Archived news and commentary: August 11 - 17, 2003

2003/09/29 - 2003/10/05
2003/09/22 - 2003/09/28
2003/09/15 - 2003/09/21
2003/09/08 - 2003/09/14
2003/09/01 - 2003/09/07
2003/08/25 - 2003/08/31
2003/08/18 - 2003/08/24
2003/08/11 - 2003/08/17
2003/08/04 - 2003/08/10
2003/07/28 - 2003/08/03
2003/07/21 - 2003/07/27
2003/07/14 - 2003/07/20
2003/07/07 - 2003/07/13
2003/06/30 - 2003/07/06

Sunday, August 17, 2003

News and commentary:

"Saddam 'made sex slaves' of Kurd women" (Lynne O'Donnel, Scotland on Sunday, 2003/08/17)
"When a group of Kurdish women and girls disappeared from their homes in Iraq in 1989, their families assumed they would never see them again.
But instead of being murdered during a campaign of mass arrests and summary executions, it now appears that the 18 women and children were abducted to be sold as sex slaves in Egypt.
Evidence was uncovered in documents found among the debris of the ransacked Kirkuk offices of Saddam’s feared intelligence and security agency. These detail the names of the women, who were aged between 14 and 29 at the time, and state that they were sold to Egyptian brothels. ...
The document states: 'We have arrested different groups of people, among them young girls aged between 14 and 29 years old. According to your request, we have sent a group of these girls to the harems and nightclubs of the Arab Republic of Egypt.'"

"Iraq jail attack kills six - U.S." (CNN.com, 2003/08/17)
"At least six Iraqi detainees have been killed in a mortar attack on a jail outside Baghdad, U.S. military officials said Sunday.
A U.S. Army spokesman said 59 Iraqis were wounded in the attack on Abu Ghraib prison, Reuters reported. The Iraqi Governing Council said the death toll was 10.
U.S. officials said two mortar rounds were fired at the prison, about 22 miles west of Baghdad, at 11 p.m. (4 p.m. ET).
Three people died at the scene and three at military hospitals, they said. The incident is being investigated.
U.S. forces have patrols near the area because there is a base nearby. Housed at the prison are local criminals and those who have launched attacks on coalition forces."

"Insurgents Hit Afghan Police HQ, Kill 22" (AP/ABC News, 2003/08/17)
"Hundreds of insurgents in a convoy of trucks attacked a police headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan, triggering a gunbattle Sunday that killed 22 people, officials said. It was one of the largest shows of anti-government force in over a year.
The fierce fighting in Paktika province was the latest in a wave of violence that has underscored just how unstable Afghanistan still is after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in late 2001. ...
Firing rockets, heavy machine guns and grenades, the attackers easily took over the office. About 15 to 20 Afghan police were in the compound at the time and seven of them including the district police chief were killed, Jalali said. The rest, realizing they could put up little resistance, fled.
Jalali said between 15 to 20 insurgents were also killed. Provincial police chief Daulat Khan said the attackers retreated with the bodies."

"From Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac" (Jean-Claude Casanova, Le Monde/The Radical, 2003/08/17)
A translated editorial from Le Monde: "If we leave the realm of hypotheticals and reenter reality, we might inquire as to the reasons for the current American interventions abroad. Americans worry about three dangers: terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and tyrannical regimes. Europeans also share these concerns. If these dangers are real, how they can be prevented? The United States’ military capacities are unparalleled, and Europe can deny neither the legitimacy of America's objectives nor her capacity to attain them. However Europe can question the way in which the United States acts because it recognizes that one can be powerful but nonetheless cause damage that is worse than that which one sought to avoid. ...
If France's only strategy is to offer soothing speeches on the Middle East while secretly wishing for the United States' failure with the hope of thereby justifying her position with respect to the UN, then France will only cause greater damage to her relations with the United States and she will divide Europe.
No, Americans will not be able to rapidly install a democracy in the region. But their intentions are, nonetheless, legitimate. When Jacques Chirac says, "Our loyalty to human rights, to the universal values of justice, tolerance and liberty must not blind us to the fact that these values may express themselves under different names throughout our respective cultures and traditions," the second part of the statement introduces a reservation that weakens the first part of the statement. Democratic values only exist if there are certain, basic political structures: respect for human rights and for the free expression of opinions and votes. When we tell the Serbs that they did not respect these values and these rights in Kosovo or Bosnia, we must have the courage to do this elsewhere as well. This does not mean that we must declare war on all non-democratic regimes. Nor must all the organizations on the earth resemble our own. This simply means that our principals forbid us from taking part in the lies of tyrannical regimes."

"Losing his religion" (Lee Smith, The Boston Globe, 2003/08/17)
"The Indian-born and English-educated Ibn Warraq, 57, is among the most prominent and outspoken Muslim apostates alive today. His 1995 book "Why I Am Not a Muslim" was an impassioned polemic against almost 1,400 years of Muslim dogma and its effect on the Islamic world. The more recent collections he has edited – "What the Koran Really Says" (2002) and this year's "Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out" – present less confrontational, more scholarly lines of attack.
Still, Warraq (the name is a pseudonym) aims to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people – as well as the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not tolerate its strictures in their own cultures. ...
Warraq's book cuts against the ecumenical, feel-good vision of Islam as a "religion of peace" found everywhere from President Bush's speeches to popular books such as Karen Armstrong's "Islam: A Short History." Indeed, anyone who's read Armstrong's book may think that she and Warraq are discussing two entirely different belief systems. ...
Warraq is particularly critical of Noah Feldman, the NYU law professor whom the US government has enlisted to assist in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution. If Feldman's new book "After Jihad" is any indication of what that document will look like, Warraq is concerned.
"How can Feldman believe there is any compatibility at all between Islamist movements and democratic principles?" he asks. 'They are democrats only in that they will use elections to take power. One man, one vote, one time. The first people who suffer are women, and after that non-Muslims. The level of denial from Western liberals renders me speechless.'" (See also: The Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society.)

"'The Bush junta'" (James Bowman, The New Criterion, from the Summer 2003 issue)
"Virtually since the day he took office, Bush has been repeatedly, almost routinely, accused of dishonesty in matters of political and economic substance by the likes of Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, and Michael Kinsley, and no one seems disposed to suggest that such accusations are or ought to be outside the bounds of civilized discourse.
As a result, the habit is now spreading to the rest of the media and to the political opposition, who are accusing the president of "deception," saying that he "knowingly misled the American people" and suggesting (in Senator Bob Graham's case) that he deserves to be impeached. Over a possibly faulty intelligence report about Saddam's lust for Nee-jhairian uranium? Preposterous! But clearly, Graham is just following in the footsteps of Krugman et al. in assuming the worst about his president. Soon, we can imagine, he will be joining them, along with Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and the intellectual elites of France and Central America, in imputing even darker crimes to what Vidal calls "the Bush junta." It's all enough to make Bill Kristol exult that the Democratic party has been driven mad by its hatred of Bush. He may be right, but this should be no cause for rejoicing among patriotic Americans who care about preserving our tradition of democratic debate between honorable opponents."

"Saddam fiddles as Tony burns" (John Gross, The New Criterion, from the Summer 2003 issue)
"It must be hard, if you live outside Britain, to realize quite how unremitting a campaign has been waged against Tony Blair and his government since the end of the Iraq war. Day after day their record on Iraq has come under attack - from the media, from disaffected members of the Labour party, from critics of the war in general. Some rough blows have been struck.
A new pitch of animosity was reached around the middle of July, when the left-wing weekly the New Statesman published what was effectively an anti-Blair issue, in the course of which it described him as a psychopath. ...
The idea that Blair had Kelly's blood on his hands quickly became the cliché of choice. A former Labour minister, Glenda Jackson, called for his immediate resignation. So did the Guardian’s heavyweight commentator Hugo Young. The Sunday Times celebrated his arrival in Japan, just after he had heard about the suicide, with a cartoon showing him being swept away by a Hokusai-style wave. (Caption: "You've had it, Tone.") The mass-circulation Daily Mail - a Conservative paper - devoted its entire front page to pictures of Blair, his propaganda chief Alastair Campbell, and his defense minister Geoff Hoon under the banner headline, "Proud of Yourselves?" The following day its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday, was fairly bursting with talk of shame and disgrace. One of its regular commentators described Blair and his associates as "wicked and ruthless men," while it ran a piece by the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, the longest-serving member of the House of Commons, in which he accused Blair of acting like a war criminal: "There may yet come a day when Parliament decides it has a duty to impeach him."(It was Dalyell who not long ago distinguished himself by alleging that Blair was under the influence of "a Jewish cabal.")" (See also: "Bye bye" (Stephen Pollard, stephenpollard.net, 2003/07/18))

"Telling the Truth in Iraq" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2003/08/17)
"But here's what is new and will have a big impact on inter-Arab politics, if Iraq can be rebuilt: Many Iraqis today express real resentment for the other Arab regimes, and even toward the Palestinians, for how they let themselves be bought off by Saddam. ...
Hassan Fattah is a young Iraqi-American journalist who has returned to Baghdad to start a terrific newspaper called Iraq Today (www.iraq-today.com). Before the fall of Baghdad, though, he worked as a reporter in the West Bank. "I sympathize with the Palestinian cause," he said, "but after the fall of Baghdad, when I told Palestinians that I was an Iraqi, they would say to me, 'You sold us out. You sold Iraq for nothing.' I was called a traitor. The average Palestinian wanted to see us fight — to resist — America, and the American 'occupation,' because that is what they understood."
Of course, Iraqis want to run their own government as soon as possible, said Mr. Fattah — but not in order to join the old Arab nationalist parade, but rather to focus on themselves. "Iraqis know Saddam was a fake," he explained. "His Arabism came at their expense. For Iraqis it was not Arabism, it was torture and subjugation. [Now] there is this feeling that the Arab world has lashed out at us because we did not 'resist' the Americans. It was because Iraqis have learned the lessons of phony Arabism — that Saddam could send $35,000 to the families of [Palestinian] suicide bombers, while leaving his own people starving and living on two dollars a day.
'That's why there is a dramatic gulf now between Iraqis and a lot of other Arabs. Young people here want to move on. In 10 years, this will be a very different place. If I can be a part of it, it will be like Hong Kong or Korea — but with an Iraqi face.'" (See also: Iraq Today.)

"Arabs vs. Iraqi Reality" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2003/08/17)
"More than three months after the fall of the Ba'athist regime, there has been no attempt at developing a common Arab analysis of the war and its aftermath.
Instead, most Arab states have resorted to their traditional methods of negation and dissimulation.
* They have refused to recognize the newly created Governing Council (Majlis al-Hukm), and toyed with the idea of suspending Iraq's membership in the Arab League. ...
Iraq will lose little if it is suspended or excluded from the Arab League, an organization that is regarded as moribund by many of its members. In fact, over 300 Iraqi intellectuals with many different political backgrounds have just published a petition asking the Governing Council to withdraw from the Arab League. ...
Many countries have already understood the realities of Iraq. Neighboring Iran and Turkey have given de facto recognition to the Governing Council and are thus in a position to seek a high profile role in that country. Russia, too, has adopted a similar position, distancing itself from France's Machiavellian maneuvers. Will the Arabs miss the bus again?" (See also: "Arab nations refuse to recognize Iraq's Governing Council" (AP/US Today, 2003/08/05))

"The strangest twist of all: Dr Kelly was a hawk" (Matthew d'Ancona, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/08/17)
"On June 30, for instance, Dr Kelly wrote to Bryan Wells, the head of counter-proliferation and arms control at the MoD, to make clear that a decade's contact with Saddam's murderous regime had left him in no doubt about "the menace of Iraq". He concluded: "I most certainly have never attempted to undermine Government policy in any way especially since I was personally sympathetic to the war." ...
What the weapons expert meant was this: that the Government, in his view, was wrong to focus upon existing weapons stocks - the casus belli Mr Blair and George W Bush had agreed upon - when the real problem was Saddam's indisputable intention to develop those stocks in future. Dr Kelly felt that the Prime Minister and his aides were exaggerating the Iraqi dictator's present capability, caricaturing the available intelligence, and, in so doing, discrediting a noble cause.
That, of course, was an easy and lofty conclusion for a backroom MoD egghead to reach, insulated as he was from 24-hour media coverage, hostile parliamentary scrutiny and the need to sell the war to the deeply sceptical public. The dossiers, imperfect as they were, were a comprehensible response to a completely new political dilemma. They were the first, faltering attempt by Western governments to prepare public opinion for a pre-emptive attack on a rogue state with proven links to terrorist organisations which refused to come clean over its WMD stockpile. The stakes were, and are, unimaginably high, as Dr Kelly discovered much too late."

Saturday, August 16, 2003

News and commentary:

"Bomb Blamed for Shutting Down Key Iraq Oil Pipeline" (Joseph Logan, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2003/08/16)
"A bomb was blamed for severing Iraq's newly reopened northern oil export pipeline, dealing a new blow to U.S. hopes of oil powering a recovery in an economy battered by war and years of sanctions.
Thamir Ghadban, U.S.-appointed de facto oil minister, told a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday it would be several days before the pipeline to Turkey was operational.
"We believe at this stage it was an explosive device planted on the pipeline," he said.
Saboteurs have been blamed for a spate of fires and explosions along the pipeline, which had begun moving crude from Iraq's northern Kirkuk oilfields on Wednesday for the first time since U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein on April 9.
Iraq's U.S.-led administration, which sees the oil industry as key to creating jobs to ensure stability in the country, said the bombing sparked a fire on the pipeline north of the town of Baiji for 24 hours before it was put out on Saturday."

"Don't expect an apology" (Jonathan S. Tobin, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/16)
"On July 31 The Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial cartoon by Tony Auth that depicted Israel's security fence in the form of a concentration camp shaped like a Star of David. Inside each segment of the star were pathetic Palestinian Arabs imprisoned by the Jewish symbol.
The cartoon was not only dead wrong on the issue it was attempting to depict the fence's purpose is to keep Palestinian suicide terrorists out of Israel, not to confine the Arabs it was also incredibly offensive.
By appropriating the symbol of Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people and using it in a way which, to many readers, evoked the Holocaust, Auth stepped way over the line of acceptable commentary. ...
Other than publishing letters about the cartoon on consecutive Sundays, the paper itself was silent. For his part, despite charges of anti-Semitism, Auth was unrepentant in interviews with both the Jewish Exponent and Editor & Publisher. He claimed his publishers backed him up.
There was little doubt about that. Though protests were ongoing, two weeks after the cartoon was published, it was clear that no apology would be forthcoming from the Inquirer." (See also: "Tony Auth's inspiration" (Stefan Sharkansky, Shark Blog, 2003/08/03))

"Mr. Gore's Blurred View" (The Washington Post Outlook, from the 2003/08/16 issue)
"Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a "virulent threat in a class by itself," validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies "designed to benefit friends and supporters." The war was waged "at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil." And it occurred because "false impressions" precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war.
This notion - that we were all somehow bamboozled into war - is part of Mr. Gore's larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq.
You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents "a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism." But then how to explain that 98 senators - including all four Democratic senators now running for president - voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an "ideologically narrow agenda" serving only "powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle."
But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: 'The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . '" (See also: "Gore Goes Gaga" (Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/08/18 issue) and "Former Vice President Al Gore: Remarks to MoveOn.org" (MoveOn.org, 2003/08/07))

"The Disgrace of the BBC" (Josh Chafetz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/08/25 issue)
"The war in Iraq has left in its wake a string of embarrassments for the BBC that have many questioning its privileged status. Throughout the war, the BBC was consistently - and correctly - accused of antiwar bias. These accusations began almost as soon as the fighting did, when the BBC described the death of two Royal Air Force crew members, after their jet was accidentally downed by a U.S. Patriot missile, as the "worst possible news for the armed forces." On March 26 (less than a week into the fighting), Paul Adams, the BBC's own defense correspondent in Qatar, fired off a memo to his bosses: "I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties.' This is simply NOT TRUE." He went on to ask, 'Who dreamed up the line that the coalition are achieving 'small victories at a very high price?' The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and costs still relatively low. This is real warfare, however one-sided, and losses are to be expected.'"

"Libya Takes Blame for Lockerbie Bomb" (Peter Slevin, The Washington Post, 2003/08/16)
"After 14 years of defiance and denials, the Libyan government took formal responsibility yesterday for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, an attack that killed 270 people and cemented Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's international isolation.
Libya agreed to pay as much as $10 million to each victim's family and said in a letter delivered to the U.N. Security Council that it is responsible for the actions of Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, convicted of plotting to destroy the airliner with a bomb built into a Toshiba radio and hidden inside a suitcase. ...
Yesterday's developments, intended by Libya as a bid for redemption and renewed foreign trade, represent a dramatic step in the quest to hold Gaddafi and his government accountable for one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in U.S. history."

"Altered appearance helped Hambali hide" (The Washington Times, 2003/08/16)
"Now clean-shaven and his face altered by plastic surgery, he was arrested with a woman by Thai and U.S. officials in Ayutthaya, a past Thai capital 50 miles north of Bangkok, a senior Thai general said. ...
Hambali was arrested Monday at an apartment building on the outskirts of Ayutthaya, a major tourist attraction with its dozens of ancient Buddhist temples, local residents said.
Mr. Thaksin said the arrest came after a tip from residents.
"We arrested the suspect after people notified police about the appearance of the foreigner. And after we checked his passport, we found that he's the one that's wanted by several countries," Mr. Thaksin said, according to Thailand's state radio network.
Plainclothes officers smashed down the door of Hambali's one-room apartment and took him away after a violent struggle, residents in the building told the Associated Press." (See also: "Major Al Qaeda Arrest" (Brian Ross, ABC News, 2003/08/14))

Friday, August 15, 2003

News and commentary:

"Depleted Uranium - the Science" (Michael McNeil, Impearls, 2003/08/15)
McNeil debunks the "depleted-uranium agitation", with lots of links and wrap-ups of scientific studies: "Best I can make out, the depleted-uranium agitation by the antiwar left is more than just exaggeration, it's pretty much invented whole cloth — garbage, in other words. ...
Depleted uranium has two possible modes of instigating biological damage — ionizing radiation due to the fact that it's a radioactive metal, and biological toxicity due to the fact that it's a “heavy” metal. Regarding the first of these, radioactively “depleted uranium” is basically as little radioactive as it's possible to be and still be radioactive and not inert.This may sound like a quibble, but the half-life of uranium-238, the major radioactive component of depleted uranium (since it's been “depleted” of other uranium isotopes) is 4.5 x 109 (i.e., billion) years (not "109" years as news pieces have erroneously reported). In other words, over the entire 4.6 billion year age of the Earth, the quantity of uranium-238 on this planet has decreased by only half. That is barely detectably radioactive at all, on the human timescale.
Even when it does decay, virtually all (> 99.99%) of uranium-238 follows the mode of alpha decay (emission of a Helium-4 nucleus), which cannot penetrate beyond a couple of inches in air and is stopped cold by sheet of paper. ...
Plus the U.N., E.U., Britain's Royal Society, and others have repeatedly investigated the effects of depleted uranium in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia as a result of its use in the wars that NATO and the U.S. have fought there. The results of all these studies are practically the same: essentially no adverse medical effects, even less than what might have been expected due to uranium's heavy metal character.
In these studies, depleted uranium gets off the hook from both a theoretical and a practical, what-are-the-observed-results? point of view; thus it's very difficult to take any leftist-fanned-up commotion with regard to this matter seriously. They're just lying, I'm sorry to say." (Note: Found via InstaPundit. See also, for example: "Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons Lingers as Health Concern" (Larry Johnson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer/Common Dreams, 2003/08/04))

"The New American Way of War" (Max Boot, Foreign Affairs, from the July/August 2003 issue)
"Spurred by dramatic advances in information technology, the U.S. military has adopted a new style of warfare that eschews the bloody slogging matches of old. It seeks a quick victory with minimal casualties on both sides. Its hallmarks are speed, maneuver, flexibility, and surprise. It is heavily reliant upon precision firepower, special forces, and psychological operations. And it strives to integrate naval, air, and land power into a seamless whole. This approach was put powerfully on display in the recent invasion of Iraq, and its implications for the future of American war fighting are profound. ...
Coalition forces in the second Gulf War were less than half the size of those deployed in the first one. Yet they achieved a much more ambitious goal - occupying all of Iraq, rather than just kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait - in almost half the time, with one-third the casualties, and at one-fourth the cost of the first war. ...
Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of "only" 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."

"The Awakening" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/08/15)
"What is an ally? Were NATO brothers like France and Germany allies — whose U.N. performances made China's seem friendly? Is Greece an ally — whose mass anti-American demonstrations were larger than those in Cairo or Damascus? Perhaps it's Mexico, which opposed our efforts in Iraq and exports 1-2 million of its own people illegally across the border as a means to prevent much-needed radical reform at home. In this context, the current meaning of "ally" too often reads as a state benefiting from American friendship that in turn expresses its thanks by gratuitous expressions of hostility in times of crisis.
What is the United Nations? It cannot stop slaughter in Liberia, as it did not in Rwanda or Serbia. It asks the United States to preempt in Liberia to prevent chaos — but not in Iraq, when our security and the world's stability were in far greater danger. The only time many of its members ever approve of the idea of democracy is when voting in the General Assembly; horrific regimes like Libya, Syria, and Iran sometimes chair committees on humane causes. France claims it is a powerful nation worthy of a veto on the Security Council, but it is also a mere one state in a new European Union that as yet has no collective voice at the U.N. A better definition for the current body is something like the following: an international organization where Western liberal states seek to ingratiate themselves with tyrannies, theocracies, and tribes — appeasement winning accolades of justice, while principles earn slanders of racism, colonialism, and imperialism."

"A Nation of Fools" (Ryan O'Donnell, FrontPageMagazine, 2003/08/15)
An interesting essay on how - and why - The Nation has been proven consistently wrong for almost a century: "As the flagship publication of the political Left, The Nation consistently champions leftists' lost causes, supporting totalitarian and Communist regimes while simultaneously rejecting any suggestion the United States is justified in military, or even philosophical, opposition to these rogue states. However, while The Nation's leftist vision of foreign policy has been constant, it has also proven to be consistently wrong. Throughout much of the twentieth century, and now, with its coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom in the twenty-first century, the political Left's ideology, as profiled in The Nation, has been continually predictable, shortsighted and ultimately erroneous with the vast majority of its foreign policy analysis. Certainly, it would be unfair to criticize The Nation for a few instances in which ideological fervor clouded the publication's rationale. However, for almost a century now, the pages of The Nation continues to illuminate the Left's analytical inaccuracies in nearly every seminal foreign policy issue encountered by the United States."

"N. Korea Shops Stealthily for Nuclear Arms Gear" (Joby Warrick, The Washington Post, 2003/08/15)
"In recent months, North Korea's attempts to seek parts and technology in Europe have increased dramatically, U.S. and European intelligence officials say. Lately, they say, the attempts are becoming ever more elaborately disguised.
On April 4, just one day after the Ville de Virgo left Hamburg, a different cargo ship departed Japan's Kobe Harbor carrying three devices known as direct-current stabilizers, which also are used in uranium enrichment, according to a Japanese government account of the incident. Just as with the aluminum shipment, the electronic parts were being routed to a third country - in this case, Thailand - where the cargo would be diverted to North Korea.
In mid-May, a month after the aluminum pipes were seized, North Korea nearly succeeded in acquiring 33 tons of sodium cyanide, a chemical used in making the deadly nerve agent tabun, according to Western diplomatic sources. The chemicals were purchased legally from a German manufacturer who believed the buyer was a Singapore company. But in fact, a switch was planned that would have diverted them to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital." (See also: "On North Korean Freighter, a Hidden Missile Factory" (Joby Warrick, The Washington Post, 2003/08/14))

Thursday, August 14, 2003

News and commentary:

"Not a dress rehearsal" (The Economist, 2003/08/14)
A balanced look at the situation in Afghanistan: "Whether or not Afghanistan can survive comes down, in part, to one simple question: are the forces of national integration there greater than the forces of local disintegration?
Optimists say yes. They think Afghanistan is more stable than at any time in the past 24 years. Many, perhaps all, of the terrorist training camps in the country have been destroyed. ... Afghanistan enjoys a legitimate government, confirmed by a representative loya jirga. There is considerable progress in writing a constitution and organising elections for next year, with suffrage for women. The new national currency, the afghani, is widely accepted and stable. The economy grew by 28% last year, according to preliminary IMF estimates. Two million or more refugees have returned home to rebuild their lives. That — together with the remarkable absence of any ethnic separatist movements — underlines Afghans' belief in their own country. There has been no major humanitarian crisis. Donors remain committed to their promises. America has tripled its aid to $1 billion this year; it will pressure others to do the same.
Pessimists scoff at much of this. Taking a marker pen, they score off on a map the third of the country — the south and southeast — that donors now think is too dangerous to visit. ...
The worry is that drought, drugs and insecurity could start to feed off each other. A glance at the map suggests they already do. Three of the country's five big drug producing provinces — Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar — are unsafe and parched. Poppy cultivation is spreading to new areas, and with it insecurity. The nightmare is a new Colombia: a place where drug lords capture and wreck government and the economy alike."

"Manifest destiny warmed up?" (The Economist, 2003/08/14)
"What is the shelf-life of an idea? Just a few short months ago, the talk — and not just in Washington, DC — was of empire, America's that is. ...
To be sure, America is now going through an imperial phase, but this one has more in common with its earlier imperial phases than with the imperial eras of Britain, Byzantium or Rome. If the assertive nationalists and the democratic imperialists have come together over Iraq, that does not mean the administration has signed up for the entire neocon agenda. And as for the foreign-policy pundits, in time they will move on to a new idea.
That does not mean Mr Bush is wrong to think that democracy is the best hope for the world, though it will surely have to take different forms in different places. He is right. But he is also right in disavowing any imperial intentions. America will have to promote its aims some other way, probably by leading multilateral action. Empire is simply not the American way. If the United States has to intervene in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and then stay on, it will not enjoy the experience. Running the place, it will discover, is nasty and brutish, so it had better also be short. Good or bad, that is not what most people mean by an imperium."

"Major Al Qaeda Arrest" (Brian Ross, ABC News, 2003/08/14)
"The CIA has captured a major al Qaeda leader who is believed to have planned bombings in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, ABC News has learned.
A top al Qaeda member and a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, Riduan Isamuddin — also known as Hambali — was arrested as part of a CIA undercover operation in the last 24 hours. The operation was cooperation with an unnamed Southeast Asia country that wants its participation kept secret, officials told ABC News.
The CIA called the arrest the "most significant capture since that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," who was captured in March, 2003, and believed to command al Qaeda's global terror network and have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. In the past, the CIA has called the Indonesia-born Hambali the "Osama bin Laden" of Southeast Asia.
Prisoners in custody have told CIA he recently received a large sum of money from al Qaeda to carry out attacks against U.S. targets in the region. "He will certainly know about what is in the pipeline," the official told ABC News. ...
Hambali, 36, was "clearly implicated" in plotting the Bali disco bombing in Oct. 12, 2002, and the attack on the Marriott hotel in Jakarta last week, according to a Pentagon official.
Officials say Hambali, whose importance only recently became known, was in on the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States."

"The BBC's Sexed-up Report" (The Wall Street Journal, 2003/08/14)
"During the inquiry yesterday into the suicide of Dr. Kelly, Ms. Watts blew Mr. Gilligan's tendentious report out of the water.
Ms. Watts released a tape of her last conversation with Dr. Kelly, who makes clear that he is not in a position to assert that Mr. Campbell inserted anything into the intelligence report. Ms. Watts said of her conversations with Dr. Kelly, "He didn't say to me that the dossier was transformed in the last week and he certainly didn't say that the 45-minute claim was inserted either by Alastair Campbell or by anyone else in government. In fact, he denied specifically that Alastair Campbell was involved in the conversation on May 30 . . . he was very clear to me that the claim was in the original intelligence." ...
Ms. Watts testified yesterday that the BBC seemed primarily interested in corroborating Mr. Gilligan's account rather than in the merits of her own reports: "I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate the Andrew Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose." And, "I was most concerned that there was an attempt to mold [her reports] so that they were corroborative which I felt was misguided and false."
As our European editorial page deputy editor Mike Gonzalez wrote last week, the problem here goes beyond the errors of judgment made by one reporter and the unwillingness of his higher-ups to acknowledge responsibility. It speaks to a culture of bias that has crept into the news reporting of what was once a very fine media organization." (See also: "Watts: 'BBC tried to mould my story'" (Jason Deans and Julia Day, The Guardian, 2003/08/13) and "Orwell's Warning" (Michael Gonzales, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/08/06))

"On North Korean Freighter, a Hidden Missile Factory" (Joby Warrick, The Washington Post, 2003/08/14)
The first of two articles: "Tae Min Hun, the dour captain of the North Korean freighter Kuwolsan, glared icily from the bridge as tempers around him soared in the midday heat. On June 30, 1999, as customs agents in India's northwestern port city of Kandla waited impatiently to board the vessel, Tae received urgent instructions from Pyongyang: At all cost, let no one open the cargo boxes. ...
When the ship's doors were finally reopened at gunpoint, the reason for the extreme secrecy became clear. Hidden inside wooden crates marked "water refinement equipment" was an assembly line for ballistic missiles: tips of nose cones, sheet metal for rocket frames, machine tools, guidance systems and, in smaller crates, ream upon ream of engineers' drawings labeled "Scud B" and "Scud C." The intended recipient of the cargo, according to U.S. intelligence officials, was Libya.
"In the past we had seen missiles or engine parts, but here was an entire assembly line for missiles offered for sale," said an Indian government official familiar with the discovery. 'This was a complete technology transfer.'"

"Inside the plot to sell a missile" (John P. Martin, The Star-Ledger, 2003/08/14)
"Around 10:30 Tuesday morning, Hemant Lakhani entered a top-floor suite at the Wyndham Newark Airport Hotel and smiled.
There on the bed sat the fruit of his labor: a surface-to-air missile that for 18 months he had plotted to deliver from Russia to the United States.
Lakhani, 68, clapped his hands and laughed as he examined and lifted the shoulder-launched weapon. Then he turned to his buyer, whom he believed to be a Somali terrorist intent on downing U.S. jets.
This was the first of 51 missiles that Lakhani hoped to deliver to his client. Now it was time to get paid.
Instead, federal agents rushed into the room and foiled a terrorist plot that they said was unlike any other that has emerged since the Sept. 11 attacks."

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

News and commentary:

"Watts: 'BBC tried to mould my story'" (Jason Deans and Julia Day, The Guardian, 2003/08/13)
"Newsnight reporter Susan Watts today denounced the BBC's "attempts to mould" her stories in what she believed was a "misguided strategy" to "corroborate" Andrew Gilligan's controversial report on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
In an extraordinary development at the Hutton inquiry today, Watts revealed she felt compelled to seek separate legal representation because of pressure from her BBC managers to reveal David Kelly as her main source in order to corroborate Gilligan's story - a move she felt "was misguided and false.'"

"Bomb rips through bus killing 15 in southern Afghanistan, blamed on al-Qaida" (AP/MSNBC, 2003/08/13)
"A bomb ripped through a bus Wednesday in southern Afghanistan, killing 15 people, including six children, and officials said they believe al-Qaida and remnants of the Taliban militia carried out the attack.
The explosion, apparently from a bomb planted in the bus, wounded five others as the bus passed through Nadh Ali district in Helmand state on its daily route to the provincial capital Lashkargah.
''It was a powerful explosion. The bus was destroyed,'' a district administrator Ghulam Mahauddin said in a satellite telephone interview. ''Six of the dead were children, eight were men and one was a woman.''
No one claimed responsibility, and no arrests were made. But Helmand provincial deputy governor Haji Pir Mohammed and Mahauddin blamed al-Qaida insurgents and remnants of the Taliban militia, ousted by a U.S.-led coalition in late 2001."

"Five killed in Saudi gunfight" (BBC News, 2003/08/13)
"Four Saudi police officers and one suspected Islamic militant have died in a shoot-out in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
The gun battle, in the residential district of al-Suwaidi, lasted for five hours.
Eyewitnesses said at least five houses were targeted in the raid, which started late on Tuesday afternoon.
Seven people were arrested on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda, the interior ministry said.
Saudi Arabia has been tightening security since a series of suicide attacks on Western targets in Riyadh on 12 May killed 35 people, including nine attackers.
Saudi security sources said on Monday that police had arrested 10 militants following a shoot-out in Riyadh on Sunday.
However, the UK Foreign Office said on Tuesday told Reuters news agency it believed the suspects - who may have been planning an attack against a British target - may actually have escaped."

"Rising Tide of Islamic Militants See Iraq as Ultimate Battlefield" (Neil MacFarquhar, The New York Times, 2003/08/13)
"In much the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel, the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier, Iraqi officials and others say.
"Iraq is the nexus where many issues are coming together — Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture," said Barham Saleh, the prime minister of this Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq. "If the Americans succeed here, this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for." ...
Mullah Mustapha Kreikar, the founding spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, said in an interview on Sunday with LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, that the fight in Iraq would be the culmination of all Muslim efforts since the Islamic caliphate collapsed in the early 20th century with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. "There is no difference between this occupation and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979," he said from Norway, where he has political asylum."

"Gilligan stands by his version of the fateful meeting that sparked a crisis" (Sandra Laville and Neil Tweedie, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/08/13)
"In the report, the first detailed one on the programme, Mr Gilligan appeared to go further than anything he had recorded in the notes from his meeting with Dr Kelly. He suggested the Government "probably knew" the 45 minutes claim was wrong, but had included it anyway.
"You admit there is a world of difference between people getting things wrong accidentally and people getting things wrong knowingly?" Mr Dingemans asked. Was that not, he added, tantamount to a "charge of fraud" against the Government?
The reason the row between the Government and the BBC had grown so "heated" was because of the perception that there had been the allegation of conscious wrong doing, he said.
He accused Mr Gilligan of allowing that wrong perception, an allegation in "express bad faith", to be broadcast across the world and picked up by other media.
Mr Gilligan replied: "Yes, but that was not an allegation I would necessarily support." Speaking slowly and holding his hands in front of him, he admitted that he would not have used that language again and had subsequently removed it from other reports."

"Feds in Newark foil terror missile plot" (John P. Martin, The Star-Ledger, 2003/08/13)
"Lakhani, who is in his 60s, was described by one source as an international arms smuggler who had dealings with "all types of terror cells" and arranged to buy weapons from sources in the former Soviet Union.
It was unclear last night whether Lakhani had any direct links to al Qaeda, but the evidence against him is expected to include audio or videotapes in which he speaks favorably of the group's leader, Osama bin Laden. In one conversation, he allegedly praises bin Laden for "a good thing," referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a source familiar with the tape.
In another tape, Lakhani tells his buyer that Americans are "bastards."
The conversations are among dozens collected during surveillance by agents here and overseas, sources said. Many occurred at the same airport hotel where Lakhani was arrested yesterday."

"'Shoot Down Air Force One'" (Adrian Shaw and Ian Miller, The Daily Mirror, 2003/08/13)
"He was caught on an undercover FBI agent’s tape saying he wanted it to shoot down a large passenger plane.
And BBC correspondent Tom Mangold told News 24: “The man behind the operation was looking for terrorists who would fire the missile at Air Force One – the president’s plane.”
But the FBI claimed the plot to kill Bush was “a false report”.
Spokesman Bill Evanina said: “There was no danger or suggestion that Air Force One was being targeted or even thought of as a target.” The Indian born man was arrested by the FBI at a hotel in Newark, New Jersey, in an international sting by MI5, MI6, the FBI and Russian agents." (See also: "Igla missile's potent force" (BBC News, 2003/08/13): "The Igla missile reportedly smuggled into the United States by a British arms dealer is capable of downing the US president's plane, Air Force One, defence analysts have told the BBC. The Igla 18 is a state-of-the-art weapon belonging to a group of surface-to-air missiles which are also known as SAM Sevens. Chris Yates, security analyst at Jane's Aviation, said it could destroy anything flying up to 10,000 feet.")

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

News and commentary:

"Missile Plot" (ABC News, 2003/08/12)
"British national was arrested this morning on suspicion of being involved in a plot to smuggle a surface-to-air missile into the United States, ABC News has learned.
The man was arrested as part of an international sting conducted by American, British and Russian authorities. The sting began five months ago in Moscow, law enforcement sources said.
This afternoon, law enforcement officials conducted a raid in midtown Manhattan to seize financial records and cash in connection with the case. According to reports, two men believed to be involved in money laundering were arrested at a gem dealership.
The unidentified British national allegedly sought to smuggle a Russian-made surface-to-air missile into the country, and he believed he was selling the missile to would-be terrorists, sources said. Instead, he sold it to undercover agents.
The man, of Indian descent, thought the missile might be used to to shoot down a passenger jet, sources said."

"Powell: Peace Process Will Not Be Stopped by Bombs" (Reuters, 2003/08/12)
First, is it so smart of Powell to say that Palestinian suicide bombings won't stop the peace process? Of course, I understand Powell's point, but what does it signal to Palestinian terrorists? Also, the headline underlines the Orwellian absurdity of the conflict. Peace will not be stopped by war:
"Secretary of State Colin Powell said "we will not be stopped by bombs" after a pair of Palestinian suicide bombings killed two Israelis on Tuesday and threatened to derail U.S. peace efforts.
Speaking to a group of Israeli and Arab students in a speech, Powell argued the United States and others pressing Israelis and Arabs to end nearly three years of violence would not be deterred by the latest killings.
"I have already seen reports (on television that say) 'Well, the road map is now finished; or the cease-fire is over; or this is all off track.' No it is not. We cannot let it go off track. We will continue to move forward on the road map. We will continue to do everything we can," Powell said.
"We will not be stopped by bombs. We will not be stopped by this kind of violence because we owe it to you, we owe it to you to give you a better world," Powell told the students."

"U.S. captures general, ex-Saddam bodyguard" (CNN.com, 2003/08/12)
"An Iraqi general and one of Saddam Hussein's former bodyguards were among 14 Iraqis captured Tuesday during a raid near Tikrit, a U.S. Army spokesman said.
Lt. Col. Steve Russell said the Iraqis were caught after a three-hour raid on 20 houses south of the north-central city, Saddam's ancestral home. Officials described the detainees as members of a family closely associated with the deposed Iraqi leader.
About 200 U.S. soldiers participated in the operation, Russell said.
Though the suspects are not among the wanted Iraqis whose faces are on decks of playing cards distributed to U.S. troops, the general and ex-bodyguard appeared on another list of former regime officials being sought, he said.
One of the suspects was the former chief of staff of the Republican Guard, Russell said."

"Terror returns: Two suicide bombers kill two, wound dozen" (The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/12)
"Suicide bombers killed two Israelis and wounded more than a dozen in two attacks within a half hour of each other this morning.
A shopping mall in Rosh Ha'ayin, an eastern suburb of Tel Aviv, was the scene of the first attack at about 9 a.m. One Israeli was killed. Rosh Ha'ayin is several miles west Elkana, where the security fence that is under construction ends at the moment.
A second Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of the West Bank town of Ariel, killing one and wounding two others. ...
Hamas claimed responsibility for today's Ariel bombing, while members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement said they had carried out the Rosh Ha'ayin attack. The two bombers were each 17, and lived near each other in Nablus, but there was reported to be no connection between the two."

Monday, August 11, 2003

News and commentary:

"How We Collapse" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/08/11)
"My point is rather that, because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs.
Most of us don't fear much from the fatwa of a murderous mullah, and few have had our sisters shredded before our eyes in one of Uday's brush chippers — much less ever seen chemical-warfare trucks hosing down our block, as cropdusters fogged our backyards.
Instead, we have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, or our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot, will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the La-La Land of Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents. ...
Such smug dispensation — as profoundly amoral as it is — provides us, on the cheap and at a safe distance, with a sense of moral worth. Or perhaps censuring from the bleachers enables us to feel superior to those less fortunate who are still captive to their primordial appetites. We prefer to cringe at the thought that others like to see proof of their killers' deaths, prefer to shoot rather than die capturing a mass murderer, and welcome a generic profile of those who wish to kill them en masse.
We should take stock of this dangerous and growing mindset — and remember that wealthy, sophisticated societies like our own are rarely overrun. They simply implode — whining and debating still to the end, even as they pass away."

"The Dissenters Club" (Jean Bethke Elshtain, Books & Culture, from the July/August 2003 issue)
"Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator. Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary. It was not always so. Throughout the World War II era, when the stakes were high, American intellectuals signed on for the war effort. Our foreign policy enjoyed bipartisan support: As everyone fought fascism, liberal, conservative, moderate, even radical intellectuals and academics found common ground without fearing that they would be accused of betraying a lofty stance of dissent.
The Vietnam era broke this solidarity forever; indeed, the Vietnam War era opened up a fissure that transfixes us yet and freezes our thinking. ...
So reflexive is the role of the intellectual as negator, so free from accountability, that the very meaning of dissent has been obscured. Hence in the wake of 9/11, those who disagreed with claims that America somehow brought the attacks on herself were said to be "stifling dissent." But the true measure of dissent isn't whether the vast majority of one's countrymen and women agree with what one is saying but, rather, that one has the freedom to say it. The widely repeated notion that no space exists within American society to make contrarian arguments is risible. Less frequently heard, in fact, is intellectual assent from academic and intellectual circles to something the government is doing or that America is undertaking." (See also: "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America" (Institute for American Values, 2002/02/12), a statement by 60 American intellectuals, including Elshtain.)

"Our true enemies" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2003/08/11)
"Yes, we want that 20-year-old terrorist dead or imprisoned. But we are naive and self-defeating if we simply continue to pick off terrorists in ones and twos, or even in hundreds, without recognizing that the very people whom we have embraced in Middle Eastern societies have created the environment in which terror thrives. And those same pals of ours have done their best to deflect all blame onto us.
We have looked away as the few destroyed the chances of the many, as the greedy ground the impoverished into the dirt. Now we are paying a price not for what we have done to Muslims, but for what we have failed to do.
Until the recent war against Saddam's regime, we never stood up for freedom in the Arab world.
We have consistently tolerated or supported those who said the right things to us, who signed the oil contracts, who promised to keep things quiet - and who made a mockery of every value our nation professes.
Our reward? Terror. But the truth is that we should be astonished that there is so little anti-American terrorism, given how long, how dishonestly and how virulently our supposed friends preached their theology of blame to local audiences.
As our political and business partners bankrupted their countries and created stagnant societies careless of human wastage, they accused us. They stole, and said we did it.
They bought mansions in the south of France, in London and Aspen, then told their people that Egyptians and Palestinians lived in hovels because America had stolen the wealth due to them - with the help of Zionist conspirators.
Our willingness to trust those who smile and pick up the dinner tab in Riyadh or Washington has been a bipartisan sin - and a national disgrace."

"The United States in the World – Just Wars and Just Societies" (Imprints, from the Vol. 7 no. 1, 2003 edition)
An interview with Michael Walzer, one of the precious few on the left who actually thinks rationally and argues logically: "What should be the role of Europe in a future international order? European states together could create a new balance of power, but that would require military expenditure on a scale that none of them, with the exception of the UK, seems willing to contemplate. Even so, some increase in their military budgets seems to me necessary if they are to play the part that I would like them to play in deciding when war is just and necessary. They can't claim such a role and then, if the decision is made to go to war, insist that the US (or the US and the UK) do all the fighting. That's not a morally tenable position. The US needs partners, real partners, who can say 'yes' and 'no' to our government – but these have to be partners who are ready to take responsibility for the way the world goes. Iraq would have nuclear weapons today, had Europe alone been making decisions about the inspection regime, the embargo, and the no-fly zones. And there would be many fewer Kosovars alive in Kosovo today had Europe alone been making decisions there. It is easy to criticise American unilateralism; I do that all the time. But European irresponsibility is an equally serious problem." (See also: "Can There Be a Decent Left?" (Michael Walzer, Dissent magazine, from the Spring 2002 issue) and "Excusing Terror - The Politics of Ideological Apology" (Michael Walzer, The American Prospect, 2001/09/22))

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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