With the apparant looting theft of highly radioactive cobalt capsules from Iraq's former main weapons testing site under poor US surveillance, you've got to wonder, how much safer we really are. Coalition troops are spread so thin in Iraq, and they are only likely to draw down further over the next year.

The Strangest Case: Amazing that Yugoslavia, which wasn't exactly so friendly to its Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims citizens, (and which, I should point out, has ceased to exist as a country a couple years ago), has turned out apparently to be one of the only places willing to take the released Canadian former Guantanamo prisoner Abdulrahman Khadr. Khadr, 20, was reportedly dumped without a passport, money, or anything by US troops. (That's not exactly how the DoD describes it in their press release).

"When Khadr last contacted his grandmother in Toronto over the weekend from Yugoslavia, he said it would be his last call to her and his last attempt to get back home. He was running out of money, which he borrowed from some friends in Afghanistan, and was scared of being picked up by authorities and jailed again...[His lawyer] Galati could not explain how a man with little money and no official documents had travelled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Turkey and Yugoslavia over the past few weeks. Khadr, whose father and brother were allegedly members of al-Qaida, was not returned immediately to Canada from Cuba because American officials told Khadr he was not wanted," reports the Canadian Press.

Al Qaeda may be spreading its perverse brand of suicidal terrorism to splinter groups around the Muslim world, but the nonviolent, pro-democratic, anti-totalitarian methods of the Serbian oppositon OTPOR are also spreading, and proving much more effective in overthrowing dictators. From Burma to Zimbabwe, Polish, Serbian, South African, and other proponents of the nonviolent revolution methods advanced by Harvard's Gene Sharp are applying their techniques to help shift the balance of power from corrupt rulers to the people.

Profiles of the person who has emerged as Georgia's leading opposition figure, 36 year old justice minister Mikhail Saakashvili, are mixed. A former Shevardnadze protege, Saakashvili earned a law degree at Columbia University and studied at George Washington University, speaks fluent English, has spoken out strongly against corruption, is married to a Dutch woman, and offers other credentials which may initially endear him to westerners. But he's also described as demagogic in profile after profile, which describe his "lust for power."

Baghdad Blasts: While interviewing by phone a US photographer in Baghdad this morning, explosions went off outside his hotel, the Hamra. Just another day in Baghdad?, I wondered. He seemed rather shaken up, but didn't want to get off the phone. The photographer has been in Iraq for four months, and in Kuwait for two months before that, and he says the situation is definitely getting worse -- more dangerous, violent, and tense.

Should the lack of weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq cause the Pentagon to reconsider its mandatory anthrax vaccination program?

As far as we know, there is less anthrax in Iraq than in the U.S. army biodefense facility at Ft. Detrick, Maryland that the FBI believes was the original source of the anthrax that killed five people in October 2001. After all, David Kay and his team of CIA sleuths have been searching suspected Iraqi weapons sites for months, at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, without so much as finding an envelope full of anthrax (although apparently they did find a jar of botulinum toxin in the refrigerator of a retired Iraqi weapons scientist who reported that after the program was dismantled in the early 1990s he did not know where else to safely dispose of the toxin).

The apparent lack of weaponized anthrax in Iraq gives rise to a question. Just why are US soldiers forced still to undergo vaccinations for bioweapons that apparently we civilians in the US are as likely to be exposed to opening our mail as they are being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq? Is the Pentagon wedded to an anthrax vaccination program that is based on a threat perception that has proven false?

Critics of the program say yes. And on Tuesday, they are slated to get a voice of support, from New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman.

"Mr. President, throughout the conflict in Iraq, our brave soldiers have have carried out their duties with strength, with honor, and with courage...That is why I am so troubled that our current Department of Defense policies may be failing them, with grievous consequences...I rise today to introduce a Sense of the Senate that asks for some changes to the current smallpox and anthrax immunization programs. Specifically it asks the Secretary of Defense to:

· Reconsider the mandatory nature of its smallpox and anthrax vaccine immunization programs pending the development of new and better vaccines that are currently under development;

· Reconsider adverse actions taken against servicemembers on the basis of refusal to take the smallpox or anthrax vaccines; and,

· Reevaluate, with the Intelligence community, the current threat of anthrax and smallpox attacks on our troops, in an effort to reflect current operational realities when considering the continuation of a mandatory vaccination program."

Etc.

Critics of the mandatory military vaccination program say the vaccine has sickened some soldiers, and what's more, that the Defense Department has relentlessly moved to quash any evidence of it, including denying military health benefits to some veterans who believe they were disabled by the vaccine.

But last week, "a panel of scientists from the [US] government's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and Armed Forces Epidemiology Board said the evidence 'strongly favors' the theory that vaccination led to the death...of a 22-year-old female soldier who died last spring after getting multiple vaccines...The woman received smallpox, typhoid, anthrax, hepatitis B and measles-mumps-rubella vaccine on March 2. On April 4, she died of lung complications caused by an acute attack of the autoimmune disease lupus."

While soldiers are required to get the vaccinations, most civilians don't even have access to those same vaccines -- even though it was civilian postal workers, media staff, and Congressional staff that bore the brunt of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks. By and large, Americans are not rushing to get vaccinated for anthrax, even after the 2001 anthrax attacks. After all, quick post-exposure courses of antibiotics proved very effective in saving lives of those exposed.

So after the very real 2001 anthrax attacks didn't send Americans rushing for anthrax vaccine, after the plan to vaccinate US front line health workers against small pox has petered out, after no WMD have been found in Iraq, and after it seems at least some US soldiers have been sickened, even killed, by effects from the vaccinations, is the Pentagon reconsidering its vaccination program?

No. Assistant secretary of defense for health affairs William Winkenwerder Jr. told the Washington Post that "there are no plans to change the vaccination program."

Is this just another "weapons" program that constituencies in and out of the Pentagon have become so wedded to, the DOD refuses to change course? It seems so.

On the other hand, another bio attack States-side could send Americans flying to get the vaccine for themselves. Perhaps that's what the perpetrator of the 2001 attacks intended.

Bingol Backlash? Were the Istanbul bombers part of an Islamist group that the Turkish government had cultivated in the 1980s and 90s in its war against the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK)? Most of the suspects in the bombings are from the town of Bingol, in southeastern Turkey, in a town and region that also gave rise to the PKK. The Wash Post's Karl Vick went to the town where three of the four Istanbul suicide bombers grew up, and found that"in Bingol, many people want answers, not from the shaken families of the accused, but from the government. Until four years ago, Turkey...had tacitly encouraged Islamic extremism in this region, judging it a useful tool in a sometimes dirty war against Kurdish separatists. A brutal religious underground group known as Hezbollah received guns from government arsenals, according to official investigations, and several thousand killings widely attributed to the group were officially ignored." (Turkey's Hezbollah is entirely separate from the Palestinian and Iranian groups that use the same name).

..."Ridvan Kizgin, director of the Bingol office of the Turkish Human Rights Association, drew parallels between Turkey's experience with Hezbollah and the U.S. relationship with the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 'Now the American government can't do anything to stop them,' said Kizgin, referring to the religious warriors funded by Osama bin Laden that the United States once regarded as useful allies. 'Turkey is in the same position.'"

Post-bombing investigation has also revealed that the bombers have undergone religious training in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and had fought in Chechnya or Bosnia. It would seem that around the world, the 20,000 people who trained in the Afghan camps, and those foreigners who fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, could be identified. And that list would be the starting point for each country to target its own base of potential militants. Is that naive?It would seem to be a whole lot more effective than Darpa's now quashed Total Information Awareness, etc.

As the Car Talk guys say, War and Piece is going to be taking a little vacation the next couple weeks. I have several articles assignments that demand more attention. But I do hope to throw up interesting bits and pieces here and there until I have more time to blog more. Until then Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Weary of war, tired of terrorism, sick of Saddam? Then read Jack Shafer's very funny and delectable anthropo-analysis of our culture's obsession with celebrity magazines, here.

Franchising Al Qaeda:

"Leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network have franchised their organization’s brand of synchronized, devastating violence to homegrown terrorist groups across the world," the Washington Post writes, "posing a formidable new challenge to counterterrorism forces...The recent attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Iraq show that the smaller organizations, most of whose leaders were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, have fanned out, imbued with radical ideology and the means to create or revitalize local terrorist groups."

..."'“The threat has moved beyond al Qaeda,' said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at the Singapore-based Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies. 'While al Qaeda was the instigator of recent attacks, very few have actually been carried out by al Qaeda.'

..."A senior FBI official said the main link among the groups appears to be their shared experiences in the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Approximately 20,000 people from 47 countries passed through the camps from the mid-1990s until the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, officials estimate...Gunaratna described the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, as 'a terrorist Disneyland, where you could meet anyone from any Islamist group.'...U.S. and European intelligence officials said the creation of terror franchises is due in part to the success in capturing or killing al Qaeda’s senior leadership and pressuring individuals and institutions that funded the movement."

Intelligence historian Thomas Powers addresses the "Vanishing Case for War," in a New York Review of Books piece here:

"The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history," Powers writes. "Whether it is even possible that a misreading so profound could yet be in some sense 'a mistake' is a question to which I shall return. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained."

Newsweek terrorism-beat reporters Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff sift through the facts presented in the Feith memo, here, and find that many of the supposed facts presented have been contradicted by other evidence. For instance,:

--"Consider one of the seemingly more compelling reports
cited in the memo: that Farouk Hijazi, the former chief of
Iraqi intelligence and then ambassador to Turkey, flew to
Afghanistan in late 1998 to meet with bin Laden," Newsweek
writes. "As Stephen Hayes, author of The Weekly Standard
piece dutifully notes, accounts of this purported Saddam overture
to Osama made its way into the mainstream press at the time...
But, as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official,
says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin
Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not
want to be 'exploited' by a regime that he has consistently viewed
as 'secular' and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict
Islamic state."

And on the circumstances surrounding the still unestablished case of whether Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, Newsweek writes:

--"The [Feith] memo invokes the by-now hoary claim—first
reported by Czech intelligence-that Mohammed Atta met
with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001. But
it concedes that the FBI and CIA 'cannot confirm' that such
a meeting actually took place. In fact, the Iraqi agent in
question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, has been in
U.S. custody for months and, according to U.S. intelligence
sources, denies ever meeting Atta—a denial that officials
tend to believe given that they have not unearthed a scintilla
of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the
alleged rendezvous."

Do such slippery and contradictory 'facts' as described above establish the conclusive case of significant cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden as the the Weekly Standard claims? It sure doesn't seem very water-tight to me.

Meantime, the CIA has expanded its internal investigation into its own pre-war intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, USA Today reports.

--"CIA Director George Tenet has ordered investigators to
substantially widen their internal probe of Iraq intelligence
to consider whether the agency missed telltale signs that
Iraq had gotten rid of its weapons of mass
destruction before the U.S.-led invasion last March. The probe,
which has been conducted by a four-member
team of former senior CIA analysts since early this year,
was broadened this week."

Istanbul blasts have targeted the British consulate in the downtown Beyoglu/Taksim district and two offices of HSBC bank. Turks are calling the recent series of bombings their September 11th.

Meanwhile investigation of last Saturday's bombings of two Istanbul synagogues, which are believed to be linked to today's attacks, has shown that the two suicide bombers were indeed Turkish. "DNA tests had shown that both men were Turks, and named them as Mesut Cabuk, 29, and Gokhan Elaltuntas, 22," the BBC reports, which also says the two men are from the eastern Turkish town of Bingol. (A Turkish contact says that the Kurdish separatist group the PKK also originated from this same town.) One of the two suicide bombers, Mesut Cabuk, reportedly had trained in Iran, and some media reports have said both men may have also trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both a Turkish radical group and an Al Qaeda linked (Arabic language) group, the Brigades of the Martyr Abu Hafz al-Masri, have claimed responsibility for the Saturday bombings, but Turkish authorities have expressed skepticism that a Turkish group could have carried out the sophisticated bombings. After today's attacks, "a man who called the Anatolia news agency claimed that al-Qaeda and the Turkish Islamic militant group IBDA-C had jointly carried out the attacks," reports the BBC. (For all the recent US media debate over an alleged past 10 year old Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link, seems we hardly understand how Al Qaeda has evolved since September 11th and forged links with terrorist groups around the Muslim world.)

Christopher Hitchens has a very good piece condemning the knee-jerk analysis of last Saturday's bombings which suggested al Qaeda's targeting of Turkey may be linked to the US's war on Iraq. I fell a bit into that trap in my earlier posts and am chagrined. Clearly, while there is increasing evidence that these attacks were perpetrated by Turks tied or sympathetic to al Qaeda, Turkey is overwhelmingly hostile to Islamist militancy and terrorism, and these attacks will do nothing but increase Turks' contempt for Al Qaeda and local fellow travelers, who all reports indicate remain a tiny fringe group in Turkey, with almost no base of local support. (although it is worth looking into this town of Bingol, given that the PKK and this Turkish Islamist group seem to have originated here).

I am still digesting all of these developments and will try to write a more coherent piece on it later. But one thing I do believe is that the US would have done better to have ramped up its global hunt of al Qaeda after the war Afghanistan, rather than divert its efforts in Iraq.

Is the Democratic base projecting its anti-war sentiments on Howard Dean? So asks Robert Kagan in this oped.

"Another possibility is that Dean's opposition to the Iraq war has been over-interpreted by his supporters on the Democratic left. They think he rejects the overall course of American foreign policy, just as they do. But maybe he doesn't. They think he's one of them, but his views may not be all that different from those of today's Democratic centrist establishment...'There are two groups of people who support me because of the war,' Dean told Mara Liasson a few months ago. 'One are the people who always oppose every war, and in the end I think I probably won't get all of those people.' The other group, Dean figures, simply 'appreciates the fact' that he 'stood up early' and spoke his mind and opposed Bush while other Democrats were cowed. Dean may not be offering a stark alternative to Bush's foreign policy, therefore, so much as he is simply offering Democrats a compelling and combative alternative to Bush himself."

Were this true, and it seems likely it is, that Dean is not as lefty as many of his core party supporters want him to be, I would like him much more. It's amazing how he has become this figure that represents what so many left oriented groups want, without actually convincingly proving he has those credentials. For instance, a British friend with very liberal political inclinations told me, she thinks Dean is for rolling back globalization, while Clark would just put a kinder face on Bush's global economic policies. Well, would Dean, the candidate whose constituency has been described as Starbucks voters, really roll back globalization? What evidence?

Amazing how he is able to capture that hope, almost like an actor. Clinton had some of that -I will be what you want me to be - ness. But once he was elected, many were extremely disappointed!

The Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes addresses the Pentagon's disavowal of the Feith memo, here.

--"The Pentagon statement...has confused, rather than clarified, the issues raised by the Feith memo," Hayes writes. "....There are four areas of confusion. What does the Pentagon mean by (1) 'new' information, (2) 'analysis,' (3) 'raw reports,' and (4) 'inaccurate'?"

Meanwhile, Slate's Jack Shafer makes a good case that the question of what evidence the US government had pre-war about any Osama-Saddam link is pried ever more open by the Feith memo, here.

The "Saddam did 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks, the Oklahoma City bombings," crowd's other favorite journalist Edward Jay Epstein, returns to Prague, to try to nail down whether Mohammed Atta did indeed meet there with an Iraqi intelligence official, as described in his Slate piece.

As my friend writes from Prague, the evidence is overwhelming that Pakistan was largely responsible for helping establish and nurture the Taliban; the evidence is also overwhelming that Saudi Arabia gave support to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. So why is the neoconservative press searching through haystacks for the shreds that might indicate cooperation between Saddam and Usama bin Laden? it is almost a pathological obsession, looking for evidence of a minor connection, versus the mountains of evidence that Saudi and Pakistani intelligence were cooperating with UBL. Why won't they look there?

Secondly, how many more Al Qaeda and Sunni Islamic terrorists are operating in Iraq Post-US Invasion than Before? Hundreds, thousands. So the proscription the neocons had for punishing Saddam for his alleged Al Qaeda ties is worse than the disease, as far as I can tell!

The appearance of corruption in this Hollinger-Black-Perle-Trireme deal is pretty shocking.

This from the Washington Post:

"...And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.

"Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.

"There's Gerald Hillman, managing partner of Hillman Capital, which also got a $14 million investment from Hollinger, according to the Financial Times. Hillman is also a partner at Trireme.

"And then there's Henry Kissinger, another longtime Hollinger director, though it must be said that Henry is very busy and was only able to make one board meeting last year.

"Rounding out the Hollinger director-hawks is Richard Burt, the former arms negotiator and ambassador to Germany. Burt is also on the board of Archer Daniels Midland, whose former chairman, Dwayne Andreas, and director Robert Strauss, were also Hollinger directors until last year. Small world, huh?

"Some might consider Andreas a somewhat risky choice for corporate director, inasmuch as ADM had to pay a $100 million fine for price-fixing during his watch. But Andreas probably felt right at home at Hollinger, alongside A. Alfred Taubman, who as head of Sotheby's was nabbed for fixing art auction prices. Taubman gave up his Hollinger seat last year, around the time he checked into prison.

The coincidences don't stop there...."

It all makes Whitewater seem like a quaint, third rate Ozarkian nothing, doesn't it?

A few notes on returning NSC official Robert Blackwill:

UPI, Juan Cole and others have reported that the recent US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill is being promoted to head the NSC 'crisis' team charged with trying to salvage the US Iraq mission. Indeed, sources cited by UPI suggest that Blackwill is essentially to become Paul Bremer's top deputy. (This I doubt. More likely, Blackwill will be a kind of Old Executive Office building-based trouble shooter Condoleeza Rice trusts to manage Bremer, the CPA, and the Iraqi Governing Council.)

"The future of the Iraq governing council will be on the agenda of talks that U.S. National Security Council official Robert Blackwill will be conducting with Bremer soon," UPI reports. "According to sources in Baghdad, Blackwill will visit Iraq to explore the possibility of enlarging the Iraq council, or dissolving it and setting up a new body."

A few notes about Blackwill, who I knew as Professor Blackwill in grad school a few years ago.

--By the standards of this administration, Blackwill is not at all a bad choice to be sent to Iraq to knock heads together on the Iraqi Governing Council.

For the purposes of assisting Bremer, Blackwill is vastly more qualified than the legions of campaign-approved, well-connected PR and campaign hacks Bremer seems somehow to have acquired as "special advisors" in Iraq.

As much drill sergeant as diplomat, Blackwill is difficult, abrasive, and vastly bright and experienced. (His embassy in New Delhi was a famously unhappy post for State Department foreign service officers). He exudes an aura of carrying the weight of the free world's survival on his shoulders. That said, as I'll describe more below, I think that, like many who held high national security positions in the Bush I administration (and in Bush II for that matter), Blackwill does not really have a vision for US national security that fits the real threats and needs of the post-Cold War, and now the post 9/11, world. Blackwill, James Baker, Blackwill's protege Condoleeza Rice, and others in that circle, seem stuck in the Cold War, great-state-struggle paradigm, more than a bit adrift since.

As Blackwill said during his Senate confirmation hearing for the post of US ambassador to India, "During those years in government and through my teaching, articles and books while at Harvard, I have concentrated my intellectual and conceptual attention on the relationships between and among the great powers in the international system. If the Senate confirms me, I believe that this particular strategic preoccupation of mine will be intensely relevant to my new responsibilities."

The problem is, the post Cold War, post-9/11 world, is not really chiefly about the struggle and relationships between the great powers. The post 9/11 world is a different animal that these Cold Warriors can't quite seem to get their heads around. (As one can see in this administration's virtual abandonment of the war on Usama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the more conventional war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq). And in their contempt for peacekeeping/nation building, international treaties, and their commitment to old-style US control of energy-rich regions, these realpolitik post-Cold Warriors are stubbornly blind to how being able to fix Iraq, for instance, after breaking it, is as important to the U.S.' success, even from the most pragmatic point of view.

Blackwill, 64, rose through the ranks of the Foreign Service, serving for 22 years, did stints as a US arms control negotiator against the Soviets, taught for fifteen years at Harvard, and became a deputy national security advisor during the Bush I administration.

It was in that role that Blackwill became a mentor to Condoleeza Rice who worked under him covering Europe and German integration for the NSC under Bush I. I would expect that Rice will personally trust and rely on Blackwill's judgment more than most any other figure at the NSC or in the administration.

--Blackwill is a Republican hawk, but from the school of realpolitik, not of neoconservative idealism. He is not an idealist, he is a realist. Closer to George Schultz and Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft than Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle. (That said, for all of Blackwill's hard-nosed realism, I have sometimes found his judgment to be just plain wrong. For instance, during 1998-9, when I was simultaneously studying with him while spending much of my time on the ground in war-time Kosovo, Blackwill predicted as near certainty that within a year or two, Kosovo was headed for independence. It just hasn't happened, and there was little reason at the time to think it would).

--He certainly at that time, 1998-1999, was also among the group of prominent Bush I foreign policy "refugees" convinced that the Clinton policy of containing Saddam Hussein was not working, and believed that the US would have to move to topple Saddam, the sooner the better.

--To his credit, Blackwill was also among a (bi-partisan) group of foreign policy practitioners and intellectuals prominent at Harvard who were warning early loud and often about grand or super terrorism. But then again, this group was more concerned with terrorism using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons than with the kind of attacks the US saw on September 11th.

--This obsession with the big terrible things that were coming to kill us, among Blackwell and other Bush I and Clinton I Pentagon/NSC refugees I studied with at Harvard, sometimes led to a kind of blindness to the real conflicts the US was getting caught up in - at least politically - at the time, including the Bosnia genocide. People like Blackwill just didn't get why Bosnia was of any national security interest to the United States, except perhaps towards the end when it threatened to unravel Nato. Any concern for ending genocide was considered by him, in my estimation, as pure sentimentality. "U.S. national security interests" were defined most narrowly. (Then again, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger from Clinton years were hardly more inspiring about bravely facing the threats of the post-Cold War era).

-- Blackwill can be really difficult to deal with. Clearly he'd been through the ringer more than a few times both personally and professionally. Nevertheless, despite this, and my differences with him over issues like Bosnia and Kosovo, I liked Blackwill. He cared about getting the smartest and best people into US government, and having them perform at their best.

Must-read column, by Senate Select Intel committee vice chair Jay Rockefeller, here:

"Faced with Republicans' continuing refusal to conduct a complete investigation into these matters," Rockefeller writes, "my staff recently drafted an options memo on the use or potential misuse of intelligence. The memo, intended only for me, was pilfered from the usually secure Senate intelligence committee and distributed to the media. It has become a convenient excuse for Republicans to shut down the committee and curtail the investigation."

This pattern of the Republicans stealing memos from Democratic staffers' computers is becoming an epidemic!

"Apparent Theft of Democratic Memos Probed," reads another Washington Post headline today. "Congressional authorities began looking into what Democrats yesterday called an apparent computer theft of staff memos critical of President Bush's embattled judicial nominees."

!

Interesting profile of Clark, from the Boston Globe.

And on the "Democrats' Dilemma," here:

"There is a growing sense of inevitability among many political observers that, barring some unforeseen event or revelation, Dr. Dean will win the Democratic nomination," the Christian Science Monitor's Linda Feldman writes. "..In the wider Democratic universe, however, the prospect of a Dean nomination has sent some party members into paroxysms of private hand-wringing. Not only do they see him losing badly to Bush, they also see Dean hurting Democratic candidates further down on the ticket - rippling into congressional races, and possibly even boosting Republican control of the 100-seat Senate close to the crucial threshold of 60 seats, which would make it filibuster-proof."

More evidence that the US is still a 50-50 country. Among registered voters polled this past week by USA Today/Gallup, 46% say they will vote for the Democratic party presidential candidate, 47% say they will vote for the Republican party presidential candidate, and 7% of registered voters say they are undecided.

The Senate Intel Committee wants an investigation of the Feith Memo leak to the Weekly Standard:

"Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he expected
to ask the Justice Department and the Pentagon to determine
if the leak constituted a crime," the Associated Press reports.
If it did, a criminal investigation should be conducted, he said.
'That's highly classified material and an egregious leak
of classified material,' he told reporters."

Some advice for Senator Roberts: Maybe he should check out what his majority staff is doing after hours on the committee's computers.

From Istanbul, a friend writes:

Dear ...I couldn't stop my tears...it is hurting me very
deeply. Here is the story...Berta (Jewish)and
Ahmet (Muslim) Ozdogan got married after big love story
and Berta got pregnant...They went to the
Sinegog last Saturday and both [were] killed. It is so sad,
but believe me [the] funeral ceremony made me more sad.
Rather then having a mixed funural and bury them
together (mother, father and baby), [their] families (I don't
know which one) decided to have different ceremonies
and bury them in different grave yard. Isn't that so
sad?...

Istanbul bombing Follow Up: The SITE Institute, headed by Baghdad born terrorism analyst Rita Katz, has posted a translation of the statement by the of the Al Qaeda group claiming responsibility for the Saturday truck bombings of two Istanbul synagogues, which have now killed 24 people, here.

University of Michigan history professor and Middle East expert Juan Cole muses on the possible motive of the Istanbul attackers here. One interesting observation: Al Qaeda has morphed, and the term has now really become a short hand for Sunni Islamic terrorists, e.g. far mor dispersed and decentralized than the band of 5,000 committed jihadists who previously declared fealty to bin Laden directly (and trained in Afghanistan?)...

Turkish police continue to make progress in the investigation.

The group claiming responsibility for the Istanbul truck bombings Saturday , the Brigades of the Martyr Abu Hafz al-Masri, is the same one that claimed responsibility for the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August.

...

The group is supposedly named for an Egyptian lieutenant of Usama bin Laden, Mohammed Atef, who the US is believed to have killed in a December 2001 strike in Afghanistan.

What does it mean that an Al Qaeda linked group is striking targets in both Baghdad and Istanbul, places that hadn't seen Al Qaeda terrorism before six months ago? Turkish sources told the western media on Sunday that it now appears that the Istanbul bombings were carried out by suicide bombers in pick up trucks. Initially they reported that DNA testing showed that the two suicide attackers were of Arab descent (e.g. not Turkish), but later reports suggested Turks may also have been involved.

The group threatens more truck bombings in the US, Britain, Australia, Italy and Japan. One thing struck me when reading the group's manifesto justifying its bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad: whoever did this is evil, but not stupid. They name UN resolutions and discuss multiple interventions, through the filter of perceived injustice and second class treatment for Muslims globally. They name some of the UN officials who were working in Baghdad that they killed, and justify killing them, by name. In other words, these are not just targets of opportunity, but a bit more carefully chosen. But to persuade who?

The Parallel Reality of the Neocons: The other day at a book talk at the American Enterprise Institute, listening to author Laurie Mylroie, employing Powerpoint, rail on about her theory that the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef must have been an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his maternal uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the 9/11 mastermind, must also therefore be an Iraqi intelligence agent, I looked around the room and wondered if everybody else there must be thinking, this is insane, this is witnessing a kind of insanity. I wasn't sure.

Richard Perle sat proudly by, suggesting during his comments that Mylroie should be placed at the head of a CIA unit that would institutionalize the B team exercises of the Cold War. Many of their comments were devoted to their idea that the CIA and State Department have been locked into a certain "filtering model of reality" regarding Iraq, a kind of prevailing worldview, that prevented those agencies from being able to absorb or acknowledge the kind of infomation about Iraq cooperating with Al Qaeda in attacks on the US, that the neo cons believe to have occurred.

Afterwards I went up to Perle, to ask whether he too felt like he was a victim of a "filtering model of reality" whereby he was so utterly convinced that Saddam did have WMD and was cooperating with Al Qaeda, that he and his colleagues were simply unable to process information that we now know suggested neither theory was true. I asked whether he felt misled by Chalabi, since it has now been widely reported that the information from the defectors provided by Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress to the CIA and the DIA has turned out to be useless. Perle said, "That's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong," and insisted that Chalabi had never provided defectors to the US intelligence community at all, contrary to dozens of reports. As for my other questions, he said, "I never said going into Iraq would be a cakewalk," something I never remotely accused him of saying.

Afterwards another reporter who had witnessed the exchange came up to me and said, you can't talk to Richard Perle that way. He suggested I should have moulded my questions to flatter the warped view of reality of Perle and his circle if I wanted to get a more quotable response from them.

I knew that, I told him, since he was trying to be helpful. But I was compelled to try and just ask Perle directly without a lot of verbal gymnastics what I was thinking, because increasingly, railing against his theories in my own work, in media critical of the neocons, etc. makes one feel like the two parallel worlds in which the neo cons and the rest of are living, are well -- unable to communicate with each other. The basic facts and reality we perceive are so entirely different. It is hard to argue about strategy or tactics or goals, when you can't get the neocons to acknowledge the basic facts that have come out of Iraq.

And frankly, I found it kind of disturbing that not a single other person at that event that day dared breach protocol to challenge the outrageousness of Mylroie's and Perle's insistence that it was the CIA and State Departments which got Iraq wrong, when all available evidence makes clear it was Perle and Mylroie who got Iraq wrong. Maybe those who disagree with the neocons have just decided to save themselves the high blood pressure of bothering to go to AEI Iraq events at all. It is only worth going, as so many foreign diplomats and journalists do, because Perle is undeniably reflective of a kind of prevailing worldview of a certain group of people - such as Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, who many of us don't often get the chance to personally listen to.

Well, now the Weekly Standard has published what it claims is definitive proof that Perle, Feith and the other neocons were right about Saddam and Al Qaeda all along. Apparently they have been leaked (imagine that!) a classified top secret memo prepared by Doug Feith for the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which spells out in 50 points the "proof" that Saddam and Osama Bin Laden had forged a cooperative relationship shortly after the Gulf War, and worked together right through 2003. "Case closed," the Weekly Standard writes. "There can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans":

--"OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD," the magazine reports, more than a bit breathlessly.

--"The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee...Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies."

Etc.

The memo asserts that it has proof to back up lots of other canards of the neocons, for instance, that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta did indeed have two visits to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligent agent, a fact that has been in dispute.

What's one to say except, this memo, these leaked "proofs" of exactly what the neocons insisted was true all along is highly suspicious in every way. The neocons do seem to have this habit of just manufacturing their own reality and their own "facts" when the real facts don't back up the worldview and convictions they have endorsed. Indeed, the Feith memo seems to offer the kind of "vindication" the neocons hoped they would get from Iraq weapons of mass destruction hunter David Kay, but which David Kay -- sadly, for them -- did not yet prove able to provide them.

It truly seems like the Administration is unravelling over the mess of post war Iraq, and that we are witnessing some of that unravelling and desperation with this leaked memo. The B team has become unhinged.

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus offers a sensible critique of some of the claims in the Feith memo, here.

Finally, isn't it humbling at what regular intervals the conservative press is leaked just exactly what the administration wants to be, while this administration makes such an unbelievably hypocritical fuss about intelligence leaks?

Follow Up: Interestingly, the Defense Department is disavowing this leak:

"DoD Statement on News Reports of al-Qaida and Iraq Connections

-"News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.

-"A letter was sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee on October 27, 2003 from Douglas J. Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, in response to follow-up questions from his July 10 testimony. One of the questions posed by the committee asked the Department to provide the reports from the Intelligence Community to which he referred in his testimony before the Committee. These reports dealt with the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida.

-"The letter to the committee included a classified annex containing a list and
description of the requested reports, so that the Committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the Intelligence Community.

-"The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of the Intelligence Community. The selection of the documents was made by DOD to respond to the Committee's question. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.

-"Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious
harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."

Why do we suspect this leak won't ever get punished...

Follow Up II: Perle keeps getting himself in trouble...

Nice bit of archeological digging into the career of New Yorker contributor Peter Boyer, who wrote a nasty review of Clark's military career and presidential candidacy in the latest issue, by the American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias, here. Apparently Boyer has made a career, as Yglesias points out, of playing the "conservative interloper at otherwise liberal media outlets," writing profiles and contributing to documentaries that have questioned the integrity of intervening to stop Milosevic's oppression of the Kosovo Albanians, sought to portray the Clintons as sinister and corrupt, and other unworthy endeavors.

Istanbul Synagogue Bombings: In 1998, after two years reporting from Sarajevo, Bosnia, I moved to Istanbul. The basis of the move was my belief, based on pure speculation, that Istanbul would be an ideal base for freelancing in a slightly larger region than just the Balkans, but also including Turkey itself, and former Soviet Central Asia. I also had a close Turkish friend from my days reporting in Sarajevo, the Turkish television reporter, Serif Turgut, who was convinced that any western reporter with half a brain could find miraculous success by moving to what she rightly considered the crossroads of some of the most journalistically compelling regions in the world.

If you've never been, Istanbul is one of the most glorious cities in the world. While I dashed around Istanbul those first few weeks meeting with contacts of contacts and Turkish think tank analysts and journalists and while searching for an apartment, I had the occasion to become acquainted with Istanbul's Jewish community and its unofficial head, Dr. Isak Alaton. As I remember, the New York-based conflict resolution specialist David Phillips had come through my Istanbul hotel and he arranged a meeting for me with Alaton, one of the city's most successful businessmen (Alaton's Alarco holding company sells air conditioners throughout Turkey and the Middle East).

Isak Alaton is an extremely kind person, and he made an effort to help me meet people he thought could be useful to an American reporter trying to understand Turkey, from academics to journalists to a kind of human fixer I could call on a cell phone on short notice. Dr. Alaton also invited me to attend a synagogue event one evening to be introduced to some of Istanbul's Jewish community. On the night I was to attend, he had a driver pick me up, and take me to the location of the synagogue, which was unmarked, and heavily secured and guarded. I found that a little odd since I had never encountered the slightest bit of anti-Semitism among Turks, and in fact, understood that Turkey and Israel had a quietly quite cooperative relationship, in particular, their militaries and business elites. During the synagogue evening, Isak Alaton spoke and then, invited me to speak to the assembled group of a few hundred people. I hardly could bring myself to say more than hello, and as I remember, Dr. Alaton seemed a bit disappointed.

Nevertheless, on the occasions I had to speak with Dr. Alaton or go to the synagogue or to a lovely residential neighborhood called Nishantishi to visit the offices of the Istanbul Jewish newspaper and have tea with the editors, I always felt like Istanbul's Jewish community was evidence of something I clung hard to while covering the post war in Bosnia: that, in this case, a Jewish minority could prosper in an Islamic country, and more generally, that people of different ethnicities can live side by side (even in the Levant), and appreciate and quietly respect each other. And in the sometimes chaotic environment of Istanbul, with its nearly 15 million people, the Jews of Istanbul gave me a sense of connection and welcome.

In the end, I didn't stay long in Istanbul, just four months. Massacres occurred in Kosovo that spring, and my connections to the Balkans pulled me back to report. CBS sent me back a satellite phone, and I hopped a charter flight to Skopje, Macedonia. And while I loved Istanbul, as a journalist, I was relieved to be back in the Balkans in a conflict environment where reporting the news was sadly much easier than in Turkey's more stable environment.

I am devastated to see news today of the car bombings at two Istanbul synagogues that have killed 20 people and wounded 300, many Muslim guards hired to protect the synagogues. This is an alarming and grim development in a few weeks filled with increasingly grim and alarming news from the neighborhood. Personally, I could not be more shocked if it happened in Paris or Cleveland.

...

I don't know enough to analyze what criminals would have committed these bombings, but the Turks I have spoken to say it was utterly larger and more sophisticated than any terrorism Turkey has seen before from its own leftist, Islamist and Kurdish-Pkk groups.

Istanbul is the ultimate cosmopolitan city. Turks are by and large radically opposed to the idea of mixing mosque and state, they are hostile to Islamist militant groups, their intellectual elite is largely secular, and their political and economic aspirations are overwhelmingly westward, towards greater integration with the EU. But most of all, Turks historically have valued their country's relationship with the United States.

Through Serif and other contacts from Turkey, it has been extremely distressing over the past year and a half to hear from Turks' perspective how they feel the US's war on terror is a war against Muslims, and to hear how extremely insulted, humiliated, and taken for granted they have been made to feel by George W. Bush, his administration's utterly mistaken assumption that Turks would just go along with the war in Iraq despite their stated concerns, and the just plain clumsy and incompetent diplomacy of Team Bush. Turks have historically loved the U.S., but they do not like George Bush's America. And they also, for that matter, do not like Ariel Sharon's Israel.

Turks were overwhelmingly opposed to the US war in Iraq, and they perceive many facets of the US war on terror with deep suspicion, some of it, in my view, unfounded. Clearly, a US war against Muslims would look a whole lot different than the way the war on terror has played out. But nevertheless, perception is important. And if the U.S. can't keep Turkey and Turks on its side during the war on terrorism, then the war is lost. There are only so many candidates for the "moderate, democratic, modern" Islamic states that the U.S. insists are possible, indeed which at one time it aspired to create in post-Saddam Iraq. Turkey is in my view by far the most promising of all potential candidates, imperfect, but hugely promising. It is the ultimate bellweather Islamic state for the U.S. to gauge attitudes. More so, I believe, than Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, or Malaysia. If Turkey is lost to the U.S., then the war is totally lost.

In fact, from talking with Serif after this bombing, it is clear that Turks' first reaction to the synagogue bombings was that this was an attack *against Turkey.* But there is no denying that the resentment built up against George W. Bush and the U.S. over the past three years is real, and that the U.S. cannot take Turkey's support for granted.

Follow Up: Just spoke to my Turkish friend in Istanbul, journalist Serif Turgut. Her observations?

*These are our Jews. 100% of people here in Turkey feel like this was an attack on Turkey, not just on the Turkish Jewish community.

*We know terrorism. But this was the largest terrorist attack on the Istanbul city center in history.

*Five of the 21 killed are Jewish. The others are Muslim. From the wounded people, 60 are Jewish, the rest is Muslim. People - Jewish Muslim - are sleeping next to each other in the hospitals.

*There is no anti-Jewish sentiment after these attacks. Some of the academics and others who have provided analyses on the news after these attacks do criticize the Middle East policy and the Iraq policy.

*Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who helped negotiate the Dayton Peace agreements that ended the Bosnian war, was recently quoted in Turkish media, saying that during the Clinton administration, polls showed that 65% of Turks strongly liked America. Now, during Bush, fewer than 10% of Turks say they like America. How much has changed in 2 1/2 years.

*After Saturday's car bomb attacks, one side in Turkey is immediately blaming al Qaeda. They were apparently very large car bombing attacks. (whether they were remote control explosions or cars driven into the two synagogues is not clear). There is much sense that they were too large and too sophisticated to be the work of Turkish groups. Some also speculate that "foreign intelligence" is responsible -- e.g. Iran, Iraq, or other intelligence group. Serif says that Turks have seen a lot of Kurdish/PKK and leftist terrorism in Istanbul, but never anything as powerful as this. In general she says, Islamist groups in Turkey have attacked other Islamists or people from their own group, not Turkish secularists or Jews or outsiders.

Jessica Lynch and Women in Combat: The ever thoughtful former US Army officer, journalist and law student Phil Carter takes on The National Review Online's Elaine Donnelly here. Donnelly says that the Lynch case shows why women should not be sent into combat. Carter, who has carefully analyzed the ambush of Lynch's unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, says it shows no such thing. "This was the predictable result of training, resourcing and leadership decisions made which sent a poorly prepared unit into combat and put them too close to the front lines," Carter writes. "At the end of the day, though, the 507th was unlucky, and they paid a heavy price for that misfortune." Do read Carter's full analysis here.

A friend of W&P sends the link to this interesting website, the Memory Hole.

Seymour Hersh says Bush will lose in 2004. Bush's biggest vulnerability, the New Yorker journalist told students at the Tufts Fletcher school? No WMD in Iraq. But it seems to me that is not Bush's biggest vulnerability, since pretty much everybody seemed to believe before the war that Saddam had WMD, including officials from the Clinton administration. I think Bush is more likely to lose because the security situation in Iraq is unravelling, and the US does not have a plan to get a handle on it.

The Democratic base has apparently been fairly unforgiving of Kerry, and to a lesser extent Clark, for their wishy washy positions vis a vis the Iraq war. But what is there not to be ambivalent about? Clearly the Iraq post-war has turned into an extremely bleak situation, and indeed is not a post-war at all, but a very messy insurgency against which the US army seems particularly ill suited to fight.

But then you listen to some of the intellectuals in Egypt or read Baghdad blogger Salam Pax's postwar musings, and one is convinced all over again that getting rid of Saddam was really a virtuous thing to do, from a strategic and regional and human rights perspective, whatever the Bush administration's motivations and deceptions for launching it. From a human rights perspective, getting rid of Saddam is one of the best things the US could have done since finishing off Nazism and communism.

And frankly while it is easy to say after the fact that everyone should have known Saddam didn't have any WMD left, honestly, who didn't think he had them? Clinton, Bush II, the Russians, the Brits, the French, etc. etc., Republicans and Democrats alike.

Nevertheless, I don't think Democrats are being reasonable if they hold their presidential candidates to a standard of Cheney-like false certainty on a position on the Iraq war that doesn't recognize the faulty information we all had; as well as the ambiguity of the situation in which getting rid of Saddam was clearly an international public good, while the deceptions and lies the administration used to justify the war created an aura of illegitimacy and alienated allies to the degree that US interests in the end have been hurt.

Another Complaint: Clearly I am not a "party" person, Democrat or Republican, although I have voted both ways at various times, while leaning more and more Democrat these days. And my posts make clear, I really don't understand partisan politics very much. But here is what I really don't get.
In a country that has not many but some very decent moderate political leaders -- people like Senators Hagel and Lugar and Lieberman and Kerry and McCain, and more importantly a significant centrist "middle" constituency, why are the political parties putting up increasingly unattractive candidates who appeal to their more extremist respective party bases? McCain would have been a much better Republican president than Bush, but the more limited and conservative Bush won the nomination, a major tragedy for the entire world. But the Democrats are just as guilty. What in the world are the major unions doing putting up Howard Dean? And why is Dean the candidate of choice for the Democratic base? I just don't get it. Why does a country that is divided so fifty fifty, where the middle few per cent decide so many elections, continue to drive a party system that puts up far less than the best than their parties have to offer?

It took the CIA to figure out Iraqis are losing faith in the US occupation? And the report is top secret?

But to be serious, the report sounds quite bleak. "The C.I.A. and the White House refused even to confirm the existence of the report," the New York Times reports. "But government officials outside those agencies said its conclusions were among the darkest intelligence assessments distributed since the American-led invasion of Iraq in March.

"'It says that this is an insurgency, and that it is gaining strength because Iraqis have no confidence that there is anyone on the horizon who is going to stick around in Iraq as a real alternative to the former regime,' one American official said."

Remember bin Laden? The Bush White House doesn't talk about him much any more, but Wes Clark does.

"Clark, a former four-star Army general, says although the Bush administration did the right thing by going after al-Qaida after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, it failed to finish the job it started," the AP reports.

"'They still haven't found Osama bin Laden. And every day, Americans live at risk because of this failure,'" Clark said Wednesday.

Clark's 3-point for nailing Bin Laden includes 1) "Pressuring Saudi Arabia to contribute to a joint U.S.-Saudi commando force to scour the Afghan-Pakistani border where bin Laden is thought to be hiding," the AP summarizes. 2) Devoting many of the linguists and intelligence and special ops specialists who have been pulled from hunting Al Qaeda to Iraq, back to hunting Bin Laden. 3) And restoring the battered relationship betwee the US and allies.

This plan's chief strength is that it would take the war on terror back to the terrorists. But its merits are all the more remarkable for coming not from the Administraiton that has largely abandoned the war against those who really attacked the US on September 11, 2001 for a totally different war in Iraq, but from a candidate who can see the difference.

Follow Up: Why is the New Republic so incredibly harsh on Clark? Why do so many of the intelligentsia seem to be holding Clark to a higher standard than the other candidates (not even to mention the administration)? [And who does TNR like anyhow, Lieberman? I like Lieberman too, but he's not going to win the nomination.] I don't understand this desire to handicap Clark and knock his national security credentials for the vaguest of hardly articulated reasons that Clark is a - what - proud and extremely self-disciplined person who holds himself most of all to incredible standards? Why does Clark seem to attract so much jealousy?

(And could the New Yorker really not think of a better title for this article???]

The Military as Voters: A W&P reader, whose daughter serves with US forces in Afghanistan and who is a veteran himself, writes about the issue of military attitudes towards US politics:

--"I increasingly find...that soldiers up & down the chain are able to understand, compartment, & deal with conflicts they may have over Iraq. (Afghanistan is a totally different deal, much more supported and showing progress. That the administration was benchmarking the wrong paradigm for Iraq is another matter...)

--"I think if I had to put together a composite viewpoint from what
I've seen/heard, a great many soldiers would give the following answers:

--"'Do Afghanistan? Absolutely! Smoke 'em! Should've let us continue hunting
those slugs the way we were, but I can definitely live with this mission (if
DoD & Congress don't throw out my benefits for my family while I'm here).
No sweat.'"

--"'Do Iraq? Yeah, Hussein had to go I suppose, but it'd be nice to have some
help 'cause our current Force Protection posture sucks! I don't care what
the CINC says...but what we need is about 4 brigades of MP's and comb this sucker starting in Mosul and move south, just like snakes clearin' rats out of a barn - get ALL the weapons. If we can get a little security we might really put something together here besides getting oil for all the president's Texas buddies.'"

--"Believe me, those who care about politics at all are intelligent enough to
understand that they have an obligation to serve the people & the Commander
in Chief and obey orders, they understand the need to not talk bad about the
situation publicly, but they clearly understand (especially the reserve
forces) that it doesn't abbrogate their responsibilities as citizens. An
administration (or candidate or 'journalist') who talks down to them and
doesn't realize that is simply insulting them. I'd love to see a straw poll
on military absentee balloting.

--"Of course, those in Iraq don't get the access to news variety that
Afghanistan (with a pretty solid support base now) gets. (I'd like to see
some candidates make campaign stops in major bases in both countries, but
it's probably impractical.)"

All intelligent observations and suggestions. Can we hope to see Clark campaigning in Afghanistan or Iraq in the future?

Bremer was yanked back to Washington today for urgent mysterious consultations with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc. Seems the White House is going to have to acknowledge in coming days that the war in Iraq is not over.

Meanwhile, Dean campaign advances, Kerry campaign implodes, Clark's stalls, and doom and gloom as it seems incredibly that Bush will likely win again in 2004, despite everything.

Europeans may help by trade war on US steel tariffs. Apparently Bush has to choose now between antagonizing steel states/rust belt should he lift tariffs on steel imports, or if not, risk that the Europeans will declare retaliatory tariffs on US products from certain carefully targetted key swing states - Florida citrus, etc. etc. Maybe the Europeans can help the Dems win 2004? Perhaps with the help of George Soros?

"A senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington said Iraq has emerged as the focal point for Islamic jihad, becoming the most active front in the movement and the top priority for Muslim fighters who want to confront the United States," reports the Los Angeles Times (reg. req.).

"The assessment, shared by analysts at the CIA and other agencies, underscores how in a matter of months Iraq has supplanted Afghanistan, Chechnya and other international trouble spots as the focus of the jihad cause...As many as 2,000 Muslim fighters from as far as Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan are operating in Iraq...The largest group of militants is from neighboring Syria, officials say, while others have come from Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Palestinian territories."

It would be stating the obvious to say this is such grim news. But the fact that the US has created a new locus for Islamist jihad in a place that by and large did not have it, all the while claiming that toppling Saddam Hussein was central to the war on terror, is stunning beyond belief. What would be the equivalent? Toppling a leftist leader in a Latin American country after which a serious Communist insurgency develops?

More on this later. But the most disturbing aspect of this story remains the continued refusal of the hawks who championed the war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was supposedly aiding and abetting Al Qaeda and was an imminent WMD threat -- to face the facts; and that they continue to lie and dissemble and mythologize what the US mission in Iraq is accomplishing, or failing to accomplish. The reality is so drastically different from what they portray, listening to their continued "Iraq war as Bush/Cheney '04 campaign" is like witnessing a kind of insanity.

Cheney's war:

"When it comes to terrorist plots," Newsweek reports, Cheney "seems to have given credence to the views of some fairly flaky ideologues and charlatans. Writing recently in The New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged that Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon’s mysteriously named Office of Special Plans and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi."

The piece continues: "...They do describe the Office of the Vice President, with its large and assertive staff, as a kind of free-floating power base that at times brushes aside the normal policymaking machinery under national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. On the road to war, Cheney in effect created a parallel government that became the real power center."

Why won't NORAD hand over their transcripts from 9/11 to the 9/11 Commission? The Commission is frustrated. They have been patient and given every agency the benefit of the doubt, to the point the families of those killed 9/11 were losing faith. But Norad still won't come through. What do they have to hide?

Clark's Iraq plan makes sense:

First, he defines what success in Iraq would mean (Iraq that is strong, stable, and not threatening neighbors; no base for Al Qaeda; has some sort of legitimate, representative government). Then he defines the principles that should guide US strategy: primarily, internationalize the Iraq mission by turning to NATO, and giving the Iraqis more a stake in the mission.

What's more, Clark would "propose a new Atlantic Charter to reinvigorate our security partnership with Europe - a Charter that will define the threats we face in common, create the basis for concerted action from our allies to meet them, and offer the promise to act together as a first choice - not a last." In other words, why not transform NATO to meet the security threats our countries face more or less in common.

Eat your heart out, Roger Ailes. I love this story. "NPR employees celebrated the news by eating takeout McDonald's for lunch yesterday," the Post reports.

The Guardian says Iraq was sending emissaries to offer concessions all over the place, not only via Maloof, El Hage and Richard Perle.

"The first approach appears to have been made last December through the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro," the Guardian reports.

"'I was approached by someone representing Tahir al-Tikriti - the Iraqi intelligence chief also known as [General] Tahir Habbush - who said Saddam knew there was a campaign to link him to September 11 and prove he had weapons of mass destruction,' said Mr Cannistraro. 'The Iraqis were prepared to satisfy those concerns. I reported the conversation to senior levels of the state department and I was told to stand aside and they would handle it,' he said. He later heard the Iraqi offer had been 'killed' by the Bush administration.

"In the next three months, several more approaches from Iraq were made through third countries, US intelligence sources said..."

Worth reading.

And as I suggested in an earlier post, while Perle tried in the NYT piece yesterday to blame the CIA for not greenlighting his meeting with Baghdad intelligence officials, "a US intelligence source insisted that the decision not to negotiate came from the White House, which was demanding complete surrender," reports the Guardian.

Out with Task Force 20, in with Task Force 121 (NYT, reg. req).

Prediction: If you are not yet, you will soon be on the South Beach diet (or your own version of it). It is uncanny and worthy of market research how this became within the course of a couple weeks a nationwide phenomenon, but everybody from your hair dresser to your mother in law is on this. Trust me.

Was Iraq trying to offer unconditional surrender before the Iraq war? Maybe, maybe not, but do check this out. Must read.

So among many interesting details here, the fact that Rome was apparently the place where the CIA had communications with Iraqi officials, via a retired Iraqi diplomat. And it was in Rome that the fake Niger documents appeared, one remembers, in October 2002.

Other strange details: Perle asked CIA officials for permission to meet with those representing Baghdad? Since when did Perle ask the CIA for anything? He would seem to answer to Rumsfeld. What's up here?

[Morning after thought on this: Apparently, it was Congressional Democratic investigators from the Senate Select Intel Committee who leaked the story of these back channel meetings between Perle and the Syrian businessman. Their motive for the leak? To raise further suspicion and dismay over the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, its Pentagon civilian masters, and neocon fellow travelers. Reporter calls Perle to ask what's up. Perle attempts to slam the debacle right back in CIA's court.]

This is all an echo of a mini war taking place inside the Senate Select Intel committee between Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and Rockefeller (D-WV). Roberts wants the committee's probe to slam the CIA. Rockefeller wants the probe to slam the administration and the Pentagon hardliners.

Speaking of back channels!!

More on Iraq's 'White Flag' from Newsweek here. Clear now this story is being sourced from Democratic Congressional investigators trying to understand the role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans in the run up to the Iraq war.

"Sources tell NEWSWEEK that [Congressional] investigators want to know if White House officials blew an opportunity to avoid an invasion of Iraq. Others see the meeting, and others that took place overseas involving Pentagon officials as part of a secretive intelligence operation that was set up by administration hard-liners within the Defense Department and functioned outside the boundaries of the U.S. intelligence community—and without congressional oversight. 'It was a renegade operation,' says one Democratic investigator. But Bush administration officials insist the secret intelligence team was a benign effort to alert policymakers to proposals and information that was being ignored by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies..."

Fortunately, news from the New Yorker that Seymour Hersh is writing a book on the war on terrorism, so all may be clear soon.

This is insane. It doesn't sound cowardly to me to have a panic attack after seeing a man split in two. But the military is planning to court martial him, for a crime, of cowardice, that could be punishable by death. Insane, insane, insane.

The Pentagon in its infinite wisdom, decided to put 'beltway bandit' SAIC in charge of creating an independent Iraqi media. The problem is, SAIC, which does everything from create the technologies for US intelligence agencies to track down Al Qaeda terrorists, to employ biodefense experts like anthrax investigation 'person of interest' Steve Hatfill, who worked for SAIC until March 2002, to conduct studies of how anthrax through the mail might work, doesn't have any experience creating content for media. Independent media development is just not what a big defense contractor does. (For a great piece on SAIC's government work, see this report by Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun).

The DoD's choice of SAIC to set up Iraq's independent media reflects a total lack of DoD consultation with any number of experts at USAID or the State Department or G-d forbid some NGOs or think tanks which would have known of a dozen other organizations that could have been brought in -- not to reinvent the wheel, mind you -- but to competently do media development.

And there are lots of incredibly respected organizations that do exactly what the Pentagon implausibly turned to SAIC to do: create and foster independent media in formerly oppressed and developing societies, like the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, and the MidEast. Organizations like Internews, and the Institute of War and Peace Reporting (for whom I've written). If you're looking for Iraqi written, internationally coached and edited reports from Iraq, I recommend IWPR's Iraqi Crisis Reports, available here.

Insecurity: Crime can seem kind of abstract until it happens to you. For six of the past 11 years, I have lived in Moscow, the Balkans, and Turkey. Moscow in the midst of a wrenching transition from the Soviet centrally controlled economy to free market Wild West chaos, a coup, casinos, the rich and poor, the whole mess. The Balkans in the midst of two wars and post-wars. While in Bosnia, I walked through morgues of those killed in horrific ways, and in Kosovo, I was at scenes of massacre, in the midst of cross fire, and was twice in a fairly awful situation at Serb police checkpoints. But in all of those cases, I can say I was never the victim of a robbery, a mugging, an assault, I was never the victim of a crime. No one so much as stole an extra dinar or mark from me. And these were in places where people were REALLY poor, where people were living on humanitarian aid, where they had lost family members and often homes and jobs, and seen a lot of violence. Maybe I was protected to a degree by being a foreigner or an American. Maybe I was just lucky. (For sure, the crimes I am talking about are minor and petty when compared with the violence that had overtaken those societies.) Nevertheless, I did not live in a compound as US diplomats do, I always rented apartments downtown and went out plenty. I wasn't reckless, but I had an occasional impromptu unrecommended argument with people in Belgrade bars, people not at all remotely friendly to the American position regarding Kosovo and Milosevic and war crimes. No one so much as laid a finger on my wallet.

I've lived in DC for almost three years, and in the past six months my husband and I have been held up at gunpoint while walking home. Ok, no harm done, we lost $40, and the police at least made a huge effort at chasing the guys, helicopters, scenter dogs, the whole magilla. No matter the investigators never seemed to follow up.

But last week, something really eerie happened, although it involved no violence. The kind of thing that makes you seriously think you can't be safe in your own home. I happened to wake up extremely early, and went downstairs to read. Putting down the shades on a downstairs window, I thought I saw a shadow moving on top of our back gate. Is it a cat, I wondered? A raccoon? The shadow seemed too big for the squirrels which claim our back deck as their own real estate. Then the motion detector lights on our garage flicked on, and I was shocked to see a blond haired man atop our back gate, trying to jump into our tiny back deck. (In case you are ever in a similar situation, you should do a better job than I memorizing what the person looks like.) I was fairly shocked. It was 430am in the morning. All of our neighbors leave their back gates unlocked and it was fairly inconceivable to me what this person could want in our particular unremarkable back deck. Lawn furniture?

I called for my husband while rapping on the window so hard, I saw later that I had shattered the glass. Hearing me, the guy backed out into the dark of the alley. I called 911 and the police came fairly quickly. We made coffee and they asked us if we had an alarm (we do). They told us they have a lot of peeping toms in this neighborhood, and also people trying to steal petty stuff from the garage like bicycles. FYI, I bought my bike at a garage sale up the street for approximately $70 and it would hardly be worth breaking and entering someone's garage to get.

You cannot stay in the room where I was before and not look at the closed window shade and not wonder what is out there.

Yesterday came news DC has the highest homicide rate in the country, per capita. Speculation that a rise in gang violence has fueled it. But there is something else creepy about DC. No crime ever seems to be solved. From the murder of Chandra Levy to the daily muggings and robbery every one we know has experienced. The police I have talked to at crime scenes after the fact have been wonderful, dedicated, they came fast, they ask lots of questions, they knock themselves out trying to find the perpetrator at the scene. But there is absolutely no follow up by investigators afterwards. Essentially there is no accountability. Get an alarm, cancel your credit cards, take a cab at night, etc.

Would we have been safer having a gun? I don't think so. In the mugging, we simply wouldn't have had enough time to do anything with it. In the more recent incident, I don't think I could shoot someone for the crime of trying to jump into our back yard, although I am very curious what his motives were.

So we've kind of barricaded ourselves in the house, turning on the alarm at night, which of course, if you have an alarm, you know, you end up setting off all the time simply forgetting you have it.

I love living in DC and urban life and walking everywhere and our friends and going to Congressional hearings and think tank meetings, but a few more of these incidents and one would seriously have to consider moving.

Follow up: A friend sends this chart comparing statistics of crime in New York versus in Washington, D.C. Fairly shocking. New York City, with 12 times the population of DC, has almost 2/3 the number of violent crimes per 100,000 citizens, and half the number of property crimes than DC. Why is that?

Follow Up II: Here's a case of someone who know how to do what we did not. Still, it was a different case. He pulled a gun on her, she pulled out her own gun, he missed, she did not.

Meta-journalist Ted Gup has an interesting critique of the CIA's corporate business model in Slate:

"The real danger of a CIA that surrenders itself to a business model is that it may come to believe, as many fear it already has, that the customer is always right," Gup writes. "In the intelligence business, that is the one sure way to bankruptcy."

In Baghdad, mortar rounds were fired into the compound that houses the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Fareed Zakaria opines against the push for Iraqification as a plausible US force reduction strategy, but offers no alternative other than the long hard slog Rumsfeld anticipates. Having lived in two NATO-occupied entities, where there was minimal aggression by the local population demonstrated against western forces, I just don't see how the US can win in Iraq using the current model. It will always be easier for would-be terrorists to foment chaos and violence than it will be for US troops to foment stability and security. Maybe the best solution is Nato-ization of the Iraq mission, something General Wesley Clark would be uniquely qualified to oversee...Then again, there's no need to wait for the 2004 elections to try to Nato-ize Iraq. After all, the US has already turned to NATO to take over the Afghan mission.

Word from the 9-11 Commission is to expect "the other shoe to drop" this week regarding the Defense Department's recent insistence that it has fully cooperated in turning over requested documents and transcripts to 9-11 investigators. Good to see the commission taking a more aggressive stance.

[And updated word from the 9-11 commission Thursday night: expect the shoe to drop after the commissioners meet on Friday 11/7. Kean and Hamilton will be giving the others full updates on what documents are yet to come from the White House, Pentagon, FAA, etc. Already, they've gotten more than 2 million documents.]

Littlest Immigrants: If this story, and the accompanying picture of a teeny crying Mexican girl being apprehended by US border patrol on the Mexican border, doesn't break your heart, then not sure what will. Post 9/11 increased border controls have disrupted the ability of migrant parents to move back and forth over the border. They're resorting to smugglers to bring their kids across. Of course the numbers are relatively small -- 1300 children under 13 apprehended in 2002, 1500 in 2003, but still.

Most Americans including myself may be under the impression that Mexico and Latin America are gradually being pulled into relative American prosperity through increased trade, NAFTA, etc. But the word from a recent Center for American Progress conference in Washington last week is that it is a totally false impression. Mexican market reforms are failing. The poor in Latin America are getting poorer. And one speaker suggested Latin America may explode with terrorism, poverty, and drug-fueled violence.

The Sunday Papers: Wishful Thinking

--Vanity Fair editor Sam Tanenhaus suggests the intellectual inspiration for the Bush hawks may not be Leo Strauss, or Albert Wohlstetter, but Kremlinologist Richard Pipes.

--The Washington Post's David Broder says Harvard historian and intelligence expert Ernie May has likened the Bush Administration's refusal to tell Americans the truth about the difficulties of the US mission in Iraq to Vietnam:

"Speaking on the morning after Bush's news conference defense of his policy in Iraq and the progress he claimed for that country, and on a day when the headlines told of fresh violence and additional casualties in Iraq, May did not mince words. The gap between official assessments of the situation and reports from the ground is 'eerily reminiscent' of the Vietnam era. We know that the 'credibility gap' in Vietnam was real, May said; what we don't know at this moment is whether the 'crumbling' in Iraq is as pervasive as it proved to be in Vietnam.

"The mere fact that a student of national security as dispassionate, nonhysterical and informed as Ernie May would not reject the Vietnam comparison out of hand speaks volumes. It adds to the impression left by Bush's news conference that we have entered a new and politically risky stage of the Iraq conflict.

Broder is right. I got to observe May when I was his student a few years ago and there is no one more measured, more unhysterical, more penetrating and questioning of easy intellectual assumptions than he. (Also, news today that Richard Neustadt, May's co-author on the book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers and a fellow Harvard historian, and advisor to Kennedy, and other presidents, has died).

--The Washington Post's David Ignatius tours Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz, and finds the author of the Iraq war is most of all an idealist, who feels an intense loyalty to the Iraqis who have committed themselves to bring justice to Iraq. Yet, Ignatius worries about Wolfowitz's tendency for wishful thinking:

"America's problems in Iraq stem in large part from wishful thinking, and Wolfowitz and his colleagues must be careful to avoid any more of it now as they try to craft a sustainable strategy. What worries me most after touring Iraq with Wolfowitz is how little the U.S. forces know about their adversaries here...Now that the going is difficult in Iraq, the Bush administration needs to think more with its head and less with its heart. The idealists can win this war, but only if they act with brutally honest pragmatism."

--In the Sunday New York Times magazine (which is getting more and more compelling the last few weeks!), humanitarian scholar David Rieff analyzes the enduring mystery of how an administration supposedly peopled by such competent, realpolitik statesmen, managed to so totally fail to adequately plan for the Iraq post-war. While many of the reasons Rieff uncovers have been discussed before -- the Pentaon shutting out State Department experts, the self-serving lies of Ahmed Chalabi and the ear he got at the Pentagon, the ad hoc intelligence channels created that bypassed the professionals, -- Rieff puts it all in one place here.

All in all, Rieff, Ernest May, David Ignatius, and others are all still struggling to understand the intellectual roots of the mess we find ourselves in in Iraq.