Woodshavings

Signing Off

2007-02-20T22:59:00.000-05:00

Thank you to all you brave and adventurous few who loyally read my thoughts on whatever interested or angered me on some particular day. I took a job a few weeks ago at Security Management magazine and moved back down to the DC area. There's a possibility a new site will be created with my good friend M.M. in the near future that is more specialized on the nexus between security and civil liberties or we may go another direction entirely and include more extensive coverage of pop culture, alternative culture and DC itself.

Whatever we do, check back here for updates.

Signing off,
Matthew Harwood

Exit Only Again

2007-02-07T11:52:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Ted Haggard is completey heterosexual. He is completely full of shit. The long and winding road of religious hypocrisy never seems to end, only become more farcical.

Reinvigorating Democracy

2007-02-02T16:59:00.000-05:00

My main man, Bill Moyers, on restoring American democracy to those who need it most: the people.

Here's the crescendo:

It is only rarely remembered that the definition of democracy immortalized by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address had been inspired by Theodore Parker, the abolitionist prophet. Driven from his pulpit, Parker said, "I will go about and preach and lecture in the city and glen, by the roadside and field-side, and wherever men and women may be found." He became the Hound of Freedom and helped to change America through the power of the word. We have a story of equal power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out. Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, from delis and from diners, tell it. From the workplace and the bookstore, tell it. On campus and at the mall, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can--to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it--for America's sake.

If you want to watch it, here it is on You Tube via The Nation.

O' So Grim

2007-02-02T16:29:00.000-05:00

WaPo is good enough to provide us a pdf copy of the National Intelligence Estimate just released, which predicts Iraq is likely to go from bad to FUBAR.

Read it and weep -- literally.

The "Huh"ization of What?

2007-01-31T10:39:00.000-05:00

Via the NYTs:

There was a time when the Champs-Élysées stood for grand living, high style and serendipity...But the road where de Gaulle celebrated France’s liberation from the Nazis, the one known as “the most beautiful avenue on earth,” has, like Times Square and Oxford Street in London, turned into a commercialized money trap...And so, in a truly French moment, the Paris city government has begun to push back, proclaiming a crisis of confidence and promising a plan aimed at stopping the “banalization” of the Champs-Élysées.

Which only goes to show that even when the French are right, they are still pretentious.

Combatting Islamism

2007-01-30T16:12:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens' eight-point plan to fight Islamism and counter the conditions and trends that make it such a popular option among young Muslim men throughout the world. This is clipped from his review of Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It from City Journal.

1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.

3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.

6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.

7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.

At first glance, I have nothing to add to this, except for a call for liberals to not explain Islamism as a reaction to American imperialism or confuse it with Third World revolution and understand it as the existential threat it wishes to be. What I like to call gushy liberals may protest this as Islamophobia, which only makes me wonder if liberal democracy, and its more economically managed counterpart in Europe, social democracy, are under threat from liberals so PC that they cannot see an emerging threat poised to destroy everything they profess and hold dear.

International solidarity has always been a column in the left's ideological architecture. It's time to ensure its foundation and support the democratic, multi-ethnic, and multi-confessional forces throughout the Muslim world that work toward a more liberal philosophy in the classical sense to guide the organization of their societies.

European Realpolitik on Iran

2007-01-30T11:52:00.000-05:00

Europe is resisting American calls to economically boycott Iran because of Iranian meddling in Iraq and refusal to curtail their nuclear program, which Iran claims is civilian in nature.

European governments are resisting Bush administration demands that they curtail support for exports to Iran and that they block transactions and freeze assets of some Iranian companies, officials on both sides say. The resistance threatens to open a new rift between Europe and the United States over Iran.

Administration officials say a new American drive to reduce exports to Iran and cut off its financial transactions is intended to further isolate Iran commercially amid the first signs that global pressure has hurt Iran’s oil production and its economy. There are also reports of rising political dissent in Iran.

In December, Iran’s refusal to give up its nuclear program led the United Nations Security Council to impose economic sanctions. Iran’s rebuff is based on its contention that its nuclear program is civilian in nature, while the United States and other countries believe Iran plans to make weapons.

At issue now is how the resolution is to be carried out, with Europeans resisting American appeals for quick action, citing technical and political problems related to the heavy European economic ties to Iran and its oil industry.

This is unsurprising as Europe values its economic dealings with Iran more than the possible chance of war breaking out between Iran and the U.S. if Iran gets more aggressive in Iraq, which indeed seems unlikely. Again this is the nature of realpolitik -- an educated guess as to how events will turn out and how it can effect a state's or regional organization's interests.

Right now, Europe is playing with a tiny fire and is unlikely to be burned. But with any fire, however small, there is the chance an ember will jump out of the enclosure and create a forest fire.

Bush's Iranian Doppelganger?

2007-01-29T13:47:00.000-05:00

An interesting quote from an ordinary Iranian who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Sunday's NYTs Magazine piece on the clash between the forces of democracy and the forces of theocracy in Iran:

“Sometimes I am analyzing myself and thinking, Oh, we have done wrong,” he mused. “He is very popular and friendly with the people, but sometimes when he is expressing his ideas, he doesn’t think about the future or the consequences. He is a simple man.”

Doesn't this sound familiar?

I must plead ignorance on how much power Ahmadinejad has in Iranian foreign policies decisions outside of clerical control, but jebus, Bush's messianic neoconservatism seems to have found it's bizarro world equivalent in Ahmadinejad's Shia messianism. If this isn't a clash of ideologies with possible horrific consequences, I don't know what is.

This Is Getting Interesting

2007-01-26T16:24:00.000-05:00

Via the NYTs today, President Bush has authorized American soldiers to kill Iranian agents if actionable intelligence is received that the agents are mixed up in plots to kill American soldiers.

But more questions about the campaign in Iraq, and in particular whether it includes a more aggressive approach to Iraq’s neighbor Iran, seem certain following a report in The Washington Post today.

The newspaper reported that the Bush administration has authorized the American military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of a new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence in the Middle East and to give up its nuclear ambitions.

The Post said lethal force against Iranians was not known to have been used to date. But the newspaper did say that dozens of suspected Iranian agents had been detained over the past year for three to four days at a time under a “catch and release” policy intended to avoid escalating tensions with Iran.

As long as the Administration continues to couple diplomacy along with this more aggressive approach within Iraq, then this is the correct foreign policy decision regarding Iran and its effort to defeat the U.S. in Iraq. War with Iran would be catastrophic for all sorts of reasons economic and diplomatic, but Iranian agents cannot be allowed to consort with the insurgency and terrorists and kill American soldiers. If Bush continues to walk this delicate line between diplomacy and force, then he should be supported in this particular situation.

Of the Ummah and the Sword

2007-01-17T14:29:00.000-05:00

Over at the fanatical and sophisticated jihadist website Jihad Unspun, we get a clear idea about how jihadists believe Islam was spread and an insider look as to how the faith should expand today. The title of the essay is "Was Islam Really Spread by the Sword?" but don't take that as a question, unless you mean rhetorically.

One of the greatest debates within the Muslim Ummah, one that causes division within the Islamic nation and that is often used by the enemies of Islam as a means of ascribing brutality to our religion is centered on the methods by which Islam was propagated throughout the globe. Was Islam spread by the sword? The quick answer to this question is a resounding yes and in this article, we hope to set the record straight using the evidence from the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the practice of the Guided Caliphs and the consensus of the righteous scholars of the Ummah, inshaAllah. While the evidences in this article are by no means exhaustive, inshaAllah they will be adequate to lay this matter to rest.

Muhammad, the messenger of Allah, was sent to all mankind and Jinn with Allah’s final and complete message constituting a system of life that leads to the ultimate spiritual, social, and economic justice, security and prosperity. In addition, Islam guarantees a blissful eternal life in the Hereafter to whoever adheres to its rules. Some will see Islam in the right light. Others will allow their whims to lead them astray. Protecting those who reject Islam through their own foolishness and who harbor the potential to corrupt others by forcing them (those who reject Islam) to embrace Islam under the gun is something for which Islam ought to be praised, not condemn. How could saving someone from Hellfire be condemned?

Read on and you'll get a litany of quotes from the Quran justifying the jihadist interpretation of this profanely sacred text as a violent ultimatum: conversion or death.

Resolve or Cynicism?

2007-01-11T14:55:00.000-05:00

Over at Slate.com, Fred Kaplan wonders whether Bush's speech last night escalating the Iraq War by deploying 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad and Anbar province is virtue of steely-eyed resolve or duplicitous cynicism.

But the worst of it is that Bush didn't articulate any backup plan if the troop surge fails. Kaplan argues any sensible backup plan would include regional diplomacy including Iran and Syria to avert a civil war from becoming a regional conflagration, but he believes Bush destroyed this option during the middle of his address.

Halfway into the speech, it seemed for a moment that Bush might address this issue. "Succeeding in Iraq also requires … stabilizing the region in the face of the extremist challenge," he said, a task that "begins with addressing Iran and Syria." But then, instead of calling for, say, talks with those countries, Bush said that their regimes have provided material support to the insurgents. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," the president warned. "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

Really? All we can muster for Iraq is a paltry 20,000 extra troops; even they will accomplish little without massive infusions from a dubious Iraqi military and miraculous political breakthroughs from a faltering Iraqi government—and President Bush, at such a desperate moment, talks about expanding the war to Iran and Syria? It's shiveringly scary.

For Bush, the drum beat never dulls, it only gets louder.

The Small Business Fallacy

2007-01-10T17:11:00.000-05:00

Hopefully, by the end of the day, Congress will approve a raise in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25. Unfortunately, the NYTs is reporting the wage hike may have to be linked to tax cuts for small business because raising the minimum wage will lead to their ruin. Thankfully, WaPo's Steven Pearlstein cuts through the bullshit -- whether it's from free-market fundamentalists or politicos too close to their local small business community. Much of his broadside is against Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, but Pearlstein does a good job of shooting down the scare tactics ideologues generally use while arguing against any wage increase (unless it's for Corporate America).

We will hear all the sob stories about how struggling small businesses with thin margins will be forced to cut back on hiring, pull back on expansion plans and, in some instances, close their doors. Moreover, this won't be a tragedy just for small-business owners and employees but for the economy as a whole, since everybody knows that small business creates virtually all new jobs. Only another round of tax breaks can keep the great American jobs machine humming.

And here's the thing: Most of it is nonsense.

To begin, both economic theory and history suggest that small business will, in time, pass on its increased costs to its consumers. Small businesses that pay low wages tend to compete with other small businesses that pay low wages, so they will all face the same cost pressures and respond in similar fashion. The worst that can be said is that a higher minimum wage will add, very modestly, to overall inflation.

There is also general agreement among economists that a higher minimum wage, at the levels we are talking about, will have a minimal impact on adult employment. Slightly higher prices might reduce, slightly, the demand for Wendy's hamburgers, cheap hotel rooms and dog-walking services. But largely offsetting those effects will be the increased demand for goods and services by tens of millions of Americans who will finally be getting a raise. A higher minimum wage doesn't lower economic activity so much as rearrange it slightly.

But Pearlstein also forgets another benefit of a minimum wage hike: the multiplier effect. This means as the wage increase hits the market, other workers higher up on the wage scale will receive raises as well. And while business owners bemoan this, it's good for overall economic activity. Workers will take the extra cash in their paychecks and return it immediately back into the economy, thereby increasing economic activity and expanding the marketplace.

If raising the minimum wage would kill the economy, do you think over 650 of the country's leading economists would advocate it?

So when you hear all the fearmongering surrounding the minimum wage hike, remember to check who funds that thinktank or who gave that politician the campaign contributions needed to get elected.

The Real NeoCons?

2007-01-09T20:57:00.000-05:00

Peter Beinart, over at TNR, has a seemingly counterintuitive argument concerning liberals and neoconservatives. According to Beinart, the real neocons of today are liberals. You may say "wait, wait," but Beinart's correct and the reason why concerns the history of neoconservatism. I'll let Beinart explain by using the first two neoconservative journals, The Public Interest and Commentary, as examples.

The Public Interest dealt primarily with domestic policy. But, in foreign affairs, neocons displayed the same skepticism toward what Francis Fukuyama has called "utopian social engineering." Early neocon foreign policy was aggressive; Podhoretz and Kristol wanted to confront communist movements across the globe. But, for the neocons, preventing communist takeovers did not mean imposing liberal democracies. In Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous maxim, conservatism's key insight was that culture matters more than politics. And, if a nation's culture was not conducive to democracy, attempts to impose one would backfire. In her famed 1979 Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Jeane Kirkpatrick ridiculed the liberal demand that Nicaragua and Iran shed their authoritarianism as a precondition of U.S. support. "No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans," she wrote, "than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence." If neocons thought it utopian to believe Washington could rapidly end poverty, they thought it equally utopian to believe Washington could rapidly instill democracy. In both cases, they believed, such hubris was a particularly liberal vice.

As it turns out, that was wrong. In the wake of America's success in the cold war and the right's success in U.S. politics, the same hubris began to afflict many neocons themselves.

Beinart is on to something here. Today, young liberals value empiricism over ideology. They should, as empiricism is the tool most valued by Enlightenment philosophers or the classical liberals such as Locke, Humboldt, Rousseau and, if I may, Paine of which they are the heirs.

Ideology unconstrained by reality has given us the French Terror, Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, and now Bush era neoconservatism. While I believe the majority of people on earth want to live peaceably and free, the United States must rely on the work of social scientists and experts on the ground to decide when democracy can plausibly be pushed overseas and when it must be nurtured slowly so the necessary institutions and economic vitality are there to sustain it.

Video of Saddam Hussein being executed

2007-01-02T12:15:00.001-05:00

I know I am probably only contributing to the rubber-necking going on regarding the tyrant Saddam Hussein's execution, but I am linking to the full version here so it is understood why civilized nations have banned this barbarity from their legal codes.

As Albert Camus once wrote, to be moral during the historial rush of reprisal and revenge, one must be "neither victim nor executioner."

Finally...

2006-12-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

someone writes about the plight of Iraqi civilians, regardless if it's gleaned from recently published books. Christian Caryl of the NY Review of Books reviews the Iraqi female blogger Riverbend's two books -- Baghdad Burning I and II, Anthony Shadid's Night Draws Near and Nir Rosen's In the Belly of the Green Bird and their overwhelming concern for the people of Iraq. As Caryl notes, Riverbend is particularly astute at uncovering the many tragic contradicitons of the U.S. Iraq adventure.

She is a passionate opponent of the occupation, and her writing sparks with rage and indignation. An avid consumer of the press and the Internet, she is well aware of the range of American attitudes about the war; she has her own.[1] When she hears that US forces in Iraq are fighting "terrorists," she notes that the American-installed Iraqi government includes several prominent members of the Islamist Dawa Party, which was behind a string of bombings that killed Iraqi civilians in the 1980s.[2] When she hears that Washington aspires to implant democracy in Iraq, she responds by showing how her rights as a woman are being steadily curtailed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism sponsored by the very same political parties that the Americans have brought to power. And when the talk turns to "collateral damage," she asserts that "American long-term memory is exclusive to American traumas. The rest of the world should simply 'put the past behind,' 'move forward,' 'be pragmatic,' and 'get over it.'"

A harsh verdict, to be sure, but perhaps it needs to be heard. The underlying irony of all this should be obvious. The writer of these words is a young female computer programmer (now twenty-seven), whose resourceful English (acquired during a long stay abroad in her childhood) would put many Americans to shame. Her familiarity with American culture and principles repeatedly comes to the fore; indeed, it is her intense awareness of American political discourse and reporting that infuses her writing. If any Iraqi can be receptive to America's grand democratic design for Iraq, surely it ought to be someone like her. And yet, as her book dramatically demonstrates, she and her occupiers may temporarily inhabit the same country, but they continue to live in different worlds.

Yet while most Iraqis do indeed hate the occupation, there is a fear that an American withdrawal will, in the words of a Shiite matron, result in

"massacres... between the tribes, between the parties and between the Sunnis and Shiites, of course.'" She hastens to add that "no one who loves their country accepts an occupation. Everybody wants freedom."

And this is why Iraq is such a tragedy of the Bush Administration's making. The U.S. is truly damned if we do and damned if we don't regarding withdrawal. I should clarify this by stating that we are more damned if we do withdraw and Iraq becomes the next killing field of ethnic and religious cleansing. Can there be any doubt the U.S., along with the fanatics and jihadists, would be responsible for this gruesome situation? Is there any doubt that if we do withdraw and genocide does occur that the U.S. will not be deploying another mass of troops to stop and contain the situation?

The fierce proponents of withdrawal never answer these questions. I do think withdrawal is inevitable, but it cannot be immediate. If so, American troops will once again be between civilization's two rivers but the blood will be knee deep rather than the slim slick it is now.

Civil War Watch

2006-12-19T10:13:00.000-05:00

The Pentagon released a report describing the escalating violence endemic to Iraq. Here's what the NYTs reports:

A Pentagon assessment of security conditions in Iraq concluded Monday that attacks against American and Iraqi targets had surged this summer and autumn to their highest level, and called violence by Shiite militants the most significant threat in Baghdad.

The report, which covers the period from early August to early November, found an average of almost 960 attacks against Americans and Iraqis every week, the highest level recorded since the Pentagon began issuing the quarterly reports in 2005, with the biggest surge in attacks against American-led forces. That was an increase of 22 percent from the level for early May to early August, the report said.

While most attacks were directed at American forces, most deaths and injuries were suffered by the Iraqi military and civilians.

The report is the most comprehensive public assessment of the American-led operation to secure Baghdad, which began in early August. About 17,000 American combat troops are currently involved in the beefed-up security operation.

According to the Pentagon assessment, the operation initially had some success in reducing killings as militants concentrated on eluding capture and hiding their weapons. But sectarian death squads soon adapted, resuming their killings in regions of the capital that were not initially targets of the overstretched American and Iraqi troops.

Shiite militias, the Pentagon report said, also received help from allies among the Iraqi police. “Shia death squads leveraged support from some elements of the Iraqi Police Service and the National Police who facilitated freedom of movement and provided advance warning of upcoming operations,” the report said.

The report goes on to describe Shiite death squads as more dangerous and violent than either insurgents or terrorist foreign fighters. This trend is frightening and portends increased ethnic cleansing, if not genocide, if the United States suddenly pulls out of Iraq leaving a vacuum of security.

I have always been a person obsessed with democracy, but now, my idealism has been blunted and pragmatism reigns supreme in my mind. The only thing that matters now is how the United States, Iraqis themselves, and other international actors act to stop a slide toward ethnic cleansing. As Americans, we hold much responsibility for the state of Iraq. Sure, the simmering hatred between Sunni and Shiite is over a millennia old, but it was the U.S. that destroyed the Baathist state and unleashed these forces. This wouldn't have been a bad thing if the U.S. reconstructed Iraq quickly and had the requisite troop strength to provide security, but as we all know now, the Bush Administration's ignorance and unrealistic democratic positivism undermined these preparations. We are the ones to blame and while history will not be kind to the U.S. for illegally invading and occupying Iraq without U.N. support --thereby undermining broadbased multilateral responsibility -- it will be even harsher if the U.S. leaves and Iraq experiences genocide with an Islamist taint.

Know the Divide

2006-12-18T09:58:00.000-05:00

The NYTs Week in Review helps Congressmen and average joes alike understand the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. It's a pretty important detail to know when trying to understand the complex mixture of faith, fanaticism, and foreign policy that goes into making the Middle East the most volatile region in the world today.

Interesting, Very Interesting

2006-12-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

Via the NYT's Sunday Magazine:

A team of C.I.A. analysts, however, has devised a new, and possibly potent, way of looking at the problem. The agency’s “Ziggurat of Zealotry” arrays Islamists into a pyramid in the Mesopotamian style, with each ascending level representing a leap in radicalization. At the bottom of the ziggurat are peaceful individuals who concern themselves with what some call the greater jihad, the personal struggle to be a dutiful and pious Muslim. Some of those individuals step up to join groups like Tablighi Jamaat — a missionary organization founded in India — that organize devout Muslims to effect change in their societies. Above that, you find groups with more radical political agendas, typically the overthrow or replacement of governments they regard as repressive and hostile to Islam as they believe it should be practiced. The next step abandons politics for violence exclusively. The top level covers only those who extend this mandate for violence globally and seek to destroy the Western nation-state system.

The ziggurat is said to be the brainchild of Cindy Storer, an analyst at the C.I.A.’s counterterror center, who presented it publicly at the University of Pennsylvania in March. The model usefully implies that recruiters from one level draw almost exclusively from the level directly beneath them. It also implies that radicalization is neither fluid nor inevitable; radical Muslims are not destined to become violent. The task for counterterrorism, then, is to disrupt the “elevators” that pull individuals and resources up the ziggurat without taking steps to incur the ire of lower levels and nudge them upward.

While it is hard for me to understand how any intelligent person with any knowledge of Islam and the myriad ways Muslims practice their faith can believe Muslims are inherently violent, this easy to understand 'ziggurat" may help the black-and-white types to acknowledge gray when thinking about Muslims and violence.

Remember, if you look back to any civilization you will find a historical epoch where violence was the major social currency: the European genocide of the indigenous of the Americas anyone?

To Lose One's Humanity

2006-12-11T16:25:00.000-05:00

Via the NYTs:

Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.

In a speech opening the two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.”

The foreign ministry had said that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled to take part. Among those speaking today are David Duke, the American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader, and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been prosecuted in France over his denials of the Holocaust.

Mr. Duke’s remarks late this afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or extermination camps were actually built during the war, on the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his speech published by the institute.

When conferences such as these are organized, I think it is important to remember what Noam Chomsky wrote about the Holocaust in American Power and the New Mandarins four decades ago:

By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity

Crocodile Tears

2006-12-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has died. The tragedy is he died before he stood before the Hague and was found guilty of human rights violations.

Tortured Justice

2006-12-08T14:42:00.000-05:00

In an act both just and hypocritical, the U.S. government is charging Charles McArthur Emmanuel with the crime of torture, committed while Emmanuel worked for his war criminal father, Charles Taylor, in Liberia.

Here's the basic gist from the BBC:

Mr Emmanuel, known as Charles "Chuckie" Taylor, had been arrested in late March in Miami and has pleaded guilty to passport fraud for not declaring his connection to his father.

He was in charge of presidential security when his father was in power in Liberia, and is accused of taking part in the torture of a victim in July 2002.

"The allegations in this case include acts of torture, such as burning flesh with a hot iron, burning flesh with scalding water, and applying electric shocks," a US attorney said in an official statement.

The assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement said it was a "clear message the US would not be a safe haven for human rights violators".

Please disregard that last statement from the U.S. assistant secretary for immigration and customs enforcement as many Cuban terrorists walk the streets of Miami everyday.

Is the trial of Emmanuel hypocritical? You betcha, but it is justice, no matter how tortured it may be.

Finally Some Good News...

2006-12-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

Wages for average Americans have outstripped inflation for the first time since the late economic boom of the 1990s. The NYTs explains why:

With energy prices now sharply lower than a few months ago and the improving job market forcing employers to offer higher raises, the buying power of American workers is now rising at the fastest rate since the economic boom of the late 1990s.

The average hourly wage for workers below management level — everyone from school bus drivers to stockbrokers — rose 2.8 percent from October 2005 to October of this year, after being adjusted for inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only a year ago, it was falling by 1.5 percent

The question now is how will the Bush Administration spin this good news to their advantage. Will they claim their ill-advised tax cuts are the reason? We shall see.

Hero

2006-12-07T11:27:00.000-05:00

I wanted to take a moment and mourn the death of James Kim, the CNET editor whose body was found yesterday in the Oregon wilderness. I had not followed this story until yesterday when I found out a friend of mine in San Francisco knew and worked with him. According to the SF Gate:

James Kim died in the southern Oregon mountains after what one rescue leader described as a "superhuman'' trek across nearly impassable terrain to try to find help for his family.

The body of the missing San Francisco man was found today, 11 days after his family's car became stuck on a side road in the snow and four days after he ventured off to look for help.

Kim, 35, died after picking his way nearly to the end of a steep, 5-mile canyon that leads down to the Rogue River in the Siskiyou National Forest west of Grants Pass. Wearing tennis shoes, he had to climb around boulders and over fallen trees in an dripping-wet environment where rescuers said they were wet within half an hour.

When news that Kim's body was found floating in Big Windy Creek, two rescue workers discussing his heroics broke down in tears. Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson emoted he was "crushed" when the news broke.

Kim's fortitude and self-sacrifice are awe-inspiring. The world lost a good man when James Kim passed away, someone who put his family before his own life.

Fearsome Twosome

2006-12-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

I'm watching the joint press conference of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair and it's so frustrating to watch P.M. Blair speak and then watch President Bush stumble and bumble his way through his part of the message.

My Recommendations One Year Ago

2006-12-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

With the release of the Iraq Study Group report, I'd like to link to a paper I wrote while getting my Master's in International Security Studies at St. Andrews titled, "What Lessons Can be Drawn From Countering Terrorists in the Iraq War."

While I claim this is no great achievement (the lessons should come easily from historical insight and logic), my paper does not differ much from the recommendations published today. Have a look if you have time.

Iraq Study Group Recommendations

2006-12-06T20:32:00.001-05:00

HERE.

Skimming

2006-12-06T09:25:00.000-05:00

The Iraq Study Group presented its report to President Bush this morning. According to the NYTs, here are the major advisements.

According to members of the panel, the group concluded that American forces in Iraq should make a major shift in priorities over the next year, largely withdrawing from combat in favor of beefing up the training of Iraq forces. It also called for stepped-up diplomatic efforts — including talks with Iran and Syria — not only to stabilize Iraq but to revive the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, news services reported.

According to The Associated Press, the report describes the current situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating” and warns of the risk of a “slide toward catastrophe” both within Iraq and throughout the region.

The Washington Post reported today that the group recommends that Mr. Bush threaten to withhold economic and military support unless the Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki meets specific milestones for progress on security and political reconciliation.

The issue now will be whether President Bush will take these recommendations seriously or will he merely skim the report and toss it by the wayside, endangering Iraqi stability and American credibility further than he already has.

Un-Augusto

2006-12-03T18:04:00.000-05:00

Human rights criminal and tyrant Gen. Augusto Pinochet suffered a heart attack and underwent the knife to save his life twice. The world will be a better place when the Gen. unceremoniously expires.

Coalition of the Grudging

2006-11-30T11:59:00.000-05:00

Slate's Jacob Weisburg has a good argument today for the U.S. to again revamp its multilateral streak and press for NATO to take up peacekeeping responsibilities if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq.

Now I don't agree with Weisburg when he compares Iraq to Vietnam -- it's not anything like Iraq other than we may lose and the U.S. certainly did not enter Vietnam to stop totalitarianism -- and his comparison of a possible genocide in Iraq to Cambodia is wrong -- it would be more like the Balkans. Nevertheless, he makes some great points, especially why it would be in certain countries interest to stop Iraq from falling into genocidal madness.

Where might troops come from? The most willing providers would probably be "new" Europeans such as the Poles, who remain eager to demonstrate their cooperative capabilities and earn some cash. Muslim troops might come from neighboring Jordan and Turkey, which have obvious stakes in preventing the refugee crisis that would attend violent partition. Western European nations would be reluctant, but possibly willing, to contribute when faced with the consequences of inaction. For France and Germany, the bargain would involve Bush admitting, at least implicitly, that his previous unilateralism was bad and wrong. Call it the Coalition of the Grudging

Spot on.

Uh-Oh!

2006-11-25T16:20:00.000-05:00

Via the indomitable John F. Burns of the NYTs:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The U.S. did its best to give the Soviets their "own Vietnam" in Afghanistan and now it seems we have forgotten the lesson of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and given ourselves our own Afghanistan.

While most of the insurgency is certainly native-born, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has created the conditions for foreign jihadists to train, fight, learn and prosper. Is it possible we have given the jihadists precisely what they wanted: Prime real estate to establish their long-lost Caliphate of an illusory past?

It definitely appears that way.

Iraqi People: Get Out Within a Year

2006-11-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum, over at TWM, links to the recent poll released by Program on International Policy Attitudes which clearly states the Iraqi population's -- Shia and Sunni -- attitude toward the U.S. occupation: Get the hell out of here as soon as possible.

Drum writes:

74% of Shiites and 91% of Sunnis want us to leave within a year (the number is 80% for Shiites in Baghdad). By wide margins, both groups believe U.S. forces are provoking more violence than they're preventing, and both groups believe that day-to-day security would improve if we left. Support for attacks on U.S. forces now commands majority support among both Shiites and Sunnis. And none of this is because of successful al-Qaeda propaganda: 94% of Iraqis continue to disapprove of al-Qaeda.

Now, it may be that these views are misguided. But it hardly matters: it's simply not possible for us to occupy the country successfully if a majority of Iraqis actively support attacks on our troops and a vast majority think we're responsible for the rising violence. It's time for us to leave.

If this is correct, I do agree with Kevin that we cannot stay and withdrawal is necessary. I am just so very afraid we have created the conditions for possible genocide. But without an enlightened leadership and multilateral coalition of partners could we even avert genocide if we wanted to? I say no and I don't believe the American people have the will for American soldiers to be the fleshy buffer between ethnic and religious hatreds.

The only problem is this: If the U.S. does leave, does anyone seriously think we won't be back there in some capacity within a decade?

Strategically, for the U.S. and those of us that believe in democratic internationalism, Iraq could've gone worse. Every U.S. interest in the region is worst off and democracy in Iraq is effectively dead.

Our Responsibility to Protect

2006-11-21T10:24:00.000-05:00

Anne Applebaum's excellent commentary on Darfur. Read it.

Another Lebanese Assassination

2006-11-21T09:58:00.000-05:00

Anti-Syrian Lebanese Cabinet Minister Pierre Gemayel joins Prime Minister Rafik Hariri as the latest Lebanese politician to be assassinated. According to WaPo, this will increase tensions with Hezbollah, which has been pushing for more power after their recent electoral victory dampened hopes another secular-democracy might spring up in the Middle East.

The shooting will certainly heighten the political tension in Lebanon, where the leading Muslim Shiite party Hezbollah has threatened to topple the government if it does not get a bigger say in Cabinet decision-making...Gemayel, the minister of industry and son of former President Amin Gemayel, was a supporter of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which is locked in a power struggle with pro-Syrian factions led by Hezbollah.

Bush's Vietnam Analogy

2006-11-17T15:24:00.000-05:00

Noam Chomsky used to write alot about the "Vietnam syndrome" or the belief among elite decision makers that the American people could not and would not weather long drawn out wars and would call for withdrawal once the body count escalated beyond what the public could stomach. Today, aptly in Vietnam, President Bush likened the Iraq War to the Vietnam War stating "we'll win unless we quit." Now this statement hosts a dizzying array of questions both moral and pragmatic, chiefly: Did the U.S. morally speaking deserve to win the Vietnam War. Unsurprisingly, I say no.

But I don't like this Vietnam analogy concerning Iraq no matter where it's lobbed out of the political spectrum. American troops should have never been deployed to Vietnam, period. Iraq is not so easy. While I still believe the initial war in Iraq was illegal and immoral, it is now and will continue to be a front in the global war against jihadism, whether we like it or not.

Now the question we must ask ourselves is: Are we willing to sacrifice the lives of more American soldiers to keep Iraq from falling into utter anarchy -- which is our moral responsibility considering we took over the security responsibilities for the country once we invaded -- or will we completely withdraw, let Iraq fall into civil war and possible genocide, which could ignite the whole Middle East, Sunni vs. Shia and both vs. Israel, while Al Qaeda uses the chaos to radicalize, train, and arm more jihadists for their global campaign against rationalism?

There can be no doubt the Bush Administration has led us right into a colossal debacle of historic proportions. The initial fight should have been concentrated mainly on the core Al Qaeda organization. But we are past that. The fight against jihadism and the war in Iraq have tragically become one and the same. No matter what we do, withdraw from Iraq or walk the same crimson path, there will be bloody consequences that will continue on for generations.

The right question to ask now is: "What is best for the Iraqi people and is in the long term interest of progress and peace in the Middle East?"

My answer is feeble, I honestly don't know.

Morally, the Vietnam War was never this complex. We should have never have gone and we should have never stayed.

Israeli Cannon Fodder

2006-11-14T14:10:00.001-05:00

The NYTs reports again the evangelical belief that support for Israel is "God's foreign policy" in the words of an evangelical preacher. Of course this isn't to preserve Israel, but to initiate a war that will bring about the Apocalypse and the rapture of those true believers.

Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming...Administration officials say that the meeting with Mr. Hagee [founder of Christians United for Israel] was a courtesy for a political ally and that evangelical theology has no effect on policy making. But the alliance of Israel, its evangelical Christian supporters and President Bush has never been closer or more potent. In the wake of the summer war in southern Lebanon, reports that Hezbollah’s sponsor, Iran, may be pushing for nuclear weapons have galvanized conservative Christian support for Israel into a political force that will be hard to ignore.

Samuel Huntington had it wrong. It will not be a clash of civilizations but a clash of fanaticisms with the rational and reasonable left to dispose of the bodies or to become victims of the ecumenical bloodletting themselves.

Oh where, oh where has the Enlightenment gone?

The Sweep

2006-11-09T13:03:00.000-05:00

According to the NYTs, Senator George Allen probably will concede today giving the Dems sole control of Congress. Incompetence and corruption at a national level has its costs.

Islamists Strike Back

2006-11-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

A suicide bomber detonated himself today at a military base in Pakistan killing 35 soldiers and wounding many more. This is in apparent retaliation for the missiling of a madrassa last month in the Bajaur tribal area of Pakistan, which killed 80 students, mostly teenagers. The Pakistani government claimed it was a base for militants.

It's as simple as this: Terrorism must be defeated using the criminal justice model, not military solutions. But then again dictatorships aren't the best practicioners of a fair criminal justice system. Also, because the target was a military training base, I would argue this was not terrorism, but an act of asymmetrical warfare. So there can be no phony conceptual differences for the tactic of terrorism, it must be reserved for political violence perpetuated against civilian targets.

Open the Gates

2006-11-08T13:16:00.000-05:00

Robert Gates, former Acting Director of the CIA, will replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. This is going to be interesting. Does this signal a new direction in Iraq? Is going to a former top CIA official the best move after Tenet's numerous blunders? What's scary to me is that Gates was a top executive in the CIA throughout Reagan's terrorist wars in Central America, specifically in Nicaragua and El Salvador. How fitting Gates now heads the Pentagon as ex-guerilla leader Daniel Ortega has just won the presidency of Nicaragua and all of the Western Hemisphere below Texas has shifted further left.

The First Fallout

2006-11-08T12:57:00.000-05:00

ABCNews has just reported that in President Bush's 1pm address he will announce Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be stepping down. Is this the first olive branch in relation to Iraq to be extended to the Democrats and the nation because of yesterday? Or is it just another fig leaf to distract the nation from our "staying the course?"

We'll have a better sense after President Bush addresses the nation at 1pm. Stay tuned.

Ding Dong

2006-11-08T12:16:00.000-05:00

Santorum's Senate life is over. The people do eventually get tired of fanaticism.

A Divided Congress

2006-11-08T02:16:00.000-05:00

Yes! It is official we have a divided Congress and now the possibility of some accountability. If the three remaining Senate seats go to the Democrats, the whole Congress is of a blue blush. President Bush may finally have some explaining to do if the Dems sweep Congress as the power of investigation would now be in the hands of those "wily" liberals. Whatever happens, a Democratic House should demonstrate to the Bush Administration that the current Iraq policy is failed and now a new bipartisan strategy to win the peace is in order.

Voting Machine Problems in PA

2006-11-07T17:46:00.000-05:00

I had to watch Hijacking Democracy on HBO this weekend didn't I. The conservative RedState.com reported earlier today that there is a "massive meltdown" in my home state of Pennsylvania's voting machines.

RedState is getting widespread reports of an electoral nightmare shaping up in Pennsylvania with certain types of electronic voting machines.

In some counties, machines are crashing. In other counties, we have enough reports to treat as credible that fact that some Rendell votes are being tabulated by the machines for Swann and vice versa. The same is happening with Santorum and Casey. Reports have been filed with the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, but nothing has happened.

What's good about this report is the machines are malfunctioning and tablulating the wrong votes both ways. What's bad about this is simple: Will we ever get through an election without the taint of possible election stealing? Get ready for the recounts and recriminations.

Vote!

2006-11-07T09:09:00.000-05:00

Do your civic duty and vote today. The fifteen minutes it takes has repercussions for the next two to four years. And if you live in PA's Fighting 8th District, vote Rendell, Casey Jr., and Murphy and bring some accountability back to Congress.

Hitchens: Don't Kill Hussein

2006-11-06T18:39:00.000-05:00

If the new Iraqi government -- and the U.S. by association -- wants to begin a new Iraq, the best way of demonstrating this fact would be to give Saddam Hussein life imprisonment and prosecute him for all his crimes so an exhaustive history of his atrocities exists for all time. As Camus said: Neither victims nor executioners.

Check out Hitchen's Slate.com piece for his argument.

Hypocrite and the Congregation That Loves Him

2006-11-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

Via the NYTs:

Long before the first tissue boxes were passed down the aisles for mopping tears, and before the first guitar chords were struck to begin the worship, many of the thousands of people who gathered on Sunday morning at the New Life Church here knew that it would be a service unlike any other in their lives...
By then, the news was less than 24 hours old that the church’s founder and senior pastor, Ted Haggard, a prominent author and national evangelical Christian leader, had been dismissed by the church’s Board of Overseers for “sexually immoral conduct.”

A male prostitute in Denver said in a radio interview on Wednesday that Mr. Haggard had been a monthly customer and a buyer of methamphetamines. Mr. Haggard issued denials, but by Saturday the brief, explosive standoff was over. The board members had heard enough — mostly from Mr. Haggard himself, they said at Sunday’s service — to justify his removal.

What was left for Sunday was to begin sorting the tangled skein of spiritual and political implications, betrayal, anguish, anger and sadness that the episode left behind in the church and across the evangelical world. Speakers urged the church’s members to find a way forward without recrimination or bitterness; a letter from Mr. Haggard was read from the 8,000-seat auditorium’s center stage.

Mr. Haggard’s letter said that people should forgive the Denver man who broke the story, Michael Jones, in particular — though Mr. Jones was not referred to by name.

“He is revealing the deception and sensuality that was in my life,” Mr. Haggard wrote. “Those sins, and others, need to be dealt with harshly. So forgive him, and actually, thank God for him.”

Naturally Haggard was vehemently against equal rights and marriage for gay couples. The only good thing besides outing another craven pseudo-Christian who didn't practice the intolerance he preached is that maybe just a sliver of the evangelical world will begin to question revealed truth and the people making money -- a great deal of money -- preaching it.

Ineptitude

2006-11-02T23:24:00.000-05:00

If you were a terrorist where should you look for basic blueprints for building an atom bomb? Stumped? Online from declassified Iraqi documents uploaded onto the Internet by who other than our federal government ordered by the GOP dominated House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

More evidence that shows the GOP's political opportunism and avarice is more detrimental to our national security than the Democrats ever could be.

Going, Going, Maybe Gone

2006-11-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

If you think Iraq is not teetering on the brink of civil war or not at the beginning of a sectarian blood-letting, think again. Via the NYTs, here's U.S. CentCom's diagram showing Iraq racing towards chaos:

Oh Novak You

2006-10-31T16:56:00.000-05:00

Robert Novak writes today that the U.S. is "Losing Nicaragua, Again" on the WaPo editorial page. I didn't know it was ours to lose. Apparently the Sandanistas may regain power after 16 years after their fall. They weren't choirboys for sure, but they were better for the majority of Nicaraguans than the detestable dictatorship of Somoza. As always with Novak you get backward prose without a hint of moral uncertainty regarding the U.S. funded Contras, which with U.S. funding practiced a true terrorist war against the agrarian population of Nicaragua supportive of the Sandanistas.

The seemingly unavoidable outcome of next Sunday's election is a Nicaraguan tragedy, losing at the ballot box what was won two decades ago by the blood of contra fighters and the risking of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

This is truly a man of democracy and classical liberal philosophy. Robert, this is what elections do, transfer power from one government to the next at the behest of the people. It certainly is a tragedy when the people of one nation elect new governments that don't increase or preserve the strategic power of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Novak must believe Monroe made it clear -- all the Americas are ours.

Oh, and he continues to lionize Oliver North. It's nice to see how terrorism is used by conservatives dualistically to divide their conception of good from evil when it's a tactic used by everyone, especially the U.S., whether directly or indirectly, since the end of WWII.

Ghosts in the Machine

2006-10-31T14:30:00.000-05:00

For all of us that love All Hallow's Eve so.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN.

Morality and Evolution

2006-10-31T12:27:00.000-05:00

In a new book, Moral Minds, Harvard Biologist Marc D. Hauser argues -- seemingly correct to me -- that morality is a product of evolution and we are hardwired to make moral decisions as the brain develops. As the NYTs correctly surmises:

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.

As any look at the myriad religions humanity has believed in throughout its history, religion produces more destruction than peace. Also, the hypothesis that morality is ingrained in our genes makes perfect sense in the "fitness" department. We are slow moving animals that do not fend well for ourselves without the protective coat of society. In any setting, we are easy prey for any number of predators. Our greatest asset is our ability to cooperate in problem solving situations such as hunting, shelter, and child rearing. As the NYTs goes on to explain:

Matters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists. Dr. Hauser’s proposal is an attempt to claim the subject for science, in particular for evolutionary biology. The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value.

Hauser argues:

[T]hat the moral grammar may have evolved through the evolutionary mechanism known as group selection. A group bound by altruism toward its members and rigorous discouragement of cheaters would be more likely to prevail over a less cohesive society, so genes for moral grammar would become more common.

Morality then becomes the essential part of our biology that allows us to group together without chaotic competition and therefore allows us to survive and prosper as a species. Without it, we would have just been dinner.

Pakistani Rules of Engagement

2006-10-30T16:47:00.000-05:00

Pakistan reported today it destroyed a madrassa that was training Islamic militants. Here's the NYTs nut graf:

The Pakistani military said today that it had destroyed a religious school used for training militants in the Bajur tribal area, which straddles the border with Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 80 people, the military said, describing them as militants.

The strike started at about 5 a.m. local time, when helicopter gunships fired missiles into the religious school, known as a madrassa, that was run by a local cleric, Maulvi Liaqut, according to military officials. Ground troops then stormed the compound.

Is this how Pakistan deals with its Islamic militants?

Gunships firing missiles into a madrassa is not a proportional response, it is a crime that will now only create more legitimate hostility to Musharraf as a pawn of the United States. Of course Pakistan should begin to deal with Islamic militants that threaten Pakistan's stability, but it should learn that repression will only bolster and radicalize Islamists into jihadists, such as in Algeria or Egypt. Also, this is bad for the U.S. as we have moved closer to Pakistan since 9/11 with Musharraf's insistence that he'd help in Afghanistan and more generally help destroy terrorist networks. Hopefully, this madrassa did indeed double as a terrorist training facility because reaction was immediate.

But opposition Islamist parties were quick to denounce the attack and blamed the United States. Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, alleged that innocent children were killed and that the Pakistan Army was covering up for the alleged Americans strike.

“This area is not an area where there can be any training camp,” Mr. Ahmed said at a news briefing in Islamabad. “This is actually tantamount to the declaration of war on Pakistan,” he said.

In this situation, who do you believe: the corrupt military dictatorship or leaders of an Islamist opposition whose possible ascension to power will be paved with indiscriminate acts of state terrorism?

Pic from BBC

My Greatest Fear

2006-10-28T16:09:00.000-04:00

Robert Kaplan echoes my greatest fear if American forces are withdrawn from Iraq: Sunni genocide at the hands of the Shia majority.

Because it turned out we had no postwar plan, our invasion (which I supported) amounted to a bet. Our withdrawal, when it comes to that, must be different. If we decide to reduce forces in the country under the current anarchic conditions, then we are both morally and strategically obligated to talk with Iran and Syria, as well as call for a regional conference. Iraq may be closer to an explosion of genocide than we know. An odd event, or the announcement of pulling 20,000 American troops out, might trigger it. We simply cannot contemplate withdrawal under these conditions without putting Iraq's neighbors on the spot, forcing them to share public responsibility for the outcome, that is if they choose to stand aside and not help us.

What we should all fear is a political situation in Washington where a new Congress forces President George W. Bush to redeploy, and Bush, doing so under duress, makes only the most half-hearted of gestures to engage Iraq's neighbors in the process. That could lead to hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, rather than the tens of thousands we have seen. An Iran that continues to enrich uranium is less of a threat to us than genocide in Iraq. A belligerent, nuclear Iran is something we will, as a last resort, be able to defend against militarily. And it probably won't come to that. But if we disengage from Iraq without publicly involving its neighbors, Sunni Arabs—who will bear the brunt of the mass murder—will hate us for years to come from Morocco to Pakistan. Our single greatest priority at the moment is preventing Iraq from sliding off the abyss.

This is America's moral obligation to Iraq after an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of their country.

Shameless Plug

2006-10-27T01:32:00.000-04:00

I've never done this before, so let's see if it works. Please, if you like what you read here and the links and commentary I provide, send my url to those you love or hate, it doesn't matter. It's better if you send it to people that disagree so I have interesting ripostes to write. It makes my life more fun. I'd rather discuss politics and culture with those that are of different opinions than my own. It may be hogwash, but argument is better than lock-step. In other words, send this url to every evangelical Christian you know.

Walling Ourselves In

2006-10-26T15:32:00.000-04:00

You know the allusions to the Berlin Wall are coming, so bad comics and even worse pundits beware! I said it first before it's even erected: "Mr Bush, tear down this wall!"

Now can we get on to serious conversations why this is genuinely a horrible idea and why Fortress America is stupid and self-defeating for a country that's supposed to stand for openness and democracy?

There has to be another way.

P.S. I should be clear -- thank you Bob -- that President Bush signed a bill that will lead to the construction of a 700 mile long fence, not a wall. Nevertheless, it serves the same purpose, only in a more cost-effective manner.

Bergen on Withdrawal

2006-10-26T14:05:00.000-04:00

New America's Peter Bergen outlines why an American withdrawal from Iraq would be handing Al Qaeda a victory tantamount to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. It's an eminently reasonable analysis from a responsible journalist and scholar.

WTF!

2006-10-25T23:34:00.000-04:00

The NYTs asks the right question: Why is President Bush floodlighting the Iraq War when almost every Republican candidate for Congress is fleeing away from it faster than Madonna from Africa?

New Jersey Goes Gay for Equal Rights, Bigots Bewail

2006-10-25T21:18:00.000-04:00

I want to thank the New Jersey Supreme Court for having the balls to understand its state constituion promotes the equal rights of all citizens. Via the NYTs:

The State Supreme Court in New Jersey said today that same-sex couples are entitled to “the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.”

But the court, in its 4-3 ruling, said that whether that status should be called marriage, or something else, “is a matter left to the democratic process.”

The court’s eagerly awaited decision found that an arrangement akin to that in Vermont, which authorizes civil unions between same-sex couples but does not call them marriages, would satisfy the New Jersey constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The court gave the legislature a six-month deadline to enact the necessary legislation to provide for same-sex unions with rights equal to those of married couples.

I used to jokingly call New Jersey "the armpit of the United States," but now I have new found respect for those four justices that demonstrated principle should never bends before politics or prejudice. I hope gay rights groups understand this is a victory and do not start fighting semantics. Civil unions are as good as marriage as long as gay and lesbian couples have the same rights as "married" couples -- meaning they can share healthcare, pass property, etc. Maybe it's time to define marriage as an exclusively religious term and promote state sanctioned civil unions for both heterosexual and homosexual couples as different than marriage. This would also preserve the separation of church and state if you believe, like I do, marriage is religious by nature. That way religious conservatives can keep marriage for themselves and the rest of us can go about living our lives with whom we choose to.

A Shit Smeared Congress

2006-10-25T00:35:00.000-04:00

Gonzo Matt Taibbi skewers the GOP Congress in his "The Worst Congress Ever." That sums it up. Cynical prose at its best.

The 4:34 Dance

2006-10-23T12:34:00.000-04:00

WaPo's editorial page has an interesting op-ed by Asra Q Nomani. In it, she argues that the Koranic verse 4:34 -- "[A]nd (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them" -- which instructs men how to handle their wives when they get uppity, provides a continuum that leads to explosive laden belts.

As long as the beating of women is acceptable in Islam, the problem of suicide bombers, jihadists and others who espouse violence will not go away; to me, they form part of a continuum. When 4:34 came into being in the 7th century, its pronouncements toward women were revolutionary, given that women were considered little more than chattel at the time. But 1,400 years later, the world is a different place and so, too, must our interpretations be different, retaining the progressive spirit of that verse.

While I applaud Nomani for taking a public stand against domestic violence sanctioned by the Koran, I always must return to why she must argue this interpretively through the Muslim holy book. Look at the last sentence quoted above. Arguing through the Koran is silly. Literalists and Traditionalists have the heads-up in this argument based exclusively on their belief in a supreme, perfect God who revealed these laws and prescriptions to the Prophet Mohammad through the angel Gabriel. If God is immutable and perfect, his laws will not contain a "progressive spirit," but the just and right way to conduct oneself for all time.

Religious interpretation is a contradictory endeavor if you sincerely believe God revealed religion through some human conduit. This is not to say religious interpretation is a bad thing. It is one of the best things because it begins to liberate the individual from external religious constraints put on her by her mosque, church, temple and family. The more people begin to question their religious dogmas and the injustice codified within, the faster institutionalized and revealed religion will crumble. A very good thing if you even take the most cursory glance through history and the barbarity produced by religion.

There's a very simple solution to the ridiculousness of trying to prove the existence and validity of a god, or gods, that rule over humanity with divine law. One rule sums it up quite nicely: Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

It has a beat everyone can dance to.

Why Fantasy Football Sucks

2006-10-22T16:28:00.000-04:00

Nicholas Kulish deliciously rants on the contradictory loyalties fantasy football fans stomach for their diversion from the hum drum of daily life. Prime example:

[N]othing compare[s] to the promiscuous fandom that can be found any given Sunday in sports bars across the country. In recent years these locales have gone from bastions of devotion to polyamorous dens, where lifelong attachments now compete for a fan’s affection with complicated layers of one-game stands and waiver-wire dalliances.

Hands stained Denver-Bronco orange by Buffalo chicken wings shoot into the air for a Carolina Panther touchdown one minute and for a Baltimore Raven safety the next. A howl of joy greets a meaningless yardage gain in the closing moments of a game, even though the team in question is three touchdowns behind. Loyalty is now shattered into tiny shards, splintered by fantasy football teams.

In other words, being a true fan is lost once you step onto the virtual turf of fantasy football. And just so I don't sound too uppity, fantasy football does help fans appreciate the sheer athleticism and heart many players outside their loyalties display week in and out -- unless your an Eagles' fan of course. Then your team is still the best in the NFL regardless of their record or the players' statistics.

Game 7

2006-10-20T00:16:00.000-04:00

Defeated. Distraught. Depressed.

What About Iraqi Civilians?

2006-10-19T10:42:00.000-04:00

I just want to put this out there: In this political season of ours, does anyone in American politics care about Iraqis?

Nobody wants to see American troops die for a war we should never have fought. As Senator John Kerry famously said during 1971 before the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

This is a great question. Now while I don't have an answer, morality dictates I ask this question: How can the greatest military history has ever seen roll into a oppressed and devastated country, create instability and the possibility of civil war, even ethnic cleansing, and withdraw because our democratic nation didn't stop the rush to war?"

While I vacillate between support of a time table for withdrawal from Iraq, I'm afraid the evacuation of U.S. troops without a steady stream of UN peacekeepers as replacements will give jihadists exactly what they want, a new base from which to train and plan attacks, and provoke a civil war that will end in a Shiite genocide against Iraq's Sunni minority. The geopolitical ramifications of this would be devastating as jihadists radicalize more Sunnis and the sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunni and Shiite becomes regional in scope.

I still believe the Iraq War was incompetent, illegal, and immoral. But do we not have a moral responsibility to the people of Iraq because of our blunder? Have we not handed Al Qaeda in Iraq a devastating blow by killing Zarqawi, an enemy even more vicious than OBL and Zawahiri?

Like any war, we have had successes and we have had failures.

What America must do now is hand the daily security responsibilities over to Iraq's security forces while pulling back to Iraq's borders and providing border security so militant volunteers cannot enter the country and commit terrorist attacks. Border security shouldn't take 130,000 troops and therefore a good portion of our boys will come home to a hero's welcome. This is the only responsible and moral compromise I can think of if we are to try and leave Iraq a better place.

Stadium Scare

2006-10-19T10:28:00.000-04:00

Seven U.S. sports' stadiums have been threatened with dirty bombs over the weekend. Should we believe it? Probably not, but we should take the necessary precautions in the long shot this is no ruse. The FBI described the threat as "questionable" in its authenticity. Nevertheless, Americans should remember that OBL always announces an attack before striking. Also, it's election time and OBL tried to make his ghoulish presence known in 2004.

I don't forsee any Ryder trucks detonating and spreading radiological filth throughout any city skyline but then again, not many civilians saw 911 coming. Security officials shouldn't let any moving trucks get anywhere near any stadium on Sunday. Better safe than sorry as the cliche goes.

Veiled Discrimination?

2006-10-18T15:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's NYTs has a interesting article on Prime Minister Tony Blair's description of the full burka as "a mark of separation."

Honestly, I agree and I do find the full burka to be a mark of separation but there are two more important questions to be asked in this controversy.

The first is: Are women being forced to wear the full burkas out of fear of their husbands and their communities?

Second, is Blair only causing more enmity between Muslims and the other 97 percent of the UK that's non-Muslim?

The first question is of ultimate importance in a secular, liberal democracy based on equal rights for all its citizens. Minorities do not have the right to come into a liberal society and violate its norms and oppress and imprison Muslim women while hiding behind their religious beliefs. The rights of women override religious freedom in this case.

But the UK needs to remember that many Muslim women desire to wear the full burka to demonstrate their religious identity. This isn't hard to understand. Muslims in the UK are divorced from the disciplinary force of the mosque and the traditional society from which they or their parents came. Sometimes, the burka is nostalgia for their religious tradition and evidence of their personal religiosity. Think the yarmulke or the cross displayed publicly by adherents of these religions.

The hard part in this situation is how do you tell those woman that wear the burka willingly and those that are coerced or terrorized into it?

I believe the solution is simply enough though. The UK should take strength from its tolerance and liberal beliefs and know the more exposed Muslims are to Western ideals, most will come to cherish them like any good English person. Many Muslim immigrants are only first or second generation so their attempts to stay true to their homeland's religious and cultural norms is understandable. Time should heal these divisions if the British government doesn't do anything stupid by creating an either/or situation.

But it seems like this is what Blair has done. UK officials need to be more nuanced -- what we usually associate with the British -- and less blunt. The Iraq War and the cartoon fiasco should have taught Downing Street the impressive propaganda skills of Islamists in Londonistan. You give them a thread of rope and they'll hang you with it.

Sometimes it's incredible to think how Blair has become the more sophisticated version of President Bush. Is this Blair's "crusader" moment? Britain may be lucky Blair will be bowing out soon. Hopefully something more reactionary doesn't park itself on Downing Street and create even more problems with Britain's Muslim minority, which is overwhelmingly law-abiding and looking for a new start in the UK.

Who's Violent?

2006-10-13T10:09:00.000-04:00

When I attended grad school at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, there was a general sneering that America had become a wasteland of cheap consumerism and violence. While we certainly have a lot of the former, it looks like those snooty UK chaps who thought we were a particularly violent breed need to think again. Via the BBC:

Scotland has been named the most violent country in the developed world by a United Nations report.

The study found that, excluding murder, Scots were almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans.

Victims of crime in 21 countries were interviewed by the UN, but senior Scots police officers criticised the study.

The survey concluded that 2,000 Scots were attacked every week. That figure is 10 times the number recorded in official police figures.

'Upward trend'

The figure for Scotland dwarfs that of other developed nations such as Japan, where people are 30 times less likely to be attacked.

The study, based on telephone interviews conducted between 1991 and 2000, said 3% of people in Scotland had suffered an assault, while the figure for England and Wales was second highest at 2.8%.

Both Australia and New Zealand had the next highest proportion of assaults among their population at 2.4%, exactly double the level reported for the United States.

Anytime Brits want to criticize Americans for their violent tendencies they should remember we were born out of their own imperial meatgrinder.

Amazing

2006-10-12T14:18:00.000-04:00

Traveling home from Costa Rica yesterday, I had the opportunity to pick up Truman Capote's classic new journalistic account of a quadruple homicide of a farming family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959: In Cold Blood. I can only give my highest praise and admiration for this mesmerizing piece of literary crime reportage. Capote is so good at weaving the myriad local personalities, recreating the crime and penning such a sympathetic account of murderer Perry Smith that it's the type of thing you read that either makes you want to give up on writing because prose this good is out there or just hunker down and attempt to create your own masterpiece of American letters.

Read In Cold Blood immediately. It takes you to the heart of darkness, but in a way that leaves you empathetic rather than vengeful -- a feeling only a great writer can produce due to the viciousness of the crime.

More Viciousness

2006-09-29T01:01:00.000-04:00

Here's one more example why the Bush Administration and most of the GOP don't believe in any of the ideals that separated Americans from much of the world for most of our existence.

If you can believe it, Republicans and a minority of Democrats have rebuked an Amendment to the detainee bill that would've allowed terror suspects the right to argue their innocence before a court. This is an essential right in any society dedicated to philosophical Enlightenment and classical liberal ideals or the foundations of modern Western democracy.

The NYTs puts it succinctly:

[The detainee bill] strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime.

If I'm not mistaken, the last time habeas corpus was suspended was by President Lincoln during the Civil War.

It seems the Bush Administration and its new breed of conservatives, which are anything but in philosophic terms, believe betting on bad precedents is the way to win this war on Islamo-fascists -- a term I applaud despite the backlash against it.

I believe history will show them wrong.

Costa Rica

2006-09-28T21:57:00.000-04:00

If there's any interest in why the blog's been silent for a little over two weeks, it's because I'm in sunny Costa Rica -- Playa Hermosa or "Beautiful Beach" -- attempting to learn how to surf, but the waves are truly monstrous, almost double overhead somedays.

I'll attempt to post some of my impressions of Playa Hermosa and the nearby town of Jaco when the mood strikes me a bit more. The latter though is a haven of hookers and a den of depravity. I think it's safe to say it resembles Bangkok, Thailand in its penchant for sex tourism and easy drug-use.

A Day to Remember

2006-09-11T11:10:00.000-04:00

Everyone knows what today is -- it needs no introduction.

It's important to remember the ying and yang of heroism and viciousness that occurred. By simple circumstance, ordinary people discovered a courage unparalleled while the hijackers fed a fire reason could not dampen. Every atrocity shows us the great battle between humaneness and misanthropic hatred tussling in each of us. 9/11 is one of the greatest indictments and greatest redeemers of humanity.

It's also important that our foreign policy be oriented toward preserving humanity and not aiding our destruction. 5 years after the smoke rose like a funeral pyre up above Manhattan, DC, and PA we must vow to wage our war with Al-Qaeda and other Islamist fanatics with more humaneness. It is only then that the world with again align with us and defeat a movement more concerned with the afterlife than this life.

We must act like the great protector of the Enlightenment we believe ourselves to be and not the Great Satan much of the Muslim world rages about.

On days like today it's important to remember Thomas Paine's famous declaration, "We have it in our power to start the world again."

Stalker Central

2006-09-07T15:42:00.000-04:00

For those too old and not in the know, there's a younger online social networking alternative to Myspace.com called Facebook.com. I heard about Facebook.com last year while attending the University of St. Andrews and was told it was a must have to stay in the loop socially among classmates.

One of the weirdest aspects of Generation Y for older Americans is the rampant voyeurism whereby young people will do and say anything to get noticed, because you never know, a talent agent might be digitally snooping around your profile. That's why you'll find compromising pics and videos uploaded willingly and enthusiastically by Myspacers and Facebookians.

But finally Facebook has tested how much information they can release of their customers and it has led to a revolt. Via The Nation's Notion blog:

On September 5, Facebook-- the social networking site made up of 9 million users, mostly college students, who post and share personal information in online profiles-- unveiled a major change.

A new feature called "News Feed" instantaneously broadcasts virtually every move a Facebook user makes to his online "friends." For example, now, when a user logs on, he will immediately see that "Tim changed his relationship status to 'It's Complicated'" or "Sarah removed Kelly Clarkson from her 'Favorite Music'" or "Randy posted a comment on Jean's wall: 'U rock my world.'" Each alteration to one's profile is even time-stamped, so others can know if "Jenny removed Bill as a friend" while she was supposed to be in her 11 am chemistry class.

Generation Y had previously been shockingly devil-may-care in its attitude towards privacy, but News Feed seems to be the last straw. Within hours of the change, dozens of online protest groups were launched, ironically, some say, on Facebook itself. One group, "Students Against Facebook News Feed," already has more than half a million members, and several other groups boast thousands each. Students are calling News Feed "creepy" and "stalker-ish" and demanding that the feature be promptly removed; others are vowing to spend "A Day Without Facebook" next week, and some have removed their profiles altogether (not an easy thing to do-- ask any college student how vital Facebook has become to campus life).

This is scary when you think about it, especially when people know you've demoted them as a friend. Oh, the awkward silences and social tensions.

But on the other hand, all Facebook has done is make it easy to see the changes your friends have made to their profile. You could do this anyway by reviewing your friends' profiles every so often although it would be time consuming. Ironically, by merely consolidating these updates in one space, Facebook.com may have finally shown young adults how important privacy is in a U.S. marked by government wire-taps and the steady erosion of our civil liberties.

It's a good lesson for apathetic college students, however disastrous it may be to Facebook.com.

Tragic but Forseeable

2006-09-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death was a tragedy but I'm tired of hearing how unbelievable it was. It was apt and almost scripted beforehand.

A Cry from the 9th Ward

2006-09-01T15:47:00.000-04:00

If you have HBO, watch Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke." It's haunting.

The head of one of the major networks needs to buy this documentary and air it in primetime so everyone can see how the U.S. government failed the people of New Orleans and how, now, politicians and developers are trying to shiv the survivors of the 9th ward by stealing their land.

Check out Mike Davis' Mother Jones article from last October for more on this disgusting land grab.

Greed conquers all.

Stop the Analogy

2006-08-30T12:09:00.000-04:00

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld believes critics of the war don't know their history. What the U.S. faces in Iraq is akin to fascism he believes. I don't disagree totally. But then again, Rumsfeld like the rest of the Bush administration likes to travel in generalizations and oversimplifications. The thrust of his argument over time has been this.

In many previous speeches, including some before groups of veterans for whom World War II is a sacred memory, he has compared the government of Saddam Hussein, and the violent resistance since it fell, to the Nazis, and warned explicitly against appeasement there or in the broader campaign against terrorism, comparing it to the error of appeasing Hitler.

But while the analogy between Nazism and Islamism carries some similarities ideologically -- killing Jews, world domination -- Islamism has yet to take over a state with significant economic and military resources to seriously jeopardize world peace. Iran is certainly a problem, but it's no Nazi Germany and I don't think there's a movement to appease Iran or its ambition to go nuclear. Also Ahmadinejad is not Hitler. There has been no Czechoslovakia moment. Besides, Iran has a vibrant pro-democracy movement that loathes the ayatollahs.

Iraq is a problem though. Zarqawi's objective was for militant Islam to overtake Iraq and use it as a base to infect the wider world. The U.S.'s presence in Iraq only made this easier for him to spread his jihadist message throughout Iraq. Arrogantly, Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration fail to admit this. Nevertheless, Islamism is a serious enemy to Iraq and it is ideologically similar to fascism, but we must remain steadfast that this is still primarily a political battle for the majority of Iraqis who have yet to decide in favor of Islamism or a militant nationalism or something more liberal and democratic.

Certainly we must kill the undeterable jihadists, but we must be careful not to alienate society in the process. Domestically, Americans must be level-headed and ignore the political red herring being served to them by Rumsfeld that if they criticize the war, they are the new Chamberlains of the 21st century. The more the U.S. military kills Muslims -- whether intentionally or accidentally -- the easier it will be for Islamism to indeed become something as powerful as Nazism.

Sometimes it seems the Bush Administration is determined to be right by pursuing policies that will make them right. Now that's scary stuff.

With News Like This, How Can the Dems Lose?

2006-08-28T16:34:00.000-04:00

More rosy news for American workers via the NYTs.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

Naturally this golden era of profitability doesn't extend to American workers. The interesting thing will be how the Democratic Party handles this economic "boon" to their election hopes. Iraq and a struggling economy where hard work doesn't pay off should be disasterous to the GOP.

It's great how sordid politics can be isn't it?

Nevertheless, I'm not hopeful the Dems will retake Congress. If the Democrats lose these mid-term elections, can there be any doubt America needs a progressive alternative. Unfortunately, the problem may be that progressive values are a thing of the past in 21st century America and we are indeed a superpower in nosedive.

Over-the-Counter But Underhanded?

2006-08-24T10:50:00.000-04:00

Fundamentalists Christians and Catholics cannot be happy while every 18 year old girl and boy breathes a sigh of relief: the morning after pill is cleared for over-the-counter use. WaPo reports:

The Food and Drug Administration approved an application today making the long-debated emergency contraceptive Plan B, commonly known as the "morning-after pill," available without a prescription to women 18 and older.

The FDA said Barr Laboratories, the maker of Plan B, could begin selling the drug, but only at pharmacies and health clinics. Women purchasing the drug will have to show proof of age.

It's nice to see parts of the government are regaining their balls and implementing policies that demonstrate reason and a healthy respect for the individual's decision to do what they think is best.

I don't want to color Christian reaction to this as hysterical since I'm no fan of abortion, although I do believe it is the woman's choice. Here's the big concern:

While the FDA concluded that the pill works like a traditional contraceptive -- preventing an egg from becoming fertilized -- it has not ruled out the possibility that it can also prevent a pregnancy by keeping a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman's uterus. That possibility has led some social conservatives to liken emergency contraception to abortion.

But then all you have to do is head over to the Family Research Council's blog and you'll get this:

On top of overstepping the law, the FDA has no procedures to ensure that children are acquiring Plan B only with a prescription, or that nefarious adults (say a 45 year old dating a 13 year old) are getting the drug for equally nefarious reasons.

FRC's arguing that the FDA and the President do not have the authority to grant the over-the-counter status. I don't know if that's correct, but they weren't complaining when Bush adamantly opposed the "morning after pill's" over-the-counter status. Nevertheless, this is a good argument. We should all be concerned when the federal government does not obey its own procedures.

But FRC blogger, Tom McClusky, can't help himself, resorting to the usual scare tactics and off-the-wall scenarios about "nefarious adults" using the morning-after-pill after having sex with 13 year olds. McClusky argues there must be procedures in place to stop this type of activity. Have there ever been procedures in place to stop this sort of thing? I'm skeptical. Think about it. When say a 41 year old elementary school teacher comes in the pharmacy for the "morning after pill," will the pharmacist turn and ask, "Yes m'am, I can fill that prescription, but only if you tell me you aren't diddling a minor you may or may not be teaching."

Ridiculous and such an obvious assault on the Bill of Rights.

Brush Off the Bling

2006-08-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

WaPo's Juan Williams argues all that bling fetishized by hip-hop is weighing down young black Americans and is a cultural depth-charge poised to sink what's left of the civil rights movement.

No argument here. I pretty much hate hip-hop but I can handle Jay-Z and I think Talib Kweli is amazing for all sorts of reasons, not least his DIY ethos and his social conscience.

Nevertheless, they are not role models; they are entertainers.

So Williams's thought on providing alternative heroes to young black students in the home and in history class is right on.

In order to face this century's class battles, young minds need the self-confidence that comes from examples of inspiring historical personalities, such as a black woman born into slavery who made herself a national leader, Sojourner Truth, or a black man living under rank segregation, A. Philip Randolph, who defied corporate power to break segregation in organized labor. Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.

You can't beat any of these three. Great American heroes regardless of race or class, they never ceased fighting for the underdog and never bowed before power. There are no closer embodiments of America's ideals than these three.

A Bad Consequence

2006-08-20T16:21:00.000-04:00

The worst thing to happen from the latest round of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel in the Middle East is the continued entrenchment of Islamism throughout the Muslim community or ummah. Today's NYTs Week in Review leads with Michael Slackman's article, "And Now, Islamism Trumps Arabism."

This is bad for all sorts of reasons. First Islamism is totalitarian and oppressive. It's about as far away from liberalism as the twin killers of the 20th century, fascism and Stalinism. Worse, its ideology may be harder to defeat because it is bolstered by a fundamentalist Islamic belief that only God is supreme and therefore religion and politics cannot and should not be separated. The worst sub-group of Islamism is the jihadists like al-Qaeda that believe they must fight and die if Islam is ever to regain worldwide hegemony.

But one of the more interesting aspects of Islamism is that for many Muslim inhabitants of the Middle East, the Islamists are disciplined model citizens fighting the oppressiveness of their secular regimes and providing the social services these despots won't. Slackman writes:

The terms Islamic nationalism and pan-Islamism have a negative connotation in the West, where they are associated with fundamentalism and terrorism. But that is increasingly not the case in Egypt. Under the dual pressures of foreign military attacks in the region and a government widely viewed as corrupt and illegitimate, Islamic groups are seen by many people as incorruptible, disciplined, efficient and caring. A victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon is by extension a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Combine this with many Muslims belief that the Islamists are the only people fighting Israeli, and by extension American, imperialism then you may have a religio-political juggernaut reemerging. Of course it is too soon to say but the recent victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah's popularity across the Sunni-Shia divide are evidence that the West will have to start talking to Islamists if we want normalized politics.

Many analysts, primarily conservative, will say there can be no negotiations with Islamists. I understand their point while being luke-warmly sympathetic, but continuing to support the status quo in places such as Egypt, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories is unacceptable and will only cause Islamism to metastasize quicker and more potently. The only course is to stuff the Islamists into the political box of governing as they increasingly win elections. Only the day-to-day monotony and mundaneness of providing services and maintaining popular legitimacy will blunt their radicalism. Surprisingly, Islamism may lead to a kind of Islamic liberalism if we are courageous enough to let things go a bit awry at times. We can't control everything and it's foolish to try.

All in all, the West must give Islamists the space to moderate. But we should always make it known that this space isn't us admitting weakness but simply allowing the forces of liberalization to do their thing like water flowing over a rockface. Eventually liberalization will wear Islamism down and the whole world will be better for it.

Politics of Peacekeeping

2006-08-19T14:52:00.000-04:00

The NYTs has a great piece discussing the pitfalls of peacekeeping in Southern Lebanon. Diplomats throughout the world are currently reviewing the UN's planning document for introducing peacekeeping forces to help Lebanon regain the monopoly of the use of force states are entitled to under international law. Naturally, problems are arising.

Diplomats involved in the negotiations acknowledged that efforts to create a peacekeeping force were lagging in part because of the reluctance of governments to introduce troops into a part of the Middle East with deep, unresolved political and religious conflicts.

But they said there were also hurdles beyond that concern, particularly in France, which surprised diplomats by pledging only 200 soldiers to the new force. About 50 French military engineers arrived in Lebanon on Saturday to prepare for their arrival.

Terrorist attacks drove American and French troops from Lebanon once before, in 1983.

The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because deliberations over the force were continuing, said that another issue slowing the formation of the peacekeeping mission was the experience of the failed Balkans effort of the 1990’s, when European and other foreign troops wearing the blue helmet of the United Nations were shackled by an unwieldy chain of command that split responsibilities between national commanders and United Nations officials in New York.

If a peacekeeping force is inserted between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in Southern Lebanon, the interesting thing will be how the "blue helmets" respond if they are fired upon by either party. Will it become another Somalia or Balkans redux?

Stranger Than Fiction

2006-08-15T21:50:00.000-04:00

President Bush read Camus' existential classic, The Stranger. The French laugh. I'm bewildered. Americans wonder who Cah-mus is. Arabs have more evidence President Bush is the "crusader" they always knew he was. Slate's John Dickerson explains:

Whatever the reasons, Camus' story line is ripe for geopolitical literary misinterpretation. The main character, Meursault, spends much of his life as the young George Bush did, engaging in escapades that demonstrate little drive or motivation. On a visit to the beach with friends, he gets into a fight with some Arabs. Later, he finds one of the Arabs and without much further provocation shoots him repeatedly...Unhappy tales of East meets West are found in the papers every day, so presumably the president was looking for more, but his aides will not tell us what he made of the story of a remorseless killer of Arabs. White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush "found it an interesting book and a quick read" and talked about it with aides. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism," said Snow.

As always I think people are looking much too deep into Bush's motivations here, but it is striking for him to advertise he read a book by the hated French's literary hero whose main plot line follows a callous killer of an Arab Algerian. Even funnier, Camus' atheism is widely known and his abhorence of positivism unquestionable considering his body of work described the utter absurdity of life. Maybe Dickerson's surmise is right though, maybe Bush is just trying to better himself.

Thwarted

2006-08-10T11:04:00.000-04:00

I'm sure everyone's heard the plot to detonate numerous airliners on cross-Atlantic flights into the U.S. from London, UK was stymied today.

The interesting bit of information will be who are the 21 suspected terrorists detained. Are they second-generation immigrants from "Londonistan?" Are they hardened jihadists that have waged asymmetrical warfare in other conflicts such as Afghanistan, Bosnia or Iraq?

It seems right now it will be the latter. Via the NYTs:

...Mr. Chertoff drew a distinction between the suspects arrested today and the kinds of homegrown, relatively amateur plotters who carried out the London transit attacks or those who were arrested more recently for scheming to blow up buildings in Florida or tunnels in New York.

“This was a very sophisticated plan and operation,’’ he said. “It was not a circle with a handful of people sitting around and dreaming.’’

As we all know it's only a matter of time before militant Islamists succeed in another attack on the U.S. homeland. Today, because of good intelligence, we breath another sigh of relief, fortunately.

Bring the Paine

2006-08-09T11:12:00.000-04:00

Hitchens eulogizes Britain's greatest radical and America's most principled ex-pat, my main man Thomas Paine -- the only founding father without the taint of hypocrisy.

Religion + Repression = Porn Addict

2006-08-08T23:51:00.000-04:00

Read this. It seems evangelicals like to rock out with their cock out. I take too much glee in this.

Me-OW

2006-08-08T16:12:00.000-04:00

The "Joes" in Iraq have something to look forward to: Lindsay Lohan.

''I've been trying to go to Iraq with Hillary Clinton for so long. Hillary was trying to work it out, but it seemed too dangerous,'' the 20-year-old actress says in an interview in the September issue of Elle magazine, on newsstands Wednesday.

Lohan, whose screen credits include ''Freaky Friday,'' ''Mean Girls'' and the upcoming ''Georgia Rule,'' says she hoped to emulate Marilyn Monroe, who performed shows for about 100,000 troops stationed in Korea in 1954.

''It's so amazing seeing that one woman just going somewhere, this beautiful sex kitten, who's basically a pinup, which is what I've always aspired to be,'' Lohan tells the magazine, adding that she would prepare for her trip to Iraq by taking shooting lessons with her security guard.

Just what our troops need, a hung-over "sex-kitten" that wants to shoot her gun off.

Sadr-mized

2006-08-04T12:22:00.000-04:00

Here's the latest upswelling of support for the "You don't have to go home but you have to get the hell out of the region" sentiment swirling around the Islamic world.

More than 100,000 followers of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr marched today to show support for Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and the United States for the violence in Lebanon.

The protesters filled 20 blocks of a wide boulevard and dozens of side streets in the Shiite-dominated Sadr City section of the capital.

Waving Lebanese flags and posters of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the protesters chanted, “No, no, no, Israel, no, no, no, America,’’ challenged Americans to fight them in their neighborhoods, and called on Hezbollah to strike at Tel Aviv.

A Nice Suggestion

2006-08-03T13:29:00.000-04:00

Sarah Posner of Alternet.org has a nice little suggestion for the Washington Press Corps.

In a perfect world, a reporter at last week's press conference with George Bush and Tony Blair would have asked Bush, in the presence of his principal European ally, if he believes the European Union is the Antichrist.

Although it sounds like the kind of Pat Robertson lunacy that makes even the wingnuts run for the nearest exit, it's a question Bush should be forced to answer. Bush and other leading Republicans have lined up behind a growing movement of Christian Zionists for whom a European Antichrist figures prominently in an end-times scenario. So they should be forced to explain to the rest of us why they're courting the votes of people who believe our allies are evil incarnate. Could it be that the central requirement for their breathlessly anticipated Armageddon -- that the United States confront Iran -- happens to dovetail so nicely with the neoconservative war agenda?

I would love to see President Bush stumble and bumble all over this question. It's about time there's full disclosure whether or not U.S. foreign policy is being written by the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.

So True

2006-08-01T12:47:00.000-04:00

Recently released Iranian dissident and journalist Akbar Ganji -- I love how those words couple -- lays down some truth to the Bush Administration.

We have learned from our history that despotism can be imported, and that despotic rulers can survive with the help of outsiders. But we have also learned that we have to gain our freedom ourselves, and that only we can nourish that freedom and create a political system that can sustain it. Ours is a difficult struggle; it could even be a long one. Anyone who claims to possess a golden formula for bringing freedom to Iran, and claims that all he needs is foreign cash and foreign help to put his plan into effect, is a swindler.

Iran doesn't need any Chalabis.

Sugar Tits

2006-07-31T15:41:00.000-04:00

Well, it's official. Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite. The hooked noses and knack for pecuniary motives Jews exhibit in the Passion don't seem like coincidences any longer.

Our Responsibility to Iraq

2006-07-30T11:57:00.000-04:00

For me, there are primarily two reasons the U.S. military must stay in Iraq: our moral obligation to the Iraqi people and the likelihood that a failed Iraq will become the next safehaven for al Qaeda and other fellow travelers to export terrorism. Frank Rich agrees with the first reason, but with legitimate skepticism.

But it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq - as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people - that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war's architects always cared more about their own gradiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.

The frightful thing about Iraq is that even if we do not stay for the first reason, we will stay for the second reason. So as the U.S. military continues to occupy Iraq to keep it from becoming the "new Afghanistan," "collateral damage" will spiral even more out of control thereby creating more insurgents. This is rightfully described as a disaster and probably the worst thing I can write is I do not see a solution that can achieve both objectives outlined above. We have lost whatever legitimacy we originally had with the Iraqi people which ensures the U.S. will only sacrifice the blood of insurgents, civilians, and America's young in a war with no end in sight and with incoherent justifications and objectives.

Iraq is a meatgrinder of American making.

What Television Can Be

2006-07-28T20:23:00.000-04:00

I'm watching Bill Moyers' on Faith and Reason right now. This is television at its best. I say this in full disclosure that I worked as his personal researcher and production assistant for about two years but, Jesus, this is amazing. Tonight is agnostics Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis. It is truly refreshing to hear intelligent people discuss God and religion skeptically but reaffirming that this pursuit, when humble and honest, confirms a humanity worth preserving.

As anyone reading this blog regularly knows, I'm not a believer. I'm quite against religion and all its noxious waste, but I do agree the search for God is worth every ounce of energy. What I was left with after my hunt was my isolation and utter minuteness. Liberating. There is only one intelligence you answer to in this world ultimately: yours.

The Parts of the Whole

2006-07-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

FP breaks down what groups make up the insurgency in Iraq. Informative stuff.

Decriminalize It

2006-07-23T12:51:00.000-04:00

More evidence that pot won't land you in Betty Ford, but simply make you giggle, eat too much cookie dough, and fall asleep.

Bombs Away

2006-07-22T01:18:00.000-04:00

Via the NYTs:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

An impartial intermediary is a foregone conclusion. Enough said.

With Friends Like These

2006-07-21T17:44:00.000-04:00

Now granted this is from Pat Buchanan, but his latest column on WorldNetDaily reports Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman professed to a gathering of Christians United for Israel, "Today we are all Israelis!"

Now I don't have to tell you what this looks like to Muslims worldwide: More evidence that the People of the Book have united to savagely attack Muslims and their religion. This also carries with it the bizarre and cynical affinity fundamentalist Christians have for the state of Israel. This has nothing to do with Israeli security and everything to do with Biblical prophesy where war erupting in Jerusalem will signal the apocalypse and that blessed event the Rapture where God wields that great dirt-devil in the sky to suck up body and soul, the true believers.

These are the people that make up President Bush's base?

It's scary to think our President may believe such supernatural revelation, content to allow Israel to violate the Geneva Conventions by bombing the infrastructure of Lebanon without a bit of protestation, leaving it a modern-day Sodom and Germorrah.

But then again, international law is for the fools and the fragile, not the indispensable nation and its most precious proxy.

Under God

2006-07-21T11:10:00.000-04:00

I am, of course, a couple days late in posting this. And I must acknowledge up front that I did not spend those two days formulating a thoughtful position on the recent House vote to bar federal judges from ruling on cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance. I don’t have much to say, besides noting that this is another destructive and short-sited attack on the constitution and the separation of powers it establishes.

Since the Executive seems intent on usurping Congresses power (see domestic surveillance) and since Congress seems intent on usurping the Judiciary’s power (see above) perhaps we should just cut the chase and collapse all three branches of the federal government into one super efficient juggernaut, under God, with family values and warrantees wiretapping for all.

--MM

Veto

2006-07-19T15:15:00.000-04:00

It’s official.

--MM

Checks and Imbalance

2006-07-19T10:06:00.000-04:00

Apparently the president decides when president’s programs need to be investigated.

President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.

Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into the role Justice lawyers played in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency listens in on telephone calls and reads e-mail without court approval, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Without access to the sensitive program, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility closed its investigation in April.

Arlen Specter barked a bit at Gonzalez...

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales.

...but by most accounts he’s preparing to play ball with the White House by proposing a bill aimed at bringing the surveillance program under the review of the FISA court.

Last week, Gonzales said the bill gives Bush the option of submitting the NSA program to the intelligence court, rather than requiring the review. Specter said Tuesday Bush assured him he will seek the court review if the legislation passes without significant amendment.

So the president who killed the Justice Department investigation of the surveillance program will be given the option of submitting the program for FISA review. Nice to see the legislative branch standing up for itself.

--MM

Misinformed Consent

2006-07-18T12:53:00.000-04:00

This is what happens when science takes a backseat to ideology:

Federally funded "pregnancy resource centers" are incorrectly telling women that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma, a minority congressional report charged yesterday.

The report said that 20 of 23 federally funded centers contacted by staff investigators requesting information about an unintended pregnancy were told false or misleading information about the potential risks of an abortion.

--MM

Morality 101

2006-07-18T10:16:00.000-04:00

For those of you who were struggling with the issue, John Bolton explains the difference between those killed in Israel and those killed in Lebanon.

Asked to comment on the deaths in an Israeli air strike of eight Canadian citizens in southern Lebanon Sunday, he said: "it is a matter of great concern to us ...that these civilian deaths are occurring. It's a tragedy."

"I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts," he added, while defending as "self-defense" Israel's military action, which has had "the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths".

--MM

The Becoming

2006-07-15T13:41:00.000-04:00

I'm trying something new. I just posted the first third of a screenplay I've been working on for at least a year or two off and on. It's called The Becoming. It's Columbine High School meets An American Werewolf in London. I hope you can check it out and leave me some comments. Tell me what you like and what you don't like.

Not so Fast...

2006-07-13T11:02:00.000-04:00

If you were thinking that the Administration’s recent concession that terror suspects are protected by the Geneva Convention represented sea change in detention and interrogation policy, think again, says Marty Lederman.

[Sen.] Graham indicated to the New York Times -- as did Administration officials -- that Congress could "limit" Common Article 3 "in a way that resembled the language of the [McCain Amendment]." Of course, as Graham concedes, this really wouldn't so much be "limiting" Common Article Three as gutting it, because, according to Graham himself, the restrictions of Common Article 3 go "well beyond the McCain standard." (The Washington Post reports that the White House and Senator McCain are crafting a bill that would track the McCain Amendment and that "makes some changes to Common Article 3," such as dropping the phrase "outrages upon personal dignity.")

How can that be? After all, the McCain Amendment categorically prohibits all "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Well, as I've tried to explain, Congress has defined those terms under McCain to include only what the Due Process Clause would prohibit if the interrogation were taking place in the United States. That is to say, conduct that "shocks the conscience" -- a standard that the courts have never applied in the context of interrogations intended to elicit information about future terrorist activity. As I feared, the Administration apparently has (if Graham's remarks are accurate) construed the McCain "shocks the conscience" test not to prohibit techniques such as sleep deprivation and "cold cell," i.e. hypothermia. (Whether that's the best understanding of the Due Process standard is open to serious question -- certainly it would not be under Justice Kennedy's concurrence in Chavez v. Martinez, which might have the support of five Justices on today's Court (although Justices Souter and Breyer have not yet tipped their hand). But Justice Thomas's opinion in that same case indicates that it takes a whole lot more to shock his conscience (and Justice Scalia's) than it does to shock Justice Kennedy's.)

But Common Article 3 is not limited to "conscience-shocking" conduct, but instead prohibits all violence against detainees and "outrages upon personal dignity." CA3 therefore almost certainly does prohibit techniques such as cold cell, or prolonged sleep deprivation.

The Graham/McCain/Administration initiative now being hatched thus would authorize the use of techniques that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Congress has the power to do this: Where a statute authorizes something that a treaty prohibits, the statute governs for purposes of domestic law if it was enacted subsequent to the Senate's ratification of the treaty.

This raises an interesting dilemma for those who opposed military tribunals and inhumane interrogation tactics as instances of Executive overreach. Hamdan may have curtailed the Administration’s ability to sidestep Congressional approval, but it may not, in the end, have much practical impact on detainees. Should Congress move forward with an initiative similar to the one Lederman describes, opponents can no longer claim that the Executive is acting outside of its constitutional authority. Opponents may continue to challenge the “Graham/McCain/Administration initiative” as being inconsistent with an international treaty, or simply, as bad policy, but those arguments will be tough sells considering the current makeup of Congress, the Court, and the public.

--MM