Northman's Fury

John McCain won't be the first to leave the race for the Presidency, but its beginning to appear as though he will be the first big name to drop out. For all practical purposes, his campaign is over. I'm reminded once again of what I said after his trip to a Baghdad market:

You know, I almost wish he would take that stroll. Watching a guy I once admired so completely destroy his credibility is as painful as watching a guy like [Evander] Holyfield keep getting into the ring long past the point that he has what it takes to be a competitive boxer. Please stop!

It looks like that time is finally coming. On the other hand, maybe he'll take the Holyfield metaphor even further and keep on despite everybody around him walking away. I hope not.

William Kristol has an incredibly delusional article up in the Washington Post called, "Why Bush Will be a Winner".

I suppose I'll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one.

Well, ridicule certainly, but I'll leave that to those more qualified. There's just one thing I want to know.

What it comes down to is this: If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president.

I like the odds.

What do you think the odds are, and how much will you willing to lose betting on them?

Because if I've learned anything over the last few years, it's that betting against the predictions Kristol makes is a winning proposition.

Russia has suspended its participation in a key arms control treaty that governs deployment of troops and conventional weapons in Europe.

. . .

Putin has in past months threatened to freeze his country's compliance with the treaty, angered over U.S. plans to base parts of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

This isn't entirely a surprise, and things have been moving in this direction since Bush withdrew the US from the ABM treaty in 2002. Actions have consequences, and pushing NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries and even former Soviet republics was bound to cause consternation in Russia. Add the ABM treaty withdrawal and the push to put a ballistic missile shield on Russia's doorstep, and Putin's actions start looking quite reasonable from Russia's perspective.

This is another case where the Bush Administration acting as though there are no rules that apply to them, and therefore encouraging others to act the same way if they can, makes the world and the US itself a far less stable and safe place.

Stability for stability's sake is not generally a good policy, but upsetting every balance in pursuit of your own goals can quickly cause events to spiral out of control; yours and everyone else's. It seems we're all cursed to be living in interesting times.

Crooks and Liars has a video up from the Bill Moyer's show featuring two guys from opposite ends of the political spectrum discussing why its important that Congress move towards impeachment proceedings.

The reason I like the clip is because it makes a point that, while I've argued it a couple of times myself, often gets lost in the mix when discussing the Bush Administration's excesses: An impeachment of Bush is not really about Bush.

Peggy Noonan wrote an article yesterday about how people, even and especially those who used to support him, are now gritting thier teeth at the mere mention of his name. Given that fact, its hard not to look at talk of impeachment as being as much about the person as about his actions, but as the commentators in the linked clip noted, impeachment is important not because of Bush, but because of precendent.

When the arguments about warrentless wiretapping and other excesses come up, the defenders of those policies don't just talk about the threats these actions are supposed to diminish, but that they are certain that Bush and his Administration would never abuse these powers. Even if they were right about that, and it has already been proven wrong in several instances, they miss the point as well. Whatever abuses the Bush Administration might partake in, the powers aren't being given to Bush, they're being given to the Office of the President; this one and all those who follow him.

Bush probably isn't the second coming of Hitler, but the purpose of seperating powers among the various branches of the US government wasn't because certain individuals wouldn't abuse absolute power, but because at some point, someone would wind up in that office who will. If the powers this Adminstration has amassed aren't reversed and its excesses punished, those powers will remain tied to that office, and odds are that eventually, someone will take office willing to use those powers in the worst way imaginable.

That is why the Unitary Executive has to be fought and why impeachment is necessary: To roll back the progress the US has made to becoming a dictatorship in the future.

Another of the many situations that people don't seem to pay a great deal of attention to. McClatchy has a good story up regarding the increasingly complex situation in the region.

The account of the clashes around Songa village on June 9 and 10, given by African Union peacekeepers manning a small mountain outpost here in central Darfur, illustrates part of an increasingly upside-down security picture in Darfur. With some janjaweed now fighting alongside rebels they once tried to kill - and with the rebels riven by disputes and attacking peacekeepers and aid workers - this is hardly the same conflict of four years ago.

As desperate as life has become in Darfur, the new complications could make things worse.

At least 200,000 people - and perhaps as many as 400,000 - have been killed in Darfur since 2003, when Sudan's Arab-led government armed janjaweed to quell an uprising by non-Arab tribes demanding more political autonomy. The government's proxy war - labeled by the Bush administration as genocide - has emptied Darfur's Texas-sized countryside into refugee camps and unleashed what aid workers describe as the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.

Now there's a new set of problems: Few people know who's attacking or why. Armed groups are breaking off and recombining according to the tactical advantage that day. Aid agencies and peacekeepers are at greater risk than ever.

"One of the problems with the security situation at this point - it is not two sides fighting against each other," Andrew Natsios, President Bush's special envoy to Sudan, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April. "It's anarchy."

Simplistic storylines are great, but they rarely reflect the reality. The disintegration of this conflict from one of government-backed "Arabs" versus rebel "Africans" to a free-for-all probably wasn't that big a leap. For one, the difference between the "Arabs" and "Africans" in the conflict was that one side were nomadic herders and the other farmers. Stand them side by side and I'm sure most of us in North America couldn't tell the difference.

The fighting has its roots in water rights, and a drought and desertification that has driven the herders and farmers into conflict over the vanishing resource. In that context, the shifting alliances and control difficulties make much more sense. The jangaweed isn't fighting for the government so much as its fighting for resourced, and the rebels in the area are fighting for the same thing. With multiple tribal links all around, alliances of convenience become common.

Not that this changes much. The region is too isolated and under-reported for there to be any real international involvement, and the simple fact remains that the water is going to remain scarce and the population is going to fight over the scraps, however they organize themselves.

Maybe that's why nobody covers Darfur much; its too depressing.

An excellent article by David Halberstam at vanityfair.com called "The History Boys" regarding the Bush Administrations misuse of historical analogies.

And at the Agonist, Ian Welsh looks at the recent bill passed in the Senate regarding Iran and reminds us how easily a country can be manipulated into war.

USA Today has an article out today that states something that has been obvious for quite some time; that the next President of the United States is going to inherit a host of problems from the Bush Administration.

The 44th president will move into the Oval Office with an agenda defined in large part by the 43rd president.

In many ways, it will be George W. Bush's third term.

Among pressing issues left on the table: What's next in Iraq. How to restore America's reputation around the world. Whether to extend tax cuts that expire in 2010. What to do about Medicare's looming shortfall. And how to complete the job of helping the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina.

No new president gets a clean slate — global politics and the economy don't run in neat four-year cycles — but presidential scholars say the unfinished business Bush will leave for his successor is unprecedented since at least World War II.

"I can't think of a single modern president about to bequeath to his successor such a difficult agenda and such a damaged presidency," says Paul Light of New York University.

None of this should be a surprise.  In the case of the Iraq War, Bush has as much as said that the solution would be left to his successors, and with that, his supporters will do everything they can to pin the blame of its loss on those successors as well.  Bush’s latest speech gives the same message; stay the course, beg for more time, don’t make any actual decisions, and hope to stumble along for another Freidman or two until he can hand off the unwinnable mess to someone else to act as the fall guy.

And while the Iraq War is the most prominent of the messes that Bush will leave to his successor, the other issues he will be handing off are no less serious, and in some cases, will be even harder for the next President to resolve.

Domestically, there are a series of economic timebombs waiting for the next administration.  The Medicare and Social Security shortfalls looming from the bulge of retiring baby boomers is just the beginning.  The Bush tax cuts, aggravated by war spending, and the massively expensive and inefficient prescription drug benefit have all made those looming crisis’ even more difficult to deal with.  Added to those problems are the huge budget and trade deficits that will have to be balanced out someday, probably painfully, and more painful the longer they are allowed to grow.  And thanks to the size and importance of the US economy, its inevitable tumble will affect the rest of us.

Internationally, the question of the US’s credibility and international reputation becomes the most pressing long-term issue.  In addition to the Iraq War, projects like the extra-legal prison at Guantanamo Bay and no-longer-so-secret CIA prisons in former Soviet satellites have eroded America’s moral authority when it comes to criticizing other countries behaviour.

Without that authority, the US has much greater trouble using its “soft power” to affect change.  Despite its name, soft power is usually far more effective at convincing folks to change their behaviour than the military kind.

And the deterrent value of America’s military power has also suffered greatly under Bush.  The continued ability of a bunch of lightly armed insurgents to tie down the world’s most expensive military machine has given new heart to all of America’s enemies, and has allowed countries like Iran to conclude a US attack is virtually impossible at present and to act accordingly.  Given how close the US Army is to cracking under the strain it has been placed in, and how long it will take them to recover, that perception is not too far from the truth.

There is one small ray of hope here.  If the next President moves quickly to distance himself from many of the policies that have caused most of the damage to the US’s image, I figure a lot of the people who used to have a high opinion of the US will be willing to treat the Bush Administration as an anomaly and forgive the rest of the country.  On the other hand, if the next President fails to move in a new direction and return to the ideals of America’s past, the damage will become rooted and take decades or longer to reverse or recover to pre-Bush levels.

There are a couple points that worry me.  The first is the simple fact that Bush has another 18 months in power.  While his actions are slightly more constrained with the Democrats in control of Congress, he could still do something like launch an air attack on Iran that will make the current mess he’s handing off even worse.

The second is some version of a Black Swan; a successful terror attack in the US being the most likely, but any major event that the US isn’t prepared for could quickly change the calculus for both the current and subsequent administrations, and I have the feeling that it is unlikely to change things for the better.

Given those headaches, why do so many candidates want the job? Well, for one thing, with big problems can come big prospects.

The presidents most highly regarded by history are those who took over in troubled times and negotiated them with skill. Franklin Roosevelt followed Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression and then led the nation during World War II. Ronald Reagan is credited with restoring America's resilience after the Iranian hostage crisis and oil shocks of Jimmy Carter's tenure.

"I think the last president to have as much danger and opportunity was when Roosevelt got elected in 1932," Biden says. "The next president — I mean this literally, not figuratively — has a chance to change the world, to put the world on a different trajectory than it is on now."

A lofty goal for certain, and I can’t argue with the perception that America is in need of a great President, or possibly a string of them, to lead the country over the next several years.  Of course, that more than anything tells you what kind of President Bush is.

Given the large number of developing crisis' out there, you can expect to miss a few of them if they're not covered well. One everybody should be paying attention to, though, is the deteriorating situation in Pakistan, for the simple reason that they have nukes.

On Sunday, John Robb posted the following at Global Guerrillas:

Fareed Farooqui reports from Pakistan on the effects of a minor electricity outage (unintentionally caused by construction activity and exacerbated by load shedding due to insufficient production of power) in Karachi. Here are some examples:

• Vicious rioting broke out Wednesday evening in several parts of Karachi and continued into the night in protest against long spells of power outages.
• Residents of the affected areas came out on to the streets and burnt tires and other materials. In some areas, the protesters broke traffic lights and damaged fast food restaurants by pelting them with stones. The police resorted to shelling and aerial firing to disperse the crowds.
• Riots also took place in various areas of Lyari Town including Aath Chowk and Shah Baig Lane. Protesters besieged a KESC complaint centre near Aath Chowk, and tried to set it on fire, but the police reached there on time.

Pakistani guerrillas haven't yet (fortunately) adopted systems disruption against Pakistan's crowded cities (Baloch guerrillas have focused on the disruption of regional natural gas deliveries). However, given the example above, it appears that Pakistan's legitimacy is so weak (particularly given recent events) that if they did adopt systems disruption, the returns on investment would be exceptional.

And remember that we're talking about a country that has nukes.

Add to that this story from the Asia Times regarding the situation around the battle at the Red Mosque that he linked to yesterday.

Six days into the offensive against the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf was on Monday desperately searching for a way to contain the damage from the bloody confrontation.

Unrest over the clashes between armed students (and possibly foreign militants) inside the mosque and government forces has spread to Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the semi-autonomous tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. An army division (10,000-20,000 soldiers) has been sent to Swat Valley in NWFP to confront the allies of Lal Masjid as well as pro-Taliban Tehrik-i-Nifaz-Shariat-i-Mohammedi (TNSM) militants. There are also preparations for a massive army operation in the North Waziristan tribal area.

. . .

For the al-Qaeda leadership sitting in the tribal areas, the situation is fast evolving into the promised battle of Khorasan. This includes parts of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan from where the Prophet Mohammed promised the "end of time" battle would start.

Jihadist circles clearly want to exploit the crisis to boost themselves as major players, and envisage even a share in the power in Islamabad.

The final battle for the mosque is now apparently underway. This is a situation that is going to have to be watched very closely. The repercussions could easily become global if Musharraf were to fall, and those nukes fall into hands more inclined to make use of them.

A few days ago, Cernig posted about a campaign by British Muslims to condemn terror attacks in the name of Islam, asking whether or not it would do for those on the right who claim that Muslims in general don't condemn such attacks and therefore by default support them.

Of course is isn't. After all, once you've made the leap to Muslim=Terrorist, there's really very little any Muslim can do to convince you otherwise. It came to my mind again when I read two stories at BBC News. One regarding Muslim leaders calling on their followers to assist authorities in their search for extremists and to work on combatting extremist ideology in their midst, the second regarding an anti-terror rally in Scotland.

Since in the world-view of the xenophobes, such evidence of Muslim cooperation and protest contradicts their arguments, they must be dismissed and rationalized away. The two major arguments seem to be that they don't really mean it, and are just mouthing the words to take the pressure off so they can come back to blow us up in our beds at some later date. Or, that there just weren't enough of them showing up, so its only a puny minority of Muslims who dislike terror and therefore the vast majority are still basically extremists and terror-supporters.

None of this is a surprise, of course, but when you keep telling people that what they're doing isn't good enough and regardless of any positive actions they take, you're still going to treat them the same, they eventually stop bothering to try, and that will be unfortunate.

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent article up where he shows the steep decline in how people around the world perceive the United States over the last six years. In some countries the shifts are quite dramatic, and he uses that data to disprove a couple of arguments regarding the legacy of George W Bush.

If one argues -- as I frequently do, including as a central argument in A Tragic Legacy -- that America's hard-earned moral credibility in the world has collapsed as a result of the Bush presidency, one can hear similar objections from each side -- namely, that while America is despised in much of the world, that has little or nothing to do with events over the last six years.

Instead, this line of reasoning goes, America was disliked well prior to the advent of Bush radicalism, either because (in the view of neoconservatives as illustrated by Hugh Hewitt here), those who dislike America are intrinsically hateful of America and our values no matter what we do. Or (in the view of a small group on the Left), America is hated not because of what we have done in the last six years, but because America has been a bullying force of Evil in the world for the last several decades (at least) and our behavior under Bush is nothing new for America; it is but a natural extension of the country's foundational or long-embraced values

. . .

Either way, what is indisputably true is that world opinion regarding America has profoundly shifted -- for the worse -- since 2000. The question, then, is why has that happened? My answer is the simplest and most obvious one (which does not mean it is right): namely, public opinion of America has fundamentally changed over the last six years because our behavior in the world, our national character and our defining values have fundamentally changed.

There is another possibility that Glenn does not look into, that it is the rest of the world that has fundamentally changed and America has failed to change with it.

Part of the reason those on the left make the argument that the US was "a bullying force of Evil" for decades, is because any fair read of American foreign policy history will show that there are many well-documented cases where US actions were far less than idealistic. What the left misses, and what Glenn picks up on, is that those cases didn't affect America's moral standing or credibility. The question then, of course, is why?

Earlier this week, I got into a discussion at Hairy Fish Nuts regarding the use of the A-bomb on Japan, mainly revolving around whether or not it was a moral decision. The reason I'm thinking about that is because in the context of the Second World War, the bombs and the decision behind dropping them was understandable and to most, particularly at the time, justifiable.

In the same way, many of the less savoury actions of the United States in the last several decades were allowed or overlooked by its allies and those more neutral because of the context of the Cold War. Confronting a militarized Soviet Union with thousands of nuclear weapons brought with it a lot of leeway.

The same actions now, under the Bush administration, are having such a negative effect on US credibility because the enemy used to justify them is nowhere near the same threat level, whatever the fear-mongers like to say. Actions that could be passed off as defensive or justifiable under the Soviet threat now merely look self-interested and aggressive.

That's not to say that the US hasn't shifted since Bush took office, but the fundamental shift took place outside its borders, and as a result, a fundamental shift in the way US actions are perceived was inevitable.

The BBC has what I hope will remain a regular feature; graphs and analysis showing what kind of progress the "Surge" in Iraq is actually accomplishing.

If with all those doctors being arrested in Britain in relation to the attempted car bombs, and with the attention Michael Moore is getting with his Sicko film, some nutcase tried to link the two and pretend universal health care could lead to terrorism.

What's that you say? Check out Fox News?

Damn! You can't even spoof these guys anymore. Even a really active imagination of far-out justifications can't match the reality of what they are actually putting out these days.

Excerpts from an article posted yesterday in McClatchy's Washington Bureau

Officials in the Bush administration awoke on the morning of January 26, 2006 to catastrophic news.

Hamas, a violent Islamist movement whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, had won Palestinian parliamentary elections — elections that were deemed free and fair and a cornerstone to President Bush's initiative to bring more democracy to the Muslim world.

For the next 17 months, White House and State Department officials would undertake an all-out campaign to reverse those results and oust Hamas from power.

. . .

As recently as March 2007, Jordanian officials developed a $1.2 billion proposal to train, arm and pay Abbas' security forces so they could control the streets after he dissolved the government and called new elections. McClatchy Newspapers obtained a copy of the plan. While two sources close to Abbas said U.S. officials were involved in developing and presenting the plan, a State Department official described it as a Jordanian initiative.

. . .

"America is so far away, they are completely misinformed about what is happening," said Munib Masri, a Palestinian businessman allied with Abbas. "The more they do against Hamas, the more power they (Hamas) get from the people."

. . .

Hamas attacked in mid-June, sweeping away Fatah's forces in Gaza in a matter of days.

Bush administration officials argue that the attack revealed fractures in Hamas, saying it was apparently ordered by military commanders at odds with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Hamas is now politically isolated, they say.

But as Rice and Israel again move to bolster Abbas with hundreds of millions of dollars in previously blocked funds, some current and former U.S. officials say the Bush administration has repeatedly underestimated Hamas and failed to recognize how dysfunctional its Fatah ally had become.

Said Miller: "I don't know if we grasp it even now."

Now, none of this is a surprise, at least not to me, but what I find interesting about this story is its similarities to a story in the Washington Post from almost exactly a year ago.

The Americans were in Somalia because of concerns about terrorism, not land. But when the gunfire rang out, the sources said, the U.S. officials wrongly concluded that they were under attack by Islamic terrorists and abruptly fled. It was a provocation, U.S. officials later told Somalis, that demanded a muscular response.

In the weeks that followed this little-known incident, which U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny, the United States expanded its role in Somalia to levels not seen since it abandoned the country in 1994. The Americans helped organize a group of secular warlords into an "anti-terror coalition" and provided them with a large, steady diet of cash.

. . .

The infusion of cash upset a fragile balance between the two sides -- but not in the direction the Americans had hoped.

By March, the warlords were under siege. By June 6, they had fled. And by June 24, Hassan Dahir Aweys, a militant Islamic leader hostile to Western democracy and reputed to have ties to al-Qaeda, had taken control of Mogadishu.

. . .

Anti-Americanism, stoked by the war in Iraq, intensified as supporters of the Islamic courts spread word that the United States was backing the warlords, whom many residents of Mogadishu say operated with impunity as their gunmen terrorized the lawless city, raping, robbing and killing as they pleased.

Public opinion gradually coalesced in favor of the Islamic courts and their militias, Somalis say. Prominent businessmen contributed men, trucks and guns to the cause of driving out the warlords. And so on Feb. 18, when Raghe and several other warlords announced the formation of an "anti-terrorism coalition" -- featuring the backing of even more American money -- the reaction was swift. Battles broke out the same day in a struggle now seen as being between homegrown Islamic militias and a hated U.S. proxy force.

Two things leap out when the articles are read side by side. The first, is that the Bush Administration apparently has no ability to learn from its mistakes.

The second: Even the Republican candidates for President in 2008 don't want any implicit support from Bush lest it sink their chances. If his own party finds his support a burden, how much more people in areas of the world where there is far greater reason for dislike of him and his policies? These may have been unintended consequences, but they were far from unpredictable.

A couple days ago, I wrote about how having the US and Israel doing everything they can to prop up Fatah and destroy Hamas would have the effect of robbing Fatah of legitimacy, and ultimately making Hamas more credible to Palestinians.

Last night, I read this:

More than 150,000 civil servants and security officers who are loyal to the new emergency government will be paid their full monthly salaries on Wednesday, officials said today. It will be the first time in months that the Palestinian authority has been able to pay the workers.

But about 20,000 public-sector employees who remain allied with the Hamas-led government of Ismail Haniya, which was dismissed by the Palestinian president in June, will not be paid by the Authority. That is expected to deepen the political and ideological rift in Palestinian society since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in mid-June.

Gee, do ya' think? It also makes a mockery of this new "emergency government" representing the whole of the Palestinian people. Basically, Fatah is using the funds Israel transfered to them to pay off their cronies who they had put into positions over the decade or so before Hamas came to power on the promise of ridding the Palestinian Authority of the corruption that plagued it.

Compare that to this item.

Members of Hamas’s Executive Force police militia are protecting the banks in Gaza against possible assaults by angry unpaid workers — though the Executive Force members themselves are among those who will not be paid by the authority on Wednesday.

Guess who is going to come out of this looking better?

If Israel and the US are really looking for an end to hostilities and legitimate negotiating partner, then they are backing the wrong horse.

from Ian Welsh. It's well worth a good read; I'll only excerpt the conclusion:

Those of us who grew up in other countries; those of use who are America's real friends, want what all good friends want for those they care for - that you live up to your own ideals. That you be the nation we know you can be. A bastion of freedom; a nation with the highest respect for civil rights; a country that never gives up "a little freedom for a little safety" and finding neither. A country that doesn't torture, that believes that pre-emptive war is never excusable.

And we want it for you not just because it'd be best for the rest of the world, though it would be, but because it would be best for you. You would be safer, more prosperous, less fearful and have a more assured future if you lived up to the best of what it means to be America - to be American.

So, on July 4th, on your birthday, this is my wish for America and for Americans - that you remember that the right thing to do morally is almost always the right thing to do pragmatically. There is no choice between "freedom and safety"; there is no choice between prosperity and massive inequality; there is no choice between generosity and fiscal prudence and there is no such thing as "managed free speech".

Be the America the world loved. Be the America you can be proudest of - the one that does not torture, that treats all men as equal and with unalienable rights. Be the America that rebuilt Europe and that lends a helping hand to countries like Afghanistan. Be the America that would never invade a country that had not attacked you first. Be the America that is about lifting all boats and not just a few.

Be that America, and we will all be Americans.

makes me really wish that the satellite pulled in MSNBC. The clips I've seen, and this clip in particular, make me think I would enjoy watching his show. His smacking around of Bush for commuting Libby's sentence is well worth watching.

And really, any time somebody invokes my boyhood hero of John Wayne to make a point, you've got me sold.

If I'd have know all I had to do was write an article about him, I would have done it much earlier.

A BBC reporter who was kidnapped in the Gaza Strip has been released, Hamas TV reported Tuesday.

. . .

It is believed Johnston is now in the care of Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip three weeks ago.

I haven’t been following the Alan Johnston story too closely, but I have kept an eye on it.  It appears that the situation may be coming to an end, one way or the other:

Hamas milita members streamed into the streets of a Gaza Strip neighbourhood on Tuesday, closing in on the stronghold where a Palestinian clan is holding kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston.

Gunmen from the 6,000-strong force secured positions on rooftops and patrolled the roads outside the compound where the shadowy Doghmush clan, the family that controls the little-known group Army of Islam, has been keeping Johnston for nearly four months.

Security forces "will not spare any efforts to free the British journalist," a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said on Hamas radio. The broadcast also gave a toll-free phone number and urged the public to provide any information about the case.

Hopefully, Hamas can get Johnston out alive, though admittedly it feels kind of weird to be rooting for Hamas in any context.

One other point on this story, particularly given the “enemy of my enemy” theme of my last post.  The Army of Islam is linked, at least ideologically, to al Qaeda.  This situation shows once again the stupidity of lumping all of the various Islamic groups into one amorphous enemy.

And on a completely unrelated and irreverent note: Am I the only person who sees "Doghmush clan" and gets a picture in his head of a bunch of Inuit tooling around the desert in modified dogsleds?

Really, the only thing about this that's surprising is that it wasn't a full pardon. The reason, apparently, is that commuting the sentence allows "Scooter" to maintain his 5th Amendment right to keep his mouth shut, where a pardon could have seen him forced to testify. He'll probably get the pardon in January. 2009.

Update: Yep.

As we get a little further away from the attempted car bombings, my mind keeps turning to the question of what the people who were behind these attacks were hoping to accomplish. I mean, they were obviously looking to kill folks, but terrorism is violence with a political aim. It's never just about killing people. It's about killing people to affect politics and policies. So I ask myself what affects were the terrorists looking for?

Two points have come to mind. The first is in regards to the attack in Glasgow and the Muslim population of Scotland.

From reading a couple of posts from Cernig and Craig Murray, it seems that the Scottish Muslim community is on the whole quite moderate and well-integrated with the rest of Scottish society. The fact that the attackers appear to have been recently arrived foreigners seems to reinforce that. It's part of what made the attack there quite a shock to locals.

So why attack Glasgow and Scotland, where Muslims are much better integrated than in England? I've read that it was because Gordon Brown is a Scotsman, but I think it was also an attempt to drive a wedge between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities there. Provoke some anti-Muslim backlash against the local Muslim community, who apparently weren't even involved, in the hopes of isolating them and making them more susceptible to jihadist recruitment.

The second point is one I kept hearing repeatedly in the coverage of the attempted attacks; Gordon Brown has just become Prime Minister. It seems unlikely that this is a coincidence. These attacks were meant to affect his government. From the LA Times:

Brown has indicated he will shift Britain away from his predecessor Tony Blair's whole-hearted support of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but the attacks appear timed to push the government to move further and faster, and to deliver a message that the violence is directed at the policies, not the person.

"It was an obvious attempt to destabilize the government and to get the government to withdraw troops from Iraq," said Patrick Dunleavy a political analyst at the London School of Economics.

With all due respect to Mr. Dunleavy, I think he has it wrong. If Brown were to move to withdraw Britain from Iraq now, the cries of "Appeaser!", "Munich!", and "Chamberlain!" would ring so loudly they'd rival volcanic eruptions. (The Madrid bombings were an anomaly. 90% of Spaniards opposed the Iraq War. Anzar knew this and made his position worse by trying to blame the attacks on ETA. As a result, Spaniards rallied against their leader rather than for him, as is usually the case when a country is attacked.) Even if Brown wanted to withdraw from Iraq, he can't make that announcement now unless he has the kind of courage that's incredibly rare in a politician. He's stuck with continuing British involvement in Iraq for at least another six months to a year, and there's been no greater recruitment tool for the jihadists than that very involvement.

Add to that any actions he takes that can be perceived as targeting British Muslims, and the jihadists win the increased support they need to pose an ever more serious threat. In that, the failure of these attacks should work to Brown's advantage. Without any massive death or destruction, the need for vengeance or payback is muted. It gives him the chance to respond in an intelligent fashion without any impetus to the hysterical voices clamouring for counterproductive, short-sighted foolishness.

One of the most difficult things to realize about 4th generation warfare, is that the physical level of fighting; the bombs and missiles, the IED's and suicide attackers, isn't where the war gets decided. The really important battles are waged at the moral level on the stage of policies and politics. It is there where we will learn if these attacks remain failures, or if the Right Honourable Gordon Brown can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Israel has released some of the tax money it collected on the Palestinian Authority's behalf but withheld after Hamas's election victory last year.

. . .

Israel accelerated efforts to support Abbas after Hamas routed his Fatah movement and seized the Gaza Strip last month.

This isn't going to work. At least, not in the way people seem to be hoping it will. As William Lind pointed out, having Israel and the US rally around Abbas robs him of any legitimacy. Even if this influx of money actually reaches the Palestinian people in the West Bank, which given Fatah's legendary corruption is a debatable prospect, it won't make Abbas seem any more credible.

This is as if you had launched a lawsuit against some corporation and they told you they'd be happy to negotiate with you, so long as the guy who will be negotiating on your behalf is somebody they choose and who they will be giving large amounts of money to. Oh, and if you try to choose someone yourself, they'll make sure you are cut off of any funding whatsoever and starved.

Abbas now looks like a quisling. The Palestinians are unlikely to accept any agreement he signs as a result.

Of course, that may be the point. That way, the hard-right Israelis and their supporters can point to the fact that the Palestinians just won't negotiate in good faith, so they must be allowed to continue their campaign of creating "facts on the ground" with additional settlements and walls.