Iran To Violate The Geneva Convention

Iran announced tonight that the 15 British sailors captured off the coast of Iraq would get indicted as spies. A website associated with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that the sailors are "insurgents" and that they would try to prove that the group deliberately entered Iranian waters with the intent to spy on the Islamic Republic:

FIFTEEN British sailors and marines arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards off the coast of Iraq may be charged with spying.

A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the Britons would be put before a court and indicted.

Referring to them as “insurgents”, the site concluded: “If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences.”

The warning followed claims by Iranian officials that the British navy personnel had been taken to Tehran, the capital, to explain their “aggressive action” in entering Iranian waters. British officials insist the servicemen were in Iraqi waters when they were held.

The penalty for espionage in Iran is death. However, similar accusations of spying were made when eight British servicemen were detained in the same area in 2004. They were paraded blindfolded on television but did not appear in court and were freed after three nights in detention.

The Iranians cannot try the men for espionage if they captured the sailors in uniform. Article 46 of the Geneva Convention states this clearly:

2. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who, on behalf of that Party and in territory controlled by an adverse Party, gathers or attempts to gather information shall not be considered as engaging in espionage if, while so acting, he is in the uniform of his armed forces.

The indictment of British sailors in uniform as spies will violate the GC. Can we expect the same level of outrage over this explicit violation as the supposed violations of the US government?

WFB, The Documents, And The Gonzales Problem

I had not planned to return to the topic of the firings of the eight federal prosecutors tonight, but a column by William F Buckley and a review of the document dump clarified certain issues in the story. Buckley, I believe, captures the essence of the massive failure seen in the Department of Justice in this instance. He notes the plenary authority of both the President to fire political appointees and of Congress to conduct investigations into the conduct of the executive branch. He warns conservatives to refrain from constraining the latter for momentary political benefit:

It is obvious that there are Democrats in Congress who want an opportunity to forage for crimes in the matter of the discharged U.S. attorneys. Nobody has come up with a description of exactly what crime might have been committed and should be investigated. What is being conjectured is that an industrious investigating committee armed with subpoena powers could come up with malfeasance of some kind.

On the other hand, the investigative function of the legislative branch is of plenary importance, and should not be aborted by hypothetical immunities of the chief executive. Woodrow Wilson wrote in his classic book "Congressional Government" that Congress' investigative power was more important, even, than its legislative power. ...

At present, the investigators want to focus on the question whether one or more U.S. attorneys were discharged simply because they were doing their duty, and that duty included refusing to speed up the prosecution of various Democrats. But in the matter of any one of the fired attorneys, guilt might be found to attach to the attorney himself -- he abused his authority by protecting a friend, or by persecuting an enemy -- or to the attorney's superiors, reaching right up to the White House. ...

Of one thing Mr. Bush is manifestly guilty. It is the criminal (in the metaphorical sense) mismanagement of the whole business of the U.S. attorneys. The fault is not personal; it was probably the attorney general and other advisers of the president who took so many clumsy steps. But Mr. Bush's stress on his rights invites a coordinate stress on his responsibilities. "These attorneys," he said, "serve at my pleasure." Right. But presidential pleasures have to rest on defensible grounds.

Reading through the document dump from yesterday, Buckley's analysis looks spot on. It seems clear from the tenor of the e-mails that the instigation for the terminations came from within Justice. Kyle Sampson writes in an e-mail (which I will reproduce farther down) that he had not informed Karl Rove of the plans as of November 15th, 2006. While the White House had started the conversation shortly after the start of the second term, when cleaning house made more sense, the document string seems to support the description of the actual terminations as a DoJ project.

However, they also strain the notion that Alberto Gonzales had no operational discussions about the firings until afterwards. In the two weeks prior to the November 27th meeting, several e-mails got exchanged that clearly show that Justice had already developed a clear plan to terminate the officials -- and to coordinate the political response. The plan went forward after the November 27th meeting, which included Gonzales, making it almost certain that the plan got approved at this meeting of all the principals.

Kyle Sampson's e-mail of 11/15/06 to Harriet Miers and William Kelley at the White House had an attachment called "USA Replacement Plan.doc":

Harriet/Bill, please see the attached. Please note (1) the plan, by its terms, would commence this week; (2) I have consulted with the DAG [deputy Attorney General], but not yet informed others who would need to be brought into the loop, including Acting Associate AG Bill Mercer, EOUSA Director Mike Battle, and AGAC Chair Johnny Sutton (nor have I informed anyone in Karl's shop, another pre-execution necessity I would recommend); and (3) I am concerned that to execute this plan properly we must all be on the same page and be steeled to withstand any political upheaval that might result (see Step 3); if we start caving to complaining US Attorneys or Senators then we shouldn't do it -- it'll be more trouble than it's worth.

We'll stand by for the green light from you. Upon the green light, we'll (1) circulate the below plan to the list of folks in Step 3 (and ask you to circulate it to Karl's shop), (2) confirm that Kelley is making the Senator/Bush political lead calls, and (3) get Battle making the calls to the USAs. Let me know.

This e-mail generated a series of exchanges between Tasia Scolinos, the DoJ press liaison, and Catherine Martin at the White House. As the e-mails make clear, the White House didn't even know which USAs had been targeted for removal at that time; Martin had to get the list from Scolinos on November 21st. William Kelley at the White House also circulated Sampson's e-mail, informing the recipients (one of which was Martin) that the messages "reflect a plan by Justice to replace several US Attorneys". He also wrote: "Before executing this plan, we wanted to give your offices a heads up and seek input on changes that might reduce the profile or political fallout."

It was after this exchange that Justice scheduled the meeting with the principals. On November 21st, four days after sending out the e-mail asking for input on the final plan to replace the USAs, Sampson scheduled a meeting on 11/27 for the purpose of discussing "US Attorney Appointments". The meeting was supposed to include Sampson, Gonzales, his senior counselor Monica Goodling (who is now on a leave of absence), the DAG, Battle, and others. With the list of terminated USAs and the plan in hand, and with Sampson and Kelley looking for input on any needed last-minute changes, it seems very, very likely that the plan and the list got discussed before Gonzales gave his approval.

In fact, what other possible purpose would there have been for the meeting? If Sampson needed nothing more than a signature from Gonzales, he could have gotten that without the meeting.

Now let's look at the statement made by Gonzales on March 13th, 2007:

What I know is that there began a process of evaluating strong performers, not-as-strong performers, and weak performers. And so far as I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers. Where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that's what I knew. But again, with respect to this whole process, like every CEO, I am ultimately accountable and responsible for what happens within the department. But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the Attorney General.

Gonzales sat in this meeting, and yet was "not involved in seeing any memos", "not involved in any discussions about what was going on"? That's absurd. For that matter, so is the defense offered by Scolinos and Brian Roehrkasse after the release of these memos. They said that no one can determine whether the USA Replacement Plan.doc and the list of terminated prosecutors ever came up in the meeting, which amounts to "You can't prove anything, copper."

All of this still doesn't make the case that any of the firings were illegal. So far, no one has offered any proof of evil intent. That's what makes Gonzales' handling of this issue so poor. Even if Gonzales didn't intend to deceive -- that is to say that he honestly didn't recall sitting in on that meeting -- wouldn't a competent CEO (as he described himself) do some research before making categorical statements? Every time a Justice official has offered a version of the firings, it has foundered on the shoals of Justice's own documentation, which one would assume these professionals would have checked before creating their explanations.

And who would accept the competence of the AG if Gonzales really had no idea how his own department drew up a list of federal prosecutors for termination? What Cabinet officer would have so little interest in how his underling fired presidential appointees?

That's why I wrote earlier that Gonzales and others who have presented misleading versions of the project are either incompetent or deceptive. We should not accept either in the office of the highest-ranking law enforcement officer of the United States, regardless of whether he is a Republican or Democrat. America existed before the Bush administration, and it will exist after it, and we had better insist on a level of competence and/or honesty that exceeds what we're getting at the moment -- or else we will live to regret it in later adminstrations.

Support Mike In The PanMass Ride

Yesterday, I put out a bleg regarding RSS programming. One of the people who responded was Mike Sierra of the blog LetMeSpellItOutForYou. I promised a cheery link in return for assistance in fixing a particularly nagging problem, and even though we're still working on the problem, I'd like to highlight Mike's efforts to raise money for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute:

A year and a half ago, I rode in my first Pan-Mass Challenge, a two-day bicycle ride across much of Massachusetts that benefits research at Boston's world-renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I originally envisioned that the ride might offer some encouragement for my brother-in-law, Bryce McHale, in the midst of his treatment for colon cancer. Instead it marked a premature memorial, since he died from surgical complications a few days shy of his 41st birthday. This year I will participate in this remarkable, uplifting event for a third time, riding a 192-mile course along with some 5,000 other bikers the first weekend of August. I ask for your help in sponsoring my ride.

The PMC is the nation's oldest fundraising bike-a-thon, and its most successful charitable athletic event. Last year the PMC raised $26 million for Dana Farber's Jimmy Fund, with an outstanding 99 percent of all funds raised going directly to developing new treatments. For its part, Dana Farber receives near-perfect scores from the National Institutes of Health in the quality and efficiency of its research. They are at the very top of their field.

Mike's looking to raise $6,500. Be sure to donate what you can to a good cause. We'll get Mike to report back on his success.

NARN, The Shirtsleeve Edition

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air today, with our six-hour-long broadcast schedule starting at 11 am CT. The first two hours features Power Line's John Hinderaker and Chad and Brian from Fraters Libertas. Mitch and I hit the airwaves for the second shift from 1-3 pm CT, and King Banaian and Michael Broadkorb have The Final Word from 3-5. If you're in the Twin Cities, you can hear us on AM 1280 The Patriot, or on the station's Internet stream if you're outside of the broadcast area.

It's a gorgeous day here in the Twin Cities; it's expected to get to the mid-60s, and maybe 70 by Monday. Nevertheless, Mitch and I will head to the bunker this afternoon to discuss the week's events. We'll definitely cover the Kung Pao Congress' new funding for spinach, peanuts, cows, and incidentally the war in Iraq. We'll probably talk about Alberto Gonzales and the latest in the flap over the firings of federal prosectors. In the second hour, we will have St. Paul school board member Tom Conlon to discuss the board's attempt to bar military recruiters from St. Paul campuses.

Be sure to call and join the conversation today at 651-289-4488.

Iran: Sailors 'Confess'

Iran upped the stakes in their latest bout of brinksmanship today. Teheran announced that the 15 captured British sailors had undergone interrogation, and that at least some of them had "confessed" to violating Iranian waters:

An Iranian military official said on Saturday "confessions" and other evidence showed that British naval personnel who were detained in the Gulf had illegally entered Iranian waters.

Britain says the 15 sailors and marines were seized Friday in Iraqi waters and have demanded their immediate release.

"The investigation, and confessions that we have, shows they have been arrested in Iranian waters," an armed forces commander told state radio, which only gave his last name Afshari. ...

Iranian forces seized the British sailors and marines on Friday in the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway that marks the southern stretch of Iraq's border with Iran, triggering a diplomatic crisis at a time of heightened tension over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Britain says they were detained in Iraqi waters. Asked about the report the group had been transferred to Tehran, a foreign office spokesman in London said: "We haven't had any confirmation of that."

This mirrors their last abduction, in 2004, when the Iranians paraded the British sailors in front of cameras blindfolded before their eventual "confession" -- and their release. They may be hoping for a similar outcome from this capture as well, making enough claims for domestic consumption before backing down from the potential military consequences of the action.

Will the British and the US take any action for this provocation? If the Iranians do not immediately release the sailors, the US should start taking similar action against Iranian ships entering Iraqi waters, and perhaps event start positoning for a blockade. Given the stressed nature of the Iranian economy, that will certainly get Iran's attention, as well as the notice of its citizens.

Iraqi VP: Pullout Would Cripple Security

Iraqi VP Tareq al-Hashemi responded to yesterday's vote in Congress by emphasizing that Iraqi security troops still need more time to avoid creating a security vacuum when the Americans leave. The BBC manages to editorialize in the middle of its report, too:

Iraq's vice-president has warned that a quick withdrawal of US troops could worsen the security situation in Iraq.

Tareq al-Hashemi responded after the US House of Representatives passed a bill imposing a deadline for all US troops to leave Iraq by 31 August 2008.

Mr Hashemi said replacing US troops with poorly-trained Iraqis whose loyalty was questionable would create a security vacuum.

US President George W Bush vowed to veto the Democratic-sponsored bill.

"I do believe that for the common interest of my country we need coalition forces to stay until further notice," Mr Hashemi said on a visit to Japan.

"We are expecting a timetable for conditional withdrawal," he said, adding that was in the national interest of Iraq, the US and the UK.

When I read this, I wondered why Hashemi would have described his own troops as "poorly trained" and of questionable loyalty. That would have been news, after all. The Sunni VP would have made headlines all over the world with a statement like that -- had he actually made it. Instead, it seems from the lack of quote marks that the BBC decided to add that in order to helpfully assign bias to its account.

Actually, the Sunni leader should make headlines for his insistence that Iraq needs the Americans to stay. He offers a little for all sides, stating that a timetable for the end of the mission would be in Iraq's interest, but that the precipitous withdrawal forced by this bill would be a disaster. The first deadline comes in July of this year, with a series of silly demands, any single failure of which would force a complete withdrawal from Iraq.

Will the Democrats pay any heed to Hashemi, whose own brother got killed by a terrorist attack? So far, the answer is no.

The Politics Of Edwards' Decision

After the initial outpouring of sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards and the impact her new cancer diagnosis will have on her family, people have begun to consider its impact on the campaign of her husband. John Edwards announced the decision to continue his campaign for the presidential nomination, and Democrats found themselves wondering just how much the issue should be debated:

After an early flurry of good wishes directed toward the Edwards family, political operatives have begun the awkward process of asking an inevitable question: How will news of Elizabeth Edwards's cancer recurrence, and her husband's decision to continue campaigning for president, affect the race for the Democratic nomination?

Several Democratic operatives agreed that the couple's headline-grabbing appearance in Chapel Hill, N.C., on Thursday would probably boost former senator John Edwards at least temporarily, producing a groundswell of sympathy and raising his public profile. ...

[T]he Edwards campaign, fresh off the announcement, made a series of moves to demonstrate that it would move ahead at full speed. Edwards held a fundraiser in New York, and then the couple flew to Southern California, where they participated in another fundraiser last night. The campaign not only announced the hiring of a communications director for the critical state of Iowa but also released a detailed list of events both the candidate and his wife would attend. Elizabeth Edwards is scheduled to give a speech in Cleveland on Monday while her husband campaigns in Los Angeles the same day.

"Everyone is struck with sadness but encouraged by their upbeat attitude and determination to continue," said David Gottesman, a New Hampshire state senator who is backing Edwards.

No one wants to discuss the decision in negative terms, and for good reason. It's political suicide. All of the competing campaigns tripped over themselves to make it clear that they would respect the decision, at least in the short term. Hillary Clinton's campaign even tried to make political hay out of her press release on the story, calling it the "quote of the week" in her weekly HillGram e-mail to supporters.

In that sense, Edwards gets some breathing room on the campaign. The other candidates and their staffs will be reluctant to go on the attack against Edwards, at least for a short period. He may garner some better press for a while, which will help boost his standing in comparison to Hillary and Barack Obama.

All of this will be transitory, as it should be. Candidates win general elections for President primarily on character and likablility, but in the primaries, policy and base connections win the nomination. Edwards will have to win enough primaries with his populist message, and regardless of whether people feel more warmly towards him after this unfortunate turn of event for his wife, he hasn't gotten much traction with that message so far. Obama and Hillary have just about made this a two-way race.

Is it impolite to even discuss their decision to continue? Some argue that the decision is private and outside the realm of polite debate, but that's not exactly right. John Edwards wants to be President, which makes this about as public a decision as one can make. The decision and the health of his spouse will have some impact on the race, and if Edwards gets elected, on his presidency as well. I would think that people can feel free to discuss the impact of the decision, although I think it would be impolite to discuss the motivations behind it. I suspect that people will by and large understand the difference, and respect it.

Did Gonzales Lie About His Involvement?

The termination of eight federal prosecutors has been compared by supporters of the Bush administration to the abrupt dismissal of all 93 US Attorneys by Bill Clinton in 1993. Today, they may be comparing Alberto Gonzales' use of the word "involved" to Clinton's questioning of the definition of "is" after a memo shows that Gonzales had more connection with the termination process than he claimed:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales's previous statement that he was not involved in "any discussions" about the dismissals.

Justice Department officials also announced last night that the department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility have launched a joint investigation into the firings, including an examination of whether any of the removals were improper and whether any Justice officials misled Congress about them.

The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general's conference room included Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, then-Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show.

Documents detailing the previously undisclosed meeting appear to conflict with remarks by Gonzales at a March 13 news conference in which he portrayed himself as a CEO who had delegated to Sampson responsibility for the particulars of firing eight U.S. attorneys.

"I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," Gonzales said.

Ah, the storied Friday afternoon document dump. It's an honored tradition in Washington, and it usually indicates that the dumper understands the political damage contained within the material. In this case, the dumpers have it right. Not only does this emphasize the fact that Gonzales and Justice have misled people on this issue, it also shows that the initial 18-day gap in documentation trumpeted by TPM Muckraker and critics of the administration actually had some significance after all.

Is there any other manner in which the Department of Justice can look any more untruthful and deceptive? Apparently so, because the Justice spokesperson now wants to argue about the meaning of the word "involved". Alberto Gonzales told the press on March 13 that he was "not involved in any discussions about what was going on" regarding the terminations. The description adopted by his supporters was that Gonzales acts as a CEO, delegating authority to his staffers and allowing them to act independently, Now we have Tasia Scolinos attempting to sell the notion that the definition of "not involved in any discussions" somehow includes attending the meeting where the decisions were made -- but not absorbing any of the details of the process.

Have we had enough yet? I understand the argument that if we allow the Democrats to bounce Gonzales, they'll just aim for more, but Gonzales made himself the target here with what looks like blatant deception. I don't think we do ourselves any good by defending the serially changing stories coming out of Gonzales' inept administration at Justice. One cannot support an Attorney General who misleads Congress, allows his staffers to mislead Congress, and deceives the American people, regardless of whether an R or a D follows his name or the majority control of Congress.

When the story broke about the NSA terrorist surveillance program, Bush did not hide behind a morphable definition of "is" or "involved". He stood at the podium and told the press that he damned well did order the surveillance program and that he broke no laws in doing so. In that manner, he turned the leak into a net positive, showing that he had the courage of his convictions and that he intended nothing more than the security of the nation.

Alberto Gonzales and his team has done the exact opposite, and have thrown gasoline on a fire -- no, not a fire, but a mere spark that would have been a two-day story otherwise. Gonzales needs to go.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg gets critical e-mail for saying that Gonzales lied. He allows that Gonzales may have been "deeply confused":

Okay, he may simply have been deeply, deeply, confused, out of touch and unprepared to give a press conference which was supposed to put an end to the "scandal" and instead poured gasoline on it at a time when his boss, the President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief, had vastly more important things to deal with. Maybe, just maybe, a good "CEO" would have asked his staff, "Hey, before I unequivocally tell the world I was out of the loop, let's double check and make sure I wasn't in the loop. Okay?"

Either he's been deceptive or incompetent. There really is no third choice.

UPDATE II: As good as the argument of "innocent until proven guilty" sounds, it doesn't apply here. I'm not arguing Gonzales commited a crime; I'm saying he's been deceptive and/or incompetent, neither of which is commendable in the nation's top law-enforcement officer. One doesn't need to be convicted to be fired, which the eight federal prosecutors could tell you from personal experience.

At this point, the notion that Bush has to retain Gonzales to protect himself and Republicans in general is starting to become absurd. Gonzales inflicted most of this damage on the administration himself, and the longer he remains, the more damage he will do. As Jonah said, it's hard to find a worse example of self-inflicted damage outside of circus tents.

Gonzales' dismissal/resignation would not do any more damage to Republicans than has already occurred. If we have to defend incompetents and/or deceivers as critical to the Republican cause, then be prepared for a disastrous 2008. Offering Clintonian word-parsing as a defense does nothing to help the cause of conservatism.

UPDATE III: Tom Maguire has had enough, too:

They don't know if they had a final target list on Nov 27, even though the plan had been sent over for White House approval on Nov 15?

Since a key part of the process meant to be managed by the White House (i.e., Karl Rove) was the politics of soothing the home-state Senators of the fired US Attorneys, how could the list sent to the White House have not included the final names?

And how could we be expected to believe that Harriet Miers and Gonzales' chief of staff came up with a list without Gonzales reviewing it at some point? Who is in charge?

And his aides can't remember if he approved it? Geez, as the old television broadcast used to say, due to technical difficulties the Invisible Man will not be seen tonight. And the Invisible Boss will not be heard from at DoJ.

He wants Gonzales to go, just for the ineptitude, if not for the deception.

Tsar Vlad I

Vladimir Putin has managed to push Russia back into a virtual single-party state, and he has the assistance of the Russian judiciary for that goal. Yesterday, the Russian Supreme Court denied one of the few opposition parties left in Russia access to the ballot, which means that the next Duma will likely have no opposition representation at all (via Michael van der Galien at TMV):

Russia's next parliament is likely to have no genuine opposition after a court in Moscow yesterday banned a leading liberal party from standing in elections.

Russia's supreme court announced that it had liquidated the small Republican party, claiming that it had violated electoral law by having too few members. The party is one of very few left in Russia that criticises President Vladimir Putin.

The move against Russia's opposition came as pro-democracy activists prepared for the latest in a series of anti-government rallies that have infuriated Russia's hardline authorities.

This judgment came after the Duma imposed a new law which forbade political parties from fielding candidates if they did not have at least 50,000 members and have representation in at least half of all Russian provinces. The Kremlin insists that they wrote the law to eliminate the fractured nature of politics in Russia, but it rather obviously keeps new political parties from forming -- parties that would get inspired by Vladimir Putin's authoritarian behavior, for instance.

With no opposition left in the Duma, it is not hard to imagine what Putin will do next. He will ask for, and receive, the removal of restrictions that keep him from running for another term of office. Putin will make himself president-for-life and continue eliminating the regional power structures that had acted as a check on federal power.

The opposition parties will start gathering to protest the elimination of the Republican Party, one of the original glasnost parties that formed under Mikhail Gorbachev. Also joining them will be Gary Kasparov's United Civil Front and the National Bolshevik Front, which also got disqualified by the Russian judiciary. Today they will rally in Russia's fourth-largest city, Nizhny Novgorod, where the mayor plans to block them by holding a "children's festival" at their desired rally point. The mayor also has blocked roads to carry out suddenly urgent street repairs.

Russian democracy is disappearing before our eyes. It will not be long now before Putin has recreated the Soviet government that he served for so long, within smaller borders. After a season of freedom, political winter once again descends on Russia, and the spring may be long in coming.

Did You Catch The Last CQ Radio Show?

If you missed the last CQ Radio show on Thursday night, you really missed a treat. I spoke with Heather Greenfield, senior writer for the National Journal, about media bias, the pressures that the mainstream media face in today's market, the presidential campaigns, and what it's like to work for Daniel Glover. It's a fascinating conversation, and Heather provides a rare look behind the media's green curtain. Her insights on the AP are especially interesting for those of us who have been critical of their reporting.

Don't believe me? The clip has had five times more downloads than any of my previous shows, well over 1400 of them. Take a listen, and don't forget that all of my previous shows are podcasted at Blog Talk Radio -- my new employer as of mid-April. If you're interested in having your own Blog Talk Radio show, be sure to contact me!

Iran Attacked US Forces In September

While the world wonders about the attack on and abduction of 15 British sailors by Iranian forces earlier this month, US News & World Report published the details of an attack by Iranian forces on Iraqi and American troops last September:

As the British government demanded the immediate release of 15 of its sailors whose boats were seized by Iranian naval vessels in the Persian Gulf on Friday, U.S. News has learned that this is not the first showdown that coalition forces have had with the Iranian military.

According to a U.S. Army report out of Iraq obtained by U.S. News, American troops, acting as advisers for Iraqi border guards, were recently surrounded and attacked by a larger unit of Iranian soldiers, well within the border of Iraq.

The report highlights the details: A platoon of Iranian soldiers on the Iraqi side of the border fired rocket-propelled grenades and used small arms against a joint patrol of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers east of Balad Ruz. Four Iraqi Army soldiers, one interpreter, and one Iraqi border policeman remain unaccounted for after the September incident in eastern Diyala, 75 miles east of Baghdad.

The Coalition forces saw three Iranian soldiers in Iraqi territory. As they approached, two of them ran back across the border, but one remained in Iraq. The joint force started interrogating the Iranian, and that's when the attack commenced. A stronger contingent of Iranians materialized and threatened to attack the US/Iraqi patrol if they tried to leave. While the Iranian captain told them this, his forces started firing on the patrol with small arms and RPGs.

The Iraqis and Americans returned fire at that point, and they took no casualties. However, the forces were unable to account for a half-dozen Iraqis after the incident. The report does not say whether the missing men were ever found or released by the Iranians, assuming they were captured.

This isn't the first time Iran has captured British sailors, either. In June 2004, they seized three British patrol boats and detained eight sailors. Teheran released them shortly afterwards, but analysts believed that they wanted to shift attention from the recently-released IAEA report that accused them of dishonesty in violating the non-proliferation agreement. They also may have wanted to push oil prices higher in order to make Bush's re-election more difficult.

Iran should take care. The British still have diplomatic relations, and so far have acted as a brake on American action against the mullahcracy. London may decide that the Iranians aren't worth the effort.

Friday Night Tech Bleg

I'm looking for a little assistance in embedding a script into the RSS feed. If anyone has experience with Atom and RSS formats and their programming, I'd appreciate a little assistance. I'll promise to link back to you in a highly approving way ....

Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner?

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared last week that he would fly to New York to personally address the UN Security Council before a vote to impose tougher sanctions on Iran for their uranium enrichment. Those travel plans have apparently been cancelled, with the Iranians complaining that the US did not issue visas in time for their trip:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad canceled a trip to New York to address the U.N. Security Council before it votes on whether to impose further sanctions against his country for refusing to stop enriching uranium, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday.

The decision came as diplomats from the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council — the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia — and Germany held a flurry of last-minute negotiations in New York on a draft resolution seeking to pressure Iran to comply. ...

Ahmadinejad said earlier this month that he wanted to take his case for pursuing nuclear power to the Security Council himself. Earlier Friday, a council diplomat said the Iranian president would arrive in New York at 1 a.m. Saturday, just hours before the council is expected to meet.

But Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini told Iranian state television later in the day that the trip had been scrapped because of "America's obstruction in issuing visas" to the Iranian delegation that was to travel to New York.

I guess that Ahmadinejad wasn't terribly serious about his trip to the Big Apple after all. The US delivered 39 visas, including Ahmadinejad's, to the Iranian mission in Benn, Switzerland, where what little contact between the two nations takes place. We also promised to have 36 more visas ready later today.

Ahmadinejad wanted a chance to play the victim once again for domestic consumption. The television appearance paints the US as unwilling to hear Iran's side of the issue, being the Zionist puppets that we are, I'm sure. That may not work out too well, though, because the vote may get postponed -- which means Ahmadinejad will have ample time to collect those visas after all.

The House, The Bill, And The Veto

Nancy Pelosi barely managed to eke out a victory on the supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war. The pork-laden bill passed with the bare minimum number of votes, and only after two Republicans crossed the aisle:

The House of Representatives today passed a $124 billion emergency spending bill that sets binding benchmarks for progress in Iraq, establishes tough readiness standards for deploying U.S. troops abroad and requires the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq by the end of August 2008.

The bill promptly drew a veto threat from President Bush.

After four hours of floor debate yesterday and today, the House approved the bill by a vote of 218 to 212. One lawmaker voted present and three did not vote. ...

In a largely party-line vote, 216 Democrats were joined by two Republicans in supporting the bill, while 198 Republicans and 14 Democrats opposed it. Voting with the Democratic majority were Republicans Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Wayne T. Gilchrest of Maryland. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) voted present. Reps. Jo Ann Davis (R-Va.), Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) and Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) did not vote.

Among the Democrats who opposed the bill were conservatives reluctant to set a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and liberals who want the troops out immediately. The 14 Democrats who voted no were: John Barrow (Ga.), Dan Boren (Okla.), Lincoln Davis (Tenn.), Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio), Barbara Lee (Calif.), John Lewis (Ga.), Gene Taylor (Miss.), Jim Marshall (Ga.), Jim Matheson (Utah), Michael R. McNulty (N.Y.), Michael H. Michaud (Maine), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Diane Watson (Calif.) and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.).

This bill has absolutely no chance of passing into law. Pelosi could barely get it passed, having to bribe her caucus with pork and threaten some with committee assignment changes. Barbara Lee, who openly opposed the bill, reportedly had to find another ride home to California after Pelosi bumped Lee off her flight. George Bush made it clear that he would not waste much time before vetoing the bill if it reached his desk:

The purpose of the emergency war spending bill I requested was to provide our troops with vital funding. Instead, Democrats in the House, in an act of political theater, voted to substitute their judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq. They set rigid restrictions that will require an army of lawyers to interpret. They set an arbitrary date for withdrawal without regard for conditions on the ground. And they tacked on billions for pet projects that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror. This bill has too much pork, too many conditions and an artificial timetable for withdrawal.

As I have made clear for weeks, I will veto it if it comes to my desk. And because the vote in the House was so close, it is clear that my veto would be sustained. Today's action in the House does only one thing: it delays the delivering of vital resources for our troops. A narrow majority has decided to take this course, just as General Petraeus and his troops are carrying out a new strategy to help the Iraqis secure their capital city.

Amid the real challenges in Iraq, we're beginning to see some signs of progress. Yet, to score political points, the Democratic majority in the House has shown it is willing to undermine the gains our troops are making on the ground.

Tough stuff. Bush sounded like a man itching for a fight, but he may not have to throw any punches. It's likely that the bill will never make it out of the Senate. The GOP will almost certainly filibuster the bill, and they might just defeat it without a filbuster if Joe Lieberman does the expected thing. Regardless, the bill will not make it to Bush's desk unless the sky falls in Iraq, and right now it looks like the Coalition has the momentum there.

So what happens next? The money for the war will start to run out next month. If Congress fails to fund the mission, the troops and their families will start feeling the bite -- and the Democrats will have to take responsibility for that. They may want to recall a somewhat similar standoff between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, one that didn't involve abandoning troops under fire in a war zone. Even a precipitous withdrawal would have to receive funding, and if the Democrats don't supply any at all, then they will have made a huge mistake for which they will pay dearly later.

Hang In There, Tony, And FM Update

White House spokesman Tont Snow will have to undergo surgery to remove a mass in his abdomen. Tony had a bout of colon cancer two years ago, and doctors want to remove the mass even though they believe it to be benign:

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow is undergoing surgery Monday to remove a growth in his lower abdomen, a procedure he said was being done "out of an aggressive sense of caution" because he had colon cancer two years ago.

He said Friday that tests since the growth was discovered have been negative, but that doctors decided to remove it to be sure.

"Please do not leap to conclusions about this because we don't know what this is," Snow told reporters. "We know it's coming out and I know I'll be back soon."

Snow had his colon removed in 2005 and underwent six months of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with colon cancer.

He said that a recent series of scans revealed the growth. Blood tests and further scans have not indicated a return of his cancer.

We'll add Tony to our list of prayers, along with Elizabeth Edwards and the family of Cathy Seipp. Keep your fingers crossed that the preliminary diagnosis is correct and that the mass will turn out to be nothing.

The First Mate came home today, which is a bit of a surprise. We had thought the doctors would keep her in the hospital until the transplant next Friday, but her blood pressure has stabilized long enough for them to be confident they've turned the corner. We just got home a little while ago, and she's sleeping. (Anyone who has been in the hospital knows that they never let you sleep there.)

The doctors will do the transplant next Friday, as scheduled, and we're hoping she can remain home until Thursday. Thank you for the prayers we have already received, and if you don't mind, keep 'em coming ...

Krauthammer: Gonzales Must Go

Charles Krauthammer has called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign. Krauthammer doesn't believe that the administration did anything illegal in firing the federal prosecutors, but instead believes that Gonzales has demonstrated an incompetence that disqualfies him from his Cabinet position:

Alberto Gonzales has to go. I say this with no pleasure -- he's a decent and honorable man -- and without the slightest expectation that his departure will blunt the Democratic assault on the Bush administration over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. In fact, it will probably inflame their blood lust, which is why the president might want to hang on to Gonzales at least through this crisis. That might be tactically wise. But in time, and the sooner the better, Gonzales must resign.

It's not a question of probity but of competence. Gonzales has allowed a scandal to be created where there was none. That is quite an achievement. He had a two-foot putt and he muffed it.

How could he allow his aides to go to Capitol Hill unprepared and misinformed and therefore give inaccurate and misleading testimony? How could Gonzales permit his deputy to say that the prosecutors were fired for performance reasons when all he had to say was that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and the president wanted them replaced?

And why did Gonzales have to claim that the firings were done with no coordination with the White House? That's absurd. Why shouldn't there be White House involvement? That is nothing to be defensive about. Does anyone imagine that Janet Reno fired all 93 U.S. attorneys in March 1993, giving them all of 10 days to clear out, without White House involvement?

The decision to fire the prosecutors falls within the discretion of the President, and by extension, the AG. There is nothing illegal about firing them, even for political considerations. However, there is nothing very smart about it either, and it does go against the general precedent over the last twenty-five years. Just because the White House has the power to fire the US Attorneys doesn't make it smart or right for them to do so.

Some have said that since the President has the power to fire appointees, there should be no controversy. By that mark, Congress has the power to hold hearings on executive-branch actions. Whether they can overcome executive privilege with subpoenas outside of an actual criminal investigation remains to be seen; I'd guess not, based on the case law. However, Congress can certainly hold as many hearings on it as they want, because they have the power to do so. That also doesn't make it smart or right, but it's the same basis on which the White House is defending the firings.

At the end of all this is the simple truth that Krauthammer understands -- this was not a battle that the administration needed, and it came at exactly the wrong time. The Department of Justice made matters exponentially worse by changing their stories and unnecessarily damaging the reputations of the attorneys involved. At some point, Gonzales has to have some responsibility for this foot-shooting escapade.

Why Is CENTCOM Kicking Michael Yon Out Of Iraq?

Michael Yon has provided some of the best reporting on the ground in Iraq. He embeds with the troops, reporting honestly on the ups and downs of our efforts there. He has proven himself courageous under fire and keeps returning to give Americans a clear view of the status of our mission. Now, however, Yon may find himself booted out of Iraq:

A general emailed in the past 24 hours threatening to kick me out. The first time the Army threatened to kick me out was in late 2005, just after I published a dispatch called “Gates of Fire.” Some of the senior level public affairs people who’d been upset by “Proximity Delays” were looking ever since for a reason to kick me out and they wanted to use “Gates of Fire” as a catapult. In the events described in that dispatch, I broke some rules by, for instance, firing a weapon during combat when some of our soldiers were fighting fairly close quarters and one was wounded and still under enemy fire. That’s right. I’m not sure what message the senior level public affairs people thought that would convey had they succeeded, (which they didn’t) but it was clear to me what they valued most. They want the press on a short leash, even at the expense of the life of a soldier.

Some readers might recall that LTC Barry Johnson denied my embed requests in 2006, but after I wrote “Censoring Iraq,” somehow the door opened up. Strangely, a couple days ago, LTC Barry Johnson invited me to be a panelist at a symposium in Washington D.C. on ”the role of blogs and bloggers in the news environment today. The intent is to help PAOs better understand the issues involved.” Call me suspicious, but my whiskers tingled on that one.

Colonel Austin Bay says it best:

This is stupid. Michael Yon and Bill Roggio are the best out there. Telling Michael Yon to exit the theater is the WWII equivalent of telling Ernie Pyle to quit filing dispatches.

Does the Army want to build honest support for the mission here at home? Or would they rather play bureaucratic games with one of the few journalists willing to go wherever our soldiers go? Someone needs a reality check at CENTCOM. (via Shaun Mullen at TMV)

WaPo Slams Democrats For Devotion To Pork Over National Security

On the eve of a critical House vote on supplemental funding for the Iraq war, the Washington Post scolds the Democrats who attached billions in pork spending to bribe its members to vote for a withdrawal timetable. The editors take apart the legislation, stating that its sponsors care more for a handful of peanut farmers than for the 24 million Iraqis who depend on the US for their security:

TODAY THE House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.

Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill -- for whatever reason -- will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next 17 months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.

The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget. The legislation pays more heed to a handful of peanut farmers than to the 24 million Iraqis who are living through a maelstrom initiated by the United States, the outcome of which could shape the future of the Middle East for decades.

The pork shows that the Democrats have no mandate for a cut-and-run strategy. Had that mandate existed, they would have simply voted to explicitly defund the war and force a withdrawal, a move well within Congressional authority. Instead, they have played at half-measures for the last two months, attempting to force George Bush to order the withdrawal by handicapping the Pentagon with an impressive array of red tape -- and shoving the responsibility for surrender onto the White House instead of on the Democrats who demand it.

Until last night, Pelosi couldn't even get a majority to support this porkfest supplemental. Now, however, the Post reports that the Out of Iraq caucus has acquiesced and generated enough votes for passage:

Liberal opposition to a $124 billion war spending bill broke last night, when leaders of the antiwar Out of Iraq Caucus pledged to Democratic leaders that they will not block the measure, which sets timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

The acquiescence of the liberals probably means that the House will pass a binding measure today that, for the first time, would establish tough readiness standards for the deployment of combat forces and an Aug. 31, 2008, deadline for their removal from Iraq.

Of course, the pork had nothing to do with their sudden support. They gave up on their wrongheaded but principled demand to produce an honest withdrawal bill out of a sense of ... what? Duty? Honor? It seems that surrender comes rather naturally to this group of Democrats.

The timing of the withdrawal seems rather suspect, too. What conditions led them to select August 31, 2008? Did they carefully review the current operations in Iraq and determine when they could reasonably be completed? No. They selected that date because it comes about ten weeks before the Presidential election -- an election they hope to win by giving their activist base the surrender they have demanded for years.

This supplemental is a despicable document on many levels. It conducts payoffs for Congressmen to endorse the surrender of the United States to insurgents and terrorists in a region where we have done that too often already. If we want to beat the terrorists, we have to fight them, not run away because we get bored or tired of the expense. They already rely on that reaction from us, thanks to a long and bipartisan history of them, and we do not need to add more ignominy to that record.

Living In A BCRA World

Only in a political climate managed by the McCain-Feingold Act could a homemade video like "Vote Different" make national headlines for days on end. Instead of simply getting a chuckle and quickly disappearing from the national consciousness, people have obsessed on the origin and nature of the ad, resulting in the creator's termination from his job. Now the Washington Post wonders whether "old-fashioned political chicanery" was at work on an ad that said almost nothing about anything:

The instant popularity of an attack video that mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) prompted plenty of talk this week about how an ordinary citizen can influence political discourse by tapping into the power of the YouTube culture.

But the unmasking of the filmmaker as an employee of a company on the payroll of Clinton's Democratic presidential rival, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), raises questions about whether the more old-fashioned art of political chicanery was at play.

Phil de Vellis, who worked for the firm that designed Obama's Web site, Blue State Digital, says no one at the company or in Obama's camp knew he had made the video depicting Clinton as the droning voice of a totalitarian establishment. Obama and his aides say they had no idea who was behind the 74-second ad, which has been viewed online more than 2 million times, and which closes by flashing Obama's Web address.

Blue State yesterday provided a Feb. 10 e-mail in which de Vellis boasted of his role in the Obama effort: "Check out Barack's new website. . . . One shameless look at me plug, I designed the MyBarackObama toolbox that is on the front page and all the sidebar pages."

Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State, a District-based online strategy firm, said he fired de Vellis Wednesday night. "This is an unfortunate situation all around," he said. Gensemer said his firm has provided only technical assistance, not creative services, to the senator's campaign. Joe Rospars, Obama's new media director, is on leave from Blue State.

In a rational political world, this would mean nothing. YouTube runs on the energy of millions of hobbyists who enjoy becoming film directors and video editors, and this would just be another funny little clip that people would quickly forget. However, thanks to the BCRA, the origins of any political communication hold deep implications for the candidates and their campaign offices.

Here's why. Political expenditures for advertising have to be reported, which requires the campaigns to identify themselves on every communication that they produce in order to ensure that the reports are accurate. That's not a problem; most of us support some form of disclosure for political campaigns. The problems comes when outside groups run ads on their own. In order to do so, they have to classify themselves in particular classes of organization, and they cannot show any coordination with the campaigns themselves when they do so. Specific restrictions apply at certain points in the campaign towards referencing and endorsing candidates rather than policies, which makes provenance even more critical.

ParkRidge47 and YouTube just showed how passé all of those rules have become. How will we police political advertising, now that it has become so easy to make? Anyone can make an attack ad now, and if it resonates, it will go viral in cyberspace. Will we conduct investigations every time someone posts a video to YouTube? To what purpose? Should employees of firms contracted by the political campaigns have to choose between their employment and their freedom to speak about their political views?

Most laughably, some people have claimed this to be the first "dirty trick" of the 2008 campaign. A dirty trick is when one campaign steals from another, or when people make up smears to kneecap an opponent. Take a good look at this ad. What dirty trick got played here? All it does is use a rather dull and banal speech by Hillary -- oddly, the one where she says she doesn't want yes-men -- in place of the Big Brother in the famous "1984" Macintosh ad by Apple. No smears, no lies, no policy stands of any kind ... just the casting of Hillary as Big Brother, an irony in and of itself. It's not even a particularly political political ad.

There's no dirty trick here. There wouldn't even be a story here, had we not traded our free political speech in a vain attempt to keep money out of politics. Maybe the woman in the ad should be throwing the hammer at campaign finance reform.

UPDATE: CQ reader Mr. Lynn notes this disturbing editorial in today's Boston Globe:

The anti-Clinton clip falls within the boundary of acceptability. It makes a point in a witty way -- the runner is wearing an iPod, unknown in 1984 -- and is airing too early in the campaign to have a significant impact. The Huffington Post has unmasked the creator as a Barack Obama supporter, who denies the campaign was involved. Viewers can now evaluate the clip based on its source. And a Clinton supporter has subsequently doctored the video to put Obama in the Big Brother role, and put that on YouTube. Free speech has generated more speech to enhance the debate over who would make the best Democratic nominee for president.

But suppose it was two or three days before a close election, and a scurrilous, deceitful, anonymous clip was posted on YouTube and the other sites that specialize in homemade videos. Candidates should, of course, monitor all these sites and flag the offending videos. But doesn't YouTube have an obligation to make sure these ads are swept from its site before they can do harm? YouTube today doesn't have a policy against attack ads late in the campaign, but it should.

When did we get so weak-kneed about free speech? YouTube doesn't have any obligation to sweep its site for scurrilous opinions. As the Globe itself notes, the solution for this speech was more speech, not muzzling it. The Globe, despite its condescending admission that this ad was "within the boundary of acceptability", accepts that this silly, fun little clip has some deep resonance that requires alertness, if not alarm.

The only YouTubes that will damage candidates are those which capture their own words. The George Allen episode proved that. No one will take anything else on YouTube seriously enough to have any impact on elections. The Globe, and many others, should cease their screeching before we do more damage to political speech.

On Second Thought, Nuclear Looks Pretty Green

With all of the concern over greenhouse gases and global warming hysteria rising, some environmentalists have taken a second look at a technology they helped abandon years ago. Nuclear power has begun gathering momentum as a green alternative to coal and oil, although the front-line environmental organizations have not yet budged:

"No Nukes" was once a familiar rallying cry for environmentalists opposed to nuclear power and all its scary risks.

With global warming a rising concern, some environmentalists are rethinking nuclear power because it emits zero greenhouse gases.

"You can't just write nuclear off," says Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an environmental research and advocacy group. "I think everybody feels you have to at least look again" at nuclear power. ...

Besides Pew, at least three leading environmental organizations — Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Environmental Defense — say they are willing to consider nuclear power as part of a long-term solution to global warming.

Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, says his group's position "has evolved."

"Global warming is the environmental issue of our generation," he says. "Clearly to solve this problem we need to have all technologies on the table. Therefore, nuclear energy … needs to be considered."

Hysteria produces some strange side effects, but this one sounds more beneficial than most. In fact, this is really the result of two hysterias meeting -- global warming and nuclear power -- and the result should test both in a way that neither have had to suffer yet. If global warming truly threatens the planet, and its main component is man-made, then nuclear power and its drawbacks pale into insignificance. If the threat of nuclear power is as bad as its opponents make out -- even though it has not yet caused a death in the US in decades of use -- then global warming has to be overblown.

In truth, though, both hysterias are overblown, and neither really have to do with saving the planet. Both have to do with allowing environmentalists to do what the Left has wanted for decades, which is to place restrictions on private property and free enterprise. Global warming especially is nothing more than a Trojan horse, used to effect the same kinds of top-down governmental control over the uses of resources that we have seen with endangered-species laws and the like.

Nuclear power has proven itself more reliable, less damaging to the environment, and safer than coal for creating energy. Dozens of miners die every year retrieving coal to produce our electricity, but no one has died from operating a nuclear power plant in the US. The worst accident we had, Three Mile Island in 1979, killed no one and resulted in only a short, small release of radioactivity outside the plant. Although older plants have operated for decades since then, the US has not built another reactor since Three Mile Island, just as we have not built an oil refinery since before that.

We have to start getting realistic about our energy needs. We need to start tapping our own oil resources for national security purposes as well as economic health; we send far too much of our money outside the US for oil. We need to expand our refining capability to meet the expanding needs of our population, at least in the short term. If environmentalists believe these to be dangerous, then they need to allow for the use of nuclear power as a replacement for coal, at least.

Israel To Give Ground In Jerusalem?

Ehud Olmert took a step yesterday that not even Ehud Barak made in his quest to reach a comprehensive peace plan with the Palestinians. In Tel Aviv yesterday, Olmert embraced the Saudi initiative, which calls for a partition of Jerusalem, a return to 1967 borders, and the end of all settlements:

In a bid to open a channel to the Arabs, Israel's premier is embracing a long dormant Saudi peace proposal that would divide Jerusalem and could flood the Jewish state with Palestinian Arab refugees with family claims to land evacuated in the 1948 war that created the state.

Speaking in Tel Aviv yesterday, Prime Minister Olmert said Israel was prepared to make "sweeping, painful, and tough concessions" in order to forge open contacts with Arab states that offered in 2002 to acknowledge Israel's right to exist in exchange for its full retreat from the territories it won in the 1967 war.

"The Saudi initiative is interesting and has many sections that I would be willing to accept — though, predictably, not all of them — and it could certainly be a convenient basis for continued dialogue between us and Arab moderates," he said.

Mr. Olmert's embrace of the Saudi initiative, a proposal Saudi Arabia's then crown prince initially shared with a New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, comes just days before the Israeli premier meets with his Palestinian Arab counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, and Secretary of State Rice. A day after their meeting Sunday, Ms. Rice will fly to Aswan, Egypt, for a summit with her Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and United Arab Emirates counterparts to discuss, one State Department official said, "strategies for marketing the Arab peace offer."

The Israelis have deep divisions over this proposal. Some see it as a reasonable starting ground, while others warn that it amounts to giving the inch that will encourage Hamas to grab the mile. Dore Gold, an ally of Binyamin Netanyahu, responded by insisting that any attempt to partition Jerusalem would only encourage the Palestinians to take the rest by force, and also would attract al-Qaeda affiliates to launch attacks to drive Israel from its share of the city.

In exchange for openness to the Saudi initiative, the Israelis want to see some modifications. The right of return has to go, although the Israelis might still be open to trading more territory in exchange for that point, as Barak suggested at Wye. They want the plan to include "confidence building" stages in order to ensure that Israeli security remains at the forefront. They also want to make sure that the borders Israel accepts are defensible against another attack through the territories -- the reason Israel occupies them in the first place, a point that many conveniently forget. The Arab nations attacked Israel twice through those lands when they belonged to Jordan.

This sounds like a loser to me, however. Israel will not accept the partition of Jerusalem easily, nor will the nation blithely support the dismantling of its settlements in the West Bank. The forced removal of settlers in Gaza created a firestorm of criticism, and that decision involved far fewer settlers in a much less defensible area. Given Olmert's popularity, I doubt he could get the Knesset to sign off on such an agreement. After botching the war and the peace in Lebanon, not too many will trust him with the Saudi initiative.

Condoleezza Rice has another round of diplomatic visits in the region, and she is expected to push the moderation of rhetoric about Israel as a forerunner to regional talks. Rice and the US have likely pushed the Saudi initiative as a replacement for the so-called Roadmap; it's doubtful Olmert would have embraced it on his own. It's hard to understand why the US keeps pushing this on Israel when the Palestinians won't support the treaties they've already signed, let alone agree to bargain in good faith with Israel now. The Bush administration should cease efforts to broker a deal until the Palestinians prove themselves ready to accept peace and a two-state solution as a permanent settlement.

CBS: IED Attacks Decrease Dramatically

CBS News published a report on Wednesday that escaped my attention, but it should get wide play in the blogosphere. According to their sources in the military, the surge has resulted in a stark dropoff of roadside bomb attacks, a reversal of the pre-surge trend:

After warning that the threat of deadly EFPs, or Explosively Formed Penetrators, was growing at an alarming rate, the U.S. military now says there's been a "dramatic" decrease in the use of the powerful roadside bombs.

EFPs "can punch through most of the armor out on the battlefield today," Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman said of the devices, which U.S. officials have said come from Iran. ...

"In February, we noticed a 47 percent decrease in explosively formed penetrators being detonated against our troops, a 53 percent decrease in the number of troops wounded and a 51 percent decrease in the number of troops killed" by the devices, he said.

The reported decrease came as the U.S. military offered to reporters what it said was proof that weapons like EFPs were being manufactured in Iran. The Iranian government has denied any involvement in providing weapons or material support to Iraq's insurgency.

According to Garver, the reasons for the marked drop in EFP incidents could include the detention of three Iranians in Baghdad in December. One of the men was believed to be a high-level Operations Officer with the Quds Force of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.

It hardly seems coincidental that the attacks have dropped so dramatically at the same time that the US has implemented tough new strategies for securing Baghdad and addressing Iran. The Pentagon had insisted that many of the EFPs came from Iran, and the warning that George Bush gave Iran specifically referenced these weapons.

The results contradict the predictions of surge critics. Many expected an immediate increase in these kinds of attacks, and indeed the media has reported those that have occurred in detail. If this information is correct, the opposite has occurred; as the US and Iraqi forces deploy into the neighborhoods of Baghdad, they push out the terrorists who plant these bombs, and they seize the facilities where EFPs are held.

Did the capture of the Iranians in Iraq have anything directly to do with the decrease? Perhaps the Iranians did the actual distribution work, or helped support the logistics of getting the EFPs into the hands of the terrorists. It may not even have been that direct. The Iranians may just have gotten the message that we no longer would force ourselves to use rules of engagement that handcuffed us and allowed Iran to infiltrate Iraq and stage attacks on us with no response.

In an update to the story, in which CBS corrects the numbers they used in their initial report, they also state that the numbers in the first two weeks of March continue the trend of declining attacks. That's before the next brigade of US troops arrive in Baghdad with the specific mission to cut off the smuggling routes that bring EFPs into the capital.

It looks like the surge is succeeding faster than the anti-war critics can get Congress to declare defeat.

CQ Radio Tonight (Bumped!)

CQ Radio will be back on the air tonight, at its regularly scheduled time, 9 pm CT. Tonight we'll talk with National Journal's Heather Greenfield about media and politics. As Senior Writer, she covers lobbying, campaigns, competitiveness and cyber security. She was a reporter for AP in Washington for 12 years and the Washington columnist for TechWeek magazine. Greenfield used to be a television reporter and came to Washington in 1991 as part of a Joan Shorenstein Barone Congressional Fellowship, in which she worked as a press assistant for the Senate Finance Committee. She has trained radio and TV reporters in Ethiopia, and wrote for die Tageszeitung as part of a journalist exchange program in Berlin. She has a master's degree in news media studies from American University, a graduate certificate in Asian studies from the University of Hawaii, and an honors degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.

Later, we'll talk about the stories of the week, including what John Edwards has to say today about his wife's health and its impact on his campaign, the efforts by Congress to compel testimony from the White House on the firings of eight federal prosecutors, and much, much more.

Have questions for Heather Greenfield or comments on the topics? You can join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889. We may have more to discuss between then and now, and I'll be keeping the agenda wide open in case any breaking stories catch our attention.

McCain Backtracking On Kennedy Partnership?

The Boston Globe notes that Ted Kennedy feels a lack of commitment from his partner on immigration reform these days. John McCain calls and chats, but will not agree to any specifics for renewing their previous efforts on a strategy for comprehensive reform. Kennedy will work on his own while McCain keeps trying to distance himself from his former partner and conservative bête noir:

Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain have all but abandoned plans to cosponsor a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year, as McCain faces tough questions from conservatives on the presidential campaign trail about his support for immigrants' rights.

Kennedy, frustrated by the slow progress of his negotiations with McCain, is instead considering filing a bill on his own, modeled largely on the measure endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. McCain is continuing to talk to Kennedy about immigration proposals, but the Arizona Republican has not committed to supporting Kennedy's approach.

The erosion of the unlikely political partnership that brought the liberal Kennedy and the conservative McCain together on immigration suggests a tough road ahead for passing a sweeping immigration measure this year. Further complicating efforts to find consensus, a group of Republicans is working with the White House to draft an alternative bill.

McCain's hesitancy about joining Kennedy on the same issue they worked together on in the previous Congress also speaks to an emerging dynamic in the Republican presidential race.

McCain has encountered anger from hard-line immigration foes on the campaign trail, particularly over an aspect in last year's bill that would have allowed most undocumented immigrants to work toward citizenship. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, one of McCain's rivals for the GOP nomination, has been especially sharp in his condemnation of McCain's approach to immigration.

Of course, that would be the same Mitt Romney who once declined to oppose the McCain-Kennedy approach in earlier days, which points out an interesting dynamic in this cycle. Candidates have not been given much room to evolve on positions for the 2008 race, and this story seems to underscore that. McCain may genuinely want to move away from his previous position to something more moderate -- for instance, a security-first plan that should please moderates. But will moderates give him any credit for doing so, especially now that he wants to run for the Presidency?

I asked Hugh Hewitt that question today in a conference call this afternoon. Hugh, whose book on Romney was the main topic of conversation, disagreed with me on this point, saying that the flip-flop meme was more of a commentariat artifact than a real concern for voters. The Republicans certainly used it to great effect in 2004 on John Kerry, however, making him appear (rightly) as indecisive and inconsistent.

I believe that is one reason Rudy Giuliani continues to lead in the early polling for the primary. Hugh correctly asserted on the call that the war on terror remains the chief concern for Republican voters, and they want someone who projects strength and focus. That explains why the GOP voters have overlooked Rudy's Rockefeller brand of Republicanism -- but I believe it is because he has refused to apologize for his beliefs, and refused to pander by backtracking on his public positions. He has stood up -- respectfully -- to the social conservatives, who have not been happy about Rudy's domestic policies but trust him to stand up to the terrorists.

Romney is fortunate, in this regard, because he has plenty of time to define himself. The YouTube moments, as Hugh also pointed out, have come out early and will not sting nearly as much. That is not the case for John McCain, who as his staff notes puts himself at the center of every policy debate. His positions on campaign finance reform and immigration have not only made national headlines, but in most cases he has chosen the role of scold while offering his opinion on all of the major networks. For McCain, a shift in position does not look like evolution as it could for Romney, but opportunistic pandering -- and neither speaks well when considering which candidate will stick to his guns, and ours, in the war against Islamist terrorism.

To be fair, though, McCain should get some credit for backing away from Kennedy and reconsidering his stances on immigration. Had he not been so sanctimonious at times in the past on this issue and campaign-finance reform, he might have gotten it, too.

Note: I didn't post about the Hugh Hewitt conference call because I had to do it while in transit to the hospital to see the FM. I didn't have time to take notes. Robert Bluey, Justin Hart, and Matt Lewis did post about it, so be sure to check them out. And don't forget to order Hugh's book -- I've just begun to crack it open, but from what I see it will be an indispensable reference to the Romney campaign.

London Bombers Going Down

British authorities have arrested three men in connection to the London subway bombings on July 7, 2005. According to reports, they caught two of them just before the suspects boarded a flight to Pakistan:

Three men have been arrested in connection with the July 7, 2005, bomb attacks on the London transport network, British police said in a statement.

Two men, aged 23 and 30, were held at Manchester airport in northern England shortly before 1 p.m. GMT on Thursday as they were due to catch a flight to Pakistan, New Scotland Yard said.

A third man, aged 26, was arrested hours later at a house in the nearby city of Leeds. Police were searching five addresses in the Leeds area as well as a flat and business premises in east London, the statement said.

"The three men were arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000," it read.

This isn't the first time Leeds has figured in this story. Three of the suicide bombers came from Leeds, while a fourth came from southern England. The potential connection of suspected leadership to Leeds makes sense, considering the concentration of the perpetrators, but it seems a little odd that the others involved would have stayed there for almost two more years after the operation.

Why were the suspects flying back to Pakistan now? Perhaps they were going to initiate another terrorist attack and needed to go back to Pakistan for more resources and fresh orders. If so, British authorities probably have a good handle on it. After all, it's almost certain that they have tracked these suspected terror organizers for quite some time. The arrest at the airport would not have been a last-minute, oh-damn-we-have-to-nail-them operation. The Brits have likely followed these people for a long time, only acting when they were about to slip from their control.

As far as their destination goes, no one should be surprised to find out it was Pakistan. Unfortunately, Pervez Musharraf has allowed Islamist terrorism to metastasize in Waziristan, and the US and UK will have to start making some hard choices regarding Pakistan's sovereignty.

Edwards To Withdraw? (Updated & Bumped)

I'm no fan of John Edwards, but I hope his press conference today doesn't have the kind of bad news that rumors have indicated. After both he and his wife Elizabeth had to change their schedules to confer with her doctors, Edwards scheduled a presser to discuss developments in her health:

John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat making a second bid for the presidency, announced late Wednesday night that he would hold a news conference Thursday, a day after he and his wife, Elizabeth, visited Mrs. Edwards’ doctor to assess her health following her recovery from breast cancer.

Mrs. Edwards, in a brief interview from her home in Chapel Hill, said she and Mr. Edwards would discuss her health at the news conference, but she declined to elaborate. ...

The Edwards campaign announced the news conference at the end of a day when Mr. Edwards canceled a campaign appearance to join his wife at a visit to her doctor. Mrs. Edwards was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, almost on the day that Mr. Edwards, running for vice president on the Democratic ticket with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, lost to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. ...

Mr. Edwards canceled an appearance in Iowa on Wednesday, so he could go to a follow-up doctor’s appointment with his wife. Early in the day, associates of Mr. Edwards said they had no reason to believe the check-up was anything to worry about, but late Wednesday evening two friends said they believed the news was bad.

I'll have the Edwards family in my prayers, and I hope you will, too. I understand what it means to have a spouse with a serious illness and how it impacts everything one does -- and how one has to make that a priority. If his wife has had a recurrence of the cancer, it would be almost impossible for him to campaign effectively. Let's hope the news isn't quite that dire and that Elizabeth Edwards will quickly regain her health, if she has lost any ground.

I'll have more thoughts later in the day, depending on the results of the press conference.

UPDATE and BUMP: Edwards chose to continue his campaign despite the new bone cancer doctors discovered in his wife, Elizabeth:

John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, said today that his wife’s cancer had returned, but that his bid for the presidency “goes on strongly.”

“The campaign goes on, the campaign goes on strongly,” he said, with his wife, Elizabeth, at his side.

Mr. Edwards said he learned earlier this week that the cancer had reappeared in his wife’s rib cage. He said he and his wife recognized that it was no longer curable, though it could be managed with treatment.

Asked by a reporter whether recurrence of the cancer would cause him to suspend any campaign activities, such as fundraising or travel, Mr. Edwards said no. “We know from our previous experience that when this happens you have a choice, you can go cower in the corner and hide, or you can be tough and go out there and stand up for what you believe in,” he said.

“Both of us are committed to the cause and we’re committed to changing this country that we love so much and we have no intention of cowering in the corner,” Mr. Edwards said.

It's a tough call for Edwards to make, and it's tough to criticize it either way. I think it's fair to say that Elizabeth has invested herself pretty deeply into John's campaign up to now, and she probably strongly resisted a suspension in the campaign. If this is what will keep her spirits high, then Edwards made the right decision.

All I can offer is my own perspective. My wife has had a number of chronic illnesses and acute crises, such as the one ongoing now, and one simply cannot stop living life or making a living. That being said, it usually helps to stay closer to home and family, just for one's own peace of mind. Edwards might find himself distracted on the campaign trail, and nagging issues might get blown out of proportion as he gets frustrated with the stress. That's one of the reasons why I decided to make the career change now -- as well as the fact that the offer was just too good to resist.

Edwards has the good fortune to have a fortune, so he can keep his family close while on the campaign trail. If he can balance the needs of his family with a presidential campaign, then he's made the right decision. I'm not hoping he succeeds in his political ambitions, but I do hope he stays strong for his family and that Elizabeth can remain as healthy as possible from now on.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that the First Mate is out of the ICU -- finally -- and is resting a bit more comfortably in a regular room. Her blood pressure has stabilized quite a bit over the last few days, but she will almost certainly remain in the hospital until her transplant.

Democrats Undone Over Iraq

William Butler Yeats wrote that "the center does not hold" in his famous poem, "The Second Coming", and Congress' new majority looks to prove it. The Democrats now face uprisings on both right and left flanks over the latest version of Cut and Run making its way to the House floor, and the prospects of passage even where filibusters cannot block votes appears very dim indeed:

Representative Dan Boren is a Democrat, but after visiting Iraq last week he announced a decision that puts him at odds with his party’s leaders: he intends to vote against their plan to set a deadline for troops to leave Iraq.

“A timeline, in effect, is cutting off the funds,” said Mr. Boren, a conservative second-term lawmaker whose territory covers the eastern swath of Oklahoma, from the bottom of Kansas to the top of Texas. “That is not the solution.”

His views have barely caused a ripple in his home district, but the House Democratic leadership has been working to keep Mr. Boren’s views from spreading through the party’s jittery conservative wing. At the same time, the leaders are trying to persuade liberals to support the legislation, even though it does not end the war nearly fast enough for their liking. ...

The consternation among Democrats on the left and the right has made the outcome of the vote far less certain than leaders had hoped, particularly after respected figures like Representative John Lewis, a liberal Georgia Democrat, declared his opposition, saying, “I will not and cannot vote for another dollar or another dime to support this war.”

In the days before the vote, Democrats said they were short of the 218 votes needed to pass the legislation. Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic majority leader, conceded, “If you are asking me, do I have 218 people that I know are definite yeses right this minute, the answer to that is no.”

The Democrats thought they rode to power on a wave of anti-war sentiment, but they have discovered that their victory had much more to do with Republican failures than with Democratic platforms. Most of their new members come from center-right districts where Democratic messages about corruption and abuses resonated -- but where they see Congress' role in Iraq as limited at best. Boren represents a typical Democratic pickup district in that respect.

Now that the Democratic leadership has gone on record as wanting to limit options for victory in Iraq, Nancy Pelosi and company find that these new representatives will not play along with them. The Blue Dogs understand that timetables represent nothing more than defunding efforts under another name. They will not vote for anything that smells of defeat and retreat, and their numbers indicate that the Democratic supplemental -- even filled with hometown pork for those on the fence -- will likely fail.

On top of that, the Out of Iraq caucus threatens the bill on the Left because it gets too cute with its defunding efforts. The Left wants a clean break -- complete defunding and an end to the deployment now. Maxine Waters has assumed the leadership of this faction, and her threat to withhold support of the supplemental would also doom the bill on just that basis alone. The Democrats have only a fifteen-seat majority, and while they may get a handful of Republicans to cross the aisle for this bill, they cannot hope to make up for the losses from the Blue Dogs and the antiwar caucus.

When the Democrats won their majority in November, I warned that the thin margin would likely prove more of a curse than a boon to Nancy Pelosi. In this case, at least, it certainly will play out that way. It makes her look ineffective and incoherent, and both antiwar and anti-corruption voters will scratch their heads to see a porked-up bill funding the war for eighteen months with ridiculous conditions slouching its way to the House floor, its hour come at last.

North Korea Pulls Out Of Talks

The envoy for North Korea abruptly broke off talks today over the slowness of the transfer of $25 million locked up in an investigation into a North Korea counterfeiting operation. Kim Jong-Il's representative flew home from Beijing rather than complete the final two days of the scheduled negotiations, leading to angry denunciations from the other participants:

Six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme have ended without progress after its chief negotiator flew home amid a row over money.

The Beijing talks stalled after Pyongyang refused to discuss a deal to disable its nuclear facilities until it recovers $25m held in a Macau bank. ...

A statement from the hosts, China, said the talks had been suspended with no date set for a resumption.

"The parties agreed to recess and will resume the talks at the earliest opportunity," a Chinese government statement said.

North Korea's chief negotiator Kim Kye-gwan made no comment as he arrived at Beijing's airport. An Air Koryo flight bound for the North Korean capital Pyongyang left soon afterwards.

The money has sat in the Macau bank ever since the US froze it out of the international network for money laundering in connection with Kim's counterfeiting operation. North Korea has produced high-quality fakes of American $100 notes, and may have dumped as much as a billion dollars' worth of them into the global markets. It provided hard currency for a regime on the brink of starvation, and the Macau bank was the only outlet for the ring. The US agreed to free the money and transfer it to China, but Pyongyang got impatient with the process and quit over it.

That has not set well with the other nations at the table. China has not made any statements about it, probably hoping to keep Pyongyang involved. The Japanese, who have had to allow their issues to get back-burnered by this process, called Kim's withdrawal a "shame" and a "waste", considering the fact that everyone had gathered to resolve their issues. Christopher Hill, who brokered the deal mainly through back-channel negotiations, spoke more bluntly. "The day I'm able to explain to you North Korean thinking is probably the day I've been in this process too long," he told reporters.

Who gets hurt by this? One has to think that the big loser is North Korea. Not only do they not get their money -- the US will surely not transfer the funds nor lift the sanctions on Kim's bank now -- but they don't get their oil, either. Their nuclear program is already a bust, and they face increased sanctions from this process, especially given the anger they left at the table.

The big winner of a North Korean bug-out could be George Bush, depending on how the US handles this. No one here had much confidence in the agreement reached with the Kim regime, considering it another version of the Agreed Framework with only incremental improvements in verification. It left wide gaps on the nuclear issue, including the disposition of extant nuclear weapons and any highly-enriched-uranium work the regime had done. Now, with North Korea reneging on their initial agreement, the Bush administration can say that they tried to reach a peaceful settlement with Kim, bending over backwards to meet his concerns -- but that Kim will not negotiate in good faith under any conditions.

Unless Kim returns quickly to the table, expect Japan and the US to start putting even more economic and military pressure on Pyongyang in the coming weeks.

Mahdis Fracturing, US Trying To Heal Them?

The Mahdi Army, once a large structure ready to do Moqtada al-Sadr's bidding, has fractured under the weight of the US surge strategy. Hundreds of Mahdi commanders now take orders directly from Iran, where they have gone to train while the US and Iraqi security plan makes the kind of progress that threatens their political stranglehold on Baghdad:

The violent Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army is breaking into splinter groups, with up to 3,000 gunmen now financed directly by Iran and no longer loyal to the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, adding a potentially even more deadly element to Iraq's violent mix.

Two senior militia commanders told The Associated Press that hundreds of these fighters have crossed into Iran for training by the elite Quds force, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard thought to have trained Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

The breakup is an ominous development at a time when U.S. and Iraqi forces are working to defeat religious-based militias and secure Iraq under government control. While al-Sadr's forces have battled the coalition repeatedly, including pitched battles in 2004, they've mostly stayed in the background during the latest offensive.

The dissolution of the Mahdis should give cause for celebration. After all, they have always had the support of Iran in one form or another. Sadr himself fled to Iran for consultations with the Iranian mullahcracy when General David Petraeus prepared the troops for the new security plan, and he hasn't been seen in Iraq since. Even a larger splinter group of 3,000 gunmen taking operational orders from Iran represents a much lower threat than the estimated 60,000 Sadr had under his control, with high morale and a free hand to kill and intimidate Baghdadis.

Apparently, though, the US feels somewhat conflicted about the disintegration of the Mahdis. Yesterday, American military forces released a key Sadr aide in what looks like an attempt to reach some sort of reconciliation with the cleric -- again:

The U.S. military Wednesday released a senior member of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr's movement at the request of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

The decision, officials said, was made with the hope of easing tensions between Sadr's Al Mahdi militia and U.S.-led forces in Iraq. Sheik Ahmed Shibani, who had been in prison for 2 1/2 years, was handed over to the office of the Shiite prime minister.

"In consultation with the prime minister and following his request, coalition leaders determined that Sheik Shibani, who was detained since 2004, could play a potentially important role in helping to moderate extremism and foster reconciliation in Iraq," U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said in a statement.

The Iraqis have demanded Shibani's release for seven months, after an Iraqi court found him not guilty of weapons-possession charges. The US military command refused to release him after his acquittal, an interesting if inconsistent position with American insistence on releasing Saddam Hussein after his conviction.

Obviously, the US kept Shibani as a bargaining chip, but to what end? Sadr has proven an unreliable partner in negotiations on more than one occasion, including after the Najaf compromise that saved Sadr from complete annihilation in 2004. The US has effectively marginalized Sadr during the surge, to the point where Sadr has not appeared in public in Iraq for many weeks. All this does is give Sadr back a little of the credibility he lost with the surge, a strange notion given the circumstances,

The US must feel that Sadr can help stabilize Baghdad, and he probably could -- but it depends on the kind of stability one wants for the Iraqi capital. To think that he can help bring peace and freedom to an area he once controlled through murder, intimidation, and organized-crime enterprises boggles the mind. Why allow the Mahdis to return to Baghdad as an organization under Sadr's control?

French Oil Execs Arrested For Bribery In Iran

In a move reminiscent of the French involvement with the Oil-For-Food Program at the UN, three top executives of the French oil giant Total found themselves under arrest for bribery. In this case, the three didn't send money to Saddam Hussein for access to Iraqi oil fields, but rather sent millions of dollars under the table to the Iranian mullahcracy:

The head of the French oil giant Total SA was detained by police yesterday over suspicions that the company paid millions of dollars in bribes for its operations in an Iranian offshore gas field.

Christophe de Margerie, 55, and two directors, were summoned on the orders of Philippe Courroye, a judge who last year placed him under criminal investigation in a case involving Iraq. That concerned the company’s suspected payment of bribes to aquire supplies in the UN Oil-for-Food programme in 1999-2003.

Total, France’s biggest public company, said that it was “completely behind its executives” and insisted that the Iranian agreements were legal. ...

Swiss investigators uncovered evidence of illicit payments and passed the case to France last December. According to Le Monde, a total of €60 million had allegedly been paid to Iranian officials up to 2003, including sums paid into accounts controlled by a son of Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian President.

There are direct connections to the OFF scandal. CEO de Margerie, called the Big Moustache by his peers, allegedly paid off middlemen for access to Iraqi oil contracts. A French court ordered his arrest last fall on those charges, which are still being investigated. de Margerie also sits at the center of an alleged money-laundering scheme in Cameroon.

de Margerie is apparently providing a full-employment program to lawyers and investogators.

Will this be another OFF scandal? Probably not. The sanctions on Iran now did not exist in 2003, when this bribery allegedly occurred, at least not in Europe. It does show, though, that any sanctions regime that involves oil will be difficult to maintain for long, as chronically corrupt entities like Total will break any rules in order to gain economic advantage over their rivals. This rot starts from the head.

Angola To Mugabe's Rescue

The unrest in Zimbabwe must have rattled Robert Mugabe this week. He has called on one of his few friends in Africa to send shock troops to frighten Zimbabweans back into submission:

About 2,500 Angolan paramilitary police, feared in their own country for their brutality, are to be deployed in Zimbabwe, raising concerns of an escalation in violence against those opposed to President Mugabe.

Kembo Mohadi, Zimbabwe’s Home Affairs Minister, confirmed their imminent arrival, with 1,000 Angolans expected on April 1 and the rest in batches of 500. Angola is regarded as the most powerful military nation in Africa, after South Africa.

The deployment comes amid reports of concern in President Mugabe’s Government over the capability of the country’s own police force to suppress outbreaks of unrest, which are mostly in Harare’s volatile townships.

The townships have been under curfew for about three weeks; one man has been shot dead and hundreds of civilians injured. Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and about 30 opposition activists are still recovering from beatings they received when police suppressed an attempted rally on March 11.

Mr Mohadi said that he had signed an agreement for the deployment of the Angolan paramilitaries with General Roberto Monteiro, the Interior Minister of Angola, last week.

The current round of trouble started when Mugabe sent his own forces after Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe's opposition. The MDC held a rally to fire up support for regime change, and Mugabe reacted in character -- with brutality. Many of the MDC leadership were arrested, and some beaten. When foreign diplomats objected to the treatment Tsvangirai and others received, Mugabe warned them to keep their mouths shut or face ejection.

Power appears to be slipping from Mugabe's grasp, a development even Mugabe sees. The act of contracting Angola's so-called "Ninjas" -- they wear all-black uniforms -- shows that Mugabe cannot rely entirely on his own security forces. Part of the reason is that so many of the native police have quit recently, disgusted over low pay and poor conditions, which would certainly include assisting in the tyranny of Mugabe.

The regime has weakened significantly, and one wonders why Angola bothers to assist Mugabe. It cannot win Angola much, since Zimbabwe has become so poor under Mugabe's iron-fisted rule. They belong to the Southern African Development Community, which provides for common defense, among other issues, but the SADC as an organization has rejected calls for assistance from Mugabe. The president of Zambia, another SADC member, referred to Zimbabwe as a "sinking Titanic", and the SADC's security protocols only come into effect for external attack, not for internal dissent.

The Ninjas will not save Mugabe for long. Zimbabweans appear to be ready to give Mugabe the heave-ho, and the contract for Angolan mercenary police might be the last straw. The Angolans will need ten days to send the first contingent and more than a month to send them all. We'll see if they arrive in time to save Mugabe.

Cathy Seipp, RIP

Cathy Seipp has passed away. Our condolences go out to her family and friends, and our appreciation for her wit, talent, and heart goes with her. Godspeed, Cathy, and thank you.

Obama: Against The Funding Before He Was For It

Do you want to know why we don't elect Senators and Congressmen to the Presidency? Mainly, they have to cast votes that appear contradictory, or in some cases, actually are contradictory. In 2004, John Kerry got hoist on that particular petard when he told reporters that he "voted for the $87 billion [war supplemental] before I voted against it". Now Barack Obama might have the same problem in reverse, after ABC News uncovered a video of Obama insisting in 2003 that Congress should not have approved that supplemental -- before he voted four times for Iraq war funding himself:

In video obtained by ABC News of a Winnetka, Ill., Democratic event from Sunday, Nov. 16, 2003, then-state senator Obama told a cheering crowd that it was wrong to vote to fund the war.

"Just this week, when I was asked, would I have voted for the $87 billion dollars, I said 'No,'" Obama said to applause as he referred to a bill to fund troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I said no unequivocally because, at a certain point, we have to say 'No' to George Bush," Obama said. "If we keep on getting steamrolled, we are not going to stand a chance."

Obama's campaign has started to put out the fire, but they're not terribly convincing. They claim that Obama opposed $20 billion of that bill that funded no-bid contracts, but that hardly matches the rhetoric in the video ABC News also provides. In a press release at the time, Obama insisted that Congress should hold the funding until George Bush presented a plan for withdrawal and also funds for investment in American schools and infrastructure at least comparable to what the US wanted to spend in Iraq.

This opposition came at the beginning of the effort to stabilize Iraq, shortly before the first elections were held that created the transitional government. If it seems a little strange to have been talking retreat at that time, remember that Obama has used that to claim consistency in his position over the entire four years. At the same time, however, he has voted four times to continue funding the war without any of the preconditions he demanded in 2003 -- and he's only been in the Senate two years.

This wouldn't sting nearly so badly had Obama not made consistency such an issue with Hillary Clinton. Obama, and to a lesser extent John Edwards, have hammered her for her vote to support the Iraq war and her refusal to apologize for it. This makes Obama look even less consistent than Hillary; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if ABC got the video from the Clinton machine.

Obama has experienced what all legislators suffer -- the need to compromise to get business completed. It makes for good legislators, but it makes for poor ground on which to run for executive office. It's why only a handful of legislators have been directly elected to the Presidency, and why even with only two years of experience in national office, Obama has the same problem as every other Senator and Congressman in the race.

Irony, Mainstream-Media Style

No one does irony like the mainstream media. When an opportunity arose to skewer one of the Right's most powerful voices, they jumped all over it -- and made themselves into fools for doing so. After hounding Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a reaction to criticism by Rush Limbaugh over his centrist policies, the Governator replied that Rush is irrelevant to his decision-making:

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are feuding.

Limbaugh says Schwarzenegger is a Democrat in GOP clothing. The governor responds that the talk show host is "irrelevant."

Limbaugh has been challenging Schwarzenegger's Republican credentials, asserting that the governor has betrayed conservative principles. Schwarzenegger has responded by turning the other cheek — until now.

"Rush Limbaugh is irrelevant. I am not his servant," Schwarzenegger said during an interview Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show.

The so-called "feud" must have ended quite rapidly, because Arnold was a guest on Rush's show this morning. They spoke for 15 minutes and had a polite and constructive discussion about policy. As Rush himself noted, the "irrelevant" remark came from the constant badgering Arnold gets about Rush's commentary, as if Arnold has to answer for everything Rush says.

The media gleefully repeated the quote, however, in an attempt to score a couple of points off of Rush. How many did that? Well, let's see - besides the CBS link, we have:

Guardian (UK)
Forbes Magazine
Houston Chronicle
Sports Illustrated
Los Angeles Times
Pravda (Russia)
NBC San Diego
San Francisco Chronicle
Washington Post

In fact, over 160 news outlets chose to publish this story, plus any number of blogs. It seems to be one of the hotter stories, as it has garnered all of this attention in less than 36 hours. The mainstream media has proven that Rush Limbaugh is exceedingly relevant in its attempt to publicize this to embarrass him.

Somewhere, Rush is lighting a cigar and enjoying one of the most satisfying laughs of his life.

Pork Serves The White House

Mark Tapscott writes a provocative article which takes the Bush administration to task for not fulfilling its promise to end pork-barrel spending. Noting that the President pledged to cut earmarks by half in the last State of the Union speech, Mark wants to know why he left it at 50%:

President Bush vows to veto an Iraq emergency supplemental funding bill if it comes to his desk stuffed with pork unrelated to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq properly armed, clothed and fed.

But Bush may have undercut his ability to shape the Iraq bill and indeed all other spending measures with a State of the Union promise. You will recall that Bush condemned earmarks and challenged Congress to work with him to cut them in half. ...

Curiously, Bush offered no rationale for preserving half of the earmarks he rightly condemned, nor did he even hint at a timetable for eliminating them entirely.

Now comes the Iraq supplemental in which Bush originally asked Congress to appropriate $105 billion for the troops in Iraq and for continued Gulf Coast hurricane relief.

The White House courier delivering the supplemental proposal to Congress had hardly left the Capitol grounds before House Democrats began meeting in secret to pork it up. They stuffed the Iraq supplemental with more than $20 billion worth of pork, some designed to buy votes for the measure but all of it done behind closed doors.

That's the problem with half-measures, a term that literally applies in this instance. It only encourages one's opponent to double down in order to get all of what they wanted. This appears to be the case with this bill, as Democrats and Republicans alike try to use earmarks to get the bill passed in Congress as well as to protect their ability to get re-elected.

The administration has vowed a veto if the bill has "too much pork", but no one has suggested a formula for that calculation. Apparently, like Justice Lewis Powell on obscenity, the White House will know a pork overdose when it sees one. In the meantime, facing a hostile Congress for the first time, the Bush administration appears committed to keeping earmarks on the table as bargaining power to preserve its own agenda.

Be sure to read all of Mark's editorial. Porkbusting still has a long way to go.

But Will They Stop Taking His Money?

George Soros wrote an article for the New York Review of Books that attacked the US for its pro-Israeli policies. The Democratic Party underwriter made clear that he felt the US should start dealing directly with Hamas, despite its existence as a terrorist organization, and complained about the influence of AIPAC. That created a problem for Barack Obama, who has received support from Soros, as well as many other Democrats:

Leading Democrats, including Senator Obama of Illinois, are distancing themselves from an essay published this week by one of their party's leading financiers that called for the Democratic Party to "liberate" itself from the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.

The article, by George Soros, published in the New York Review of Books, asserts that America should pressure Israel to negotiate with the Hamas-led unity government in the Palestinian territories regardless of whether Hamas recognizes the right of the Jewish state to exist. Mr. Soros goes on to say that one reason America has not embraced this policy is because of the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. ...

The Soros article puts Democrats in the awkward position of choosing between Mr. Soros, a major funder of their causes, and the pro-Israel lobby, whose members are also active in campaign fund-raising. Pressed by The New York Sun, some Democrats aired their differences with Mr. Soros.

Well, except for Obama, the leading Democrats themselves are not distancing themselves from Soros. His campaign office, at least, issued a statement rejecting Hamas as a partner for peace, noting that the US position on this is correct, and that many other organizations besides AIPAC agree. Obama himself has not addressed the issue, but at least his staff has.

The same cannot be said for Hillary Clinton or the DNC. Hillary Clinton's response came via Re. Eliot Engel, who called Soros "obviously very self-absorbed". The DNC refused to comment, and one of its vice-chairs, Susan Turnbull, tried to blame the pro-Israel policies of the US on George Bush -- meaning that she agreed with Soros about it, although she tried to separate her agreement from AIPAC, which promotes the policies that Bush (and previous presidents) implements.

When will we hear directly from Clinton on this issue? Soros plays a critical role in raising funds for the party she wants to lead. Will Hillary personally and explicitly reject his calls to negotiate with terrorists? Up to now, Democrats haven't breathed a word about Soros' attempts to paint AIPAC as part of a cabal to make American policy subordinate to Israeli interests. They need to state whether they buy into Soros' conspiracy theories as well as into his cash, and they need to do that themselves, rather than through proxies.

In fact, they can make their position very clear by either accepting or rejecting Soros money, now and in the future, and that applies even more to the DNC.

Afghans Dealt For Italian Journalist

Yet another Italian journalist has his freedom thanks to deal-cutting with terrorists. Hamid Karzai's government released five captured Taliban fighters in order to free Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who had been kidnapped two weeks earlier and watched his driver get decapitated:

The Afghan government admitted yesterday it had struck a deal with Taliban kidnappers to secure the freedom of an Italian hostage. An Italian aid agency said Daniele Mastrogiacomo, a journalist with La Repubblica newspaper, was freed only after five Taliban militants had been released from prison.

President Hamid Karzai's spokesmen admitted a deal had been made but refused to elaborate. ...

Gina Strada head of the Italian non-governmental organisation Emergency, which runs a hospital in Lashkar Gah, told La Stampa that President Karzai had authorised the release despite protests in his own government.

"The Afghan government was not a big help," she said. "[The Italian ambassador] spent hours and hours fighting with ministers and Afghan officials who refused to carry out Karzai's orders."

Karim Rahimi, an Afghan government spokesman, admitted "some demands" had been met but refused to specify how many prisoners had been freed. "This was an exceptional case and it will never happen again," he said.

It will never happen again. Yes, I'm certain that the Taliban believes that to be the case. Why, at this very moment, their leadership probably has met to discuss how further abductions will not end in the same result.

The next time, they'll demand ten prisoners, and they'll probably get them.

Incentives increase the level of activity that creates them. That is a human reality that stretches through every culture, regardless of race, creed, or language. If the Aghan government rewards abductions, the Taliban will start cranking them out faster and faster. They have had a large number of their fighters captured, and they will use whatever means they can to get them released and back on the front lines -- and abductions are relatively easy missions to execute.

Hamid Karzai said he made the deal to preserve the "friendship" of the Italians. It sounds as if Karzai had two extortionists involved in this deal. Italy has 1800 soldiers in Afghanistan, and the implication appears to be that Italy would have exited without Karzai making the deal. If so, it shows that Berlusconi isn't the only Italian premiere to lack the fortitude to stand up to terrorist demands for deals.

Bush Digs In, Democrats Double Down

George Bush took the only option left open to him yesterday by his Department of Justice -- defending executive privilege. He defiantly stated at a press conference that he would not allow his advisors to testify under oath in the controversy over the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors, but he did offer to provide them for "conversations" with Congressional inquiries into the issue:

Inviting a showdown with congressional leaders over the firing of U.S. attorneys, a defiant President Bush on Tuesday refused to make White House political strategist Karl Rove available for public questioning under oath.

Bush agreed to let lawmakers interview Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers in private, but the concessions failed to placate Democrats, who have accused the White House and Justice Department of dismissing eight federal prosecutors for political reasons.

The House and Senate Judiciary committees readied plans for today and Thursday to authorize subpoenas for Rove and other officials.

Bush said his staff would oppose the subpoenas, setting the stage for a possible constitutional confrontation in which past and current members of the White House staff could be held in contempt of Congress.

As Bush stated, this is actually a reasonable compromise. It allows Congress to get testimony from White House aides such as Karl Rove without establishing a precedent for the trammeling of executive privilege. As Arlen Specter noted in support of Bush's proposal, Congress could accept his offer as a first step. If they interviewed Rove and Harriet Miers and found points that required further investigation, then they could move to the subpoena process, but in the meantime they could slow the rush towards a Constitutional clash between the branches.

Unfortunately, that seems to be what the Democrats want -- and it shows them overplaying their hand on the wrong issue. The termination of the attorneys involved did not break any laws, certainly not in the process used, and that's all about which Rove and Miers will testify. A challenge to executive privilege would almost certainly fail without strong evidence of an actual crime; the courts will not tip the balance of power in Congress' favor for a fishing expedition, especially when the executive branch offered a reasonable compromise.

In a way, this kerfuffle has provided an interesting distraction from the Democrats' other promised investigations. They wanted to start a hailstorm of subpoenas for investigations on everything from the Iraq war to energy policy, all of them more significant in the long run than this controversy, and more politically lucrative for the Democrats. Instead of just making the point that the administration allowed political hacks to run wild at Justice and embarrass the White House for a while, the Democrats have turned it into an issue that has overshadowed all others -- and has deprioritized their ever-changing efforts to end the Iraq war.

Without a doubt, though, this is an issue that the Department of Justice and the White House brought upon themselves, especially with their ham-handed efforts to explain the firings as "performance related". That explanation to Congress flew in the face of the DoJ's own documentation, and it forced the terminated attorneys to defend themselves publicly. David Iglesias writes his defense in the New York Times today:

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer” in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

That, to me, indicates a problem with Domenici and Wilson more than the White House, which seems to have caved to Congressional pressure on Iglesias. Will Congress demand a public explanation, under oath, from their own? Unlikely, since many of them stick their noses into ongoing investigations, including Chuck Schumer on the Plame investigation. However, it still reflects poorly on the DoJ and Gonzales' administration, which showed no loyalty to someone they considered a star, pitching him under the bus when someone griped about his handling of one particular case.

The entire issue shows political hackery all the way around -- and if the Democrats aren't careful, they may come out as the biggest hacks of all.

What A Tough Sanctions Regime!

The Palestinians have demanded an end to the aid embargo now that they have created a unity government between Hamas and Fatah, regardless of the fact that the new government still has not met any of the conditions the West set for resumption of support. One might think that the sanctions might have convinced the Palestinians to change their policies, since they are so dependent on outside economic assistance -- but that would take actual sanctions. As it turns out, the Palestinians got more Western aid money than ever after the declaration of sanctions:

Despite the international embargo on aid to the Palestinian Authority since Hamas came to power a year ago, significantly more aid was delivered to the Palestinians in 2006 than in 2005, according to official figures from the United Nations, United States, European Union and International Monetary Fund.

Instead of going to the Palestinian Authority, much of the money was given directly to individuals or through independent agencies like the World Food Program.

The International Monetary Fund and the United Nations say the Palestinians received $1.2 billion in aid and budgetary support in 2006, about $300 per capita, compared with $1 billion in 2005.

While the United States and the European Union have led the boycott, they, too, provided more aid to the Palestinians in 2006 than 2005. Washington increased its aid to $468 million in 2006, from $400 million in 2005.

The European Union and its member states alone are subsidizing one million people in the West Bank and Gaza, a quarter of the population, as part of their effort to avoid creating a catastrophe from the embargo.

Two thoughts come to mind from this report. First, this is how the aid should have been distributed from the beginning. Instead of supporting terrorist organizations, and Fatah certainly qualifies in spades as one, we should have bypassed the ridiculous PA altogether and sent the aid directly to the people -- at least to the extent the PA allowed it to reach them. For too many years, we supported the Palestinian terror structure directly, and all we got in return were intifadas and, in one case, a direct attack on American diplomats in Gaza.

Second, and more importantly, the continuation of aid has kept the sanctions from doing their job. The idea of sanctions is to place pressure on a governmemt to change their policy, as well in this instance not to be seen funding terrorists. That pressure comes from the people who support the government -- and the Palestinian people clearly elected Hamas to govern them. Their privations ceased being our problem when they elected Islamist terrorists to run their government.

Their support for terrorists and terrorism, which is quite open and explicit, is the problem. If the West wants to change the situation in the territories, they have to begin by changing the attitude of the people. Instead, in 2006, they continued to support them while they supported Hamas, while Hamas conducted abductions of an Israeli soldier and allowed Islamic Jihad to launch continuous rocket attacks against Israel all year long.

I understand the impulse behind this -- the West wants to be seen as "nice", so that the sanctions don't seem aimed at the people. That may make sense in Iran, where the people are more pro-Western, and it certainly made sense in Iraq, even if the sanctions regime got so thoroughly corrupted. The Iraqis didn't elect Saddam Hussein to the position of Most Brutal Dictator. That's not the case with the Palestinian Authority, where the people freely elect terrorists of one stripe or another.

We're not going to stop terrorism by buying it off. All we do is pay for more terrorism. If the Palestinians do not explicitly renounce violence, agree to abide by prior agreements of the PA, and recognize Israel's right to exist, then we should stop all aid, and let the Palestinians fend for themselves.

Taliban And Al-Qaeda At War In Wana?

It's getting to the point where people need a scorecard in Waziristan to keep all of the players straight. A battle broke out today between Taliban elements in Waziristan and Uzbeki terrorists from al-Qaeda who overstayed their welcome in the Pakistani mountains:

Nearly 50 people have been killed after rising tension between local tribesmen and foreign militants in north-west Pakistan erupted into fierce fighting.

Heavy shelling has raged since Monday near Wana in the South Waziristan tribal area close to Afghanistan.

Most of those killed were militants from Uzbekistan suspected of links with al-Qaeda, officials said. At least two children also died in the crossfire. ...

Uzbek militants had largely kept themselves to themselves and were not linked to al-Qaeda's anti-Western agenda, but in recent months they are reported to have become more involved in local disputes, says the BBC's Aamer Ahmed Khan in Islamabad.

Reports suggested that Taleban and local tribesmen had demanded the Uzbeks leave, or disarm, and that fighting broke out when they refused.

The Pakistani government, which has signed agreements with the tribesmen, has been urging them to kick out al-Qaeda-linked fighters.

Once again, we return to the underlying role of tribalism in the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict. Six months ago, I wrote about how some of the terrorist conflicts in this region could get traced back to simple tribal politics. This battle springs from the same conflict.

The region of Waziristan sits in the middle of Pashtun territory, which straddles the border between the two nations. The tribes in Wana and Waziristan are all Pashtun, whereas most of the rest of Pakistan gets split between Baluchis and Punjabis. On the other side of Pashtun territory in Afghanistan, the Tajiks and the Hazaras form a buffer between the Pashtuns and the Uzbeks.

If Uzbeks found themselves in Wana, they were a long way from home. The Pakistani government wants the tribes to eject outsiders, not al-Qaeda as an organization. After all, the Taliban have an association with AQ, but the Taliban are primarily Pashtun. Uzbeks would be seen as an easy target, and attacking them would help demonstrate their supposed commitment to fighting terrorists.

That's why the BBC reports this as a Taliban attack on al-Qaeda, but that's not quite correct. It looks more like a Pashtun attack on Uzbeks who made the mistake of thinking that everyone was enjoying one big happy jihad. It might make Pervez Musharraf look good and serve to fool some people into thinking that his agreements with the Waziristan tribal leaders still could produce some effort against terrorism, when it just means that the Pashtuns have a free hand to eject any outsiders.

Still, it's not a bad thing to see competing Islamist terrorists attacking each other. It seems like a distraction from the Taliban's upcoming spring offensive, and that's something to cheer.

UPDATE: The indispensable Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail agrees, and has more detail about what started the fight in the first place.

Iraqi Insurgents Using Children For Attacks

The BBC reports that the increased checkpoints implemented as part of the surge strategy has forced Iraqi insurgents into a brutal change in tactics. Believing them more likely to pass through the security posts, terrorists have begun using children to carry out suicide attacks on Iraqi civilians:

A US military official has said children have been used in a bomb attack in Iraq, raising fears that insurgents are using a new tactic.

Gen Michael Barbero said a vehicle stopped at a checkpoint was waved through because two children were seen in the back, but was then detonated.

Militants were changing tactics in response to tighter security, he said. ...

Gen Barbero said there had been also two adults in the car. They parked it near a market, abandoned it with the children inside and apparently detonated it.

The two children died, along with three civilians in the vicinity, officials said.

No one knows the identity of the children or the adults in the car. One would presume that parents would have committed suicide along with their children, so it's probably safe to speculate that the children had been abducted for the purpose of using them as terror-attack shields. They may also have found the children on the streets and deceived them into thinking that the adults would take care of them.

The brutal nature of this new tactic shows a large amount of desperation on the part of the insurgents. First, now that we've seen that tactic, we will adapt security procedures to keep it from succeeding in the future. It only had use as long as the approach remained novel, but that time has passed. If checkpoints had been lax about checking children, they will no longer be so trusting.

Second and more importantly, it shows that the insurgents have given up all hope of convincing any Iraqis of the righteousness of their cause. Only the most bloodthirsty of people would find the exploitation of children as terror-attack shields to be convincing. The Iraqis on the street will look at this attack as beyond the pale, even for the region. The terrorists have earned themselves a great deal of revulsion, and they can expect even more Iraqis to support anything which brings an end to their viciousness and cruelty.

Only a group with nothing else left in its arsenal would try this. The terrorists have found the chlorine bombs ineffective, and the checkpoints have bitten deeply into their power base. This disgusting chapter in terrorism only serves to show the effectiveness of the Coalition in forcing the extremists to their last extremity.

Live Blog: Jonah Goldberg At UM

I found out a few days ago -- from reading The Corner, naturally -- that NRO editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg would give a speech to CFACT here at the University of Minnesota tonight. I have long wanted to meet Jonah, but didn't have the opportunity until now. With the First Mate in the hospital, I sent Jonah a welcome-to-Minnesota e-mail (to which he sent a friendly reply), but didn't think I'd get the opportunity to hear the speech.

Fortunately, the FM has improved greatly. I visited with her this afternoon and spoke with doctors, and they're very encouraged about her status. She tired out quickly today, so I need to let her get some sleep, but her blood pressure has been very consistent and very normal all day. They removed the IV drip and switched to oral medication, and they think she'll get out of the ICU pretty quickly. After I received an invitation from CFACT to introduce Jonah -- whose speech is next door to the hospital, as it turns out -- I accepted, and I'm looking forward to meeting him.

I'll live-blog the speech after I sit down. Keep checking this post for updates.

7:06 - Starts off by talking about the power of blogs -- how much the conservative blogosphere has matured and filled out. Minnesota "punches so far above its weight".

7:09 - Very humorous, but he wants to avoid the "humorist", especially after he got stuck on CNN between two comedians in late 2000, and got challenged to define what was funny.

7:11 - "You have a pulse, which is one of the things I look for in a non-inflatable audience ..."

7:12 - Talks about Bush Fatigue, and how it seems to be getting more and more burdensome. He doesn't feel the need to defend someone so poor at defending himself. Jonah also has gotten tired of having the front man for conservatism be someone who isn't terribly eloquent. That's why Jonah thinks that Fred Dalton Thompson has such cachet now.

7:14 - Jonah talks about his dislike for "compassionate conservatism", saying that he doesn't want government to feel his pain -- he wants it to feel his boot in its ass.

7:16 - If Bill Clinton spent a billion dollars on marriage counseling -- if not on himself -- we would have criticized it as outside of the scope of government. Why do we give Bush as pass? That kind of question has us wanting the next Reagan.

7:17 - Rudy Giuliani is more liberal than people think, but he's still the frontrunner for the Republicans, certainly an interesting development. Jonah says that he did a great job in saving New York City, but that doesn't mean he'll be the great foreign-policy president as people assume.

7:21 - The GOP is turning into the foreign-policy party, and the evangelicals take that very seriously -- apparently seriously enough to deprioritize the social issues on which they normally focus.

7:22 - Now he's looking at the Democrats. Hillary is imploding. A month ago, Hillary's people all dismissed Barack Obama as a flash in the pan, but they're taking him seriously now.

7:25 - Jonah doesn't think that Obama had a long shelf life, at least not if he stayed in the Senate. This is his time -- after this, he would get stale in the Senate chamber.

7:27 - Edwards: the Howard Dean of 2008. Or, maybe, the Howard Dean Wannabe of 2008.

7:28 - We're too focused on electability, instead of having the right discussions on the nature of conservatism.

7:30 - Now we're moving towards environmentalism, and tells a funny anecdote regarding a conversation he had with a polite but earnest Al Gore supporter. He references Jim Ignatowski, but only a couple of us are old enough to get the joke.

7:32 - Thanks, Lexhamfox -- we're hoping she gets into a regular room in the next couple of days.

7:33 - "Over the last 100 years, the average temperature of the globe went up one degree Celsius. In the same period, the globe got 1800% richer."

7:36 - The US uses its wealth to create positive solutions, such as medicine. Wealth frees people to create such things as AIDS treatments, cancer cures, etc. The rest of the world gets more or less a free ride on our R&D. Why should we limit our economic growth, when that's the case?

7:38 - Bush doesn't defend himself on Kyoto. The press says that Bush "refuses to sign Kyoto", but Clinton already signed it -- and then stuck it in a drawer after the Senate voted 95-0 to refuse to approve it if he submitted it. By that measure, Bush, "that war-mongering bastard", refused to sign the peace treaty with the Japanese. If the Democrats want to approve the treat, they could do it tomorrow, now that they control the Senate.

7:42 - China plans on building over 2000 coal-fired power plants over the next 15-20 years, or one every ten days.

7:45 - Carbon dioxide is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator, of global warming. As oceans warm, they release more CO2.

7:47 - "You can tell you're being conned when all of the supporting evidence and all of the contradictory evidence is said to prove the same thing."

7:49 - M. Simon, I'm the one who got the temperature change wrong. Jonah said 0.6C, 1.0F.

7:51 - He's talking about the connections between fascism and liberalism, especially environmental activism. This is along the same lines as his next book.

7:53 - He's quoting Gore in Earth in the Balance, blaming Plato, Descartes, and Francis Bacon for using reason to separate Man from his Edenic idyll.

7:57 - Jonah mentions one of the more overlooked aspects of the Nazi movement - its polytheistic paganism.

8:01 - Carbon offsets, the modern-day indulgence to remove the requirement for penance for our sins.

8:04 - Moving into the Q&A. To the extent that the GW debate is over, doesn't that make Gore the perfect candidate for the Democrats? Jonah - Gore and Gingrich have that similarity. Both think they can build a movement that will allow them not to run but get swept into office without campaigning, Gore happens to be doing it better.

8:09 - Is there any candidate on the Right that can slow down the GW train? Jonah -- Short answer: no. Newt probably could do it. Bush lets the Democrats keep painting the lack of Kyoto agreement, but the Democrats could start implementing Kyoto limits now that they control Congress. If they don't, then Bush should use that against them.

8:13 - Fred Dalton Thompson deserves better than Jonah's assessment of him as a "bright new shiny thing". He could be a man who would not get rolled. Jonah - He agrees. He wouldn't have guessed that at this stage there would be this level of dissatisfaction with the current GOP choices, and Jonah is concerned about the desperate quality of the draft-Thompson impulse. So far, Jonah sees him as the Republican Obama.

8:17 - Why are Republicans are so unwilling to challenge GW dogma? Jonah - GW has become "the children" of the political debate of 2007-8. If you argue about GW, you hate the Earth.

8:22 - How can Democrats keep up with Newt Gingrich intellectually? Jonah - Best predictor of who will win in the general election is who has more likability. Newt's negatives are higher than Hillary's and much higher than Obama's. Intellectually, he may be able to run circles around them, but that doesn't mean he'll win.

8:26 - One of the interesting aspects of the campaign so far is that Hillary has lost her identity as a female candidate. Few people talk about her as the first potential woman President.

8:29 - Our focus on competence in the GOP primaries by supporting technocrats serves as a subtle indictment of the Bush administration.

8:32 - Wrapping up. Jonah is an excellent, engaging, and humorous speaker. He drew a significant crowd for a conservative at the U of M -- more than 100 people -- and kept them in rapt attention. He made the event fun and didn't spare criticism for either conservatives or liberals. If you ever get a chance to see him speak live, make sure you take full advantage of it.

Herald Hackery?

Yesterday, I posted about a faux pas committed by Mitt Romney in Florida, when addressing a group of Cuban-Americans. The quote from the Miami Herald article was this:

People chuckled when presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon raised in Michigan and elected in Massachusetts, bungled the names of Cuban-American politicians during a recent speech in Miami.

But when he mistakenly associated Fidel Castro's trademark speech-ending slogan -- Patria o muerte, venceremos! -- with a free Cuba, listeners didn't laugh. They winced.

Castro has closed his speeches with the phrase -- in English, ''Fatherland or death, we shall overcome'' -- for decades.

However, CQ commenter Conservative Gladiator says that the context of Romney's use made the meaning plain:

Romney: “I said at the outset that the threat in Latin America is unprecedented. I say that because the Castros have a second tyrant and he has great wealth, from oil. We must stand just as firm against caudillos like Hugo Chavez, tutored by Fidel Castro. Chavez and Castro are brothers in blood, intent on personal gratification at the expense of their people. Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro have stolen the phrase – 'Patria o muerte, venceremos.’ This phrase should not be used by dictators, but by liberators.

“There are two spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere. One is dark, bellicose and spreads misery by denying people basic freedoms; the other shines like a powerful light, is peaceful and wants only for its people to live in liberty and prosper."

As Brant from SWLiP notes, this makes a big difference in the use of the phrase -- and it shouldn't have caused any "wincing", as Beth Reinhard wrote. It plainly uses Castro's language as a criticism against him, a rhetorical device that has been long in use and is quite effective. It would not be just a mistake by a pretender, but a deliberate -- and I would say excellent -- barb at a dictator who long-windedness needs some puncturing.

Like Brant, I'd like to get a copy of the speech as delivered. This was Conservative Gladiator's first comment at CQ, so I'm still holding off judgement of Reinhard until I see the transcript. If Reinhard is correct, then the original post still applies. If Conservative Gladiator is correct, Reinhard and the Herald owe its readers, and Mitt Romney, an apology and a retraction.

Finally, Something On Which We Can Agree?

The Washington Post reports on the latest document dump in the controversy over the fired US Attorneys, and it now has a tangential connection to the Plame investigation. The ranking of federal prosecutors by Kyle Sampson in a category of USAs who had not distinguished themselves, a column from which the Department of Justice selected two other prosecutors for termination, included Patrick Fitzgerald -- who was, at the time, investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity:

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had "not distinguished themselves" on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.

The ranking placed Fitzgerald below "strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty" to the administration but above "weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.," according to Justice documents.

The chart was the first step in an effort to identify U.S. attorneys who should be removed. Two prosecutors who received the same ranking as Fitzgerald were later fired, documents show.

Fitzgerald's ranking adds another dimension to the prosecutor firings, which began as a White House proposal to remove all 93 U.S. attorneys after the 2004 elections and evolved into the coordinated dismissal of eight last year, a move that has infuriated lawmakers and led to calls for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to resign.

Maybe it adds a dimension of reality, although that wouldn't have been apparent in 2005. At that time, Fitzgerald had been known as the man who won convictions in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, sending Omar Abdel Rahman -- the "blind sheikh" -- to prison here in Minnesota. He also managed to overcome his supposed mediocrity to convict Governor George Ryan of Illinois of bribery. That sounds like a pretty distinguished record for any prosecutor.

However, Sampson may have amazing predictive powers. After all, the same prosecutor opted to continue his investigation for three years after finding the culprit, never filing charges on the original intent of his appointment as special prosecutor, and instead nailing Scooter Libby for perjury and obstruction over something that turned out not to be a crime at all. In that investigation, at least, Fitzgerald hardly distinguished himself; his efforts went more towards demonstrating the reasons why special prosecutors should be eliminated.

Mary Jo White, a former US Attorney herself and a critic of the Clinton administration's approach to terrorism, calls this ranking a travesty. It serves to undermine all credibility in Sampson's analysis, she responded, and called Fitzgerald one of the best prosecutors in the country, if not the best.

In any case, this story seems to be more of a red herring than anything else. No one tried to fire Fitzgerald, and in fact he did get a plum assignment from John Ashcroft two years earlier as the special prosecutor -- which tends to paint Sampson as a political hack swimming outside his depth at Justice. The Post article seems a bit desperate to tie the stupidity and incompetence at Justice to something more sinister, and it fails on its face.

Patterico, though, makes a good point about the frustration he feels as a defender of the administration on this issue:

I often hear defense attorneys bemoan counterproductive actions by their clients. For example, the attorney might do a tremendous job raising potential reasonable doubts during the People’s case — but then the defendant will ruin everything by insisting on testifying to a story so ridiculous that a conviction is certain.

These attorneys’ attitudes towards their clients can be summed up as follows: I’d like to defend you, but you’re making it very difficult for me.

This is the way I am starting to feel about the folks in the Bush Administration, on the issue of the U.S. Attorney firings. They have unquestionably been the victims of some smears by Democrats and Big Media (but I repeat myself). As a result, I’d like to defend them.

But they’re making it really, really hard for me to do so.

Patterico has defended Justice on this issue since the story broke, but he's frustrated by the contradictions and inaccuracies that Justice and the administration have produced in their explanations. He sees the allegations of conspiracies ludicrous, as I do, but the issues of competency and intelligence rather valid -- as I do.

Patrick Ruffini spoke for many on the Right last night when he scolded Republicans for not defending Alberto Gonzales and fighting back against the Democrats. I know that several CQ commenters feel the same way. However, my interest in this blog isn't just tribal Republicanism, but competent and intelligent conservative government. I agree that the President can fire federal prosecutors at will, but that doesn't make it right for him to do so outside of allegations of specific malfeasance -- which has been the standard for the previous 25 years. If any administration starts turning federal prosecutors into partisan attack machines, it becomes dangerous for Americans as a whole, and that's worthy of criticism, even if it falls within the limits of the law.

Dueling Ramadan Executed

Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam Hussein's Vice-President and one of the co-authors of his atrocities, was executed today after an appeals court ordered the death penalty last January. He handed his will to his lawyer after Iraqi authorities carefully weighed him, avoiding the inadvertent decapitation that occurred during an earlier hanging:

Saddam Hussein's former deputy was hanged before dawn Tuesday, the fourth man to be executed in the killings of 148 Shiites following a 1982 assassination attempt against the former leader in the town of Dujail.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, who was Saddam's vice president when the regime was ousted, went to the gallows on the fourth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

Bassam al-Hassani, an adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said the execution went smoothly, although Ramadan appeared frightened and recited the two shahadahs — a declaration of faith repeated by Muslims — "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet." ...

The execution took place at 3:05 a.m. at a prison at an Iraqi army and police base, which had been the headquarters of Saddam's military intelligence, in a predominantly Shiite district in northern Baghdad. Ramadan had been in U.S. custody but was handed over to the Iraqis about an hour before the hanging, according to al-Hassani, who witnessed the hanging.

Ramadan got convicted for his role in the judicial murders of 148 men, women, and children of Dujail after an assassination attempt on Saddam. The Iraqi government chose the town for public retribution and executed the defendants without any sort of due process or any consideration of guilt or innocence. Ramadan also got found guilty of torture and forced deportations, the same as the other Dujail defendants, including Saddam himself. The Iraqi appellate court found that Ramadan deserved the same sentence as Saddam and Barzan Ibrahim for the same crimes.

Ramadan personified the strangeness of the Saddam regime. Nothing more than a cog in Saddam's machine, he managed to make himself menacing by wielding Saddam's power as an acolyte. He conducted some of Saddam's notorious purges in order to strengthen their position and eliminate any chance of internal regime change. He also referred to the US Congress as an arm of the Israeli Knesset.

In late 2002, he offered a solution to the impasse between Iraq and the US. He challenged George Bush to a personal duel with Saddam Hussein, in a return of champion combat as an alternative to war -- a practice that died in antiquity. It showed the medieval sensibilities of perhaps the world's most brutal and perverted tyranny, and no one but the hypocritical Human Rights Watch are sorry to see the end of these monsters.

Is Obama More Liberal Than Kucinich?

No wonder Dennis Kucinich scolded Democrats for deploying over the debate horizon when confronted with Fox News Channel's cameras for their Nevada debate. It turns out that Kucinich has harbored a secret conservative streak -- at least compared to the supposedly moderate Barack Obama. McClatchy reports on a National Journal analysis of the declared candidates for President from both parties and ranks those who have served in Congress (via Memeorandum):

The most liberal member of Congress running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination isn't Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

It's Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

And the Republican candidate who's grown less conservative over his years in Congress? Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Those are among the interesting findings in a recent analysis of votes by all the members of Congress who are running for president. They cut to the heart of debates going on among activists in both major parties: Can a liberal Democrat win a general election? Which Republican is ideologically pure enough to win support from conservatives?

Okay, no one will be surprised by that analysis of McCain, but the details may still generate a couple of raised eyebrows. McCain drew only a score of 46 for his 2006 voting record on social issues, placing him in the left-of-center category in the Senate, and over 20 points behind Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat. He only manages a wan 64 on economic policy and a surprisingly low 58 on foreign policy.

On the liberal side, Obama rides high for 2006, one of only two years he has in national office. He generated the 10th most liberal voting record in the Senate. He joins a multiple-tied first place for most liberal economic record, sharing that with Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and John Kerry, among others. On foreign policy, he's almost as bad, with an 85 rating and a #13 ranking among liberals. He scores a 77 on social issues, which puts him more towards the center of the liberal caucus. He is no moderate in practice, even if he purports to be moderate in his approach.

Whither Hillary? She drifts into the center of her caucus overall, with 63 on economics and 62 on foreign policy in 2006. Those came from a concerted effort to become more appealing to centrists and moderates in preparation for this run. Her 70.8 rating for 2006 shows a significant change from her 78.8 lifetime rating, which comes closer to her 80 on social issues -- slightly more liberal than Obama.

One of the interesting aspects of the Democratic field from Congress is the remarkable similarity in their scores. All of them come from the more liberal faction of their party. Their lifetime liberal scores run in a narrow range from 84.3 (Obama) to 76.8 (Joe Biden), meaning that all of the Democrats in the race come from the liberal half of the caucuses. Hillary only gets edged by Dennis Kucinich by 0.6 points, who gets beaten by Obama by almost 5 points. They do not have a moderate in the race, despite Hillary's attempts to paint herself as such.

The Republicans running from Congress have a much wider profile. Their conservative scores run from 82.5 (Duncan Hunter) to 51.7 (Ron Paul). Paul's number comes as a big surprise, as some conservatives in Texas have made a point of touting him as a credible alternative to the current frontrunners. And while McCain may have a lifetime 71.8 rating, he has drifted into the 50s the last three years and four of the last six.

Of course, these candidates have the disadvantage of actually having voting records, while other contenders like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney do not have that track record. That's why Americans have traditionally not elected Presidents from Congress.

McCain Making A Run For The Border?

John McCain started his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2008 with two strikes against him -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act and immigration reform. He has stated on many occasions that he represents conservative values, but conservatives mistrust him primarily because of these two issues. McCain apparently has heard the feedback, and he seems to be retreating on immigration as a result:

As he left Iowa, Mr. McCain said he was reconsidering his views on how the immigration law might be changed. He said he was open to legislation that would require people who came to the United States illegally to return home before applying for citizenship, a measure proposed by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana. Mr. McCain has previously favored legislation that would allow most illegal immigrants to become citizens without leaving the country. ...

Mr. McCain, for example, appeared to distance himself from Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat with whom he formed an alliance last year on an immigration bill that stalled in Congress.

“What I’ve tried to point out is we couldn’t pass the legislation,” Mr. McCain said. “So we have to change the legislation so it can pass. And I’ve been working with Senator Kennedy, but we’ve also been working with additional senators, additional House members.”

Mr. McCain focused instead on the proposal by Mr. Pence, a conservative. “Pence has this touchback proposal,” Mr. McCain said at a news conference. “I said hey, let’s consider that if that’s a way we can get some stuff.”

This seems like a substantial turnaround. McCain, until now, has made it very clear that he saw a "touchback" as unnecessary and burdensome for illegal immigrants. Perhaps he still does, but his sense of pragmatism calls him to start looking for compromises in order to get the rest of his bill passed.

He also seems rather embarrassed now about his flirtation with Ted Kennedy. It's not the only association with a liberal Democrat that McCain will live to regret during his run for the presidency. Russ Feingold and the McCain-Feingold bill that imposed restrictions on political speech will also serve as an anchor to his White House aspirations. Will his sense of pragmatism inspire him to backtrack on that legislation as well? And would anyone trust him even if it did?

UPDATE: It's worth noting, of course, that Rudy Giuliani shares McCain's position on immigration and the BCRA to a notable extent, and that Romney used to do so until recently. Romney has pledged to fight the BCRA, and his immigration stand has shifted a little to McCain's right.

Russia Drops A Bomb On Iran

Russia has staunchly defended the Iranian efforts to develop nuclear power, even when the IAEA made clear the extent of Teheran's evasions and prevarications in the early stages of the program. They sold the mullahs a turnkey nuclear power plant, unmindful of how the Iranians could use the spent fuel for weapons development. Moscow tried its best to slow down the imposition of a Western-backed sanctions regime at the UN.

All of this history makes their latest move an even more surprising and substantial repudiation of the mullahcracy:

Russia has informed Iran that it will withhold nuclear fuel for Iran’s nearly completed Bushehr power plant unless Iran suspends its uranium enrichment as demanded by the United Nations Security Council, European, American and Iranian officials said.

The ultimatum was delivered in Moscow last week by Igor Ivanov, Russia’s Security Council Secretary, to Ali Hosseini Tash, Iran’s deputy chief nuclear negotiator, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because a confidential diplomatic exchange between two governments was involved.

For years, President Bush has been pressing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to cut off help to Iran on the nuclear reactor, which is Tehran’s first serious effort to produce nuclear energy and has been highly profitable for Russia. But Mr. Putin has resisted.

Recently, however, Moscow and Tehran have been engaged in a public argument about whether Iran has paid its bills, in a dispute that may explain Russia’s apparent shift. The ultimatum may also reflect Moscow’s increasing displeasure and frustration with Iran over its refusal to stop enriching uranium at its vast facility at Natanz.

“We’re not sure what mix of commercial and political motives are at play here,” one senior Bush administration official said in Washington. “But clearly the Russians and the Iranians are getting on each other’s nerves — and that’s not all bad.”

Something tells me that Putin's motivation comes from something other than a collections-agency status on the bill. He sank a lot of Russia's international influence into kowtowing to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Putin's Great Game aspirations of late seem more important than an unpaid bill or two. He bought real influence in Teheran, or so he thought, with the Bushehr plant.

Some calculations have changed in Moscow. Putin had been almost the only substantive foreign support for Ahmadinejad, besides China, which needs Iranian oil. Some other pressure point must have been hit by the West. Perhaps someone mentioned Russia's G-8 status, or maybe other commercial issues got worked in Putin's favor. What is obvious is that Ahmadinejad placed all his eggs in the Russian nuclear basket, and for the moment he has come up empty.

Its apparent cancellation puts Ahmadinejad in a tough spot. He sold the nuclear-power plant as a major victory against Western opposition, especially the Great Satan itself, the US. He even put a nuclear symbol on the latest currency note to brag about Iran's ascension to the top tier of nations -- at least in the category of offensive weaponry. Now Russia and Putin have pulled the rug out from underneath him, and the entire Iranian nation will witness the pratfall.

What happens if Ahmadinejad cannot deliver nuclear power? He has forced Iranians to suffer through economic sanctions that multiplied economic problems Ahmadinejad created on his own. If the entire reason for their suffering produces nothing but Russian IOUs, he will lose what little political support he has, perhaps even with the mullahs themselves. They may jettison him rather than face the angry mobs of Iranians that will form when they realize they've been had.

Protect The Polar Bears By Killing Them

Animal-rights activists serve often as examples of unintended humor, but perhaps none more so than the protectors of nonhumans in Germany. Incensed that a zoo acted to save the life of a polar-bear cub abandoned by its mother, they have demanded that the zoo kill the cub -- in order to comply with animal protection statutes:

A fluffy polar bear cub called Knut, who has become a media celebrity, should be given a lethal injection according to German zoologists, who say he has become too dependent on humans.

Their controversial claims have provoked a public outcry and a debate about the treatment of zoo animals.

The male cub is the first baby polar bear to survive in Berlin zoo for 30 years. After he was born on December 5 last year, his mother, Tosca, a grumpy 20-year-old former East German circus bear, put Knut and his brother out to die on a rock in the bear pit. Keepers scooped the cubs out of the compound with a fishing net and placed them in an incubator. ...

“Hand-feeding is not appropriate to the species and is a grave violation of the animal protection laws,” said Frank Albrecht, an animal rights campaigner. “Legally speaking, the zoo should kill the baby bear. Otherwise it is condemning the bear to a dysfunctional life and that too is a breach of the law.”

The director of Aachen zoo, Wolfram Ludwig, also believes the Berliners made the wrong decision in saving Knut: “It is not correct to bottle-feed a small polar bear. He will always be fixated on his keeper and will never grow to be a proper polar bear.” Knut, he argues, should have been killed when Tosca rejected him. “One should have had the courage to kill him much earlier.”

Someone will have to explain the concept of euthanizing an animal to protect it. Protect it from what -- other animal-rights activists? If Knut could understand the controversy, he'd wonder whose side the animal-rights activists are really on.

Perpetuating species, especially endangered species, provides one of the main reason for the existence of zoos. Polar bears do not mate well in zoos anyway, and when they do, only about half of the cubs survive. The Times of London reports that only 34 have survived over the past 50 years, a rather discouraging record. When one appears on the brink of death and the mother wants nothing to do with it, it makes sense to try to save it rather than let it die out of some odd sense of inauthenticity.

The keepers of the Berlin Zoo took the humane step of preserving Knut's life. Killing him now would serve no purpose and bring no benefit to the species. He will be unsuitable for return to the wild, but it doesn't appear that his parents Tosca and Lars will be going back there, either. Should the zoo kill them as well? How about every other animal that will not get released into nature?

With animal-rights activists like this, what animal needs predators?

Support, Si! Pander, No!

Memo to Presidential candidates: it is dangerous to use foreign-language slogans without learning the nuances of their history. Mitt Romney either never learned that or decided to try out his new Fidel Castro impersonation in front of the wrong audience (via SWLiP):

People chuckled when presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon raised in Michigan and elected in Massachusetts, bungled the names of Cuban-American politicians during a recent speech in Miami.

But when he mistakenly associated Fidel Castro's trademark speech-ending slogan -- Patria o muerte, venceremos! -- with a free Cuba, listeners didn't laugh. They winced.

Castro has closed his speeches with the phrase -- in English, ''Fatherland or death, we shall overcome'' -- for decades.

''Clearly, that's something he was ill-advised on or didn't do his homework on,'' said Hialeah City Council President Esteban Bovo. ``When you get cute with slogans, you get yourself into a trap.''

It goes deeper than that, which is why this will ding Romney's efforts in a mild way, and add to the anecdotes of clueless politicians.

The mistake reminds me of people who use words they clearly do not understand, in order to sound more proficient than they truly are. Romney made the same mistake here, attempting to convince Cuban-Americans of his solidarity with their cause. In both cases, the avoidable goof gives the opposite impression: it makes the speaker look like a fool, and a pandering fool at that.

Romney is a smart man with a good message, so this will pass within a few days. However, it points out a danger for all politicians in pandering to ethnic groups on a superficial level, without taking the time to understand their culture and especially the nuances of their language. The Cuban-American community wants to see policies that support their die-hard opposition to the Castro regime. They can hear those policies in English and understand them perfectly well. They don't need slogans and cheers; those are the tools of the dictator they oppose.

In fact, that's pretty good advice for the rest of us, too.

Prayers For Cathy Seipp

Sometimes, when we're in the middle of crises, we lose perspective on how our stresses and sorrows relate to those around us who may have it much worse than we do. In the middle of a very bad day for the First Mate, I had one of those realizations when I heard the news about Cathy Seipp. Her daughter posted the latest update about Cathy, whose cancer appears to have overwhelmed her:

As earlier mentioned in the comments section, my mother is in the hospital. The doctor says that right now they're just making her comfortable. She's sedated, with painkillers among other things. Lungs collapsed so right now we just want to make sure she has dignity and is not in pain. The doctor says she has a couple days left. I want to thank all her readers for reading this blog, her friends for supporting her who made up "Team Cathy." Through you all, I learned what a true friend was.

Last night, I had to have the First Mate sent to the hospital in an ambulance because her blood pressure could not stay under control. She's in the ICU tonight, and will now likely stay in the hospital until her transplant late next week. The doctors have to stabilize her BP before she can handle the surgery that would stabilize her BP -- so our frustration has grown tremendously the last few days.

However, my wife is blessed with a friend who will donate his kidney to save her life. Now that she has the proper supervision, her life is not in danger. I can still call her on the phone and talk with her. She is getting the best medical care available, and it is helping her.

I wish I could say the same for Cathy, and when I read her daughter's post, the impatience and the frustration I felt all day today melted away. Please join me in prayers for Cathy, her brave and supportive daughter, and the entire Seipp family. They will need them in the days ahead.

Guest Post: Rep. Duncan Hunter

For this extended primary season, we have an extraordinary opportunity to get acquainted with the men and women who want to run for the Presidency. I have extended invitations to all campaigns to have their candidates post their messages to CQ readers. Today, I'm happy to introduce Representative Duncan Hunter, in an exclusive post regarding the surge strategy in Iraq.

An Exclusive Post For Captain's Quarters On The Surge In Iraq

I would like to thank Ed Morrissey for giving me the opportunity to write a guest blog at Captain’s Quarters about the surge in Iraq. The courtesy is much appreciated.

Now, let me take a moment to talk about Iraq. What we're doing in that country is following the same basic pattern that we've used to expand freedom around the world for more than 60 years in places like Japan, Europe, and El Salvador. First, you stand up a free government. Next, you stand up a military capable of protecting that free government, and lastly, the Americans leave.

We've stood up this free government in Iraq and we've also stood up 129 Iraqi battalions that are trained and equipped. What we need to do now is rotate all those Iraqi battalions into combat zones, which will help re-enforce the chain of command, develop combat effectiveness, and help validate the civilian government's control over the military.

While those Iraqi troops are getting battle hardened, they'll need the support of American troops. That's where the President's plan comes in. You can call it a surge, you can call it an escalation, you can call it whatever you want, but what the President is doing is sending reinforcements to Iraq to help mentor and train the Iraqi troops, secure the country, and complete the mission.

I returned this week from a fact-finding trip to Iraq where I met with top U.S. military commanders in Baghdad, Ramadi, and Fallujah and was briefed by Iraqi Army and police officials.

In a letter to the President, I made several recommendations and attached a sample schedule for three-month field operations for all 129 Iraqi battalions, a plan that can be executed within the next six months.

Once the Iraqis are capable of taking responsibility for their own security, then we can rotate American troops home with the knowledge that Iraq is not a threat to our nation and will not be a state sponsor of terrorism.

At this critical point, the members of Congress who are engaging in political posturing, while our soldiers are carrying out their mission, are doing a real disservice to the troops. Let me add that if the Democrats were to cut off reinforcements and supplies to our troops in Iraq, our troops will never forgive them and I don't think the American people will ever forgive them either.

Speaking from experience as someone who has had a son who spent two tours serving in Iraq as a Marine, I know that it's not easy for us here at home to know that our troops are risking their lives expanding freedom in a foreign country. But, even though it's difficult and dangerous work, it's also vital.

The Loose Cannon At Justice

The Bush administration faces another week of drip-drip disclosures in the controversy over the terminated federal prosecutors. Most of the damage will come from the work of Kyle Sampson, who recently resigned as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, as today's revelation by the Washington Post indicates. Sampson sent out a memo to the White House counsel's office informing them that Carol Lam represented a "real problem" a day after she informed the Department of Justice that she needed search warrants in an expansion of the Randy "Duke" Cunningham corruption case:

The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general's chief of staff warned the White House of a "real problem" with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys. ...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants" in a criminal investigation of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just quit as the CIA's top administrator amid questions about his ties to disgraced former GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

The next day, May 11, D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, sent an e-mail message to William Kelley in the White House counsel's office saying that Lam should be removed as quickly as possible, according to documents turned over to Congress last week.

"Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following," Sampson wrote, referring to "[t]he real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

First, it should be noted that Lam did not get "fired" in any sense; the administration decided not to keep her for another term in office. Lam's term expired on November 18th, and within a couple of weeks she was told that she would not return for another term. That is not the same thing as "firing" her, expecially not "firing" her in the middle of a term as US Attorney. As such, her departure would not have allowed the administration to use the new Patriot Act mechanism that allowed for interim USAs to avoid the Senate confirmation process; her replacement would not be an interim, mid-term appointment and would have to have received a full confirmation process.

However, this memo gives the appearance of more than coincidence between her investigation of corruption and the motive to remove her, at least for Kyle Sampson. It could still be coincidental, but it's getting harder to buy. Why would Sampson escalate the removal of Lam to the White House counsel office a day after she requested the search warrants for Brent Wilkes and Dusty Foggo? Surely, as someone who already had Lam on his short list of non-renewal candidates, he must have watched her performance carefully at the time. Would he have known of the search warrant requests, and if he did, doesn't that indicate a connection (for Sampson) between that an the escalation of her firing?

This doesn't represent an obstruction of justice, because in any event, the search warrants were issued and the two men indicted for corruption, regardless of Sampson's memo. Not renominating Lam for the office doesn't indicate a conspiracy to block probes into Republicans; firing her at the time of the request certainly would have made a case for that, but this does not. It does, however, show Sampson as a loose cannon at Justice, and that has implications for Gonzales.

Clearly, he misled Congress about the extent of White House involvement in the firings, and again, that either means he had no clue to what Sampson was doing or he chose not to reveal it. Neither reflect well on him or on the Bush administration, which has every right to be angry about the mess Gonzales made of these personnel decisions and the explanations that followed. Perhaps the hiring of the respected Chuck Rosenberg ast the AG's chief of staff will head off more calls for Gonzales' ouster, but not as long as these memos continue to slowly leak out. Either Gonzales needs to get everything in the open at once and deal with the consequences, or he will continue to look either evasive or clueless. If that cannot be resolved, the Bush administration will need to replace Gonzales with someone more competent.

Another Silly Obama Meme

The early primary race is often called the silly season, but it seems that the campaign of Barack Obama inspires silliness in a league of his own, on both Left and Right. We've already heard carping about Obama's "authenticity" as an African-American on one hand, and breathless speculation as to whether Obama visited a mosque at age eight on the other. Now, to add to the circus of irrelevancy, David Ehrenstein scolds people for supporting Obama out of a desire to find the Magic Negro:

AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro."

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia.

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is "Magic."

Oh, good Lord. Is Ehrenstein really arguing that white people who support Obama are racists? Yes, he is. He goes into a long dissertation to explain that the white mainstream likes to find non-threatening black men to idolize in order to cover for their latent fear of black sexuality, and uses a number of films in which to prove his hypothesis. Ehrenstein notes the roles of film pioneer Sidney Poitier as an example, although he manages to miss In The Heat Of The Night and A Patch Of Blue, two films off the top of my head where Poitier is anything but non-threatening.

If Hollywood can be faulted for anything in its engagement of race, it's the opposite problem. It can't seem to tell a story about race relations without making a white person its focus. Take the films Ghosts of Mississippi and MIssissippi Burning, for example. Both recount true crimes during the civil-rights movement. Both involve murders of civil-rights activists. Who provides the focus of the movie? In Ghosts, it's Alec Baldwin playing DA Bobby DeLaughter, and in Burning, it's Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe playing FBI agents.

Both are good films, and Burning is especially excellent, but both films make it much more about the interior lives of white people than of the black people victimized by Jim Crow and racial hatred. Ghosts does that worse than Burning, where the filmmakers had a much better real-life protagonist on which to focus: Myrlie Evers, who fought for 27 years to bring her husband's murderer to justice. Evers later served as leader of the NAACP and is quite an inspirational figure -- but the writers and producers chose to focus on DeLaughter instead.

The films roles about which Ehrenstein complains were filled by African-Americans not because of some need for the Magic Negro, but because black actors can now get cast in non-racial roles. Morgan Freeman's roles in most of the films about which Ehrenstein complains could have been filled with white actors, but Freeman draws people to the box office. He has market power because of his talent and his work -- and that's not a basis for complaint.

I'm no fan of Obama, but my dislike isn't personal but political. I don't like his hard-liberal approach to issues. Otherwise, he seems like a personable man, but that's it. I doubt than many of the people who do like him feel a need for a Magic Negro in their lives, and the suggestion that people would find a potential President a benign, powerless figure seems ludicrous on its face.

The Butchers Of The Taliban

The Taliban continue their terrorism of the Afghan people, but in the case of three men helping NATO forces in Nuristan, they have shown a brutality that goes beyond terrorism and into diabolical cruelty. Taliban fighters caught the three men after they helped a supply run in the eastern province and maimed them in a most heinous way:

Taliban militants have hacked off the ears and noses of three Afghan drivers captured helping American forces.

Fighters mutilated the three men seized after delivering fuel to a US base in the eastern province of Nuristan on Saturday.

"After downloading their supplies into a coalition base in Nuristan, they were heading to Kunar," said Ghulamullah, the deputy chief of police in Nuristan, who uses only one name. "On their way the Taliban stopped them and cut off their noses and ears."

It is the first time that such a barbaric punishment has been meted out by Taliban fighters on those suspected of working with foreign forces.

Fuel tankers supplying American bases have previously been targeted by insurgents with the tankers routinely torched and the drivers often left badly beaten.

Where, exactly, does that punishment get listed in the Qu'ran? Nowhere; it only repeats the "eye for an eye, nose for a nose" found in the Torah and the Bible. Taliban is a term derived from the Pashtu for "student"; apparently, these students of Islam have been making up their version as they go along.

It's not as if we've lacked for examples of radical Islamist cruelty and inhumanity in the past, but this makes it all the more clear. These are not men in any sense of the word besides genetic; they are psychotic cowards, reminiscent of disturbed children who delight in torturing small animals. One cannot hope to reason with such people, but must instead ensure that they can present no danger to anyone else, ever.

Time To Create A Domestic Intelligence Agency?

Has the time arrived to divorce the counterterrorism functions from the FBI and create a new agency dedicated to the task? Richard Posner believes that we have long needed to do just that, and to follow the lead of other nations in separating law enforcement from intelligence work within our borders:

Detecting terrorist plots in advance so that they can be thwarted is the business of intelligence agencies. The FBI is not an intelligence agency, and has a truncated conception of intelligence: gathering information that can be used to obtain a conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses and often physical evidence and even suspects. This enables a criminal investigation to be tightly focused. Prevention, in contrast, requires casting a very wide investigative net, chasing down ambiguous clues, and assembling tiny bits of information (hence the importance of information technology, which plays a limited role in criminal investigations).

The bureau lacks the tradition, the skills, the patience, the incentive structures, the recruitment criteria, the training methods, the languages, the cultural sensitivities and the career paths that national-security intelligence requires. All the bureau's intelligence operations officers undergo the full special-agent training. That training emphasizes firearms skills, arrest techniques and self-defense, and the legal rules governing criminal investigations. None of these proficiencies are germane to national-security intelligence. What could be more perverse than to train new employees for one kind of work and assign them to another for which they have not been trained?

Every major nation (and many minor ones), except the United States, concluded long ago that domestic intelligence should be separated from its counterpart to the FBI. Britain's MI5 is merely the best-known example. These nations realize that if you bury a domestic intelligence service in an agency devoted to criminal law enforcement, you end up with "intelligence-led policing," which means orienting intelligence collection and analysis not to preventing terrorist attacks but to assisting in law enforcement.

Posner wants a new organization created that has no arrest authority, one that can play a string out longer than just the ability to get a conviction. He uses as an example the arrest of several men in Miami who had big dreams of jihad, but little competence in conducting it. The FBI managed to get an infiltrator into the group, but it turned out that the mole was the only one able to arrange financing to promote their cause.

Unfortunately, the FBI arrested everyone before they could make contact with actual jihadis, as they planned to do. Posner criticizes them for stopping there, rather than conducting real counterterrorism. Noting the ridicule the group received for its amateurish operation, but Posner notes that most terrorists start off as amateurs until they can make contact with more professional terrorists who can guide them. That's what the Miami group wantd to do, and those are the people Posner says for which a real counterterrorist operation would have waited.

Will Americans put up with a domestic intelligence agency, even one without the power of arrest? Americans generally speaking have a healthy dislike of that kind of function. The FBI used to be quite adept at it, but it led to the myriad abuses of J. Edgar Hoover and a substantial corruption of the federal government. During wartime, we have more patience, but not tremendously so -- and the reaction to the limited efforts of the Bush administration to conduct surveillance on just communications shows that.

Posner probably has this analzyed properly, but don't expect this Congress to authorize a new domestic intelligence agency, not with this administration. It will have to wait until the 111th Congress convenes.

Rudy Responds On Citgo

Rudy Giuliani responded yesterday to criticism for his indirect involvement to lobbying efforts on behalf of Citgo, the subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned petroleum company. Speaking with reporters in Tampa, he shrugged off the issue, saying that his firm tried to protect American jobs in Texas:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Sunday defended his law firm's role in representing Citgo Petroleum Corp., which is ultimately controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying it was helping protect American jobs.

Giuliani acknowledged though, that his opponents will try to exploit the news that a lawyer with Bracewell & Giuliani of Houston has been representing Citgo before the Texas legislature.

The firm has had a contract with Citgo since before Giuliani joined it.

"Oh, they'll exploit everything," Giuliani said in an interview. "There are things that make sense and things that don't make sense and that doesn't make any sense. It was one of those political attacks where you have nothing to do with it, you're not involved in it and so it doesn't really worry you very much. What they're doing is lawful and honorable and helping to protect jobs for more than 100,000 Americans."

Although Citgo Petroleum is a U.S.-based company, it was bought in 1990 by Petroleos de Venezuela, the national oil company of Venezuela. It employs 4,000 people in Texas and other states, and Giuliani said indirectly more than 100,000 people have jobs because of the company.

This particular issue always looked like a non-starter. First, as the AP notes, Giuliani joined the company after it had already contracted to represent Citgo, and before Chavez became such a headache to the US. Giuliani never represented Citgo personally, and the attempt to tie him to Chavez seems really weak.

Giuliani had a good response ready. He noted that Chavez and Venezuela would not present much of a problem had we developed alternative energy resources and eliminated the need to import so much oil He promised a moon-shot type effort to develop alternatives to imported oil, saying that energy independence had the same impact that the Apollo program had on the US decades ago.

Rudy also told reporters that we needed to leverage Chavez more in South America. He causes as much angst in Latin America as he does with the US, but Giuliani said that we had not used that enough to build bridges with other nations in the region. A skillful use of Chavez could help realign the hemisphere in America's favor.

All in all, a good response. Giuliani took a weak lemonade and made some strong lemonade. Let's see what he can do when the lemons get a little more tart.

CQ Interview: Myrna Blyth

Earlier this afternoon, I had the opportunity to speak with Myrna Blyth, longtime editor-in-chief of the Ladies Home Journal, columnist for National Review, and co-author of How To Raise an American: 1776 Fun and Easy Tools, Tips, and Activities to Help Your Child Love This Country. We spoke about the difficulties that parents face in instilling into their children a sense of pride in their American heritage. Her book, co-authored by former White House speechwriter Chriss Winston, discusses those difficulties and presents a multitude of suggestions for solutions. She also will launch a website, How To Raise An American, to continue supporting parents who want to help their children value the American experience.

Here's a small portion of our interview, podcasted for your convenience:

EM: Tell us why you saw a need for a book to help parents raise patriotic children.

MB: Well, I think both my co-author and I felt that it was more difficult today to raise children who are patriotic. In fact, a recent poll taken by the Winston Group in Washington found that while over 97% of Americans feel patriotic, 70% agree that children today are less patriotic than children were in the past. There are lots of reasons for this, we discovered. We thought that most people instinctively think that as well, but we found that it is difficult to raise patriotic kids, because of the little history they are taught, the way they are taught it, the influence of the media, and many reasons like that do impact kids, and there's no counterbalance, especially from parents teaching them to love this country.

The interview lasts about a half-hour, and I believe gives a great look at this book, which will officially launch on Tuesday, March 20th. You can pre-order it at the Amazon link by clicking on the picture above.

Gathering Of Eagles Round-Up

Michelle Malkin has a great round-up on the Gathering of Eagles counterprotest yesterday in Washington, DC:

It was a breath-taking, historic, and emotional day in Washington, D.C. You won't know it if you tune in to the usual MSM channels. But new media--bloggers, conservative documentarians, Internet activists, FReepers (giant thread here), citizen journalists, photojournalists, and talk radio hosts--turned out in full force to participate and cover the Gathering of Eagles counter-protest. Thousands upon thousands turned out despite freezing temperatures and hairy travel conditions. We met bikers who drove up all night from Huntsville, Alabama; a retired NYC firefighter who arrived here at 2am; college students who traveled from Massachusetts; a Vietnam veteran's wife who bought plane tickets at the last minute from San Francisco; and countless participants who arrived as part of Move America Forward's cross-country caravan.

A pure, grass-roots effort, the Gathering of Eagles' volunteers matched the massive Soros-funded anti-war machine sign for sign, chant for chant, and marcher for marcher. The contrast was most stark right before the entrance to the Memorial Bridge, where Eagles gathered with a field of American flags--while anti-Bush, 9/11 conspiracy nuts wrapped themselves in a figurative blanket of yellow "Out of Iraq" placards. Several of the vets shouted, "Yellow! How appropriate!" in between spirited chants of "U.S.A! U.S.A!" While the classless Cindy Sheehan ranted profanely, the Eagles raised their voices in polite, but roaring disapproval and raised their American flags in answer to the ANSWER socialists' Che banners and peace pennants.

The National Park Service estimates that 30,000 counterprotestors lined the streets of DC in response to the organized protests sponsored by International ANSWER and other groups. Janet from SCSU Scholars did a great phone-in interview with us on the NARN, which should be podcasted by tomorrow at Townhall. Be sure to read her reports on the GoE effort, too. And See Jane Mom revels in the retrosexuality on display by the GoE.

The Washington Post noted the strong turnout:

As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration's cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, "If you don't like America, get out!"

Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as "War There Or War Here." Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.

It seems the demise of support for the war in Iraq has been somewhat exaggerated. Be sure to read all of the links in Michelle's post.

KSM: Game Over

After the release of the transcript from the Guantanamo tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, many people expressed skepticism about his claims of involvement in so many terrorist plots. Some even postulated that Mohammed had fallen prey to American torture, even though he denied acting under duress during the hearing, or that he had gone insane during his American detention. However, the one Western journalist to have interviewed the al-Qaeda mastermind believes that Mohammed understands he has come to the end of his run as a terrorist, and now wants to establish a record of his legacy as a reaction to his current impotence:

He lived for this spotlight, the chance to say: “Look at this spectacular operation I pulled off against the most powerful nation on earth.” But he is not a fantasist. KSM is a guy who enjoys plotting and being in the field. He could be the head of the mafia and also the imam of a group of people praying in Afghanistan. He would enjoy both roles.

Another possibility is that he might be taking credit so other people, still at large, can avoid the blame. We can never know for sure. One thing that is clear is his wish to be dignified as a prisoner of war. When he mentions George Washington, he is addressing America. He is saying: “This is your own hero, you used to be oppressed by the Brits and the Brits considered George Washington to be a terrorist.”

He knows that the smallest count against him will be enough to have him executed. Hardly anyone, even in Al-Qaeda, will believe he was responsible for all these operations. But he’s hoping they’ll think he has been selfless.

He is not a man of Allah but a man of action. I knew that when they were captured it would be KSM who talked first. Ramzi [Binalshibh] would be much tougher to interrogate: a true believer in Allah, in his own way. I would bet when he was captured Ramzi thought: “My true jihad has just started.” KSM would have thought: “This is it, game over.”

In the end, KSM's lack of faith has led him to give up, now that he has no way of breaking free from US control. Binalshibh, as Yosri Fouda notes, would see this as just another phase of the jihad, but KSM has no such illusions to bolster him. He knows his days are numbered, and that seventy-virgins will not await him at the end of his journey.

Mohammed wants to exit the stage as brashly as he strutted upon it. He wants to ensure that his reputation lives far beyond his actual presence on Earth, even if that means being remembered as the most bloodthirsty butcher outside of a dictatorship in long memory. What's more, Fouda insists that he is not exaggerating much, if at all. Fouda even notes that one attack with his fingerprints managed to get missed by KSM in his tribunal statement, the tanker attack on a Tunisian synagogue in 2002 that killed 21 people. If anything, Fouda postulates, he may just have blurred lines between what he did and what he planned to do.

Fouda knows that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned and perpetrated a number of murderous acts, including 9/11, although he thinks Mohammed Atef may have done the high-level planning for that attack. Fouda also speculates that KSM would not have made 9/11 a success had it not been for Mohammed Atta, whose organizational ability apparently far outstripped any other KSM underling. His death wound up hurting al-Qaeda, making it almost impossible for them to conduct complicated operations on the order of 9/11, even while KSM dreamed them up.

The master terrorist without the faith of his brethren has been exposed as nothing but a psychopath who likes to kill people for whatever reason he finds handy. He has nothing left but his mouth and his history, and he will use them both to establish his legacy -- which is the reason he's talking to the Americans now.

Are American Funds Supporting Jihadis?

Joel Mowbray, the syndicated columnist whose writing occasionally appears at Power Line (and who I met at CPAC), has an article in today's OpinionJournal that reports on how an American-financed Arabic television channel has started broadcasting jihadist content. Al-Hurra, which started off as an Arabic equivalent to Voice of America, has shifted its perspective towards Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah rather than the moderation we expected:

Fighting to create a secular democracy in Iraq, parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi had come to rely on at least one TV network to help further freedom: U.S. taxpayer-financed Al-Hurra.

Now, however, he's concerned. The broadcaster he had seen as a stalwart ally has done an about-face. "Until now, we were so happy with Al-Hurra. It was taking stands against corruption, for human rights, and for peace. But not anymore."

Stories that he believes cry out for further investigation, such as recent arrests of those accused of supporting the terrorists in Iraq, are instead getting mere news-ticker mentions at the bottom of the screen. And Arab voices for freedom, which used to have a home on Al-Hurra, are noticeably absent. "They're driving out the liberals," he complains.

Mr. Alusi is not the only one concerned about the recent changes at Al-Hurra. Ken Tomlinson, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors--the congressionally-created panel charged with overseeing Al-Hurra, among other government-funded broadcasters--is currently demanding answers about the network's decision last December to broadcast most of a speech by Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah.

Unsurprisingly, the change came with the arrival of former CNN producer Larry Register. He quickly moved to make Al-Hurra follow the lead of Al-Jazeerah, a move that made Hurra's staff happy but veered sharply from the stated mission of the channel. The US funds Hurra in order to have an outlet for American diplomacy direct to the Arabic people, without the filtering effects of state-controlled media in Arab nations. That is why the administration supports Hurra with American tax revenues.

Instead, we're paying for jihadists like Nasrallah to give speeches on Hurra. Hamas officials now have air time to discuss their policies on the territories and on Israel. On February 9th of this year, Register allowed Muslims to use Hurra to broadcast charges that Israel would destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount after Israel changed some of the access restrictions in the area surrounding it.

Read all of Mowbray's report. If we allow Register to hand over the mikes to terrorists such as Nasrallah and lunatic conspiracy nuts like Hurra did on February 9th, the channel is doing more damage than having no direct media access to Arabs at all -- and should get shut down, if a change in management cannot be made.

France Wanted Israel To Attack Syria

At the start of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, France sent word through secret channels that it would support Israel in the war if Ehud Olmert attacked Syria and deposed Bashar Assad. Chirac wanted Israel to attack the root of the problem in Lebanon and eliminate Hezbollah's lines of support (via Michael Ledeen at The Corner):

French President Jacques Chirac told Israel at the start of the war in Lebanon that France would support an Israeli assault on Syria, it was reported on Sunday.

Army Radio reported that in the message, which was delivered by Chirac to Israel via a secret channel, the French president suggested that Israel invade Damascus and topple the regime of Bashar Assad. In exchange, Chirac assured Israel full French support for the war. ...

"Former prime minister Ariel Sharon had explained to the French in the past that Iran is the main one responsible for Hizbullah's armament in Lebanon, while Chirac saw Syria as the primary one responsible for the matter," former Israeli ambassador to France Nissim Zvilli told Army Radio in an interview.

"President Chirac saw Syria as directly responsible for the attempt to undermine the Lebanese regime," he said. "He saw them as directly responsible for the murder of [former Lebanese prime minister] Rafik Hariri and directly responsible for arming Hizbullah. Likewise, he saw Syria as the one giving Hizbullah orders on how to operate."

In this case, Chirac had it right. I warned at the beginning of the conflict in the sub-Litani that the Israelis were attacking in the wrong direction. Attacking into Lebanon, while understandable, only would make the situation worse:

However, one has to wonder whether Israel has chosen the correct enemy. Lebanon just recently freed itself (mostly) from Syrian occupation through a people-power revolution. Syria occupied Lebanon for almost 30 years prior to that, and they put Hezbollah into place as their proxy, not Lebanon's. Granted, Israel had a point when they noted that Hezbollah politicians have ministers in the Cabinet, but unlike Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, they do not have political control of the government.

A free and democratic Lebanon could be an ally to Israel, or at least not an enemy. They could eventually have a relationship similar to that of Jordan; not exactly friends, but not at all enemies. Why toss that away in a misdirected rage?

Syria and Iran fund, support, and supply Hezbollah. Without Assad's assistance from Syria, Hezbollah would not have any resources to attack Israel or to create the tensions seen in Lebanon. The problem last summer originated in Damascus and Teheran, not in the sub-Litani region.

Had Israel followed Chirac's advice, it could have led to a wider war in the region, and possibly could have complicated matters for us in Iraq. However, it would also have had the salutory effect of getting the Syrians a lot less interested in Iraqi and Lebanese affairs and more interested in saving their own skins. A success in Syria would have ended Hassan Nasrallah's power base and begun marginalizing Hezbollah in Lebanese politics. After that, the Israelis could have gone into the sub-Litani to mop up what remained of Hezbollah's forces.

Instead, the Israelis decided to fight the wrong war, and to fight it in the wrong way. They momentarily disrupted Nasrallah and gained better security on a temporary basis, but the lack of will to fight an all-out war with the enemy the Israelis decided to fight left them with few permanent gains, if any at all. In this rather singular case, Israel should have taken Chirac's advice.

The Institutional Apology

All customer-service professionals share at least one common experience: the apology. The ability to execute an apology makes or breaks careers. If it comes out too rote and lacking empathy, it will serve to enrage the customer. If a representative makes too many of them or gives away too much as penance, their employer will not trust them to look after the company's interests. As someone who has spent almost two decades in customer service management, I can tell you from long experience that this one aspect of customer service may be the most critical piece of customer retention. Mistakes will be made -- how companies react to them is what customers value most.

With that in mind, it makes sense that apologies would become their own industry. Not surprisingly, it has started with the industry that probably has the greatest need for professional apologizers:

Airlines are getting serious about saying they’re sorry.

After a spate of nightmarish service disruptions, American Airlines, JetBlue Airways and others are sending out more apologies, hoping to head off customer complaints and quell talk of new consumer-protection regulations from Congress.

But no airline accepts blame quite like Southwest Airlines, which employs Fred Taylor Jr. in a job that could be called chief apology officer.

His formal title is senior manager of proactive customer communications. But Mr. Taylor — 37, rail thin and mildly compulsive, by his own admission — spends his 12-hour work days finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers and then firing off homespun letters of apology.

“Erring on the side of caution, our captain decided to return to Phoenix rather than second-guess the smell that was in the cabin,” Mr. Taylor wrote to passengers who were on a March 7 flight to Albuquerque. A faulty valve was to blame. “Not toxic, it was obviously annoying,” he assured them, throwing in a free voucher for future travel to clear the air.

He composes about 180 letters a year explaining what went wrong on particular flights and, with about 110 passengers per flight, he mails off roughly 20,000 mea culpas. Each one bears his direct phone line.

I used to tell my staff that all they had to do was follow the procedures and the policies correctly, and that if that still created mistakes, I would take the responsibility for them. I referred to myself -- jokingly -- as a professional apologizer. I had no idea the position would ever exist.

It's easy to criticize this, but I think it's a smart move. A good and sincere apology, with some measure of remuneration to the inconvenienced, will defuse many dissatisfied customers and turn them into enthusiastic patrons. If a company wants to really focus on these opportunities, it makes sense to employ a professional apologizer to do it. With the right man on the job, it can cost a company thousands of dollars in freebies, but gain them millions of dollars in revenue in the long run.

I do pity Fred Taylor, however. No matter how good someone is at handling these complaints, they have a negative impact on the spirit after a while. Hopefully, Southwest will ensure that Taylor has his "freedom to move about the country" on a regular basis to recharge the batteries.

Iraqi Survey Says ...

The Times of London conducted a major poll of Iraqis to determine their state of mind a month after the beginning of the surge, and it finds the Iraqis rather optimistic. Four hundred pollsters went door to door to speak to over 5,000 Iraqi adults, and found that almost a majority of them preferred life now under the democracy of Nouri al-Maliki rather than the oppression of Saddam Hussein:

The poll highlights the impact the sectarian violence has had. Some 26% of Iraqis - 15% of Sunnis and 34% of Shi’ites - have suffered the murder of a family member. Kidnapping has also played a terrifying role: 14% have had a relative, friend or colleague abducted, rising to 33% in Baghdad.

Yet 49% of those questioned preferred life under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, to living under Saddam. Only 26% said things had been better in Saddam’s era, while 16% said the two leaders were as bad as each other and the rest did not know or refused to answer.

Not surprisingly, the divisions in Iraqi society were reflected in statistics — Sunnis were more likely to back the previous Ba’athist regime (51%) while the Shi’ites (66%) preferred the Maliki government.

Maliki, who derives a significant element of his support from Moqtada al-Sadr, the hardline Shi’ite militant, and his Mahdi army, has begun trying to overcome criticism that his government favours the Shi’ites, going out of his way to be seen with Sunni tribal leaders. He is also under pressure from the US to include more Sunnis in an expected government reshuffle.

The poll suggests a significant increase in support for Maliki. A survey conducted by ORB in September last year found that only 29% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the prime minister.

Maliki has gained strength as the US and Iraqi forces have begun to reclaim the streets of Baghdad. No one respects a leader that allows chaos and destruction to prevail, which explains Maliki's low marks last year. Undoubtedly, those played a role in driving Maliki to the position of George Bush, who demanded a free hand to act against the Shi'ite militias as well as Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda terrorists, and Ba'athist remnants to which Maliki had limited our operations previously.

As Allahpundit at Hot Air notes, the results are not blockbuster material yet:

Another 16% said they both reek. Righties will find cause for hope in those numbers, lefties will wonder why after four years we can’t get a clear majority to prefer life under American occupation to life under the Arab Stalin. Glass half-full, glass half-empty.

The whole poll is like that. You’re better off with the summary at the polling firm’s website than the Times of London article, which misleads a bit in reporting that only 27% of Iraqis say the country is in a state of civil war. That’s accurate as far as it goes, but another 22% say they’re “close” to a civil war but not there yet. TOL neglects to mention that.

Be sure to read the entire Hot Air post for a breakdown of the crosstabs. Allahpundit believes that the Sunnis got oversampled, which would tend to skew the results somewhat, but I'm not sure in which direction. Would that make Maliki's support underreported, or would the surge effort against the Shi'ite militias play towards Sunni desires and therefore inflate Maliki's numbers? Hard to say, but I'd guess the former rather than the latter.

One interesting point about the survey is the difference between Shi'ite and Sunni predictions about the security situation when the US withdraws from Iraq. Most Shi'ites believe it will immediately get better, while Sunnis are split; only 46% think it will get better, while 37% believe it will make matters worse.

I think these numbers are rather encouraging. Within six months, and after a month of intensive clear-and-hold operations, the Maliki government has seen its approval rating almost double. More Iraqis appears optimistic about the future, and even the Sunnis appear more open to optimism. If we can stick to our strategy and stabilize the capital, we can keep momentum on the side of liberty and democracy.

UPDATE: ORB has an interesting set of slides on the survey. One of them notes that a clear majority, 64%, prefer the current political system of a centralized government. That includes a majority of both Shi'ites and Sunnis. Only 21% want a federal system with three autonomous regions, although 72% of the Kurds prefer that, understandably. The Joe Biden model of splitting Iraq only gets support from one in five Iraqis -- perhaps a piece of information Biden should consider.

The Beautiful American?

Americans have heard for decades about our reputation as travelers abroad -- encapsulated by the monicker, "the ugly American". The term, which actually came from a more complex novel than the name implies, now gets used to describe American foreign policy, especially regarding the war in Iraq. John McCain told the Sunday Telegraph that he wants to change how our allies and enemies abroad view us:

John McCain, formerly the leading Republican presidential contender, has told The Sunday Telegraph that restoring America's sullied reputation abroad will be "a top priority" if he wins the White House.

The Arizona senator, an Iraq war hawk, was talking aboard the revived Straight Talk Express - the vehicle that made his name during the 2000 presidential election and that he hopes will revive his faltering fortunes this time round.

The bus ferried the senator, his aides, and journalists, to a series of public meetings throughout the flat, snow-covered farmland of rural Iowa, where voters will be the first to express their preferences for the party nominations next January.

Of America's poor image abroad, even with long-time allies, Sen McCain acknowledged candidly: "It is a very dispiriting situation and I know we will have to work hard to improve it."

How would McCain go about repairing the damage to the image of America abroad? The conservatives he claims to represent might be surprised at the agenda. He proposes to do the following:

1. Close Guanatamo Bay and transfer all prisoners there to Fort Leavenworth
2. "Truly expedite" the judicial proceedings for detainees.
3. End torture, even though no one has established that anyone has been tortured as a matter of policy.
4. Reaffirm his commitment to climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases along European sensibilities.

McCain seems pretty eager to pander to Europe as part of his presidential campaign. I wonder how many votes he expects to win in London.

One would expect more sense from McCain, especially on Gitmo and greenhouse gas policy. On the latter, McCain voted against the Kyoto pact that the Europeans insist on forcing us to adopt; in fact, the Senate shot it down 95-0 before Clinton could even submit it, led by those Ugly Americans, Chuck Hagel and Robert Byrd. Has he now decided that the US should adopt crippling economic sanctions while allowing India and China to remain outside the restrictions?

Closing Gitmo only means that the US has to open a similar facility elsewhere. Non-uniformed combatants seized while at war against the United States have never gained access to our civil court system, ever. They don't belong in American criminal prisons, and I'd prefer they get warehoused somewhere else than Midwestern America. Having them on an island, where any potential escape means getting eaten by sharks, sounds much better to me. If McCain locks them up here, it will only increase the attempts to grant the terrorists habeas corpus and have them tranferred to courts designed to handle robberies and fraud, not attempts to conduct war against America.

This interview will no doubt play well in Britain. Odd that McCain hasn't made these points a prominent part of his campaign here in the US.