This is over and above India agreeing to isolate its civilian facilities from the weapons programmes, and agreeing to safeguards to ensure that there is no illegal transfer from one to the other. [Read what prominent Indian strategic analysts have to say]

By insisting that in the event of an Indian nuclear test, the United States can not only suspend fuel supplies, but seek possession of material already supplied, the Hyde Act seeks to ban India from further testing. In other words, it seeks to turn India's unilateral moratorium on further testing into a bilateral legality. The United States is also pressing other members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to insist on the same conditions. [Related Posts: Cynical Nerd & Maverick]

By evoking memories of past letdowns, the Hyde Act has already undermined the benefits that might have accrued to the American nuclear power industry. Even if India were to accept the terms of the Hyde Act in totality, it would hedge its risks by not relying on nuclear energy as much as it would have without the onerous conditions. That would make the market for nuclear energy smaller that it would otherwise have been. And it would be even smaller for American suppliers, as India would move to ensure greater supply diversity. In other words, India would minimize reliance on nuclear energy and American suppliers in order to minimize the costs of testing nuclear weapons should the need arise.

Moreover, other than pure dogma, it is unclear how America stands to benefit preventing India from conducting another nuclear test. Moratorium or not, no government in India would be foolish enough to attract international opprobrium by conducting unilateral tests again. India is only likely to test should other nuclear powers begin to do so again. Indeed, the United States can use the possibility of an Indian test to discourage other nuclear powers from testing. That possibility would vanish if India is legally bound not to test.

The negotiations on the "123 agreement" are far from over, and the deal is far from dead. It is a deal that is worth having, both for its own sake and for the sake of the broader bilateral relationship. So a degree of mutual compromise is in order, even if the terms of the 123 agreement are in variance with what was agreed between Prime Minister Singh and President Bush. This does not, however, mean that the deal is worth having at all costs. Even if historical and current context were to be ignored, there is no question of India accepting a formal legal restraint on its nuclear options. America is constrained by its laws. But India cannot allow those laws to circumscribe its strategic independence. If diplomacy fails to address its concerns, India should be prepared to walk away from the deal.

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If you actually read Rick's post, it's far from clear that he's sitting and supping with Dennis Kucinich just yet. Actually, he's come to pretty much the same conclusion I have - that the war is likely to fail because we can't maintain the political consensus necessary to stick it out.

Here's Moran:

If we had 3 or 4 years and the political will to maintain troop levels where they are now, then we would have a real chance to make the difference. But our commitment to the military aspects of the surge will be measured in months, not years. By early fall, the race for President will be in full swing and the obvious lack of political progress in Iraq will increase calls for some kind of redeployment - probably from even some Republicans.

He has no useful prescription, except that the political forces here in the U.S. need to play together better (note that I don't either...).

For now, the imperative is preventing unmitigated disaster. It may involve giving in to the Democrats and withdrawing some of our troops and redeploying some others. Is the President a big enough man to do this? Or is he more in love with his legacy and would therefore resist changing course to reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground and in the councils of government in Iraq?

Yeah, that's just fricking great. We'll come up with a solution that mollifies the warring political parties here while ignoring the realities of the real warring parties in Iraq. Maybe not.

Rick's not wrong about his analysis. But his prescription is pure poison.

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In one of my very first major posts on MyDD--a post which I paid $25 to write at a Kinkos in Modesto, California as there was no other way for me to get online--I posited the political blogosphere as the avant-garde of political and opinion journalism. Considering that it is now quite old in blogosphere terms, and the conditions under which I wrote it, I am surprised at how well it still stands up. Here is an excerpt (emphasis in original):

While the poetic and artistic avant-garde sought to relocate the primary purpose of art away from the aesthetic function, I had a very difficult time figuring out what the Blogosphere sought to do differently than the Political Opinion Complex. However, at long last I think I have it.

While the corporate funded Political Opinion Complex seeks to distribute information primarily for the purpose of consumption, the primary goal of the Blogosphere is to distribute political information for the purpose of agitation / direct action. The POC only wants you to consume what it produces. The Blogosphere seeks for its consumer to act after, or even as a result of, consumption of its product. To put it another way, The Blogosphere is a counter-institutional formation that seeks to relocate the primary purpose of political and opinion journalism in agitation toward action rather than in profit-based consumption.

Three years later, I no longer agree with some of the specifics of that formulation, but I still subscribe to the general sentiment (for example, I wrote something similar in an article for the BBC last October).

I'll skip over the lame 'vanguard' trope, which was fresh back in 1902.

It reminds me of all my artist and writer friends who are frustrated that they can't make a living doing their art. But they, at least, lack the arrogance to presume that they are owed a living.

And I'll suggest to Chris that he flat misses the point of the modern political & advertising message machine - it is exactly to get people to act. What's different about the Internet is that the space for action and nature of the action desired changes, and the expectation is that because you're a customer, you're also a part of my marketing team.

Now, one of the things I do is to help companies do this. It's rapidly becoming a platitude among people who are knowledgeable in marketing.

The difference between Chris and I is that I acknowledge that it's a living - an interesting and lucrative one - and he purports that what he's doing is, in essence, art.

Bowers' defense will doubtless be that his 'cause' differentiates us.

Riiiiight.

I've got a 'cause' for Chris. It's defending the ideal of America against a faux political avant-garde that's in it for the money. You're no different than James Carville - except that he's won some elections, he gets paid more, and he's a better writer.

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Religious freedom is among the most important rights and as such worth fighting for, and religious freedom is for everybody (lacking extraordinary evidence that some religion is dangerous in a practical sense). I've always thought that, morally and practically, the best way get freedom, protection and respect for your own religion is to support others boldly practicing their religion, such as Christianity.

I think "pagan" should not mean "crybaby". I am against lawsuits and finger-pointing as the model for pagan pride. I abhor the kind of attitude that leads to people hassling Christians over creches at Christmas, and that spurred the ACLU to threaten to sue a Christian cross off the seal of the County of Los Angeles California. (While leaving an image of the goddess Pomona in place, which was sure to be noted with justifiable snark by even the most fair-minded Christian.)

Pomona Versus Jesus? (link)

I continue to think this is morally the right approach, but the facts do not support that position as being practical. It was taking the graves problem to court that did the job.

The efficacy of the courts to get important things like this done, when prejudice has meant that appealing to goodwill was futile, creates perverse incentives to seek grievances and sue over them rather than playing nice.

Nothing about worshiping Isis or Odin means that you've got to be litigious or politically liberal. But most people like results.

Since pagans are few and politically unimportant, this means nothing in a practical sense. But if, down the road, pagans get lawsuit-happy, I'm going to point to this as the explanation.

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MRAP Cougar: testing...
(click to view full)

What I'm finding instead, as I speak to members on both sides of the aisle, is a fuzzy level of awareness and understanding even after the issue has hit the floor in the latest supplemental - and when there are fully switched-on exceptions, they seem to be born of unplanned encounters in theater, or a chance briefing by someone outside the entire system. Rep. Gene Taylor [D-MS] has been a consistent supporter of the war and the troops, and is a Democrat I respect for a number of other reasons as well. Over 2 years before he became Chair of the House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee, he had this to say to SecDef Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles back in May 2004:

"As far as IEDs, it was conversations with troops in the field that told me that that was their biggest fear, not a hearing in this room, not a statement from the secretary. It was troops in the field that told me that that's what they were afraid of and they didn't think the proper measures were being taken to protect them.

And lastly, it was a National Guard unit from home, shortly before Christmas, that showed me proudly their efforts to make their own up-armored Humvee, because apparently no one above was bothering to tell Congress, which writes the checks for these things, that they needed to be protected.

You're obviously a smart man. I mean, you're probably one of the smartest people I know... And what's troubling is how someone who is so smart and so detail-oriented, why does it take from January to May for this committee now to find out about this in the wake of all those other things that this committee should have known about?

I sent those kids off to get killed. I share in that responsibility. I also share in the responsibility to fix these things, but we can't fix these things if we're not told about them."

USMC RG-31, IEDed in Iraq
(click to view story)

Which seems to be the story of this entire issue, over and over again. It wasn't until 2006 that a retired Colonel explained the last piece of the puzzle to Rep. Taylor: that up-armoring wasn't enough, and that a Humvee taking a blast versus a v-hull vehicle taking one is like a flat-bottomed boat hitting a wave at speed versus a v-hull boat. State of Mississippi, remember - his light finally went all the way on. For Sen. Biden, it was an encounter in Anbar province, Iraq during the summer of 2006.

To Biden's credit, he began talking to colleagues about getting more vehicles like the one he saw into theater - and met a surprising amount of dismissiveness and resistance. His staff have told me that they, and he, have been somewhat bemused and a bit troubled by the fact that here they were, of all people, leading a charge on this issue in the Senate, at this late date. You can add me to that list of the bemused and troubled. But the bottom line is, they did lead it.

Meanwhile, commanders on the ground were finally beginning to request mine-protected vehicles, and some were included in the budget. The requirement grew from 185 vehicles in May 2006; to 1,185 vehicles on December 2006, to be formally requested in the supplemental funding bill by the military; to a contract for up to 4,100 vehicles issued on January 27, 2007, total dollar amount unspecified. A total of 9 contractors have been invited to submit qualifying MRAP (Mine-Resistant, Ambush Protected) Category 1 patrol vehicles and larger MRAP Category 2 squad vehicles for testing and procurement:

• Armor Holdings: a modified FMTV, which is the Army's standard medium truck. Looks like a v-hulled troop capsule on top of the standard truck frame.
• BAE: new RG-33, and RG-33L with a robotic arm to poke safely at suspicious objects. Early MRAP order placed to ship 90 of them to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
• Force Protection: Cougar 4×4 and 6×6. Used by the US, British, and Iraqi armies in Iraq. That's a Cougar in the blast testing picture, above. Early US MRAP orders for 1,325 placed already.
• General Dynamics: RG-31 in partnership with BAE's South African subsidiary and GD Canada. Used by the US 101st Airborne in Iraq, by US EOD teams, and by the Canadians in Afghanistan. US has ordered about 450 - some under MRAP, many outside it.
• General Purpose Vehicles: Serjeant and Commander police vehicles.
• International/Navistar truck: new v-hulled MPV design based on their Workstar 7000 tractor-trailer cab, in cooperation with Plasan Sasa of Israel whose armor solution protects the Marines' MTVR trucks.
• Oshkosh Trucks: partnered with PVI for the Alpha in cat 1, and with Thales-ADI Australia for their Bushmaster in cat 2. The US military ordered 100 Alphas under MRAP, to be shipped to the front pending successful testing. Bushmasters have been used by the Aussies in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, and the Dutch also use them in Afghanistan.
• Protected Vehicles, Inc: new Alpha patrol vehicle, and the Golan squad vehicle co-developed with and used by the Israelis. the Golan is also designed to carry reactive-explosive armor for extra protection vs. the RPGs and shaped-charge side-firing Iranian IED land mines used in Iraq; the US ordered 60 in an initial MRAP order, for shipment to the front.
• Textron Land: stretched version of the M1117 Guardian Armored Security Vehicle that has been ordered, used, and liked by MPs in Iraq. Bad news: the only factory is in New Orleans.

Of course, talk in the Senate is cheap. But this wasn't. Nor were the efforts behind the scenes before this speech was made - even though none of the manufacturers involved are located in his home state of Delaware:

WASHINGTON, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2007
Vol. 153 No. 54 Senate S4033-4034

Mr. BIDEN: Madam President, I wish to begin by stating very simply that this amendment is literally, not figuratively, a matter of life and death. I have been here for many years. I have never begun a discussion of an amendment--and I have sponsored some serious amendments and pieces of legislation--by saying something as graphic and drastic as this is literally a matter of life and death. But it is. This is not hyperbole. This is not an exaggeration.

What my amendment will do is allow the military to put 2,500 more mine resistant ambush protected vehicles--known in the military by its acronym, MRAP--in the field by the end of this year.

Now, let me explain what I am talking about. First, I want to point out that the committee acknowledged the need for these vehicles and included $2.5 billion in this bill [JK Background: the 2nd-half 2007 supplemental military funding bill, currently the subject of political dispute]. But what I propose in this amendment is forward-funding money from next year's 2008 budget into this supplemental. In that way, we can build more of these vehicles which have one purpose--the specific purpose of saving lives, American lives. The fact is, as most of my colleagues know, 70 percent of American casualties in Iraq are caused by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

Many of my colleagues, including the Presiding Officer, have been to Iraq. They have had the same experience I have in my seven trips--visiting field hospitals. There, you see amputees and people with serious head injuries who, because of the incredible skill and triage capability of our military doctors and nurses, are able to be kept alive. Most of those injured at Walter Reed and at Bethesda naval hospital are victims of these devices, sadly now familiar to all Americans from the nightly news. We have tried very hard--although this administration has done so belatedly--to better equip our troops to withstand IEDs. God forbid they find themselves victim of an IED attack, but if they do, we want them to be able to survive.

MRAP vehicles provide four to five times more protection to our troops than up-armored HMMWVs. That statement, that these MRAPs provide four to five times more protection than up-armored HMMWVs, is not my estimate. That is the judgment of our military leaders. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, GEN James Conway, with whom I spoke as recently as this afternoon, wrote on March 1 to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said:

Multi-National Forces--West, that is, the Marines in Iraq [JK Background: specifically, in Anbar province], estimates that the use of the MRAP could reduce the casualties in vehicles due to IED attack by as much as 80 percent.

He went on further and said that even though the MRAP is not expeditionary: It is, however, the best available vehicle for force protection. He concluded by saying: Getting the MRAP into the Al Anbar Province is my number one unfilled warfighting requirement at this time.

Let me repeat that: Getting the MRAP into the Al Anbar Province is my number one unfilled warfighting requirement at this time.

He went on to tell me today that although there is some disagreement in terms of priorities within this building, he was speaking to me from the Pentagon, he said, "I believe this is a moral imperative."

How many generals with four stars or three or two or one on their shoulders have you heard use that phrase? How often is something so fundamental it is called "a moral imperative"? This is a man who is heading back out to Iraq soon. He is talking about protecting his kids, his troops.

On my last trip into Anbar Province last summer, I went to Fallujah. I met with the commanding Marine general and roughly 30 to 40 of his commanders and noncommissioned officers. I was taken outside a building to see what they were trying to do to diminish the casualty rate of American forces required to patrol Fallujah. They showed me what they called a rhino [JK Background: he means a Buffalo, aka. "The Claw"], a big vehicle, looks like a Caterpillar bulldozer with a great big proboscis on it, a great big arm that is used when an IED is identified, to disarm it. It was interesting. I observed for the first time--maybe others knew about it--the hull. The bottom of it looked like a ship out of water. It had a V-shaped bottom. A humvee, like your SUV or your automobile, has a flat bottom. In a humvee, even if it is reinforced, it is still flat. The rhino had a V-shaped bottom or floor. I asked why. They said it made them much more blast resistant and it could protect the troops inside. That is the first time I heard about this concept. They did not have MRAPs yet, but they had this rhino, a much bigger vehicle for a different purpose.

As I talked to them, I remember asking the question, why aren't we building more of these things? You know, the folks on the ground, these kids and many not so young women and men who are climbing into these coffins, know that even in an up-armored vehicle if they are struck, deadly force may be exerted, scrambling their brains or outright killing them. The number one requirement of the Commandant of the Marine Corps is to get more of these vehicles. I respectfully suggest to all who care--and every one of us cares about the fate of the troops--if there is any place we should not consider the cost--emphasize again, not consider the cost--it is when there is a consensus that what we are purchasing can save lives. We have made no sacrifice in this country to fight this war except for the families of those who have gone to the war. We should not hesitate to save the lives of those who are sacrificing because of cost.

A couple of my colleagues off the floor, none of whom are on the floor at this moment, have told me it might not be cost effective because the military is working on a new vehicle [JK Background: the JLTV, which might be ready in 5 years or so if you give them a lot of R&D dollars, instead of using that to buy safer, proven vehicles right now. Typical Pentagon]. Give me a break. Cost effective? I wonder how many people asked, when we were talking about the invasion of Normandy in World War II: You know, we better be careful. We may build too many landing craft. We might have some left over. What are we going to do with them after the war?

We have no higher obligation than to protect those we send into battle. We have received a pretty good dose of this administration's willingness to send people into battle not prepared. Rumsfeld's famous comment: You go with the Army you have, not the Army you like or need. That is paraphrasing him from a couple of years ago. When we find a way to protect people better in battle, then it seems to me we have an overwhelming obligation to act.

Let me explain the specifics of the MRAP. Each vehicle can hold 4 to 12 troops. Like the rhino, these vehicles have raised steel, V-shaped hulls and chassis. The raised hull is valuable because it gives the blast more time to expand, lessening the impact. The V-shape pushes the blast up the sides of the vehicle and away from the occupants. With an up-armored HMMWV or any humvee, the flat bottom sends the blast through the floor right into the occupants. In addition, the vehicles have side armor and bulletproof glass, and they also have tires that can be driven when flat.

Ever since the military began using MRAPs in Iraq, the requirement has grown, as commanders realize how much better they are at protecting their personnel. In May of last year the requirement was only 185. By July, it had risen to 1,185. By November, it had risen to 4,060. By February of this year, after the supplemental request was submitted, it rose to 6,738. One month later, the requirement went up again to the current level of 7,774. At this point every one in the military agrees, we need 7,774 MRAPs.

The Marines are the executive agents for this program, meaning they are managing it for themselves and the other services. Every service has a need for the vehicle for explosive ordinance units as well as regular patrols. The Marines need 3,700 of them. The Army needs 2,500. The Air Force needs 697. The Navy needs 544, and the Special Operations Command needs 333. The cost of 7,774 MRAPs is $8.4 billion. This administration's current plan is to spend $2.3 billion this year and $6.1 billion next year. But I believe we can and must do much better, and so do the Marines. If we simply put more funds up front, spend them in the supplemental rather than allocate them a year later in the 2008 budget, the same money that we are going to spend anyway next year, if we move it up, we can accelerate production drastically.

Some have said the extra production capacity does not exist. Again, speaking to the Commandant of the Marine Corps today, he indicated that there are eight companies they are dealing with and he has confidence that they can build all they can purchase, all they can afford. That is also what the Chief of Staff of the Army thinks.

On March 14, General Peter Schoomaker told the Appropriations Committee that with the MRAPs, "We can build what we get the funds to build. It is strictly an issue of money."

Let's assume the Commandant of the Marine Corps and General Schoomaker are wrong. Let's assume they have made a mistake. Let's assume we can't build as many as the money we give them. So what. So what. We are not talking about building a highway on time. We are talking about an informed judgment by the United States military, to build not a new weapons system, but to build a new protection system for their forces.

I respectfully suggest, if we are going to err on one side or the other, for God's sake, for a change, let's err on the side of doing something that will protect American fighting women and men.

Quite frankly, if the Marines believe we can do it, then my money is on the Marines getting it right. If General Schoomaker says he needs it, and more money will get the vehicles, then I take him at his word. I would rather take a chance, and I believe the American people would also, to protect more Americans under fire than not.

What does this mean specifically? Well, by adding $1.5 billion, which my amendment does, to the supplemental today, the Marines will have $4 billion to work with. Based on their estimates, that will mean 2,500 vehicles get to the field 6 months sooner than under the current plan. You may say: What is 6 months? Ten of thousands of lives is what 6 months is. Figure it out: Four to twelve people in 2,500 more vehicles. Add up the numbers. That's 10,000 to 30,000 Americans. Look at the casualty rates that come from IEDs striking up-armored HMMWVs. Do the math, and tell me if their lives are not worth taking a financial risk to protect.

If we move this money forward, on October 1 of this year, instead of having only 2,000 MRAPs, we would have 4,500 in the field. On January 1, 2008, instead of 3,500 MRAPs, we would have 6,000 in the field. By February, we would fulfill the entire requirement, instead of waiting until next July. We are still going to spend $8.4 billion, but spending it faster will make a major difference.

If you want to be callous about this, it would also save the American taxpayers a whole lot of money because for every one of those injured soldiers who comes back--to put it in Machiavellian terms--who needs a lifetime of medical care, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars committed per casualty. I can find no logical argument for delaying this.

Let me end where I began. This is a matter of life and death. Madam President, 2,500 more vehicles means literally that 10,000 to 30,000 more Americans will have a four to five times greater chance of surviving a hit with an IED while on patrol than exists today if we do not act. Madam President, 10,000 to 30,000 Americans will not be added to the casualty and death numbers if we move this money up.

To use the phrase of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, at 3 or 4 o'clock today, on the phone with me: This is a moral imperative.I agree. It is a moral imperative that we protect these troops as soon as possible.

So tomorrow, when I have my 1 or 2 minutes to speak to this issue before we vote, I will urge all my colleagues to vote for this amendment."

101st Ab RG-31, Iraq
(click to view full)

The amendment passed in the Senate, and has solid support now on both sides of the aisle. The contemptible politics and deeply dishonest 'slow-bleed' strategy surrounding the supplemental make the exact timing of funds unpredictable, but on this issue the funding numbers will be there as soon as the needs of forces and commanders in the field trump the needs of politics.

Following House-Senate reconciliation, the amendment's value is down to $1.2 billion (the House had not included the full amount in its bill), but the Marine Corps believe they can shift $300 million from other programs over FY 2007/2008 to buy these vehicles, in order to meet their goal of making every single vehicle riding "outside the wire" (i.e. outside American bases) in Anbar province a blast-resistant vehicle with MRAP-level protection. Up-armored hummers would then be restricted to operating under explicit commander's waivers.

The Army remains predictably slow in this respect, and their request for only 2,500 MRAP vehicles in FY 2007-2008 won't begin to replace about 19,000 Hummers in theater. But they're moving in the right direction at last, toward blast-resistant patrol vehicles like the 101st Airborne's RG-31 Mk5 Chargers (one of the approved MRAP vehicles), rather than restricting these designs to Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams. They're also going to get more of these vehicles, sooner than planned.

That's going to save lives. You may like Senator Joseph Biden's political and policy choices, or you may hate them - but no matter what you think of him, he deserves real credit and sincere appreciation for this.

Long, long overdue. Still... better late than never.

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Violence is a common phenomenon at US schools and universities. Last week a student of English literature at the University of Virginia killed at least 30 students in a rampage considered as the deadliest school attack in the US.

So it's pretty cheeky of Iranian media to drive home a point that "Violence is a common phenomenon at US schools and universities" when they live in a glass house, speaking of violence. This is the country that invented the suicide jihadist bomber. This is a country that hangs homosexuals in public (warning, graphic). Oh, and also publicly hangs teenage girls accused of unchastity. And Iran also hangs dissidents, or those so accused, from cranes in public squares.

Nope, no violence here, only in America. Move along, now.

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He says:

A recent report detailed Al Qaeda’s progress in recruiting a new generation of leaders to replace the ones we have captured or killed. The new recruits come from a broader range of countries than the old leadership - from Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Britain to Germany, from Algeria to Pakistan. Most of these recruits are in their early thirties.> They operate freely in the disaffected communities and disconnected corners of our interconnected world - the impoverished, weak and ungoverned states that have become the most fertile breeding grounds for transnational threats like terror and pandemic disease and the smuggling of deadly weapons.

Some of these terrorist recruits may have always been destined to take the path they did - accepting a tragically warped view of their religion in which God rewards the killing of innocents. But millions of young men and women have not.
...
Delivering on these universal aspirations requires basic sustenance like food and clean water; medicine and shelter. It also requires a society that is supported by the pillars of a sustainable democracy - a strong legislature, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, a free press, and an honest police force. It requires building the capacity of the world’s weakest states and providing them what they need to reduce poverty, build healthy and educated communities, develop markets, and generate wealth. And it requires states that have the capacity to fight terrorism, halt the proliferation of deadly weapons, and build the health care infrastructure needed to prevent and treat such deadly diseases as HIV/AIDS and malaria.

He's right and he's wrong here, I believe. The movement we face is both something that is fertilized by the kinds of conditions he describes above - and yes, we would go far in choking it off if we were to fix these conditions, and we should.

But it is also carefully nurtured by state actors who harbor, support, and subsidize its growth for their own relatively Westphalian reasons.

I believe we face a movement seeded and nurtured by both the conditions in the 'edge states' and by carefully executed support from states which are not and should not be considered 'failed'.

When I understand how Obama proposes to deal with that, I'll be able to unqualifiedly support his foreign policy.

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Opening 'graph:

Ryan Lackey wears body armor to business meetings. He flies armed helicopters to client sites. He has a cash flow problem: he is paid in hundred-dollar bills, sometimes shrink-wrapped bricks of them, and flowing this money into a bank is difficult. He even calls some of his company's transactions "drug deals" – but what Lackey sells is Internet access. From his trailer on Logistics Staging Area Anaconda, a colossal US Army base fifty miles north of Baghdad, Lackey runs Blue Iraq, surely the most surreal ISP on the planet. He is 26 years old.

And Evans' conclusion:

One of the few things Ryan and Tyler agree on is their scorn for America's attempt to secure and rebuild Iraq. Tyler rages that the US military "couldn't bother to protect" the road between Baghdad and Anaconda, or even the four-kilometre stretch between Baghdad International and the Green Zone. And he found that when most other Americans dealt with Iraqis, "they were very insulting, they were often very condescending, and in many cases I felt that they treated them like subhumans."

Both of them lament the sorry state of the electrical system. "Not having power was probably the single biggest problem that created animosity among Iraqis," Ryan says. "The US tried to rebuild it in the Western industrialized-country model. The way Iraqis install a power system is, they put a bunch of small generators on neighbourhood blocks, with power cables running to everyone's house, and just sell them access directly. And it's easy to have a market-driven pricing mechanism. But the US solution was to give large US companies business here … If they'd had electricity working within a month or two of the invasion, there probably wouldn't have been near as much violence."

Iraqis desperately want to work. "You don't see people begging for money. You see people selling gas for money, selling cigarettes by the side of the road," Ryan says. Tyler agrees: "I interviewed a lot of people, and I never met one that wasn't so painfully eager it almost hurt to turn them away." But their economy remains paralyzed.

"The best way to deal with terrorism in the long run is to fix the underlying conditions that create terrorism," Ryan says. "It's difficult to fix their ideology, but it's easy to fix their infrastructure. But the US has done a bad job … It's like a feedback loop. They got on the wrong side of the feedback loop." Iraqi frustration breeds insurgents; insurgent violence cripples reconstruction efforts; and the resulting lack of power, communications, finances, and jobs breeds more frustration.

In the face of this feedback loop, American forces have withdrawn into heavily guarded enclaves. SSI's modern, globalized, best-of-both-worlds strategy, bringing Americans and Iraqis together to help rebuild the shattered country, has faltered. Blue Iraq's neo-colonial approach, living and working exclusively on military bases, continues to thrive. The seeds Tyler has helped to plant – a team of crack engineers still erecting dishes around the country – may someday help drag Iraq into the 21st century, one satellite link at a time. But not until the rain of insurgent bombs and bullets has ended. And neither Ryan nor Tyler expects that to happen for years.

Blog readers can, if they choose, read about the battle space as it appears to Westerners and Iraqis in Iraq. They can discern the not-very-hidden hands of Al Qaeda and elements of the Iranian government in shaping that space. I suspect that narratives of mystifying, terrible, and depressing carnage obscure this basic point to many newspaper readers.

Accounts like Evans' won't tell us what the least-bad policy options are for Iraq. But they do help to inform us about the realities of the situation there.

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1920 - 6.8 1921 - 8.1
1922 - 8.0
1923 - 7.8
1924 - 8.1
1925 - 8.3
1926 - 8.4
1927 - 8.4
1928 - 8.6
1929 - 8.4
1930 - 8.8
1931 - 9.2
1932 - 9.0
1933 - 9.7

By 1943, though, the rate had fallen below 2003's rate. The FBI says in 1991 the rate was 9.8, a tenth above 1933's rate. But beginning the next year the rate started trending strongly downward so that the 2003 rate was 36.7 percent less than 1994's rate, 5.7 v. 9.0. (A.L. conveniently linked to a table with annual figures from 1960-2004.)

Looking at other decades of comparison shows that homicide rates have gone up and down over the years. In fact, from 1870-1910 the murder rate hovered around 1/100K! The overall rate declined by about 50 percent between 1933-1958, when it reached approximately 2003's figure. By 1990, the rate was back to to 1933's level. Then it plummeted again back to the level of the mid-1950's. Interestingly, the rate's climb from the mid-1950s to 1990 took more than twice as long as its subsequent decline. By 2005, the rate had risen to 5.9, where it remained for 2006.

A graph of murder rates from 1900-1990 is on this site, be advised that the site has a definite agenda but its raw data seem accurate, based on my readings.

Now, one of WOC's smart readers comment on what these data mean.

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Onyx belongs to one of the trainers at the horse farm. She's a lab mix, rather obviously, and well suited to life on the farm. (Better than the barn cat, who sleeps right under the horses' feet sometimes.)

What a good dog.

If you'd like to see what she looks like from atop one of the horses, you can view this image. As you can see from her tiny little legs at the top of the frame, it's important that she stay out of the way on her own. You and the horse might both miss her (or rather, not miss her, in the horse's case).

Onyx seems to understand that, and has always been well behaved. She's a friendly girl, just as you'd expect.

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Which gave me the problem of naming it.

I've always named my bikes, and given them vanity plates with their names,.

My MuZ Baghira is "Thalia". The KTM is "Metternich".

So what to name the Tiger?

My first thought was Montecore, the tiger that attacked Roy. It's a cool name, and ironic, and a good reminder that the bike is dangerous. But it felt like bad karma. A friend suggested Chompawat, after the famous man-eater, but again - bad karma.

Hobbes? great - a twofer - Calvin and political theory. But no way to get it - and kind of cutesy.

Think, think, think. Think about great cartoon tigers - and hey!!

Thomas Nast and Walt Kelley!!

Meet Tammany Tiger.

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"Clearly, the man who did the shooting at Virginia Tech had a mental-health problem which resulted in a murder-suicide,'' Poussaint said. "You can't force people to get help, but you can induce them. There are thousands of students who commit suicide on college campuses all around the country each year.

"And sometimes when people are depressed and think about harming themselves, they harm other people as well.''

So, think before you offer a simple solution such as arming teachers. What happened Monday goes much deeper than that.

And the implication follows that a solution of disarming everyone needs to be thought through, too. I think that the coming debates will whirl around the privacy barriers preventing college administrators from learning about the status and diagnoses of mentally-ill students and mental illness diagnoses being reportable to the instant-background check system used in firearms purchases. Also relevant are these observations by Dr. Chris Rangel:

Although people suffering from serious mental illness like schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder are twice as likely to commit a violent act as the general population, the vast majority of people who do commit violent crimes do NOT have any serious mental illness and the vast majority of those with mental illness do NOT commit any violent crimes. Other variables like male gender, youth, substance abuse, and poverty are far better predictors of future violent behavior than mental illness alone. ... Mental illness is not even a good predictor of the future risk of committing mass murder. In one study of 34 adolescent mass murderers only 23% had any evidence of pre-existing mental illness and only a scant 6% showed signs of psychosis. ...

There's nothing simple here, folks. BTW, according to ABC news, there 1,100 college suicides per year. This is a lot of needless, tragic deaths, but hardly the "thousands" that Dr. Poussaint avers.

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Here's the part everyone cites, from 'Politics As A Vocation':

'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state--nobody says that--but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions--beginning with the sib--have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Here's the part everyone leaves off:

Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the "right" to use violence. Hence, "politics" for us means striving to share power, either among states or among groups within a state.

There's no need to explain the freedom of an individual to use force appropriately (i.e. in a state-sanctioned way), as opposed to the ability of an agent of the state to use force in a state-sanctioned way. We're all agents of the state, in a sense.

...and that undergraduate Political Theory education is worth something!

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I do not think a nonspecific and negative mental preparation like "DON'T FREEZE!" is much good. "DON'T!! FREEZE!!!!" - that's not very useful.

I've said before what I think is useful.
Achilles Last Stand: The Primal Heroic Response

Under conditions of unexpected terror, in the absence of satisfactory specific preparation, all elaborate theories fail. This (summarized in post #4) works. Do this.

It will be useful to investigate the mental processes of those who did act positively, and who were lucky enough to be around to recount them. Admire them. Remember them. Imitate them.

Pick a hero, such as Professor Liviu Librescu. Learn all about his life. Strive to be more like him.

Focus on the positive. Focus on the good. Have a model. Move towards it.

The discussions on the Virginia tech massacre are too negative, in my opinion. Fighting each other with words is not a useful part of the mourning process.

All discussions focusing on the evil one are useless. You will never find any sense at the bottom of his madness. Order and good can give reasons. Evil and chaos ultimately can't. To dwell on what's senseless and vile only opens you to mental harm.

Talk about how "you can't say what you would do unless you were actually in classroom X" is empty negativity.

If you've been unexpectedly terrified by a violent threat, and acted positively, you know what you did. This is nothing special. Many people have done this. You can too. Likely you already have. So be heartened and be positive.

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Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense -- mind, spirit and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

Steven Taylor, at OTB (and PoliBlog) writes:

More Asininity (This Time from Malkin)

What in the world is going on? First we have Derbyshire and Blake and now this. First, why do we have to find blame in places other than the fact that a truly disturbed individual simply did an unthinkable act and cracked. There is only so much that can be done in a free society to prevent such situations. This attempt to blame a general "liberal" attitude at universities and that this somehow has led to a culture of "conflict avoidance" that somehow, by inference, led to people not defending themselves on Monday - that is utterly ridiculous.

There's a lot to unpack here.

Michelle is strongly advocating more people carrying weapons. James is strongly opposed to it.

That's a topic I'll talk about more later on, not today.

Michelle is very specific in her blame of campus culture - specifically progressive campus culture - for the apparent passivity of the students, and blames the passivity of the students - in some part - for the scope of what the evil madman was able to accomplish.

I've also talked about the roots of the modern terrorist movement as being closely aligned with mainstream academic thinking, and will have more to say about that later, as well.

But I want to talk about one simple thing tonight. I'll evoke the immortal words of noted right-winger Michael Moore, who gave a lecture in Cincinnati in 2003:

Near the end of his lecture, Moore invoked the memory of Sept. 11, 2001, transporting his audience to the seats of a hijacked airplane.

"Two or three men holding box cutters paralyze 100 people," he said. "How can this happen?"

There's fear, certainly, from seeing some of the first class passengers' throats sliced open. The smell of death, the blood, the rasping breath of misery. But something else had to be in play. Maybe the forbearance that comes from living comfortable lives. Surely someone would take care of this, as surely as policemen always rushed to aid them in times of need.

"Could the 100 passengers have stopped the men with box cutters?" Moore asked. "Sure, of course. Three guys with blades against a hundred unarmed fighters? The hundred win every time. Maybe not easy, maybe a few die, but the hundred win. We know it because those brave fighters on the Pennsylvania flight got up from their seats. And they beat the hijackers!"

Then Moore asked the audience to replace those passengers with 100 people from the Bronx or Over-the-Rhine or any not-so-comfortable community -- the kind of neighborhood where calling 911 won't necessarily bring the police running to help you.

"And maybe when the police do show up -- if the police show up -- they take you away instead," he said.

Now, Moore asked, do you think 100 people from the Bronx would sit there?

"They would fight back," he said. "They would rise up out of their seats and fight."

He's right. The good folks don't fight. They don't because, to be honest, they never have in their lives - if you're my age or younger, fighting in elementary school isn't normal, it's the end of your school career. It amazes me how few of my peers have ever had a real altercation.

Obviously, by virtue of my willingness to own and use arms - and martial arts of other kinds - I made the decision a long time ago that I would fight. I've argued in the past that fighting bad people is an obligation society places on good people as a way of raising the cost of being bad.

And the reality is that in extremis, people freeze, flee, or fight. Two of those reactions are useful. I'll quote my law enforcement officer friend:

By design, Universities are filled with idealists wishing to take the higher road of understanding and compassion when it comes to dealing with the dangers people often pose toward their own species.

...

Most importantly, if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and you can access real shelter or cover, waste no time running full speed in that direction. If you are trapped, in a room with an assailant who is picking off victims as he/she finds them, FIGHT.

No, I do not blame the victims in Virginia. The only person to blame is an insanely evil young man who isn't here to receive his just punishment.

But I have advice for those who would prefer not to be victims. And it lies in the simple fact that the State cannot, and will not guarantee your safety. You are the ultimate guarantor of your safety. You should act that way.

So here, I'll side with Michelle, and my cop friend, and Michael Moore (who would have thought it?) and tell Taylor that to call Malkin's views asinine is - well - I'm too polite to say asinine, so I'll just say foolish and wrong.

Update: fixed dumb conflation of names.

Update 2: Anne-Marie Cox takes a swing at the issue too; she's indignant that John Derbyshire would suggest that someone might try and do something in the face of an active shooter:

If I had to choose a favorite insane statement here -- like, say, if someone was holding a gun to my head -- I think it'd be the idea that, "At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him." Or, best yet: you could always try the ol', "Shoe's untied!" bit. Works with my theoretical mass shooting murderers all the time.

Um, Anne-Marie, it's like this. One of the ways that you train for things that haven't ever happened to you - and I'm so tempted to put in an assf**king reference here - is to imagine them, and pattern a response. real grown up people - like pilots, musicians, and yes, people who fight for a living - do exactly that.

Along with real training, it has a nice benefit, to which I can testify - which is that you'll respond better if you've got a pre-made plan (and better still if you practice it) than if you don't.

I'll bet that no one today gets on an airliner without thinking a little bit about how they'd react to a hijacker. Which is one reason there won't be any more hijackings without serious weaponry.

So thanks for playing, Anne-Marie, and please go back and comment on things you actually know something about, like what midlevel Washington wannabe politicians do for relaxation.

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Kent State was a tragedy that was the result of two sides facing off over the war in Vietnam. One side was protesting the seemingly endless and expanding conflict in Indochina; the other side was called in to maintain civil order. Guns went off, and four people lay dead. The young generation just emerging from the 1960s rallied around this event. The antiwar cause was buttressed. Their deaths, while tragic, were at least casualties in a battle of ideas.

But what of today's young generation? The Virginia Tech massacre seems prophetic for them. Nine times the number died at Virginia Tech than did at Kent. What cause did these young people die for?

None at all. They died because a lunatic got his hands on some very effective killing technology. The press looks for meaning, and answers. They'll never be found. Because they're not there.

Today's young generation must contend with mass death at the hands of anonymous people, with anonymous causes. Certainly, murder sprees are not unique to today's young generation. But situational catastrophe seems to have taken on a life of its own in the past 10 years. In terms of age, it's possible that some of the kids who were shot at by Cho Seung-Hui might have dodged bullets of similar intent at Columbine High School in 1999. This is a generation that has become accustomed to being distracted, influenced, and sometimes killed en masse by random occurrence without a coherent purpose.

Some of these kids are in school, others among them are in Iraq and Afghanistan. There too, they must contend with anonymous, random violence. International Jihad does indeed represent a cause, albeit incoherent much of the time. But each act of violence in the name of Jihad seems arbitrary, and murderous.

What must today's young people make of the world they must engage? What are their expectations, as a generation? Media has pounded them all their lives about how the world is dangerous; it's full of child molesters, murderers, disease and vice. They're a generation raised with interior childhoods, safe from what lurks outside, but free to observe it on a screen. All their worldly needs could be met in homes and safe places. Childhood became a crafted vocation.

Virginia Tech was the slaughter of the lambs by one of their tormented own. While their lives had purpose and meaning, their deaths had none. That's the despicable truth. Where Kent defined the older generation's opposition to war, Virginia Tech defines only an rising tide of random atrocity without end.

Wish them well.

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What do you tell your college bound child about crime, danger and self-preservation?

Recognize that a University is just a city within a city, filled with people. Some are good, some are bad, some are there to take advantage of the environment for profit and others, to prey upon a particularly vulnerable population.

By vulnerable, I include students, staff and faculty, all of whom tend to believe the hype about the University Community being somehow insulated from the crime that exists outside the borders. By design, Universities are filled with idealists wishing to take the higher road of understanding and compassion when it comes to dealing with the dangers people often pose toward their own species.

Tell your son or daughter that in order to decrease the risks hidden behind the school's marketing facade, they must listen to their instincts when confronted with danger, rather than letting their intellect and ideals overcome them. A student needs to be willing to see danger when it presents itself. They need to understand that bad things happen to good people every day, even in places that are supposed to be safe. That all of nature survives and thrives upon decisions of fight or flight, but fails or dies if they succumb to the immobility of fear.

Unfortunately, we live in a would-be virtual world, where we protect our children from fear and leave them to practice their survival skills in games that allow them to respawn when they make the wrong choice. This leaves them believing that they cannot come to harm and although I don't think walking around riddled with anxiety over every potential encounter is healthy; skepticism, caution and adaptability to swiftly changing circumstances are excellent tools for long term survival.

To be more specific, if something doesn't look right, it probably isn't and you should report your concerns to the authorities. If someone seems irrational, delusional or just plain weird, let someone know. If someone seems to believe you have a romantic relationship and you don't - be alert and report stalking or obsessive behavior as soon as you encounter it. Sometimes, if these situations are caught early, the subject can be helped with medical intervention. Do not put embarrassment above safety.

Most importantly, if you find yourself in an active shooter situation and you can access real shelter or cover, waste no time running full speed in that direction. If you are trapped, in a room with an assailant who is picking off victims as he/she finds them, FIGHT. Throw things, big things if you can grab them. Use that as a distraction to assault the shooter. Go down fighting if you must, but do not let yourself be immobilized by fear. Unless you can hide among the bodies and successfully play dead (a risky tactic if the assailant decides on a 'coup de grace' shot), you may as well go down fighting. If you cower in a corner or under a desk, as soon as he sees you he will kill you. Take the initiative away. You have nothing to lose in this situation. Remember the lesson of 9/11, submission to an adversary bent on killing plays into his expectations and will likely result in your death.

Update: changed formatting to distinguish the author's words from mine.

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"The gunman, Peter Odighizuwa, killed three, and probably would have killed more but for another student's gun:

"Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, officials said.

"We saw the shooter, stopped at my vehicle and got out my handgun and started to approach Peter," Tracy Bridges, who helped subdue the shooter with other students, said Thursday on NBC's "Today" show. "At that time, Peter threw up his hands and threw his weapon down. Ted was the first person to have contact with Peter, and Peter hit him one time in the face, so there was a little bit of a struggle there."

Imagine if someone had been in that position at Virginia Tech. One more reason why the university administration is going to have a tough, tough time living this one down. Deservedly. From January 2006:

"Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill [to allow people with concealed carry permits to carry guns on campus] was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Can't argue with a fantastic success like that, can you?

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When the Virginia legislature failed to overrule VA Tech's carry restrictions, maintaining the right to carry on university campus under House Bill 1572, proposed by Todd Gilbert from Shenandoah county, VA Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was delighted: "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

At this point the authorities are saying that at least 20 persons have been killed at VA Tech by a gunman who didn't even bother to conceal his weapon. Draw your own conclusions, but I imagine the press and Democrat congress will spin this as evidence of the need to further disarm citizens, though a single person with a concealed carry permit could have prevented the tragedy. The real travesty is that no one who might have put a stop to this was armed, because they'd been stripped by good intentions--thus making the campus relatively safe for an attacker who wasn't really worried about expulsion, and didn't have to be concerned about a student or faculty member with a concealed weapon.

If anyone knows more about the concealed carry situation at VA Tech or other VA schools please contribute to comments.

Update: Fox now reporting 32 dead. So far reports are that he used a 9mm handgun, which makes it even more incredible. Such a thing would not have even been conceivable unless it were perpetrated against a totally trusting and unarmed population.

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We're very slightly under $14,000 today, with very little publicity after the initial 3 or 4 blog posts.

Here's what's going on:

1) I'm working to get the legal and accounting set up for the PAC, so that we'll be legal and I can contact each of the pledged donors to fulfill their pledge.
2) I'm reaching out to a number of people to put together a 5-person Board of Directors so this isn't just me doing things and/or making decisions.
3) I'm designing a site that will allow you to register, pledge, donate, post your thoughts, and contact others to help us raise money and awareness.

My guess is that all of this will happen between 4/21 and 5/10, with a goal of being fully operational by 5/15.

Feel free to go to the VictoryPAC site and add your pledge.

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The congressmen praised Patraeus' speech, and as the case in each insurgent city and territory was different, they agreed that it would be impossible to pass a general resolution, but that each instance would have to be considered separately. Patraeus specified the case of each of the territories, and the Congressmen decided that the Iraqis were to become unincorporated territory, and that any sacred or historical artifacts looted in the 2003 invasion were to be returned. They also made the Kurds, the Shiias, the Sunnis and the people of Kurdistan, the Assyrians, the Mandeans, the Iraqi Turkmen, Shabaks, and the Roma (some dispersed and living in the U.S.), while the people of Kurdistan (Sulaymânîyah Province) were allied to keep their privileges, their insurgency being blamed on a few individuals. The people of Fallujah, however, were severely punished for having been a home to many Jewish academies for centuries and under British control in the 1920's who nevertheless mounted an insurgency numerous times. To secure Fallujah, the U.S. had to depopulate the city and then send in new settlers, knocked out all the bridges over the Euphrates River, but later helped re-build all the mosques destroyed in the Battle of Fallujah.

It is clear from the judgment of the British passed on these insurgent territories that they strove either to win their loyalty through benefits, or to treat the territories so harshly to win their loyalty through benefits, or to treat, the territories so harshly that they would never need fear them again. The ancient Romans, unlike the British, regarded any middle way as harmful. In their resolutions, they chose one extreme or the other: benefiting those with whom they saw hope for reconciliation, and, where there was no hope, making certain Rome could not be harmed again. The ancient Romans carried this out in two ways: One was to destroy the city and bring the inhabitants to live in Rome; the second was either to strip the city of its inhabitants and send in new ones, or, leaving the former inhabitants in place, to send in so many new ones that the original inhabitants could never again conspire against the authority of Rome. The Romans used these two methods in the case of Latium in Italy, destroying Velitrae and providing Antium with new inhabitants.

I have heard it said that in our actions we should look to history as our teacher, which is particularly true for Presidents. The world has always been inhabited in the same way by men who have had the same passions: There have always been those who serve willingly, those who rebel and those who are punished. Should anyone doubt this, he has only to look at the incidents in the city of Fallujah in Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004 recapturing Fallujah. Even though the particulars of the insurgency and recapture of these territories was quite different, that fact of the insurgency and the recapture are the same.

If it is true that in our actions we should look to history as our teacher, it would be good if those who will have to judge and punish the territories of Iraq would follow the example of those who once ruled the world, particularly in a case where the ancients teach us in no uncertain terms the best course of action. Just as the Romans judged each territory differently, as the offense of each people was different, so must we now strive to evaluate the difference in offense in each of our insurgent territories.

If you were to assert that this is precisely what we have done, I would reply that we have done so only to some extent, but that we have fallen short in important ways. It is good that we allowed Kurdistan and many other Iraq Provinces to keep their assemblies, and that we indulged them, managing to reconquer them with benefits, because I equate them with the people the ancient Romans treated in a similar manner. But it is not good that the Sunni people of Baghdad, who acted in the same way as the ancient Roman cities of Velitrae and Antium, have not been treated the same way they were. If the judgment of Romans believed that rebellious populaces had to be either benefited or destroyed, and that any other course of action was dangerous. From what I see with Baghdad we have not adopted either of these two courses. One cannot claim that the Sunnis have benefited by having to come to the U.S. every day, their offices abolished, their sinecures wiped out, their being disparaged publicly and having soldiers quartered in their previously secure neighborhoods. And yet, one cannot claim, either, that we are securing ourselves against them by leaving their city walls intact and allowed five-sixths of their citizens to go on living there, not sending in new settlers who would keep them in check. In any future war that we might have to fight, we will have to face greater expenditure in Baghdad than we will in fighting the enemy. Experience taught us this in 2004, before Fallujah rebelled or we began our cruel reprisals. For when the al Qaeda troops assaulted al Anbar Province, we had to send our forces to Fallujah in order to keep the city stable, instead of using those troops in Ramadi in Anbar Province.

Nor would we have had to pull Reservists from home and send them back to Iraq as part of the "Surge." The Sunnis disloyalty resulted in our having to face considerably more peril and expenditure than if it had remained loyal. Hence, putting together what one sees now and what one saw then, and the conditions we have imposed on the Baghdadis, one can categorically conclude that if -- God forbid! -- the U.S. Green Zone were to be invaded by terrorists, Baghdad would either rebel or cause us so many problems as we tried to secure it that it would become an expenditure the U.S. would not be able to bear.

I do not want to neglect discussing the prospect of a U.S. terrorist attack, and the inevitable designs any state-sponsored terrorists have on Iraq and Baghdad, as at the moment this is a central topic of discussion. Let us not concentrate on the danger we can expect from any Sleeper Cells in the U.S., but let us turn our sights on a peril closer at hand. Anyone who has observed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's course of action will note that in his strategy for extorting the states he has threatened, he never looks to U.S. alliances, having little esteem for the U.S. and Britain. One can only conjecture that he intends to create such a powerful state in Iran that he will be unassailable, making allegiance to him desirable for the leader of any nation. Should this be his design, then he is clearly aspiring to possess all of Iraq that he now infiltrates. There is no doubt that because of his boundless ambition, and the way he has drawn out negotiations with us without ever concluding any agreements. It now remains for us to see if the time is right for him to put his designs into practice.

I remember hearing American historians say that among the many reasons one could call Presidents James Polk's expansion of U.S. territory into former Mexican lands, Lincoln's provocations at Fort Sumpter, President William McKinley's exposure of a battleship, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's strategy of rebounding from Pearl Harbor, is that they are experts at seeing an opportunity and seizing it. This view is proved by our experience of what they have carried out when they had the opportunity. If one were to debate whether now is an opportune moment for them to assault the U.S., I would say no. But one must consider Ahmadinejad can wait for the kind of moment in which he can be assured of victory, as time is on his side: Iran will eventually acquire nuclear weapons or para-nuclear weapons of mass destruction such as Polonium, and Ahmadinejad will grasp the first opportunity that presents itself and place his cause to a great extent in Fortune's hands.

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And following the Sourcewatch link to 'Democracy Alliance' we get:

"Members of the Democracy Alliance include billionaires like George Soros and his son Jonathan Soros, former Rockefeller Family Fund president Anne Bartley, San Francisco Bay Area donors Susie Tompkins Buell and Mark Buell, Hollywood director Rob Reiner, Taco Bell heir Rob McKay ... as well as New York financiers like Steven Gluckstern." [3]

Conservative site 'Discover the Networks' says:

Media Matters has not always been forthcoming about its high-profile backers. In particular, the group has long labored to obscure any financial ties to George Soros. But in March 2003, the Cybercast News Service (CNS) detailed the copious links between Media Matters and several Soros "affiliates" - among them MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, and Peter Lewis. Confronted with this story, a spokesman for the organization explained that "Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros" (emphasis added), a transparent evasion.

Here's why this matters - if the issue is to replace one group of powerhungry liars with another, it's really hard for me to motivate any energy to become involved. And I assume that I'm not alone.

Transparency and honesty matter, or they don't. You can't bust GWB for failing to be completely transparent and then cloak yourself in bullshit without the room starting to stink.

Honesty is more important to me than social justice because I don't believe that people who are profoundly dishonest are capable of advancing the cause of social justice.

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Racist Quote of the Day:

Oh oh....looks like a pouty Brown Sugar is going to ask Daddy to buy her another pair of Ferragamos. Or invade another country.

--T.Bogg (referencing a photo of the Secretary of State).

There's an amusing debate going on in the blogosphere over whether Imus is a liberal or a conservative, as if that makes any difference. If "nappy-headed ho" comes out of your mouth when you describe a female college basketball player, you're a racist. If making a lewd reference to a black prostitute is what comes to mind when you need to dis Condaleeza Rice, you're a racist. And it doesn't matter if the nazis over at LGF are pretending to take offense.

I have never understood the notion that liberals like Tom (of TBogg) - who would spasm into rageful unconsciousness listening to a white redneck talk smack about a black man or a woman somehow feel free to bring out their inner Tom Mezgers if the target isn't on their side of the angels.

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If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger, white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then don't let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Don't let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don't let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality - which is the same goal as affirmative action. A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of "anything goes" in speech becomes censorship. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their place. Liberalism thus means helping to silence the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation - they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups' speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.

I believe Hicks to be off base in his explanation of the root of this construction; he explains it as a political tactic adopted as the previous tactic - affirmative action - began to fail. He's wrong; this is a manifestation of the underlying philosophy behind affirmative action - the primacy of group identification, and the construction of politics as conflicts between identified groups.

I'd suggest going back to Marcuse's 'Repressive Tolerance' for a historic touchstone.

A bit more bloggage then back to work...

...2002 was an interesting year, wasn't it?

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In order to develop a smarter Iran policy, U.S. leaders must first accept certain distasteful facts - such as Iran's ascendance as a regional power and the endurance of its regime - and then ask how those can be accommodated.

OK, there's some things to think about in that.

But - no where in the article is there anything about the demographic issues or the potential collapse of Iranian oil revenues - and the political implications that presents for the "endurance of its regime". Now it may be that those issues are overblown; there are certainly arguments to be made.

But I'd say that it's pretty difficult to talk about Iran and our long-term strategy with them without dealing with these issues - or at least raising and dismissing them with some arguments that hold some weight.

And it's difficult for me to sit down and accept the authoritay of someone who is a Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign relations and author of 'Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic' when he tells me that Iran is an unstoppable force in the Middle East and doesn't deal with the reasons why Iran may either be a hollow power - or why it may be motivated to be aggressive within a specific window of time. If this is what the leading experts are doing - heaven help us all.

Then Noah Pollak sent me a note announcing the new issue of Azure, the magazine he's involved with.

In it, David Hazony (editor in chief of the magazine) has an article on 'The New Cold War' in which he details the issues in containing Iran.

By most measures, Iran is an easier mark than the Soviet Union. It does not yet have nuclear weapons or icbms; its Islamist ideology has less of a universal appeal; its tools of thought control are vastly inferior to the gulag and the KGB; and its revolution is not old enough to have obliterated the memory of better days for much of its population. In theory at least, it should be much easier for the West to mount a similar campaign of relentless pressure on the regime - from fomenting dissent online, to destabilizing the regime through insurgent groups inside Iran, to destroying the Iranian nuclear project, to ever-deeper economic sanctions, to fighting and winning the proxy wars that Iran has continued to wage - in order to effect the kind of change of momentum needed to enable the Iranian people to bring their own regime down the way the peoples under communism did in the 1980s and 1990s.

This article cuts closer to my presuppositions and beliefs than Takeyh's; it stands as a counter to his arguments about the inevitability of Iranian power with an argument about the necessity of countering it.

But it's more in the nature of a polemic than an analysis.

And the question, of course, is whether it's the right polemic. And some analysis would help make that case. Or Takeyh's.

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"Boy, those results don't look like those from Gallup - from the real voters. At the Politics Online conference in Washington a few weeks ago, I remember one of the many pundits there arguing that Hillary has no grass roots support and momentum because you can't find it in the blogosphere. Well, maybe in one blog."

The political blogs are all about Edwards and Richardson, and the polls are all about Hillary.

It's a fundamental mistake to presume that because one narrow slice of the chattering classes (us) happens to be all excited about a candidate - like, say Ned Lamont - that the enthusiasm is shared by the larger electorate.

I think there's a lesson there for the netroots - especially the wannabe political consultant class netroots - and I'll cite my perennial source John Schaar:

"Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960's. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow."

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During the first five hijrī centuries, Muslims witnessed enormous intellectual breakthroughs across a broad range of subjects in Islamic thinking. These successes included topics such as the fundamentals of jurisprudence, linguistics, interpretation and historiography. These intellectual advances resulted in a revolution of opinions and interpretations that varied from the extreme conservative right, such as the Hanbalī school [in reference to the Ahmad Ibn Hanbal], to the utmost level of reason-based interpretation proposed by the great thinker Ibn Rushd [Averroes], and between those two extremes there were a multitude of other schools of thought. For example, at the time when Abū Hanīfah al-Nuamān accepted less than 100 hadīths [sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad], Ahmad Ibn Hanbal recognized more than 10,000 hadīths.

Nevertheless, Muslims committed a grave mistake against themselves and their religion when they closed the door to ijtihād [interpretation] and stopped searching for new concepts and solutions. They became satisfied with simply taking from what their ancestors had produced, although those concepts and solutions were the outcome of an ancient era and the fruits of the conditions of a past time. Therefore, Muslims are living in a status quo environment where they ruminate on the thoughts of other men who exerted efforts to set concepts that suited their time eight centuries ago. In comparison to ancient Muslim men of religion such as Averroes, who is as important intellectually as Aristotle, current Muslim scholars read only in Arabic, they are not aware of modern sciences, and they find themselves in social environments that do not allow them to be intellectually open to the innovations of humanity in the different fields of social and human sciences.

We are in dire need of a new generation of scholars who can comprehend the sciences, cultures and knowledge of the current age as well as understand the heritage of ancient Muslims. Seventy years ago, the grand imām of the Azhar, Dr. Mustafá Abd al-Rāziq, was a former professor of philosophy in a university. Which university you may ask? Not the University al-Riyadh or the University of Sana'a, but he was a professor at the University of Sorbonne.

I have been engaged in meetings with a number of scholars from the Vatican. I always bemoan and wonder why the Vatican abounds with men of religion with such splendid educational, intellectual and encyclopedic cognitive backgrounds in their various areas of knowledge, while our scholars know nothing about the great fruits of human creativity in many of the different branches of social and human sciences.

At a conference held seven years ago, I saw a scholar who is considered by some as the greatest Muslim jurist and preacher of his time. He was an Egyptian with Qatari nationality who fled from Egypt during the clashes between the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamāl Abd al-Nāsir in 1954. At the conference, he used more than one interpreter, and never got involved in discussions about modern streams of thought. On the other hand, the Vatican scholars were using four or five languages in their discussions that covered vast fields of knowledge. I will not hide the fact that I felt ashamed of him that day. He seemed so primitive in his thoughts and approaches. It appeared as if he was a primeval human from the forests of ' Borneo Island.'

We need a generation of Muslim religious scholars who have studied other religions, human history, world literature, philosophy, sociology and psychology and can speak a number of languages; the languages of civilization. Until this happens, our Muslim scholars will remain primitive and stay at their level of naivety, shallowness and isolation from the path of civilization and humanity.

Before I reached 20 years of age Father George Qanawātī, a monk who headed the Dominican Monastery in al-Abbāsīyah, Cairo, had taught me about Greek drama and ancient Greek philosophy. Another monk taught me some simple things that have made many people nowadays think that I am an academic expert in Judaism. However, never in my life have I seen a Muslim man of religion who had encyclopedic knowledge in a number of fields of interest.

In conclusion, just as we are underdeveloped in all of the fields of science, we are in the same respect, underdeveloped in the sciences of our Islamic religion. Our backwardness in Islam is the same as it is in medicine, engineering, information technology and space research. We are nothing but a 'parasite' of humanity. Even the weapons used by the militias of the groups calling themselves jihādīs [related to Islamic jihād] are made by others who work hard at a time when we are insipid.

We need to see the emergence of a generation of this type of men of religion, which I have just described in the article, who combine the zenith of Islamic sciences and modern sciences at the same time. Without them, Muslims' isolation from the progress of humanity will increase. Campaigns of criticism will be escalated against them. I can also imagine that a huge number of them will be driven out of the European communities and from North America. In addition to that, Islam-West clashes, such as the war against the Tālibān in Afghanistan, may reoccur. Muslims (or to be more precise, large sectors of the Muslim population) will become the primary enemy of Western civilization or may become the first enemy of all of humanity.

Despite the need, such long-pursued development within Islamic religious institutions is very unlikely to occur. The biggest Islamic institutions in the modern world, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are expelling any element that calls for the slightest renovations and changes. If so, what should we expect about demands for comprehensive change?

One of the Islamic universities has dismissed Dr. Ahmad Subhī Mansūr when all he has done is rejected the recognition of prophetic hadīths as a source of jurisprudential principles. The university should have discussed the differences in viewpoints using a scientific method that would be performed within the framework of a dialogue, and organized arguments where the differing scholars can exchange opinions. Strangely enough, Abū Hanīfah al-Nuamān, one of the great-four Muslim jurists, was in the same situation as Dr. Ahmad Subhī Mansūr when he decided to recognize only a few of the hadīths at a time when other jurists accepted all prophetic hadīths. To be more precise, if Abū Hanīfah had seen a book like 'Sahīh al-Bukhārī' [al-Bukhārī's Authentic], he would have rejected more than 90% of its contents. In this situation some modern Islamic university would have deemed Abū Hanīfah kāfir [apostate] although he was the first of the great four Islamic jurists and was entitled 'The Great Imām.'

As a matter of fact, conditions in today's Islamic religious institutions do not allow those institutions to produce men of the quality of Abū Hanīfah and Averroes. They are more and more isolated and occupied with 'yellow' religious references. For centuries, their role in the interpretation of Islam has been restricted to the texts of books and not their contexts. It became rare to find one scholar at these institutions who read even one book in a language other than Arabic.

Therefore, the long-sought for change among the Islamic establishment is now contingent upon a political leadership that is willing to lean toward a rational interpretation of history and a vision for the future. Unfortunately, these qualifications are not easily found within Islamic communities. Nevertheless, we need to demand a political leadership that works towards achieving radical procedural change within the structure of the Islamic scholarly community and that is willing to herd this community into harmony with the age of science and the progress of humanity. Without this driving force, Muslims will be heading for a massive confrontation with humanity which will be as disastrous as a collision between two celestial bodies.

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However, the end of Second World War was the beginning of another large-scale conflict, which has been described as the Cold War. Since the Soviet Union had joined the Allied camp, it was difficult for the rest of the allies to turn their backs on their wartime communist partner and start a traditional war against the Soviet Union, which was an extremely essential ally despite being completely contradictory politically as well as economically.

As soon as the Second World War had ended, "yesterday's allies" became "today's enemies." The U.S. along with Britain and countries from what was later called Western Europe found themselves in confrontation with their former ally, the Soviet Union. A country, which following the war was becoming larger, more powerful and more influential.

I would like to concentrate on describing the world scene at the end of the Second World War because this particular situation is the source of the two historical paths or options which will be handled in this article. Before Second World War broke out in 1939, the Soviet Union was contained within its borders although, it had patriarchal relations with other communist movements worldwide through an organization that the Soviets established to support such movements, which was called Communist International or the Comintern.

The military defeat of Germany and Japan, created a power vacuum in the international arena after the Second World War. In Europe, the German army began withdrawing westward after it had reached the gateway to Stalingrad. Simply speaking, as the German army retreated from east to west, the Soviet army occupied the territory that they abandoned. At first the Soviet forces moved forward within their own territory then they advanced into other countries that later formed the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon and were known as the Eastern European countries or the countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Consequently, all the lands that were removed from the realm of German sovereignty became new areas of influence for the Soviet Union and its political and economical ideologies. As a result of the German retreat to the west the bloc of countries in Eastern Europe was formed and became like planets orbiting around the Soviet Union.

A similar process took place in Asia. When the Japanese army retreated from the vast territories that it had conquered outside of the Japanese home islands, communist parties in those areas took over the evacuated lands.

Although this process took place in more than one country, there are numerous examples including; Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Mongolia, the greatest and the most important case in point was that of Mao Tsetung in China. He, and after him the remnants of his communist followers, proceeded to replace the withdrawing Japanese forces and simultaneously swept away the Chinese anticommunist alternative led by Chiang Kai-shek who withdrew from the Chinese mainland and settled on the island of Formosa. For years, the Western world considered the exiles on Formosa to be the official Chinese representatives and dismissed the great giant mainland with its population exceeding one billion people.

Thus, the so-called free world came out of the Second World War victorious over its enemies, but the gains of the Soviet Union were bigger and far more important than those of its allies in the war.

The Second World War ended but the Cold War began and continued until the announcement of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the years from 1945 until 1991, the controlling factor in international politics was the conflict between the two poles of the Cold War. In spite of the fact that the Cold War can be considered from many perspectives, this article will concentrate on only one issue; the division between the two Koreas. The specific reason behind choosing the Korean issue is my belief that it summarizes most of the facts, the characteristics and the repercussions of the Cold War era.

The major players of the Eastern camp during the Cold War have since 1991 categorically changed their political, economic and social policies. The Soviet Union, all of the Eastern European countries except Belarus, all the Asian socialist countries except North Korea and the entire socialist Third World except Cuba have redefined their political and economical policies. Neither Belarus nor Cuba represent and exemplify the Cold War era as the two Koreas did and are still doing.

Korea was one nation before being divided by the ideologies of the Cold War era. The people of the two Koreas are racially the same and they speak the same language. The greatest distinguishing feature between the two Koreas emerged due to disparate choices between two historical paths and destinies. Therefore, 45 years after of the end of the Korean War, it is the right of the reader to know, and the duty of authors to explain, the reasons that led to the creation of two Koreas. There is a South Korea that moves, works and lives politically and economically in concurrence with the Western system, and a North Korea which circled in the orbit of the Eastern bloc, strictly speaking of Mao Tsetung's communist China.

Thus, it has become up to humanity to see, reflect on and examine the repercussions of each path and the choices of South Korea and North Korea. In my belief, these two choices are the most significant characteristics of the era of the Cold War. Equally, the modern results of the two significant historical choices of each Korea represent the fruit and consequence of each choice.

When the Korean Peninsula was divided into two nations, North and South Korea, more than half a century ago the number of people living in each of the states was almost the same. Today, due to the deteriorating living and health conditions and the high mortality rate among children in North Korea its population numbers only half that of South Korea's 50 million.

It is noteworthy that while mortality rate among children in South Korea is six in every one thousand, in North Korea the percentage is four times more than that. This means that 24 children out of every one thousand newborns die before their first birthday in North Korea.

I thought it would be suitable, for the benefit of the message of this article, to offer the readers a number of significant comparative facts that I have compiled during a prolonged study of the two countries.

For example, while the number of telephone lines in South Korea reaches 24 million, in North Korea there are less than two million telephone lines. The annual electrical consumption for the whole of South Korea is 320 billion kWh. On the other hand the North Korean state consumes only 21 billion kWh annually, which means that the amount of electricity being used in South Korea is 15 times more than it is in North Korea. Furthermore, while South Korea consumes 650 thousand barrels of oil on daily basis, North Korea consumes only 25 thousand barrels. In other words, South Korea's usage of petrol is 2500% higher than North Korea's.

It is worthy to mention that there is a certain mathematical relationship between the amount of petrol used in any society and the level of economical development in that society. The greatest proof for this equation is China. While the Chinese economy has been growing at a rate of 9% annualy, there has been an consummate increase in the country's demand for petrol and other fossil fuels.

In addition to the previously mentioned comparisons between the two countries, the amount of the total economic production in South Korea is equivalent to $1200 billion while the economic production in North Korea does not exceed $40 billion, which means that the local production of South Korea is 30 times what it is in North Korea. The per capita real income in South Korea has reached $24,000 per year, while in North Korea it is less than $1,800 per year. It could be useful and even funny for readers to know that the average height of males in South Korea has increased to 1.74 m, while it remains 1.58 m among North Korean males. Finally, life expectancy in South Korea is approaching 80 years, while it remains ten years less than that in North Korea.

I think that readers will agree that these comparative statistics are extremely significant indicators that need no explanation. One country chose poverty, backwardness, and suffering, while the other chose progress, prosperity, health, and production. Talking about the pride of a nation, one side chose to receive donations and financial aid, while the other chose development and wealth and has subsequently obtained excess funds so that it can offer aid to others.

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Firstly, there is a strong belief among many that the glorification and sanctification of the Islamic fiqh [jurisprudence] is a baseless act. These critics often note that the Islamic fiqh is merely a man made interpretation of holy texts. It might be useful to refer here to the most fixed and wide-spread definition of the Islamic fiqh that says that, "Fiqh is the science concerned with the deduction of practical rules out of their juristic references." It is easy to see that any process of deduction is a human, not a divine, action since it inevitability requires the use of language and logic.

As further proof of the temporal nature of fiqh, it is known that the legacy of the great sunnī jurists, Abū Hanīfah, Mālik, al-Shāficī, and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, was created in less than 200 years. In addition to that fact, the second and third juristswere contemporaneous and, importantly, still differed in their opinions regarding fiqh. How could Mālik publish a jurisprudential madhhab [school or legal system] different from that of Abū Hanīfah unless the latter's work was nothing but a human production? One more significant evidence that we are discussing a merely human work from beginning to end is the fact that the third sunnī jurist produced two different legal systems, one for Iraq and another for Egypt.

Consequently, the principles considered, by some, to be the Islamic tenets for comprehensive systems of government are nothing but ijtihād. Such interpretations have come to be called the Sultanic commandments. Experts know that temporal rulers, whether during the Umayyad or the Abbasid eras, heavily influenced most of what was written about the Sultanic commandments. These rulers acted this way in order to guarantee that whatever was written about the laws would concur with their desires and understanding concerning the governance of their respective communities.

I would like to emphasize that similar processes took place in other places. The relationship between the opinions and writings of the British political thinker Hobbes and the British throne is a case in point. It has been argued that Hobbes specifically wrote opinions that echoed the desires of the British crown.

Therefore, the existence of political parties formed on religious basis alone is illogical because the principles of the so called Islamic doctrine in governorship affairs reflects nothing but the interpretations of humans who could be right or wrong, so the matter is entirely a human production.

Islam does not articulate a comprehensive framework for organizing government systems that could replace the contemporary details found within the constitution. Outlining such detailed schemes was neither the task nor the aim of Islam. However, blaming Islam for not presenting a distinct political system is tantamount to blaming it for not having a comprehensive theory in psychology, sociology or management sciences.

In fact, Islam came with groups of general rules, which would be more useful if used as guidance when formulating the more detailed regulations. Taking al-Māwardī's book ' al-Ahkām al-Sultānīyyah' [The Sultanic Commandments], as well as many similar books about the same topic, as examples for such detailed regulations is preferable to demanding too much from vague Islamic statements. Those works are manmade ijtihād, which reflect the authors' academic and rational abilities, as well as their cultural and motivational backgrounds while bearing in mind the unavoidable impacts of historical and geographical factors.

My focal point for this article is that there is a clear and powerful logic that can eradicate the viewpoint that is calling for the establishment of political parties based on religious platforms. We can agree that the overall rules that some call 'systems of governorship in Islam' were merely the deductions of men who lived more than one thousand years ago and pondered over the rules that they thought, in their time and place and inasmuch as their understanding, knowledge and conditions were, would lead to the establishment of a governing system representing the essential values of Islam. Once we have agreed about this then we must agree that the so-called 'ruling system in Islam' is a vague and imprecise description of what Muslim jurists wrote more than one thousand years ago in a serious and respected attempt to form bodies that would govern their communities in harmony with the principles and values of Islam.

We should accept the notion that the writings of ancient Muslims with regards to laws and government are valuable attempts that have been inspired by the essence of Islam. This is the most reasonable conclusion any rational mind can reach. Once we have done this then we will have to believe that there has been a lack of ambition within the Muslim community for a period of time exceeding one thousand years to update and expand our political traditions. We must renovate the writings of the ancient jurists as regards the Sultanic commandments so that we can reform our contemporary political and constitutional regulations.

Thus, any discussion that quotes heavily from writings, that were published a thousand years ago, and ignores contemporary Islamic jurisprudential issues will be just like using a book compiled in the tenth century A.D. on medicine and pharmacology as a founding base to establish modern medical systems and institutions. Decidedly, of course, this practice will lead to the death of all the patients.

Islam spoke about donkeys and cattle as important means of transportation. It also spoke about the principle of shūrá [consulting], but not directly about democracy, citizenship and human rights.. Nevertheless, it is shameful for a modern man to insist on using donkeys as his only means of transportation. This kind of decision lead to the conflict between Wahābīs, led by Faysal al-Darwīsh, and King cAbd al-cAzīz, when the Wahābīs rejected all the aspects of modern civilization like cars, telephones and radios.

In my belief, the individual who insists on solely using the concept of shūrá is like the person who believes that means of transport should be restricted to donkeys and cattle, on the ground that Islam spoke about donkeys and did not speak about cars, trains or planes.

Current political realities beg the question "Why can't we as Muslims establish political parties based on religious platforms?" Especially in light of the fact that there are numerous political parties in Europe that are described as Christian, the most well-known of them is probably the Christian Democratic Party, to which the German Chancellor Mrs. Merkel belongs.

I have, in front of me while writing these words, the constitutions of all the countries which have Christian parties in addition to the principles of those parties. There is not a single word, in neither the constitutions nor the principles of those parties, that assumes that those parties will rule according to religious fundamentals or according to any other principles but the values contained in their respective constitutions. These parties are Christian in name only. They are political parties representing conservative viewpoints. Their principles and values have been inspired by Christianity but they rule and are ruled by the terms of their constitutions and positive laws.

I do not think that the supporters of a movement like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will ever dare to announce that their goal in transferring the Brotherhood into a political party is to reach a similar frame of mind as that of the Christian Democratic Party.

There remains one important argument. It is my absolute conviction that political parties who describe themselves as Islamic are acting purely as political bodies. They are simply political entities seeking power. In and of themselves these goals are legal objectives. Yet, some of these parties play an emotional chord when they describe themselves as Islamic. They are nothing but a salafī [fundamental] movement living off of the understandings and deductions of humans who lived more than ten centuries ago and handled the issues of their age through solutions that were consequences of their time and place.

There is no better evidence than that of Muhammad Ibn Idrīs [Imām al-Shāfi cī] who published a new legal system when he arrived in Egypt since his previously published legal doctrine was suitable only for a distinct body politic in Iraq.

The catastrophe is when a people characterized by intellectual indolence, since neither they nor their ancestors have worked to update their political doctrine for one thousand years, want to continue to live as parasites on the understanding of others who worked hard and made every effort ten centuries ago.

In my belief, movements calling themselves political Islamic movements, amongst them the Muslim Brotherhood, unconsciously suffer from tremendous intellectual dilemmas which have very strong and negative impacts on their abilities to form new and modern doctrines of law.

Islam touched on lofty values about justice, equality and the virtues of knowledge. We can call these 'general values' or 'macro values.' Nevertheless, in order to be suitable for times and places other than during the dawning of Islam it did not articulate detailed specific codes or micro values. As such, followers of political Islamic streams of thought are fighting tooth and nail to establish a comprehensive governing system that is not applicable in the modern era. Islam has not prescribed such a detailed system. Therefore, political Islamic movements end up clinging to topics that have little relevance in the modern era, such as the impermissibility of bank interests in Islam and the panel code among others. The best thing for them to do is to admit that Islam came as a sublime religion and not as book in economics, politics, sociology, psychology, chemistry or medicine. However, if they make this admission, how will they play the game of politics? If they make it, they will abandon the strongest tool of their political propaganda. In addition, they will be required to present a realistic political, economical and social program and not their usual tricks and slogans of 'applying God's commands', 'Islam is the solution' and ' al-Barakah [the blessing]'. Such abstract and common slogans, if examined in the practical battlefield of life, would prove to be nothing but big empty air bubbles that contain mere politics and no religion whatsoever.

Regarding the issue of the 'blessings,' many of the kind, simple Muslims think that having people ruling in the name of Islam on top of the community is enough to bring welfare and blessing. To those who think this way I would argue that early Muslims, to be more precise the companions of the Prophet, the al-Muhājirūn [emigrants] and al-Ansār [supporters] and amongst them the Prophet himself, were defeated in the battle of Uhud. If victory, success, progress, or welfare are achievable through blessings alone, Muslims would have been victorious in Uhud as they clearly had the blessing of the Prophet. However, the defeat of Muslims in Uhud proves that just as God created the creatures of the world, he has also created certain rules and laws to run the universe, amongst them the laws of nature. One of these laws says that whoever fights without the material and practical qualifications of victory will be defeated. Through these laws Muslims, led by Tāriq Ibn Ziyyād, won in their conquest of Andalusia and due to the very same laws, Muslims were defeated several centuries later in the Battle of Tours in southern France.

In conclusion, whoever thinks that blessings will come upon him just because he says that he is ruling in the name of Islam will receive results in all fields similar to the defeat in the Battle of Uhud. Victory, progress, and successful leadership come only through science and good administration, which are human tenets that belong to no religion, denomination or nationality. We have no single evidence that those who want to rule their communities in the name of religion acquire any of such tenets. On the contrary, we have shinning evidences acquired from their backgrounds, their ideological history and their relationship with the universality of science, knowledge and the values of progress that they do not and will never acquire these tenets.

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