the U.S. Army's investigation into why so many helicopters are being lost to hostile fire, and the tactics being used. * Lisa Burgess reports in Stars & Stripes that 160,000 Interceptor Body Armor systems are now en route to soldiers serving in Iraq and Kuwait, thanks to a Herculean effort by 9 separate defense contractors. Hope they give some to the Polish troops. * As the U.S. Marines prepare to take over in the Sunni Triangle, they're getting crash courses in Basic Arabic. Good idea - and one we recommend expanding to any troops you know. * This article talkes about the coming transition in Mosul. The 101st Airborne "Screaming Eagles" paratroopers have done well, and the article looks at the process of organizing their replacement by the Stryker Brigade and its armored vehicles. * Sean Penn is back in Baghdad, and writing about his experiences. Mike Hendrix notes that he seems like less of an idiot this time. RECONSTRUCTION & THE ECONOMY * Cutting the number of civil affairs troops in Iraq makes little sense to Praktike, who also think the battalion-level CERP aid programs should be expanded. I'm with him on both counts. * Here's some information about the CERP Program and what it has acheived so far. * Iraqi blogger Alaa has some advice for the allies. * Man, that is one Basra doctor with los grandes cojones. Bravo. * Some form of Iraqi governance is getting closer. Team Agonist has links that give us some background on the Kurds' position, the role of Shi'ite Ayatollah Sistani, and some of the headaches involved in the process. * Praktike has some disturbing reports concerning the Shi'ites of Iraq, esp. Ayatollah Sistani's speeches. Standard bazaar bluffery before negotiations, or something more serious? * Bosnia's aftermath teaches us to go slow in these cases or face a weak government and long-term instability... expect high tension, hard bargaining, and major headaches as all sides including the USA work to come to a deal they can live with. The USA is trying to create a process that gives moderates an advantage. As they should. * On the economic front, apparently Iraqi reconstruction has its own trade show. * "Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!" Well, the whiskey part sure is becoming a booming business for the Iraqis. Seems they're taking a tip to from Canadian history back in the 1920s, and running booze into their larger "alcohol-free" neighbour Iran. Woo hoo! THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE * Liberal Hawks reconsider the Iraq war and its aftermath. Have their minds changed? It's a very good discussions, featuring Paul "Terror & Liberalism" Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Friendman, Ken Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, et. al. * Curious which countries have troops in Iraq right now? The Command Post has your answer. ETCETERA * We have some great photos of Saddam's capture, from a source who shall remain anonymous. * Donald Sensing thinks Donald Rumsfeld should have listened more. * Which "cards" have we captured so far? The CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." * The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops. American, Australian, British, Canadian, and Polish troops are included, along with some links relevant to Israel [updated January 15, 2004]. * I try to end on a lighter note. With idiot relatives like this, you almost feel sorry for Saddam. Almost.

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IRAN REPORTS * Pejman discusses the latest political showdown in Iran, in the wake of The Guardian Council's decree invalidating over half of the candidates for Iran's Parliamentary elections. Hint for the U.S. State Department: rule by decree from an unelected "Guardian Council" of theocrats is not democracy. * A student at the Iranian University in Tehran pens an open letter to President Bush. * Kaveh thinks the Iranian Reform Movement is done for. The respected editors of the Christian Science Monitor newspaper think the Iranian muillahs are done for. I lean toward Kaveh's view. U.S.A. HOMELAND SECURITY BRIEFING * Looks like there's some hope on the horizon re: "smart" shipping containers. Good. Container shipping is one of our most serious domestic security vulnerabilities, and Sen. Bob Graham (D-FLA) has been right to focus on it over the past couple of years. * Lebanese citizen Mahmoud Youssef Kourani has been charged by federal prosecutors in Michigan of fund-raising for the Hezbollah terrorist group of Lebanon. Kourani used a corrupt Mexican official and Mexican smugglers as a path into the United States illegally. Parapundit talks about this case, and the larger trends it's tied to. * Another arrest for jihadi activities in America... and this one is an annoying blog-troll whom Tacitus remembers well. * "Tribunals" are planned for individuals like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who were thought to have a direct role in planning and executing the Sept. 11 attacks. Phil Carter looks at what happens next, and the likely role of the U.S. Supreme Court. * Phil also offers a quick summary of what's up re: the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, and the Supreme Court's likely decision to take the Padilla v. Rumsfeld case as well. * Right winger Kim du Toit is mad as hell about the so-called "free speech Zones" for protesters. Rightly so. Tacitus points out, however, that they began before Bush took office. THE WIDER WAR * Canadian soldiers launched an early-morning raid Sunday on a compound in Kabul, arresting suspected terrorists and seizing drugs, cash and weapons in their first offensive action since arriving in Afghanistan last August. * The "Palestinian Authority" has formally imposed Islamic law in Judea and Samaria. ChicagoBoyz describes it as "the end of secular nationalism in the PA," and probably means more persecution of Palestinian Christians, many of whom have already fled over the years. Remind me again why another Talibanesque terror state in the Mideast is a good idea? * "Extreme Peace Missions" indeed: a joint Israeli-Palestinian team in the Antarctic has been successful, resulting in "The Mountain of Israeli-Palestinian Friendship." The team even has a blog. * Some recent changes in the planned path of Israel's Security Fence. * Beirut Calling has a Lebanon 2003 year-end report, covering developments in that region. * "Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments." ChicagoBoyz analyzes the lesson to be learned from Libya's recent decision to play nice. * The North Korean famine, and some of its potential implications for the situation in Korea. This is about the true face of the North Korean regime. Have the courage to look at it. * Agreement is reached to move U.S. troops out of Seoul. Or is it? * Hours after up to 40,000 Muslims marched against a planned ban on Islamic headscarves in state schools, a carbomb attack on a newly appointed prefect of Algerian origin dramatically underlined the scale of France's problems. * Oh, and guess who organized that little demonstration? Winds affiliate WATCH/ offers a translation of Blandine Grosjean and Olivier Voge's exposé in Libération. * UNESCO in Paris invites Hani Ramadan to give his opinion on stoning during their conference on the clash of civilisations. Hani supports stoning of women according to shari'a law. Good thing that international multilateral instituions exist so we can discuss such things. * American Muslim Murad Kalam visits Egypt - and has his illusions shattered like glass. "I fled home the next week, leaving all my illusions of the Arab world in my Cairo flat.... On the long flight home, I promised myself I would never accept anything less than full democracy for my fellow Muslims in the Arab world or apologize for the tyranny that now masquerades as Islam." ...I say we finance more of these trips! * Meanwhile, ties between radical Islam and the neo-Marxist left continue to grow. The 2003 Cairo Conference is just the latest example of a larger trend. * See this Irish incident as well, wherein a prominent pro-Palestinian IRA member objects to Belfast's Holocaust Memorial Day. Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think we missed something important, use the Comments section to let us know

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Fri Jan 16, 1:46 PM ET LISBON (AFP) - Actor Tom Cruise has acted as cupid for a Portuguese couple, appearing on state television to implore a factory worker to marry her longtime cameraman boyfriend, it was reported. According to the weekly newspaper Tal e Qual, Joao Martins, who works for Portuguese state broadcaster RTP, asked the star to make the plea after he met Cruise while covering the Spanish premiere of his latest blockbuster "The Last Samurai" in Madrid last Friday. "Sonia, you have to marry Joao. Please marry Joao. He is crying behind the camera," Cruise said as he looked into the camera. "Name your children after me," the actor added. The cameraman was on the telephone with his girlfriend when Cruise's plea was broadcast on RTP later that same day and Sonia Braz immediately said yes to the marriage request, the paper reported. The couple plans to wed later this year. Martins said he never imagined Cruise would agree to his request. "All my girlfriend asked for was that I get his autograph," he told the paper. Cruise often mingles with fans, and even takes calls on their mobile phones, during walkabouts before his movie premieres.

Now that's a stand up guy. Also a great story to tell little Thomas Cruz Martins one day...

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There is no way of proving this, of course, but there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein ever intended to initiate hostilities with the United States once he acquired a nuclear weapon; if anything, rogue state regimes see in such weapons a means of deterring American military action against themselves. Interestingly, Condolezza Rice, just a year before she became National Security Adviser, voiced confidence in deterrence as the best means of dealing with Saddam. In January 2000 she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she declared, with respect to Iraq, that "the first line of defense should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration." She added that rogue states "were living on borrowed time" and that "there should be no sense of panic about them." If statelessness is a terrorist enemy’s "most potent protection," then is not "stateness" a rogue state’s most potent strategic liability?

Once you acknowledge that state actors can be deterred, his answer becomes simple

Traditionally, however, war has involved military operations between states or between a state and an insurgent enemy for ultimate control of that state. In both cases the primary medium for war has been combat between fielded military forces, be they regular (state) or irregular (nonstate) forces. Yet terrorist organizations do not field military forces as such and, in the case of al-Qaeda and its associated partners, are trans-state organizations that are pursuing nonterritorial ends. As such, and given their secretive, cellular, dispersed, and decentralized 'order of battle,' they are not subject to conventional military destruction. Indeed, the key to their defeat lies in the realms of intelligence and police work, with military forces playing an important but nonetheless supporting role.

In detail, it looks like this:

Intelligence-based arrests and assassinations, not divisions destroyed or ships sunk, are the cutting edge of successful counterterrorism. If there is an analogy for the GWOT, it is the international war on illicit narcotics.

There's lots more, and you ought to read his work. (personally, I think there are some other large holes in it, as in his inability - or unwillingness - to distinguish guerilla warfare from terrorism:

Terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a form of irregular warfare, or "small war" so defined by C. E. Callwell in his classic 1896 work, Small Wars, Their Principles and Practice, as "all campaigns other than those where both sides consist of regular troops." As such, terrorism, like guerrilla warfare, is a weapon of the weak against a "regular" (i.e., conventional) enemy that cannot be defeated on his own terms or quickly. Absent any prospect of a political solution, what options other than irregular warfare, including terrorism (often a companion of guerrilla warfare), are available to the politically desperate and militarily helpless? Was Jewish terrorism against British rule in Palestine, such as the 1946 Irgun bombing attack (led by future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Menachem Begin) on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (killing 93, including 17 Jews),19 justified as a means of securing an independent Jewish state? "Terrorism may be the only feasible means of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship, the last resort of free men and women facing intolerable persecution," argues Laqueur. "In such conditions, terrorism could be a moral imperative rather than a crime--the killing of Hitler or Stalin early on in his career would have saved the lives of millions of people."

Note that assassinating Hitler or Stalin - even in their early political career - would be guerilla warfare - an attack on the troops or political structure of the state. I think that he misses the key definitions of terrorism as I understand it:

If you hate the United States, or Republicans, you might believe that killing Hastert, even though he is nominally a ‘civilian’ would somehow strike at the effectiveness or strength of the U.S. or the Republican party (note: I don't advocate this, Ann, please don't get any ideas...). You'd be deranged in these cases, because one of the strength of our system is its relative independence from who wields the levers of power. But you'd be ‘understandably’ evil. Comprehensibly evil. But to kill the guy who runs the Quick Mart where Dennis stops and gets his Slim-Jims, in order to frighten or intimidate Hastert moves the evil to a whole new category. The grocer’s life becomes meaningless, you make him into a pawn, devalue him as a moral agent, and in so doing, devalue yourself morally.

He buys into the notion of terrorism as an extension of warfare by irregular means. I don't. But there's a deeper blindness in his piece which keeps me from stepping back from my current positions; a simple argument which he misses and which is central to my view. Here's the rub. As I've noted in the past, I personally believe that terrorism will be here for as long as we're struggling with 'Bad Philosophy'. We will continue to see essentially random acts ranging from 'mucking' to Murrah. But the scale and threat posed by that level of terrorism will be relatively low, and the actors will be highly vulnerable to traditional police work (as were the recently-arrested Texas terrorists), unless they are backed by something that controls resources on the scale of a small state or large multinational corporation. I can get five friends together and blow up a bridge (and I have just the friends to do it, too...). But to do something at the kind of scale that 9/11 represented takes more than the willingness to die for my cause. Hezbollah can supply the bodies, but it is the cash supplied by that Iranians, Saudis, and (formerly) Iraqis that pays for the staff and infrastructure to educate children in the ways of hate and feed them until they become murderous adults. It is national governments that allow terrorist organizations to build camps to house and train their recruits, and provide the stable living conditions that allow the leadership the time and space to plan and organize. The kind of terrorism that we need to be worried about is a binary agent. It requires both the kind of human actors that can be found or created in many places, but to make their actions something other than self destructive paroxysms of rage, it takes tacticians, resources, training, and weapons that need to be provided at a larger - national - scale. And that's the fear of what a nuclear-armed Iraq or North Korea might do. Not that they would use the weapons directly - because, after all, if they do they're done for. But that they may find ways to place the weapons in the hands of those who could use them in ways that they might deny. Using his model of the 'War on Drugs' is informative; as long as there are states which are essentially captive to narcotics cartels - say, Panama - it is impossible to stop the flow of drugs. As long as there are states which use terrorist armies as proxies, we will not be safe. The answer is, I believe to simultaneously do three things: 1) work to dry up state support for terrorism as aggressively as we can; 2) improve our ability to detect and respond to terrorist activities internally; 3) fight 'Bad Philosophy'. This is one that's going to take some doing...

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MEET AT 9:00AM Take the Camp Pendleton Exit on Rt. 5 just north of Oceanside. Volunteers will meet at the main gate parking lot no later than 9:00 a.m. to be escorted to the event. WORK INVOLVED Volunteers will be: * Assembling school supply kits, putting pencils, pens and notebooks in tote bags * Assembling medical supply bags, putting sm. equipment and supplies in bags and boxes. * Moving boxes into containers. People who can't lift things won't have to. TIME COMMITMENT Volunteers should be prepared to help until 1:00 pm. If possible, we may need them longer. We'll provide lunch. I'll be there, and hope some other folks can be as well. More details here.

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"The other day I went to a tourist information booth and asked, "Tell me about some of the people who were here last year." "Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect." "When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, 'Did you sleep OK?' I said, 'No, I made a few mistakes.'" "I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose." "I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got a full house... and four people died." "If a person with multiple personalities threatens suicide, is that considered a hostage situation?" "Why isn't the word, 'phonetically' spelled with an ' f '?" "When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?"

Welcome to Winds of Change.NET, where we're always looking on the bright side of life... with sunglasses on. If you've heard a really good joke, email us. We'll run the ones we really like as Guest Blogs with full credit.

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IRAN REPORTS * Iran is denying an Israeli claim that Syrian planes carrying humanitarian aid for the Bam earthquake victims returned home with weapons for Hezbollah. * Expendiency Council chairman Ali Akbar Rafsanjani is blaming Bush for his statements that Iran is working on WMDs, harboring al-Qaeda leaders, sponsoring international terrorism, and taking note of the nation's stellar human rights record. * Iranian president Mohammed Khatami is accusing the Guardian Council of making Iran look despotic by barring hundreds of reformist candidates from the upcoming elections, including the granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini. * Speaking of Khomeinis, Alphabet City has a link to a recent report by Michael Ledeen that Hossein Khomeini was forced to return to Iran as a result of threats against his family. USA HOMELAND SECURITY BRIEFING * A new source, possibly inside al-Qaeda, was partially responsible for the US decision to raise the threat level during the holiday season according to USA Today. * A Chicago-area jury is being shown intelligence documents that portray area newspaper publisher Khaled Dumeisi as a spy for Saddam Hussein. * The US is planning for a dirty bomb attack by sending out teams of scientists to major cities with radiation detection equipment to monitor the radiation level in hopes of detecting any attempt to bring such a weapon into a major metropolitan area. * Saudi national Sami Omar al-Hussayen has been indicted for distributing terrorist funds and seeking to recruit additional terrorists. * Cleveland Islamic leader Fawaz Mohammed Damrah has been indicted for concealing his links to Islamic terrorist organizations, among other things. THE WIDER WAR * The Taliban has launched a series of renewed attacks in Afghanistan within the last week in Uruzgan, Nimroz, and Khashrow. On a more positive note, Afghanistan's mujahideen are disarming, suggesting a possible lull in the inter-warlord feuding. * The Pakistani military has launched a major operation into southern Waziristan in hopes of locating al-Qaeda suspects. While the actual al-Qaeda appear to have escaped, the suspects wanted for harboring them have surrendered to the authorities. * A faction within the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is the prime suspect in the recent Maguindanao bombing that killed 15. The MILF is also believed to be hosting the training grounds for Jemaah Islamiyyah's second generation as well as supplying weapons to the communist NPA. Thank God we all know that militant Islamists and secular communists could never work together ... * Thailand new security advisor Kitti Rattanachaya is claiming that the recent violence in southern Thailand has an al-Qaeda connection through both JI and the KMM. As a result, Thailand is probing Islamic schools as the authorities try to hunt down terror suspects. * Malaysia, meanwhile, has arrested several Thai in connection with the January 4 army depot raid that started the upswing in violence in southern Thailand. * Indonesian authorities have arrested Adi Sunarya for his links with JI leaders Azahari bin Husin and Noordin Mohammed Top. * BBC has lengthy story up on the women of Jemaah Islamiyyah that helps to illustrate what I've noted before about al-Qaeda operating within close filial or social circles as a means of preserving operational security - something I think that they might have picked up from the Greek terrorist organization November 17. * Fazul (sometimes Faisal) Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaeda's point man in East Africa, had quite an undercover career in Kenya before masterminding the Mombasa attacks against Israeli targets. * Nabil Sahrawi, the new leader of the GSPC, has an interview with the Arab daily al-Hayat that MEMRI has been kind enough to translate for us. * The US is dispatching an anti-terrorist team to West Africa in response to what appears to be an active al-Qaeda presence in the region in conjunction with their Algerian affiliates. * Saudi Arabia is acknowledging that al-Qaeda has infiltrated the Saudi National Guard, which is responsible for, among other things, the protection of the 6,000 or so members of the al-Saud family. The Saudi daily Okaz is also making what appears to be a veiled threat against the US in response to recent remarks by Rumsfeld advisor Richard Perle. * Israel and Turkey are joining forces in order to hunt down the al-Qaeda cell that perpetrated the bombings in Istanbul back in November. * French authorities are said to have thwarted a chemical weapons attack by al-Qaeda to attack Russian interests in France. * We try to end on a lighter note if possible. Former Iraqi information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is, at long last, back on the air where he belongs ...

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REPORTS FROM THE FIELD * Sean Penn is back in Iraq, and writing articles. Really. * Rantburg has a mirrored copy of a photo of Saddam Hussein just moments after his capture at the hands of US forces. * US soldiers have captured 13 in a raid on Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. * Soldiers from the US 4th ID have killed 2 Baathists attempting to flee southeast of Khalis. * British and Danish forces have captured a senior Baath figure near Basra. * Task Force "All American" has located a major arms cache. * The US has captured several suspected al-Qaeda near Mosul. * Several relatives of Baathist leader Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri have been captured in Samarra. * Khamis Sirhan al-Mohammed, #54 in the Deck of Cards, has been captured by the 82nd Airborne Division near Ar-Ramadi. Here's The full CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." * al-Bawaba is reporting that Saddam Hussein's former secretary Abed Hamoud al-Tikriti has died while in US custody. * A mortar attack on Logistical Base Seitz west of Baghdad has injured 35 US troops. * 2 French civilians have been killed by gunmen in Fallujah. * 5 people have been killed in a Shi'ite mosque bombing in the Iraqi city of Baquba. * Attacks on US forces in Iraq are down 22% since the capture of Saddam, and I would say that one of the possible explanations as to why is that the remaining Baathists are too busy fighting amongst themselves right now. RECONSTRUCTION AND THE ECONOMY * Saddam Hussein has been declared a prisoner of war by the Pentagon. Newsday takes a look at what this means under the Geneva Convention. * It seems that Saddam Hussein's old statues are being put to a new use - honoring US soldiers who have fallen during the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom. * The US is planning to release 500 Iraqis as part of a carrot-and-stick amnesty drive. * High-ranking Baathists in Tallafar have renounced their party affiliation according to CENTCOM. * Fallujah, once a hotbed of anti-Americanism, seems to be becoming less hospitable to the Iraqi insurgency. This sentiment doesn't appear to be shared by Saddam's old thugs, however. * The Seattle Times has a nice round-up of other good stories from Iraq that are very much worth checking out. THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE * Turkey is warning against a break-up of Iraq. Orrin Judd says they may have reason to be concerned. * Syria plans to return $200,000,000 to Iraq according to a Turkish newspaper interview with Bashar al-Assad. * The Union of Arab Lawyers is planning for the defense of Saddam Hussein with legal experts from Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon traveling to Cairo to form a defense committee. * The US is using Turkish bases to rotate troops in and out of Iraq. * General Meyers is praising Mongolian troops for their efforts on behalf of coalition forces in Iraq. * The US has rebuffed a plan by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to hold early elections. * David Kaspar notes that the German media is starting to pay attention to the progress being made in the reconstruction of Iraq. WMD HUNT * The testing performed on the mortar shells recovered by Danish troops in Iraq appears to be inconclusive, with Danish tests showing positive and US tests turning up negative. Further testing is going to be conducted. * The US appears to be investigating every lead as to whether or not WMDs were shipped out of Iraq prior to the war, despite Rice's recent statements that the US has neither credible nor firm evidence that they went to Syria as some have suggested.

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* I'm not opposed to space exploration at all - in fact, I'm an enthusiast. Here's what I would support. This isn't even close. * As you might expect, Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings offers a much more detailed take on the program. Suffice to say that he isn't happy, either. * Jay Manifold of A Voyage to Arcturus cuts right to the heart of the speech. In rapid point form, he lays out the Scope, the Schedule and the Resources committed. * Laughing Wolf is surprisingly happy with the speech - and his madness may have method in it:

"I had no realistic hope of a truly visionary plan that would make use of the engine of private enterprise, nor was I surprised. I had a number of concerns that this plan would or could cripple private space efforts, and I am pleased (and a bit surprised) that it did not do so from the start. All in all, I like this plan because while it breaks no new ground, it does not appear to place limits on non-governmental possibilities. I can live with a tired re-hash of the past, provided that it does not prevent others from creating a brighter future. "

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bq. "Nagl's scholarship helped earn him a post as a professor at West Point. But when I met him last month, he was testing his theories far from the classroom. Nagl is now the third in command of a tank battalion in the heart of the so-called Sunni Triangle, which extends north and west of Baghdad. The counterinsurgency expert is, for the first time in his life, practicing counterinsurgency...." There's more, of course: article excerpts, links to some of Nagl's writings, reports re: the 10th Mountain Division's efforts in Afghanistan, and other goodies. For additional front line insights, I recommend this interactive "Arab Tribes in Iraq" presentation, as well as The Art of Peace's coverage of the Al-Buessa tribe's role in Fallujah's violence. Note the dynamics involved. Finally, see Orrin Judd's Iraq-related article "Why Stay," which notes the differences in Iraq's 3 major ethnic enclaves, makes some thought-provoking predictions, and even links to an article in The Village Voice. Judd's sobering post makes the local consequences of a U.S. pullout from a divided tribal society crystal clear. Elsewhere in the War on Terror, The Art of Peace adds depth to Orrin Judd's 10th Mountain Division reports by bringing us up to speed on recent developments in Waziristan, where the U.S. is working with the Mashuds against the Pakistani Wazir tribes that shelter al-Qaeda. The USA has apparently learned from the British and Russian experiences, and is working hard to keep the tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan's "lawless frontier" from uniting against them. This has significant policy implications, and explains why the USA is relying on slow progress from Karzai's efforts instead of "cracking down on the warlords" militarily as some ill-informed people are proposing. The resulting compromises are sometimes unhappy, and often sub-optimal... but it may be the best we can hope for. The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't going to be easy, but success is possible. Also necessary. --- UPDATES --- * Apparently, Maj. Nagl was a classmate of Blaster's. Come home safe, Major. * Trent Telenko emails a link to a Seattle Times article covering the Stryker Brigade's activities in Iraq. Lt. Col. William Buck James has a good approach.

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"Perhaps the Arab world failed to realize that when they say “we will destroy you”, we actually take it to heart; after September 11th, we no longer wish to rely on their incompetence before testing the validity of the threat, and we should not relax in our wish to stop that sort of threat. In a world where one threat could very well mean the encroaching doomsday scenario, we should take these as seriously as possible. The Arab and Muslim world, however, do not see it as such. Their view and tactic has always been that these threats were negotiating points, much like haggling at a bazaar. But September 11th changed much of that with this country. Now, if a state says that it means to destroy us, we will take it as an act of war. To Arabs and Muslims in general, that threat was perhaps merely a dream, or an outlet for rage at their own inabilities in the world community to create something more valid in modern times. But they have not moved beyond this, and have utterly failed to grasp the seriousness of our resolve. Whether or not Saddam had these weapons is a futile argument at this point: he is gone, and he could have avoided it by shutting up and playing ball. He gambled on the hot air of the Arab world, and he lost. His words made him the enemy; his posturing; his inability to comprehend that when he said “we will destroy you”, that we would take that message most seriously. Therein is the Arab problem: to make them understand that this is our message. If you speak the words, you better mean them."

Well, that would be a fine start, at least. For one thing, it might stem the steady cultivation of hate within their societies, by attaching real costs to fostering or tolerating it. Here's the bottom line: Right now, inculcating hate has the positive value of distracting the population from societal failure. Until the consequences clearly outweigh that benfit to the Muslim world's dictators and theocrats, it will continue. And so will the war. And so will the steady raising of the stakes, as the technology curve continues to drop and the hate continues to spread and harden beyond the capacity of peaceful means to fix. That way lies disaster, for all sides. UPDATE: While Banagor's piece clearly generalizes its key concepts beyond the British Kilroy Silk affair, British blogger and principled leftist Harry Hatchett does have lots of background on that situation if you're interested. From the right, I offer Belmont Club's perspective.

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bq. "The Army shut down most of its ammunition production facilities after the Cold War and spent clost to a decade not buying ammunition. Now the piper must be paid becasue we hace continuous operations eating up small arms ammunition as fast as we have production capability to make it." Efficiency is not the be-all and end-all for military procurement. Diversity of production and overall capacity may matter far more. Right now, there is one major plant producing military small arms ammo in the USA, and it's running at full capacity. All it takes is one major fire, and then what? This situation may be efficient, but it's not smart. Then there's the Army's apparent refusal to use old-fashioned lead munitions, easily available on the civilian market and often sold by the Army itself as surplus if SFTT's readers are to be believed. This strikes me as both dumb and ineffecient. Supplemental contracts to Olin Winchester Co. and Israeli Military Industries for each to produce 70 million rifle rounds per month beginning in June will help with the situation on the ground, though Kim du Toit has some reservations as a result of his own experiences. Still, as this article notes: bq. "The general said it would probably take until 2005 to get small-arms ammunition production to a level at which there will be enough to cover all the increased training needs and begin rebuilding the war reserves." "Gee, we'd really like to have done something about this crisis that arose elsewhere in 2004, but we didn't have the bullets." Not good enough. Not when there's a real war on... and this should have been forseen. Back to Trent: bq. "If the Army was really serious about ammunition for training troops here in the states, it would get an EPA waiver and use commercial off the shelf steel jacketed lead 5.56 and 7.62 ammunition for the duration. This thing of suffering trainig shortages in wartime because of the requirement for "green" tungsten bullet mil-spec ammunition is flat insane." If someone out there has a perspective we haven't considered here, by all means speak up via the Comments section and let us know. Right now, however, I'm with Trent. UPDATE: See the comments section for one response. Is this the consensus from firearms experts? If so, this whole thing starts to make more sense.

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Scott Tarkington of Demosophia not only offered to do an amazing and kind favor for me (Biggest Guy was stuck at Union Station in D.C. on his way back to VA), but has a bunch of interesting blog stuff worthy of comment and note. See especially: * Den Beste's 3 Way War Typologies * Before the Wave; and * Sane Talk About Zionism and War. Comments are queued up after the above. Steve "300K" Lopez, my favorite target-of-abuse at the LA Times, has a truly stupid column up on state finances. I've heard far better at Middle Guy's high school debate practices, and this guy gets a Times column and big dollars for it? Go figure. Mr. Carroll, I can set you up with some of these smart high school kids...and Mr. Lopez, I can refer you to some knowledgeable - and liberal - folks who could set you a little bit straight on state finances. In case you'd like to understand why I think it's so dumb, start here. I'm enjoying the hell out of Carville's latest book, and am discovering reading a book one (short) chapter at a time is fun, in a frustrating way - amazingly like foreplay. I've been invited to be one of the motorcyclists escorting the limos for the premiere of the new movie 'Torque' - a long story, and something cheesy enough that I may actually take the time and go do it. If so I'll have to practice my xtreme riding sometime tomorrow... ...and, most important of all, today is the fourth anniversary of the day that TG and I admitted to each other that "this relationship matters." Yes, it does. She still matters to me, and yes, I know how lucky I am to have her, love her, and be loved by her in return. Snarky political comments to resume soon.

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IRAQ BRIEFING * U.S. forces confirmed that the Black Hawk helicopter that went down near Fallujah this week was probably downed by ground fire. This attack may be indicative of the presence of foreign fighters supporting the Iraq resistance, although certainly Iraq possessed plenty of munitions prior to the invasion that they could use against Coalition forces. * Operation Iraqi Freedom II is beginning, removing the 123,000 American troops currently in Iraq and replacing them 110,000 soldiers and marines. The transition will provide numerous opportunities for attacks on U.S. forces. What happens over that period will be a significant indicator of the state of enemy forces in Iraq, as if they possibly can, they'll want to take advantage of this opportunity. Hat tip: The Agonist. * Iraqi impatience over the pace of the reconstruction boiled over this weekend, throwing stones at British troops and suffering six dead and eleven wounded. (Hat tip: The Agonist). * There are still those who claim Russia as an American ally. The United States claims it has evidence that Russia provided high-tech military equipment (use laexaminer/laexaminer) to Iraq in violation of UN sanctions. If true, this should provide a valuable bargaining chip in convincing Russia to forgive Iraq's debts. (Hat tip: Instapundit). * The WMD question remains up in the air after Dutch inspectors found mortar rounds that may contain mustard gas, a blister agent. The weapons likely date back to the Iran-Iraq war, although they would still represent a violation of the UN requirements. (Hat tip: Instapundit). * Which "cards" have we captured so far? The CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." * The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops. American, British and Australian. Anyone out there with more information, incl. the Poles and Czechs? [updated Dec. 25, 2003] * Don't forget Chief Wiggles' Toys for Iraq drive! IRAN REPORTS * If Iran and the United States are to get along, the U.S. must accept Iran's right to nuclear technology, says Iran's President, Mohammad Khatami. This doesn't bode well for U.S.-Iranian relations in the near term. (Hat tip: Little Green Footballs). THE WIDER WAR * Michael Totten breaks it down an explains just why the war is so important: not because we might lose, but because of what might happen if our current tactics fail. * North Korea continues its bait and switch with its nuclear programs; having shown evidence of its ability to build nuclear weapons to a U.S. delegation visiting North Korea last week. The North Koreans assured them that they are willing to freeze their program again in exchange for U.S. concessions (surprise). Thus far, however, the Bush administration is holding fast to its demands that North Korea submit to inspections to verify the dismantling of their program. * The United States gave Uzbekistan a failing grade for its human rights practices, a first for a former Soviet republic. The move is only symbolic, but it may serve notice to nations nominally allied with the United States that support for the war will not translate to a blind eye on human rights violations. Or it could show that the U.S. is only talking a good game on human rights; either way, expect it to become an issue in the war. * Israel is discussing potential peace talks with Syria if Syria stops providing support to Hezbollah. But it will probably take some pointed hints from the United States before Syria is willing to take that step. * It appears the United Kingdom may have stopped a suicide bomber, although there are no details available regarding the target. (Hat tip: Instapundit). * We try to close on a lighter note if possible. In tribute to Joe's earlier post, Scott Ott explains how Rush Limbaugh secured the Eagles' victory Sunday. Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think we missed something important, use the Comments section to let us know.

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His second post is truly intriguing. He raises the question of what the next progressive wave will look like. He says:

None of this is to say that these issues from previous progressive eras are dead. They aren't: healthcare, for example, is likely to be a significant issue in the coming decade. At the same time, however, they aren't likely to be the enormous drivers of social change that they have been in the past. But if the big issue of the next progressive era isn't labor, the social safety net, or individual rights, what will it be? Today, in hindsight, we can see Truman's integration of the armed forces and Jackie Robinson's debut with the Dodgers as the first faint stirrings of the great civil rights crusade that drove the 60s, but nobody in 1950 could have predicted that. Likewise, there is probably something simmering below the surface today that will drive the next big progressive era. But what?

Exactly - what is the principle around which the left side of the house will coalesce? Hmmm...

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On the hopeful front, Friedman's latest, which ends with:

We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can't just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II. This column is the first in a five-part series on how we can do that.

If you've read my stuff at all, you'll know that I'm looking for this answer. I sometimes feel like I'm clutching at straws in doing so, but I'll deal with that. I'd keep the military warmed up while we looked, tho.

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Reports From the Front * Lieutenant Colonel Sherman R. McGrew, who is writing from Iraq, relates the story of his Iraqi interpreter, who cannot be named in order to protect his identity. * Stryker Brigade News blog is dedicated to news and information about the Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Ft. Lewis, WA (3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division), currently serving in Iraq. Give their blog a visit! * At least 8 people have been killed in a New Year's Eve bombing at a Baghdad restaurant. * The US has arrested suspects who are believed to have been involved in shooting down a Blackhawk helicopter on November 15 in Mosul. * Iraqi insurgents are said to be using tactics honed from al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Chechen rebels against the US. * The second battalion of the new Iraqi army has graduated from training. The new Iraqi army is set to be up and running by September 2004. Social & Economic * 5 protesters were recently killed in an anti-Kurdish demonstration in Kirkuk. Interestingly, followers of Muqtada al-Sadr have apparently sided with the Kirkuk Turkmen against the city's Kurdish population. * The Iraqi finance minister has come to an agreement with Lebanon and Jordan to return frozen assets worth a billion dollars. * 100 Iraqi judges are getting a crash course in international law to prepare them to try members of the former regime, including Saddam Hussein himself. * CIA interrogators are reportedly taking a lighter hand with Saddam Hussein out of the expectation that information about the interrogation will come out in a trial. The International Stage * Jordan's foreign minister is warning Saddam's daughters to avoid making political statements if they seek to retain assylum status within the Hashemite Kingdom. WMDs * Stuart Cohen, Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, is standing by pre-war US intelligence in regards to Iraq's WMDs. * The Washington Post meanwhile, has a lengthy possible explanation for the lack of WMDs to date that suggests, among other things, that there was some kind of a shell game going on between the Iraqi scientists and Saddam Hussein in regards to his own arsenal, similar to those that have been suggested by Armed Liberal in the past here at Winds of Change. Etcetera * Which "cards" have we captured so far? The CENTCOM list. And the visual version of "Ba'ath Poker." Love that Ace! * The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops. American, British and Australian. Anyone out there with more information, incl. the Poles and Czechs? [updated Dec. 1, 2003] * Don't forget Chief Wiggles' Toys for Iraq drive!

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IRAN REPORTS * Contractors and construction consultants who violated building regulations in Bam will be charged, according to Management and Planning Head Mohammed Sattarifar. Given the death toll from the quake, that seems quite reasonable to me ... * Iran has refused a US offer to send a relief mission to assist in the distribution of supplies to the victims of the Bam quake. * Thousands of Muslim worshippers in Tehran are shouting "Death to France!" and denouncing Chirac as a Zionist for his proposal to ban "conspicuous" religious insignia from state schools after a sermon by Ayatollah Janati, a powerful member of the Iranian government who has previously called for Iran to renounce the Non-Proliferation Treaty. USA HOMELAND SECURITY BRIEFING * The US decision to cancel numerous flights over the holiday season has been due in part to intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning multiple suicide hijackings using international flights. The plan, according to an informant, called a for a terror blitz against US targets, possibly launched by an al-Qaeda exodus from the Hadhramouth region of Yemen (the ancestral home of bin Laden) into Saudi Arabia and from there to disperse across the Middle East and East Africa. * The specific dates for al-Qaeda attacks have passed, and as such the terror alert may soon be lowered, though I myself would wait until after Eid al-Ahda before breathing a sigh of relief because al-Qaeda generally prefers to act at a period in which they feel that operational security will be within reasonable parameters. * The US is trying to determine whether or not two American brothers detained in the Philippines were providing support to Islamic terrorists, presumably in the United States. The Weekly Standard has more. * Las Vegas, interestingly enough, seems to be no stranger to terrorism investigations, as noted by the Review-Journal. THE WIDER WAR * As most readers already know, Osama bin Laden (or someone who sounds like him) released an audiotaped statement recently to al-Jazeera. I would recommend my analysis, that of the Belmont Club. * Also of note is this article in The National Review which discusses not only the latest bin Laden audiotape but also this MEMRI translation of the first audio message to date from al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi. * The Hindustan Times is reporting that if you want to be a terrorist, the UK appears to be the safest place to be. * Ansar al-Islam founder Mullah Krekar was rearrested in Norway for complicity in organizing suicide bombings in Iraq. However, a Norwegian court has ordered his release on lack of evidence. * The Indian SAIR has an interesting look at the spread of radical Islamism in Bangladesh. * The Philippines is claiming that the two American al-Qaeda arrested there were providing funds to factions within the Moro Islamic Liberation Front aligned with the terrorist network. * According to MEMRI's news ticker via various conservative news outlets, Islamist sources in London (who have credibility on par with the former Iraqi Information Minister), al-Zawahiri's deputy Ahmad Hussein Abu al-Khir, who is either al-Khadr (a Canadian Egyptian whose son recently returned home) or al-Khayr (who is said to be in Iran) has been arrested. * The top members of the Senate Finance Committee are questioning the effectiveness of OFAC in the bid to freeze terrorist financing. * 150 Saudi figures have signed a petition warning against altering the Kingdom's education system. * The US navy has seized yet another al-Qaeda drug ship in the Persian Gulf, this one carrying $11,000,000 in hashish. * A top Taiwanese intelligence official is claiming that the nation has been targeted by members of al-Qaeda as yet another symbol of the network's global reach. * AllAfrica has an interesting look at the "Nigerian Taliban" who were recently causing so much trouble in Yobe state. Nigeria is also reportedly seeking the group's backers, an indication of just how seriously they're taking this. * A Chechen "rebel archive" has been seized from Alleroi and is said to detail who financed which terrorist attacks as well as listing Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov's bodyguards. * Rohan Gunaratna, the author of Inside Al-Qaeda, is calling the international affiliates of the terrorist network bin Laden's greatest achievement as well as warning to expect al-Qaeda attacks every 3 months. * A Taliban bike bombing in Kandahar has killed at least 13, mostly children, in their latest attack inside their former spiritual home. Though Mullah Sabir says he's sorry. * We try to end on a lighter note if possible. It seems that Timothy Dumouchel has decided to sue Charter Communications for addicting him to TV as well as making his wife fat and his kids lazy. Talk about a lack of personal responsibility ...

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He replies that a) some may argue that it's unaesthetic; b) it places - at the end of a long term of wealth concentration - civil society at some risk; and c) he makes the case for B) by pointing to George Soros and suggesting that increased concentrations of wealth could create a situation where

the imbalance in political power between the super-rich and the rest of us might become colossal. Of course, campaign finance reform might conceivably land Soros in jail, but the point still holds: if the super-rich become rich enough, they'll become laws unto themselves. And if that happens, it doesn't matter that the rest of us are getting richer, too.

I'll agree, suggest that we're already seeing that to a great extent, and further, that what we're already seeing is having serious negative consequences on civil society. I've defended redistribution in the past

There is a critical level of diffusion of power that has made the American model work. Not too diffuse, for there we get the demos, and ultimately the mob; and not too concentrated, for there we begin to stratify as those with privilege erect barriers to make sure that they can keep it. My biggest concern is that we are near a tipping point where that delicate balance will be at risk. I, and others like me, want to shove the pendulum back the other way.

Glenn thinks that the tipping point is in the far future. I don't; I think that the kind of isolation and stratification that we're talking about is here, now, and that the values of those who would toss out equality as a social good and replace it entirely with a reified hierarchy of power and wealth frighten me.

...I'll also suggest that there is also an even more significant distinction between a society that holds equality - any kind of equality - as a foundational belief, and one that does not. I used Dickens' England as an example of a class-driven society; one in which the accepted reality of inequality - in every form, political, legal, economic, and moral - is itself one of the organizing principles of the society. I could have used Elizabeth's England, or the Persia of Cyrus, but there are more people that know Dickens - and the point is more clearly made by a society closer to us - than either of those. Those are fundamentally different kinds of societies than those that hold equality as a value, regardless of what kind of equality is being discussed, and that difference ought to be obvious. If it isn't, imagine for a moment a Persian artisan making an appeal to Cyrus or Darius based on their common humanity, and on some body of common rights. Having trouble?? No kidding... The notion that people are equal in any way, and that societies should be organized on that principle was a revolutionary one, and one that we sadly take for granted. We shouldn't.

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DAGESTAN Dagestan (sometimes spelled Daghestan) is a Russian republic adjacent to Chechnya with a population that is predominantly made up of Sufi Muslims. They were invaded by the late Chechnya-based Arab warlord Amir ibn al-Khattab and his International Islamic Peacekeeping Brigade in 1999 in an effort to incorporate the republic into a Pan-Islamic theocracy spanning across the Caucasus, as explained by Chechen jamaat commander Amir Ramzan in this interview published on the pro-separatist Kavkaz Center website. Khattab's invasion, combined with the bombings in Moscow that killed roughly 300, led to the current Russian occupation of Chechnya. As most readers are no doubt aware of, distinguishing between the Chechen Islamists led by Shamil Basayev (who is himself an alumni of one of bin Laden's Afghan camps) and the larger al-Qaeda network is at best a matter of semantics, though I should add a brief caveat that it is not my intention to justify Russian policies with regard to Chechnya so much as to explain just who it is that is fighting them there and who they are ultimately loyal to. That being said, on December 15, a large group of Chechen fighters crossed into Dagestan, seizing hostages from Shauri and Galatli before breaking into 3 groups and heading back towards Chechnya and Georgia. This led to several encounters with Russian forces before the operation was completed and it was learned that a number of "Arab mercenaries" (a term used by the Russian press to describe jihadis) were among the dead. Other accounts suggest that the Arab leaders fled into Georgia and left their Chechen allies to die at Russian hands and it is entirely possible that just the upper-tier Arab commanders fled, leaving all of the cannon fodder to die regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. Whatever the case, these events appear to have led to the capture of a Chechen rebel archive that may well prove to be an intelligence goldmine as well as forcing Russia to consolidate its stance in the South Caucasus. There are also unconfirmed reports that senior Chechen warlord Ruslan Gelayev (Gelaev) is among the dead. I would note that any Chechen warlords have had this nasty habit of coming back from that condition in the past, this would be exceedingly good news if true. THAILAND While there have been past reports of al-Qaeda operating in southern Thailand under the auspices of JI, up until recently there has been very little proof of actual Islamic extremism in the country. That all changed on January 4, when 30 attackers burnt down 21 schools, killed 4 soldiers, and raided an army depot in the southern provinces of Narathiwat and Yala, the former of which was placed under martial law soon afterwards. Since then, there has been further violence in Pattani and Yala, including one attack that killed 2 soldiers. According to Thai security adviser General Kitti Rattanachaya, these attacks are being carried out by well-trained separatists linked to JI who could be getting support from the KMM. This is significant because there have been a number of press reports labeling the KMM as the political wing of the Parti Islam Se Malaysia (PAS), which is run by Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the father of alleged KMM leader Nik Adli Nik Aziz and we could be seeing the beginnings of a push by JI and KMM to try to create a "greater caliphate" in continental Southeast Asia by incorporating southern Thailand into Malaysia. NIGERIA Northern Nigeria has recently been identified as a hotbed of Islamic extremism fueled by an aggressive Wahhabi missionary campaign into West Africa and repeated outbreaks of inter-religious violence in the country. However, in recent days a specific organization has appeared with the apparent intention of challenging the Nigerian government for rule in at least one northern province: al-Sunnah wal Jamaa, also known as Hijrah, possibly a reference to Takfir wal Hijrah ("Anathema and Exile"), a militant Islamic movement that once tried to assassinate bin Laden for impiety. Rantburger Paul Moloney also speculates that they may be connected with an Australian organization of the same name led by a Sheikh Omran and perhaps connected to Zarqawi's al-Tawhid organization, which is in of itself a segment of the larger al-Qaeda network. The organization first came to public light on December 31, when Nigeria deployed riot police across Yobe state after over 200 members of the group attacked police stations in the state capital of Damaturu after arriving from neighboring Borno state 4 months earlier. After three days of clashes across 3 towns that left 8 dead, Nigeria announced that the group had been suppressed, arresting 7 and deploying 500 troops to hunt down any survivors. I'm not sure what happened during the course of the deployment, but by the end of it all Governor Bukar Ibrahim had announced that "many" Taliban-oriented radicals had been killed. According to AllAfrica, Hijrah is made up largely of highly-educated graduates who sought to establish an Islamic theocracy in Kanamma, Yunusari, and Toshiya, which would then be placed under the rule of unemployed potenate Taliban leader Mullah Omar. This sounds like quite an odd agenda even by Islamic extremist standards, but one might want to remember that Nigeria as well as several other nations have recently been singled out by both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri as being "ripe for liberation," which may explain why the Nigerian authorities are probing the uprising for foreign backing - don't be too surprised if the money trail leads all the way back to Riyadh before all of this is said and done. IRAQ As Joe noted on January 2, the immediate effect of the capture of Saddam Hussein has been to splinter the Baathist leadership into 3 factions, only two of which I would say are likely to be a genuine threat to coalition forces in the country. The first and largest of these forces is said to be led by one Colonel Hani Abdul Latif al-Tilfah al-Tikrit and to be comprised of former members of the Special Security Organization, the presidential guard, and special commando units. If Colonel Hani does indeed retain the allegiance of the al-Tikriti tribe, that means that he likely has a lock on whatever remains of the Baathist slush fund, given that 5 families within the immediate area of Tikrit were largely responsible for financing the Baathist insurgents against US forces. The most interesting character in Colonel Hani's rogues' gallery, however, is Lieutenant General Tahir Dalil Habbush, whom Taheri informs us is a Soviet-trained intelligence expert. Habbush has this penchant for being somewhat akin to a bad penny given that he keeps turning up, whether it's being involved in backdoor negotiations, the alleged intelligence memo regarding Mohammed Atta which Isikoff and Hosenball believe is forged (see here for my own thoughts), as well as in this story in the Christian Science Monitor in 1999 ordering the destruction of VX. The second major group is led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was previously believed to be the main driver behind the Baathist insurgency as well as having forged an alliance with Ansar al-Islam. However, al-Douri himself seems to be ill and little more than a figurehead for Major General Seyfallah Hassan Taha al-Rawi, which may explain the confusion among some Iraqi bloggers as whether or not he would be able to orchestrate such a massive campaign while in such fragile health. The Syrian border connection probably means that they have either some kind of incestuous fraternal ties with their ideological bretheren in Damascus or are else running the underground railroad for foreign fighters together with the Iran-based Ansar al-Islam. Al-Douri seems to have the support of the former Saddam Fedayeen and other non-Tikriti Baathists. The third group, led by Muhsin Khudhair al-Kafji appears to be made up largely of "true believers" among the old Baathist ideologues as well as the civilian elements of the old regime, relying on what appear to be largely sympathetic tribes and Palestinian terrorists for muscle, the latter of which I interpret as being whatever is left of the Palestine Liberation Front and the Abu Nidal Organization. While I very much doubt that al-Kafji's faction has the necessary forces to inflict any kind of damage against coalition forces (as opposed to those led by Colonel Hani and al-Douri), they actually probably have the most realistic goal in their desire to "patch up relations with" (read: ingratiate themselves to) their Syrian counterparts and live out the rest of their lives in Syria rather than go before a war crimes tribunal and spend their days in prison.

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From commenter anne.elk (her handle):

At other times, when Jeff bravely stood by Jewish kids in France by stating how he would wear a kippah if it would only help them in their struggles against French anti-semitism, I tried to help Jeff understand how anti-semitism does exist in our own country, and encouraged him to wear a kippah to help our children. Again, to my dismay, Jeff did not respond to this invitation. I know that within Jeff is a liberal heart, and a considerate man, and I only ask again for Jeff to make use of his pulpit to explore his own ideas and theories.

I try and help my seven year old understand how to do division. I try and help him understand adverbs. When I am talking to my older sons, we discuss things and I express my opinions and make arguments with the intent of convincing them, because I believe they are individual actors with moral and intellectual standing comparable to my own. That may be a subtle difference to some, but to me it is as clear as a summer's day. Willis - whose blog has the tagline 'Like Kryptonite to Stupid' takes the intellectually sophisticated tack that liberal interests are served by the following:

I call these two guys on their liberalism because I am very aware of the straw man of liberalism that gets an enormous amount of play in the media and blog world. I don't expect people to toe the line with the Democratic Party, because I myself disagree with the DNC on quite a lot of issues. In their two cases, I find very little straying from the GOP line on any issue of merit. Even more so, I find that they both take every chance to bash liberals at the first blush - while giving the right a pass on practically everything. In contrast, I find folks like Alex Knapp and John Cole who are certainly more amenable to Team Bush even more critical of their "team" than Jarvis/Totten. I don't know either of them much in real life (although my brief meeting with Jeff tells me that he's wicked tall) so I look at their blogs and wonder how someone so orthodoxly in favor of the right can be considered a liberal. For Christ's sake, even the WSJ editorial page disagrees with the Bushes every 1,000 years! I look at the evidence, and call it as I see it.

Help me out here, Oliver - why does 'calling someone out on their liberalism' do anything at all to advance liberal causes? As opposed to, say burnishing your own self-image? I mean you're not even taking issue with any specific thing that they say, except 'Why do you pick on the liberals?' And, sadly, the basis is right there - in his explanation that Alex Knapp and John Cole are 'more critical' of the Right than Jarvis or Totten. Because, you doofus, Totten, and Jarvis, and I all care about liberal causes - real liberal causes like improving the lives of the less-well off, defending the environment in ways that actually accomplish something, and working to create a world politics that neither empowers the multinationals nor the kleptocrats. These values have been hijacked by the Bad Philosophers and the Nannies. This means that a) they are going to lose a lot of political power; and b) where they get political power, they will imitate the California State Legislature and do and spend lots while accomplishing very little. I said it a long time ago, and I've never understood why people just won't accept it:

"...I’ll comment that while my posts are pretty critical of the DNC establishment, they are critical with an eye toward creating an unassailable Democratic hegemony...so watch out!!"

We've been here before, of course. Remember POUM? And go read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" to get a sense of what I'm talking about.

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It's good, to me, not only because it lays out much of the political and social dynamic that explains our current politics around Iraq, and because it serves as a convincing history of an important history in a way that manages to both show the context within wider history, and highlights important human truths that have application beyond what the book shows. The most important, I deeply believe, is the - inexactitude - of human effort, especially in the political arenas. As we sit here and solve the world's problems at our keyboards, things are clear, they are consistent, they are exact. The world - the world of the crooked timber of humanity, which we inhabit - is one in which histories are written in blurry pencil, rather than with a ruler's precision. Halberstram goes through one documentable, relatively simple and minor historic event...the decision by the Western powers to use military force in the former Yugoslavia...and demonstrates this. I've marked about two dozen quotes, but in the interest of brevity, and hopefully convincing you to go get the book from the remainder stack or from the local library, I'll just retype three:

One moment that had seemed to symbolize the supreme confidence of the Bush people during this remarkable chain of events. It came in mid-August of 1991, when some Russian right-wingers mounted a coup against Gorbachev and Bush held firm, first trying to support Gorbachev and, unable to reach him, then using his influence to help the embattled Boris Yeltsin. The coup had failed. A few days later, Gorbachev, restored to power in part because of the leverage of Washington, had resigned from the Communist Party. To the Bush people, that attempted coup had been a reminder that with the Cold War officially ended or not, the Berlin Wall up or down, the world was still a dangerous place, which meant the country would surely need and want an experienced leader, preferably a Republican, at the helm. Aboard Air Force One at that time, flying with his father from Washington back to the Bush family's vacation home in Maine, was George W. Bush, the president's son. he was just coming of age as a political operative in his own right, and he was euphoric about the meaning of these latest events. "Do you think the American people are going to turn to a Democrat now?" he asked. ... [Journalist Roy] Gutman's interview with Seselj left him with no doubt about Serb intentions. He filed his story on Seselj but felt that what he'd written was somehow hopelessly inadequate. The calm, understated nature of professional journalism had not been equal to the sheer horror of the deed and the threat. Something sinister was beginning to happen, with no restraints to limit the brutality. ... Watching the intense byplay between those two [Albright and Cohen], Berger thought that one of the differences between Cohen and the activists in the administration like Albright, Clark, and Holbrooke, who was making occasional appearances at the principal's meetings, was that Cohen had not experienced the terrible human wrenching of Balkans One, in which they had stumbled, failed, and agonized over three years before finally patching together a policy that worked. None of the more senior principals ever wanted to go through that again.

Do read the book.

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Libya * The announcement of Libya's impending disarmament elicited a variety of responses. Instapundit notes that even the NY Times admits that this is a big success for the Bush administrations foreign policy. * Andrew Sullivan points out that France, long a major power in African politics, was completely left out of the deal between Libya, the US, and UK...and the French press is none too happy about it. * Some of us (myself included) are pretty skeptical of any deals with dictators, but QandO details a variety of reasons for optimism on the Libyan deal. (Via WOC) * True to form, the BBC doesn't even mention that the ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in a war justified largely by concern over illicit weapons might have played some role in Libya's decision to disarm. * Roger Simon notes that Libya's missiles for their nuclear program came from North Korea, but what about the centrifuges needed to produce weapons grade material? * That question appears to be answered with this NY Times article claiming that Pakistan, America's ally in the war on terror, was the source for the centrifuge designs. Zimbabwe * After withdrawing from the Commonwealth, it was back to the grind for Comrade Mugabe. The first order of business was to once again defy a court order and reoccupy the offices of the independent Daily News. * As for Mugabe's continuing "land redistribution program" Head Heeb reminds us that this is, and always has been, a land grab for Mugabe and his ZANU thugs. * But despite Mugabe's continued excesses and abuses, South Africa's Mbeki can always be counted on to support appeasement. * Meanwhile, AfricaBlog reports that the Zimbabwean economy continues to decline. Nigeria * Strategypage predicts that Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Equitorial Guinea are ripe for war in 2004, but if this is war, then the first battle has already ended in Nigeria where government forces have just "crushed" and Islamist uprising in the north of the country. * Abiola comments on Nigeria, war, and Nigeria's Islamists here and here. * But maybe the situation isn't really so dismal... CS Monitor puts an optimistic spin on the new year with this article claiming that Africa's hot spots are calming down. They may have something here, particularly in the case of Liberia * In a step toward peace, the UN has begun to disarm Liberia's fighters... * ...and in a surprising develoment, the disarmament program was briefly overwhelmed by the large number of people desiring to turn in their weapons. Hopefully this is a good omen.

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bq. "The slavery of Africans could not been possible without centuries of their depiction as subhuman. The Rwandan genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the last decade was clearly spurred by their representation in Hutu media as "cockroaches" to be squashed." Indeed. So long as the Arab and Islamic world continue their steady campaign of genocidal hate toward the Jews, peace will remain an illusion that no "roadmap" or other window-dressing can redeem. Hatred of this depth and virulence also makes an instant lie of the Left's newest proposal, that of a "bi-national state" in Israel in which Jews would be left at the mercy of people who not only share these views, but actively propagate them. That this proposal equates to putting the future welfare of black people in the hands of Ku Klux Klansmen matters not at all to those who do not consider Jewish life of real value... and who occasionally show the poor judgment to be open about it rather than keeping their feelings for safe company. "Peace" proposals that do not take these realities into account are not expressions of hope, or decency, or anything else. They are lies, pure and simple - and those lies lead to murder.

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The unnamed man was in hospital for a heart-by-pass operation. But surgeons had to take out part of a large vein in his leg to replace a section of blocked artery in his chest. When they sewed up the leg wound, they removed the first two letters of the word "women", the Daily Mirror says. The patient says he has been left too embarassed to wear shorts in public. Leeds General Infirmary, where the operation was carried out, said: "Part of the tattoo was accidentally erased." The British Medical Journal later printed a picture of the tattoo, warning doctors to be careful when sewing up tattooed skin.

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When I pointed out to Dean that he was depending heavily on continued failure in Iraq, he said, ''I'm not betting on it, and I'm hoping against it, but there's no indication that I should be expecting anything else.'' What neither of us knew at the time was that Saddam Hussein was already in custody, having been seized about eight hours earlier. The following day, when Hussein's capture was announced, there were endless TV images of Iraqis dancing with relief and joy, and even the most intractable foreign capitals issued gracious congratulations. There was no way of knowing whether Hussein's apprehension might prove as transitory a success as the toppling of his statue, but suddenly the antiwar position seemed like a less marketable commodity than it had the day before. And the fear of some senior Democrats -- and a considerable number of freshly polled voters -- that the party hadn't disposed of the old antiwar bogy, but rather raised it once again, appeared all too well founded.

and then lets Dean set out his strategy for confronting Bush:

Toward the end of our conversation, Dean said to me: ''The line of attack is not Iraq, though there'll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, 'What have you done to make us feel safer?' I'm going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,'' whom Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ''Our model is to get around the president's right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.''

which is a most interesting strategy. I'll suggest that Dean and I may well agree on homeland security, but probably differ on WMD and the Saudis. I think that a defense strategy based solely on containing WMD and pre-WMD artifacts is a bad, brittle strategy; that the technology is - as all technologies do - moving down the learning curve, and that effective embargoes amount to putting reassembling shattered bottles and hoping the genie will climb back in. Clearly we need to do the easy things - buy up and secure the Soviet warheads, track the large-scale industrial complexes where components and weapons will be built. But as long as there are people who want to use them, we have to assume they eventually will get them, and so in parallel we need to reduce the number of people who want them. Here his argument about the Saudis makes sense. But I'll disagree with his priority. It is clear that Saudi money and influence are a big part of what we face in Islamist terror, and worse, permeate Washington, in both parties, at high levels. And we can only assume that Europe is similarly disposed. But I don't even think that is the major obstacle to directly confronting the Saudis. It is simply that direct confrontation will lead to their collapse - and that our logical response - occupation - will provoke the Muslim-wide war I mean to avoid if possible. Here is a case where gentle pressure, patience and finesse - combined with some serious housecleaning on our part - seem like the logical paths. Which is a polite way of saying that in a year, the horse may learn to sing. Traub puts the debate into historic perspective.

The Vietnam War spelled the end of cold-war liberalism. Jackson sought the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1972 but lost to George McGovern, the leader of the peace wing, who had opposed almost all the weapons systems that Jackson supported. The battle inside the party continued with the election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, who divided his foreign-policy team between the dovish Vance and the hawkish Brzezinski; the contest reached its theatrical climax when Carter nominated Paul Warnke, a former McGovern adviser, as chief negotiator on the 1979 SALT II arms talks. Warnke had stated that he would be willing to make unilateral cuts to the American nuclear arsenal. Jackson, who opposed the negotiations altogether, used Senate hearings to depict the nominee as an enemy of military prepared-ness. He brought in witnesses from the Committee on the Present Danger, an assemblage of Democratic hawks, many of whom would soon be known as ''neoconservatives.''

The Democratic Party lost these hawks, and was soon moved to the sidelines on issues of security.

It remains a matter of debate whether Reagan did, in fact, spend the Soviets into the ground [A.L. note - hey, I said he was partisan...]. Nevertheless, the cold war ended on the Republicans' watch, and so Reagan's unyielding stance was given much of the credit for bringing it to a close. And while the G.O.P. emerged from that era as the party of resolution, the Democrats emerged as the party of fecklessness -- a status brought home in the most mortifying possible manner when Michael Dukakis, their nominee in 1988, posed in a tank wearing a tanker's helmet and was compared to Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

The collapse of the USSR left us as the world's hyperpower, and gave us the luxury - as Halberstram describes Clinton - of being disinterested in foreign policy. It became a secondary arena for policymakers, and a place where a kind of cross-party, nonideological consensus could emerge.

There are two very large inferences that can be drawn from comments like these and, more broadly, from the current debate over national security issues in policy institutes, academia and professional journals. One is that the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration. The other conclusion is that the administration's claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right -- but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate.

The fact that the Bush policy violates so many of the 'institutional' norms ought to make him vulnerable to charges of recklessness. But...

The terrorist attacks made the moral quandaries of the 90's look like luxuries and restored the old party stereotypes with a vengeance. By the time of the 2002 midterm elections, the Republicans enjoyed an astounding 40-point advantage on the question of which party was best at ''keeping America strong''; the election was understood as a referendum on national security policy, and the G.O.P. swept the board.

The Democrats are, intelligently, trying to reformulate a response. Dean has one, as does Clark. But Clark's positions are surprising, and raise questions about whether he will be able to directly confront Bush on issues of military policy.

And yet here was the former Supreme Allied Commander positioning himself slightly to Howard Dean's left. Indeed, the central paradox of Clark's campaign, which in recent months has neither gained nor lost much altitude, and remains fixed in a flight path well below Dean's, is that a candidate whose chief virtue was his credibility on national security issues has proved to be such a peacenik. People around Clark disagree as to the source of his surprising politics. One figure who has given Clark substantial advice says that Clark has moved left owing to the ''political dynamic'' fostered by Dean. Clark himself says that he's just angry at the commander in chief's failure to take responsibility. When Clark and I spoke in November, I said that those of us in the audience at the conference assumed that he believed the Bush administration could have and should have stopped the terrorist attacks -- a terrible charge, almost a calumny. No, he said; he meant that the administration had refused to conduct ''an after-action review,'' as he would have done. Of course, if that's what he meant, he could have said so. It seemed, rather, that he had decided to mine the vein that Dean had worked so effectively.

And having done so, will then be presented with the dilemma of selling those views to a general electoral base far less willing to be 'weak and right' than 'strong and wrong'. Clark also has very specific criticisms:

When I asked Clark how he would have behaved differently from Bush in the aftermath of 9/11 -- we were sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport beside his campaign plane -- he said, ''You could have gone to the United Nations, and you could have asked for an international criminal tribunal on Osama bin Laden,'' thus formally declaring bin Laden a war criminal. ''You could then have gone to NATO and said: 'O.K., we want NATO for this phase. We want you to handle not only military, we want you to handle cutting of fund flow, we want you to handle harmonizing laws.''' NATO had, in fact, declared the terrorist attack a breach of the common defense pact, but the Bush administration had brushed it aside. Clark said that he would have made Afghanistan a Kosovo-style war.

and

Clark argues that the very consensus war-fighting strategy that produces terribly inefficient wars also greatly increases the likelihood of a successful postwar outcome -- which is what the whole effort is supposed to be about. ''It's not where you bomb and what building you blow up that determines the outcome of the war,'' Clark said to me. ''That's what we teach majors in the Air Force to do -- make sure you hit the target. It's the overarching diplomacy, the leverage you bring to bear, what happens afterward on the ground, that gives you your success. And for that you need nations working together.'' That, in a nutshell, is the Wesley Clark alternative paradigm of national security.

He's right in the sense that international consensus, once reached, is a powerful tool for managing the political aftermath of war. But discussing it and doing it are very different things.

Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different -- the post-9/11 world. Clark argues persuasively that the NATO ''consensus engine'' forces member governments to ''buy into'' joint decisions. But what if the French or Germans don't want to buy into Iraq or, say, to a tough posture should Iran start violating critical nuclear safeguards? A key aspect of the neoconservative argument on terrorism, most associated with the analyst Robert Kagan, is that Europeans do not feel threatened by terrorism in the same way, or to the same degree, as Americans do; consensus-dependent institutions like NATO or the Security Council are thus likely to fail us in the clutch. Clark's answer is that if we take the concerns of our allies seriously, they will rally to our side. But they may not; Frenchmen may consider the United States, even under a benign President Clark, a greater threat to world peace than Iraq. It may be that in his years with NATO, Clark so thoroughly absorbed the European perspective that he has trouble recognizing how very deeply, and differently, Americans were affected by 9/11.

This isn't to suggest that Clark - or any of the Democrats - are without a grounded, coherent perspective in which to place their policies.

In an article last spring in World Policy Journal, Dana H. Allin, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon, foreign-policy thinkers from the conservative side of the Democratic spectrum, proposed a doctrine of ''nationalist liberalism,'' which would ''consciously accept the critical importance of power, including military power, in promoting American security, interests and values,'' as the neoconservatives had in the 1970's. But the doctrine would also recognize that America's great power ''will create resistance and resentment if it is exercised arrogantly and unilaterally, making it harder for the United States to achieve its goals.'' The authors laid out a ''generous and compelling vision of global society,'' which would include ''humanitarian intervention against genocidal violence; family planning; effective cooperation against global warming and other environmental scourges''; foreign aid; free trade; and large investments to combat AIDS. All the major Democratic candidates could be considered nationalist liberals. And it's no surprise: since this is more or less the consensual view of the foreign-policy establishment, practically everybody the candidates have been consulting takes this view. With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did.

What is suggested is something which seems to combine the aggressive military effort of Bush with the humanitarian - and more importantly, the internationalist from an economic, environmental, and postentially political base. I see a number of issues with this approach, and will touch on several immediately. The first is that I think it unlikely that the world community - which had a stated interest in restraining US power before Iraq - is going to accede to the unfettered use of US military forces as long as we sign Kyoto, offer cheap AIDS drugs, accept the ICC, and agree to spearhead militarily intervention to limit genocide. I don't think that one buys us the other. Domestically, I see a hard time forging a consensus for the kind of sacrifice that would take - a military large enough to both act on our behalf, and do the world's bidding at the same time that we harness our economy to benefit the world's (stipulating for the moment that those actions would in fact benefit the world economy, which is a legitimate subject for debate). All of this is an airy academic discussion unless the Democrats can either sideline defense as a subject for this election, or demostrate that their warm goodwill for foreign governments can be handcuffed to a ruthless willingness to defend US lives and interests.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: ''Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?'' In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn't. ''Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?'' O'Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that ''the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.'' Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that's the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement.

No kidding. I'm wrestling with the issue of internationalism a lot these days. My core issues, simply, are that I believe that the EU elites are far more corrupt and self-serving than our own - and I distrust ours. I think that the UN has squandered it's legitimacy as it dignifies murderous kleptocrats with votes matching those of countries with legitimately chosen (or at least imposed over a long term) governments which have some legitimacy beyond the barrel of a secret policeman's gun. This is all great food for thought; sorry to have quoted so extensively, but please go read the whole article and draw your own conclusions.

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Try a thought-experiment. Imagine a human infant somehow raised apart from society and all human works - a wild child. Before that person has been brought into contact with a society, are they fully human? Part of what makes us human is the fact that each of us stands on the shoulders of giants, to borrow Newton's phrase. That's true not only in science and engineering, as Den Beste points out, but in all aspects of human activity - in fact human activity is largely based on taking from and adding to that larger fabric of frozen knowledge. We live in a hive mind, and each of us internalizes much of it. If you want to see what it looks like, walk into a good library and look around. That fact is a part of why we address cultures as a whole - why I believe it is the Palestinian culture rather than a few individuals that must be restrained. It is also why I think that there is hope; because I know that the wild children that have been found managed to become at least somewhat accultured, and that dark and bloody cultures have in the past become docile.

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