Tom Ridge resigns, [via Hecate@Atrios]. Here's the Post's take on possible replacements: Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the NSC's Frances Townsend, and former Virginia governor James Gilmore.

The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman has a phenomenal story about the Massachusetts front company that owns the Gulfstream being used by the Pentagon or CIA (it's not clear which) to "render" terror suspects to countries where they are tortured for information:

The identities of the company's owners are obscure at best.

The most recent records at the Massachusetts secretary of state's office list Bryan P. Dyess as the president and member manager and Mary Anne Phister as treasurer. No Massachusetts address could be found for Phister. The only Bryan P. Dyess that a Globe reporter could locate receives his mail at a post office box in Arlington, Va., on North George Mason Drive, 7 miles from the Pentagon.

Records with the Federal Aviation Administration list the current vice president as Colleen A. Bornt, whose only address appears to be a post office box in Chevy Chase, Md. Records indicate that both Dyess, 48, and Bornt, 54, received their Social Security numbers in the mid-1990s.

People who receive Social Security numbers late in adulthood are either recent immigrants or people given a new identity, said Beatrice Gaines, a spokeswoman for the Social Security Administration ...

In May, Newsweek reported that an undisclosed US agency set up a "covert charter airline" to move CIA prisoners because "it was judged impolitic [and too traceable] to use the US Air Force." Seymour Hersh's new book, "Chain of Command," suggests that a secret group inside the Department of Defense conducts the renditions. A CIA spokesman declined comment for this article.

And on the subject of the US government's forays into torture, there's this:

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

The Jesse Helms Republicans are back, and gleefully rubbing their hands over the prospects of cutting US funding of the UN.

Has the threat from al Qaeda been hugely overblown? So argues German journalist Dirk Laabs in this LA Times oped:

The German federal police, the BKA, was once famous for its relentless, coolly efficient pursuit of terrorists. Hundreds of BKA agents eliminated the first three generations of the Red Army Faction, a terror organization that killed scores of politicians and civilians in the 1970s and 1980s. Then the hunt was on for the fourth generation. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested; again, legions of agents were dispatched.

But finally, in 1997, BKA experts admitted there may never have been a fourth-generation Red Army Faction. The experts had been hunting a phantom. Lone-wolf terrorists or isolated veterans had committed the few, random attacks that occurred.

It was a striking example of how a police force — and a whole nation — fell for propaganda from the terrorists, which was pumped up by almost obsessive media hype. Looking at the current reporting on Al Qaeda, the question is: Is history repeating itself?

This month, at the BKA's annual conference, Germany's top investigators and international experts discussed what they had discovered since Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda and the international Islamist terror network. The main thing they have learned is that there is less than meets the eye.

Yes, Al Qaeda was once centralized, structured and powerful, but that was before the U.S. pulverized its camps and leadership in Afghanistan.

In other words, this battle in the war on terror might already be over. It's as an ex-CIA agent once said: "I quit the agency at the end of the Cold War because I was tired of politicians making me describe the Soviet Union as a 20-foot giant — when it was really only a dwarf." ...

All too often, investigators have fallen for myths — many times fed by the terrorists themselves. The BKA has constructed profiles of 60 radical Islamists. "There was no pattern, no model … every activist had individual motives to become radical," a German investigator said.

But being less structured doesn't mean the terrorists are less dangerous or easier to stop. Quite the contrary. The smaller the fish, the tighter the net needed to catch it. "We take every case seriously now precisely because there is no pattern," one German investigator said.

Investigators admit that 3 1/2 years after 9/11, they know next to nothing about the motives of Islamic terrorists. Knowing so little means they have few means to predict — or prevent — future acts.

Update: Eric Umansky has more on a forthcoming book by the LA Times' Terry McDermott that seems to reach a similar conclusion.

Matt Yglesias reviews Ken Pollack's Persian Puzzle here and debates Christian Lowe's contention in the Weekly Standard that Iran getting nuclear weapons would be "intolerable" for Washington. Matt says it would be more like "undesirable." I think this gets exactly at the real divide between the US and Europe on Iran's nuclear program: Iran getting nuclear weapons is highly undesirable, but ultimately tolerable to the European troika negotiating with Tehran (or rather, what is intolerable to them is the action that would be required to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons if diplomacy fails); while Iran getting nuclear weapons is ultimately intolerable to Washington. More from Zakaria: "If coercion means American military strikes, it is an utterly counterproductive idea. Such a move would do limited damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, rally the country round the regime, isolate the United States further in the world and probably prompt the Iranians to retaliate by sponsoring terror attacks against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Update: Reader SC writes:

Just reading that Zakaria article on your site. He's right, of course, which is pretty scary.
More scary because of the stories of the Mullahs consolidating, rather than conceding, power.
I was kind of banking on the students revolts. Silly me.
I read the Farouz Farzami piece in the Times over the weekend too - it's very sad.

Khamenei's consolidation of power, partly through a new parliament that took office in May, has given even more leverage to religious institutions, including the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards and vigilante groups such as Ansar Hezbollah, analysts said.

As a result, fear, intimidation and harassment have become instruments of the state in ways reminiscent of the early fervor following the 1979 revolution, Iranians complain. Women can still get away with relaxed dress, but the debates over political openings and reforming Islam have gone behind closed doors, or ended.

Conservatives say they are merely putting the Islamic republic back on course and restoring limits on discourse while not undoing social change...

Beyond Khamenei, Iran's future is still far from settled. The big question in Tehran these days is about which conservatives will dominate. Their camp now offers at least four distinct philosophies about running the country and dealing with the outside world.

More: Interesting letter to the NYT today.

The WaPo's Charles Lane on the Valerie Plame leak case -- did Novak take the fifth?:

But Novak is not before the court, and a key question in the case is why he is not, because he presumably knows the identities of the original leakers.

Neither he nor Fitzgerald has been willing to say whether Novak has even been subpoenaed or, if so, whether he has cooperated.

One intriguing possibility, noted by several lawyers familiar with the case, is that Novak may have invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and that Fitzgerald has not yet chosen to give him immunity from prosecution to compel his testimony.

Both Fitzgerald and James Hamilton, Novak's attorney, declined to comment for this article. Hamilton said Novak "will not comment."

Via Atrios, Edward Luttwak argues in the NY Times today that, based on recent US history, and contrary to many expectations, a second term Bush national security policy will be more moderate than the last:

...While re-elected presidents who no longer have to face the voters are theoretically free to pursue their wildest dreams, in practice they never do. Consider the last two second-term presidents.

For the second Reagan administration, dovish pundits predicted an even tougher stance against the Soviet "evil empire," as well as a further acceleration of the arms race, led by the so-called Star Wars system against ballistic missiles. After all, in Reagan I, all the ceremonies of détente had been stopped, and a huge budget deficit had been accepted to build up the armed forces as quickly as possible. Some feared that Reagan II might escalate confrontation to outright war.

For Clinton II, the Cassandras warned of an even more passive foreign policy than Clinton I, during which the administration had refused to interrupt the Rwanda genocide, delayed intervention in Bosnia, and left Middle East diplomacy to the most tentative secretary of state anyone can remember, Warren Christopher. The president had shown enthusiasm for every aspect of domestic policy and an indifference to foreign affairs that not even live television coverage of preventable massacres could overcome.

Curiously enough, however, re-elected presidents tend to disappoint their most enthusiastic followers by changing direction: they go right if they started on the left (or vice versa); become active where they were passive; turn dovish if they were hawkish; and in all cases converge toward the center of gravity of American politics, as well as toward the mainstream foreign-policy traditions . . .

Why these reversions to the moderate mainstream? It is not a desire on the part of the president to be more widely loved, or to court the approval of future historians. Such things may have an influence on the margins, but they are overemphasized. Rather, the essential mechanism is simply entropy - the powerful tendency of any dynamic system to revert to equilibrium after being unbalanced. This applies no less to politics than it does to a glass of water.

Update: Henry Nau has more on tribal warfare within the conservative camp. Highly recommended.

Italy's La Repubblica has an important piece out today that advances a story my colleagues and I published in the Washington Monthly a couple months ago. Unfortunately it is not available online without a subscription and I am still getting it translated. But the gist of it is that the authors, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe d'Avanzo, confirm the role of Sismi (the Italian military intelligence service) in the secret Rome meeting between Pentagon officials from the office of Doug Feith, Iranians, and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar -- a fact that we were the first to report. The authors also scored an interview with Nicolo Pollari, the head of Sismi, who shared his view on the purpose of the meetings, why Sismi was involved (indeed, Pollari told them that the meeting took place at a Sismi safe house in Rome's Piazza di Spagna), and other interesting details. Pollari also claims that Ghorbanifar was not there -- (which is false; Ghorbanifar's presence at the meeting is a fact that no one at the Pentagon disputes. What Feith's office in fact says is that the Pentagon officials who attended the meeting did not know in advance that Ghorbanifar was going to be there and were surprised by his presence).

Update: Here's some of the interview with Pollari, with immense thanks to David L. and Piero for the translation:

Pollari: "It's true, we organized the meeting in Rome with the Iranians, but Ghorbanifar wasn't there. We didn't know these Iranians. One of them even asked us how to write his name. Anyway, the meeting. This is how it went. A minister calls me up. Who? No names. He tells me that the Pentagon wants to organize a meeting with some Iranians. They've got some information about matters concerning our national security. So I get to work. I keep an eye on things through two of my men. But all they talk about is tripe. But above all, oil contracts. ENI [Italian State Petroleum]. Concessions for new exploitation. Lines of credit for tens of millions of dollars ... As if the Sismi is some sort of hawkers' mart where
you buy and sell. I decide to alert the government. I spell out my misgivings about our institutional role ... I want to avoid any future misunderstandings..."

Via David Meyer, this excerpt of a recent FT piece on a second Bush term US policy to Iran is interesting:

Danielle Pletka, a senior Middle East analyst at the influential neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, this week sketched out what a second Bush administration's policy towards Iran might look like.

It did not go unnoticed among her audience of experts that she avoided the words "regime change". At odds with other neo-conservatives, who for years have described the Islamic regime as one ready to fall like a rotten fruit, Ms Pletka said a revolution was not on the cards.

Policy to date had been characterised by "frustrated concern and congressionally mandated sanctions", said Ms Pletka. She admitted this was not good enough: "Facing something with nothing is not an effective alternative in foreign policy."

The administration should not get dragged into bargaining with Iran over "incremental" steps, she said, as it had with North Korea. Instead it should consider a Libya-type offer of a "grand bargain".

In exchange for handing over all weapons of mass destruction and halting support for "terrorist" groups, the US should be prepared to renew diplomatic relations and remove unilateral sanctions. There would be no negotiations, she said.

As Iran is unlikely to take such a decision, what remained was a "twin-track" approach of tightened containment backed by preparations to use military force.

"We need to provide much more support for Iranian dissidents," Ms Pletka said. The Central Intelligence Agency should also develop "on the ground" capabilities.

The funding element is already set out in the draft Iran Freedom Support Act, which has been put forward in Congress. This would also punish foreign companies investing in Iran, but Ms

Pletka said this was no time for the US to get involved in a trade war with Europe.

Over the past month or so the "military option" for Iran has been the hottest topic of debate in Washington. Senior officials say military intervention is not being considered. However, it is an open secret that influential neo-conservatives at least hope Iraq will be sufficiently stable within a year to free up the US military for its next campaign.

Military strategies have been discussed among the community of think-tanks and armchair generals. But the options remain unattractive, partly because of Iran's ability to retaliate itself or through its allies, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah. Daniel Byman, a terrorism expert, said Iran had the capability to make Iraq "a living hell for the US".

Ms Pletka, however, said the limits of US military abilities had been exaggerated. "That's the end of the road," she said of the military option.

Via Kriston Capps, this is pretty terrifying. What happened to Yushchenko? Update: Yushchenko's top ally Yulia Timoshenko looks to be holding up better.

Hope everybody had a nice Thanksgiving.

Stay tuned: a colleague has a piece out tomorrow that significantly advances a story that has been a subject of reporting at this site. Will get it up as soon as I can.

In the meantime, here's some stuff I missed putting up last week. This piece on proposed US assistance to Iranian pro-democracy groups -- and recognition that some Iranian pro-democracy groups would rather pass. And Iranian journalist Farouz Farzami writes in the New York Times today asking, "How can such a small minority of vocal people - totally orchestrated worshipers and their security guards - set the agenda for a nation of 70 million people?" Update: Matt Yglesias highlights this interesting LA Times piece on the deficiencies of US Iran intelligence.

More: This effort by MEMRI to intimidate Juan Cole is wrong. For an organization that specializes in translating reports about hatred against Jews, Israelis and Americans, one would think MEMRI could be a little more discriminating in the fights it picks.

Sunday Night Update: This from the Forward about a DeLay-linked lobbyist is interesting.

Very interesting. This gives credence to at least one of the NCRI's most recent claims.

Exciting doings in Ukraine. Is the former East Bloc's post Soviet revolution over? It appears not. It seems to work better when we don't invade. Paging Timothy Garten Ash.

Caption: Supporters of Ukraine's opposition leader, Viktor A. Yushchenko, demonstrated today in front of parliament in Kiev.

Bush met with former Soviet dissident and Israeli hardliner Natan Sharansky a couple weeks back, when he was in town for, among things, promoting his new book, the WaPo's Dana Milbank reports:

Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister's plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza -- a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon's plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be "encouraging more terror." A figure who has previously railed against the "illusions of Oslo" and described that famous accord as "one-sided concessions," Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak's government over the Labor prime minister's plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.

In his book, Sharansky echoes many of Bush's favorite lines, talking of the need for "moral clarity" in fighting evil . . .

Just as Bush justifies the Iraq war by talking of it as a catalyst for democratization in the Middle East, Sharansky argues that while dictators keep power by spreading fear and hatred, democracies are inherently peaceful. "When a free people governs itself, the chances of a war being fought against other free peoples is removed almost entirely," he writes.

CBS's Dan Rather to retire.

European negotiators say they notice a softening of the US position on Iran, reports Reuters:

Diplomats said that recent comments by top U.S. officials indicated Washington might be exploring a potential shift in strategy regarding the Iranian nuclear program, which it believes is a front for developing bombs.

"I think there may be some movement in the U.S. toward a softer approach," a diplomat from the European Union told Reuters. "This change would not happen immediately, but there are hints that it is coming."

The likely change would be an attempt to play the "bad cop" role alongside the EU's "good cop" role as the Europeans pressure Tehran to abandon uranium enrichment permanently.

On Monday, Iran said it has kept a promise it made to the European Union last by freezing its entire uranium enrichment program and the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, gave a cautious confirmation.

President Bush reacted to the announcement with mild skepticism. "Let's say, I hope it's true," he said.

European diplomats also said they noticed that Bush acknowledged the possibility the EU initiative might work.

Too many US troops in Iraq? So say some influential pro-war hawks:

Indeed, Afghanistan, where the United States has one-tenth the troops it has in Iraq, was cited by several specialists as a model for the American presence in Iraq following the elections. The US troops are rarely seen by the wider Afghan population, operating primarily along the borders and flushing out remaining pockets of resistance.

"I think that many are now beginning to see that El Salvador and Afghanistan are better counterinsurgency and postconflict reconstruction models than the strategies we've pursued in Iraq," said [Michael] Vickers, the Pentagon consultant, who as a CIA agent helped oversee US support for Afghan rebels in their guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. "In counterinsurgency, an indirect approach is superior."

Update: I disagree with Matt here. I don't think the strategists above are advocating fewer US troops in Iraq out of a new conversion to dove-ishness, or alternatively, to free up US troops for more adventures (necessarily). I think it has to do with thinking about counterinsurgency strategy, and how a big foreign occupation army not planning to stay forever won't win against a domestic insurgency that only has not to lose. If there are less of you, and you try to hold less ground, the insurgents have less to poke at.

Ronnie Earle, the Travis County, Texas District Attorney, issues a "moral indictment" of Tom DeLay, in the New York Times:

The open contempt for moral values by our elected officials has a corrosive effect. It is a sad day for law enforcement when Congress offers such poor leadership on moral values and ethical behavior. We are a moral people, and the first lesson of democracy is not to hold the public in contempt.

What the Iran deal to suspend uranium enrichment says about US-European relations.

Here's the WSJ's take:

This, then, is what the latest Iranian-European deal is about. It is not mainly intended to stop Iran from getting a bomb. Mainly, it is intended to stop the U.S. from stopping Iran.

And here's the AP's account of the view from Europe:

Analysts said the Americans would have to settle for less than referral.

"This will virtually undermine U.S. efforts to move the Iran nuclear file from the IAEA board to the Security Council," said Shannon Kile, who follows nuclear issues for Sweden's Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

"The multiethnic Mosul, once considered a model city, is fast becoming Sarajevo," writes Spencer Ackerman at Iraq'd. And what we really have to worry about is ethnic violence in Kirkuk:

That won't be anything compared to Kirkuk. As George Packer recently wrote, given the fervent and competing claims on Kirkuk, that city could truly be where the first shots of the Iraqi civil war are fired. (Though it could be contended that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war now, I'd argue that what's been happening over the last several months has put Iraq more into the category of failed state--where the government exists largely on paper and various factions have consolidated control over competing centers of power--while the Hobbesian civil war is just over the horizon.) According to today's edition of the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Azzaman, the battle lines are getting drawn in Kirkuk as we speak.

NBC correspondent Kevin Sites' letter on what he witnessed in the Falluja mosque.

Now the INC is saying that it was Iraqi Interior Ministry police backed by American contractors who roughed up guards in raids on INC offices last week. But those Interior Ministry police were trained by the CIA, says the NY Sun.

Powell pushed?

What Bush and Rice are reading.

The Executioner's Yes Man:

Bush approved 152 executions during his six years as governor. For each of the first 57, he made his judgment based on a three- to seven-page "execution summary" prepared by Gonzales and on an oral briefing that typically lasted no more than 30 minutes that the chief counsel usually presented on the day of the execution. In nearly all these cases, Gonzales was the only person standing between the executioner and a governor who made it abundantly clear he had little or no interest in granting clemency.

I assume the good folks like David Brooks who have been championing Goss's imposing of White House martial law at the CIA will call for Rumsfeld and his Republican House supporters to be disciplined for publicly opposing intelligence reform the president supported:

Ms. Harman, who had helped fashion the compromise bill, said Mr. Rumsfeld had made it "absolutely clear" in congressional testimony that he opposed the changes, adding, that he "was resisting it, in public."

She said it was "unfortunate that the president, as commander-in-chief, couldn't get the secretary of defense to stop his opposition, which has been ongoing for months and which emboldened some of these House folks to dig in."

Highly recommended Mark Danner opinion piece in the New York Times eulogizing the Powell doctrine.

Writing in the LA Times, intelligence historian David Vise calls Porter Goss's memo to CIA employees last week "astounding" in its open ordering of agency staff to provide the intelligence the President wants to hear:

This marks the first time — as far as the public knows at least — that a CIA director, in writing, has ordered the agency's spies and analysts to back the president. Why does it matter? Because a president, in theory, relies on the CIA to present facts neutrally, honestly and objectively so that he can base his policies on accurate information. The CIA's analysts are not supposed to be cheerleaders.

Yet the Goss memo, leaked to the New York Times last week, tells the CIA's employees that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work," adding: "As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

Iranian students urge boycott of May presidential elections, the WaPo's Robin Wright reports. And on the topic of Iran, a Knight Ridder story of four Iranian brothers who attended an MEK rally in Denver imprisoned in the US against US court orders. The Department of Homeland Security wants to deport the Mirmehdi brothers to Iran.

The CIA has raided four offices of the Iraqi National Congress, the INC spokesman reports in a press release:

The Iraqi National Congress today announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency led raids on four INC facilities recently. Three INC offices in Baghdad were attacked on Thursday and the INC office in Najaf was attacked last week by heavily armed US civilians accompanied by masked Iraqis. The offices were vandalized, a number of staff were assaulted, and equipment and documents were stolen. Staff members who requested to see search warrants were beaten and abused and no warrants were produced.

CIA operatives in Iraq are out of control and are operating outside the bounds of American and Iraqi law. The CIA is failing in its duty to protect US forces and the Iraqi people from terrorists and is attacking groups and individuals who point out its failures.

The INC will take action in the Iraqi legal system to force the CIA and its Iraqi agents to act within the law. The INC appeals to the US government to stop the
CIA from engaging in political vendettas and rededicate itself to fighting America's true enemies.

Just heard that the CIA is recommending that the Justice Department investigate who told the WaPo's Dafna Linzer about concerns surrounding Powell's recent comments on Iran's nuclear program. This seems an effort at intimidation -- against sources and journalists. Surely what's more worth investigating is if what Powell said is true.

Fascinating speculation on who will get deputy secretary of state, from the esteemable Chris Nelson, of The Nelson Report:

Bush names...latest “leading candidate” for Deputy Secretary of State...the staff director of the 9/11 Commission, Phil Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor, and a “good friend” of Secretary-designate Condi Rice. Zelikow thus moves ahead of earlier “favorites” like former Undersecretaries Arnie Kanter, Bob Kimmit...although sources warn not to count anyone out, or in, at this point...

AEI's Tom Donnelly offers his view of what the recent Bush cabinet appointments mean:

The dog that hasn't barked in this transition--and by all "rumint" isn't going to bark any time soon--is the ousting of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Given that the Pentagon's management of the Iraq war was President Bush's greatest campaign liability, there's at least a paradox in Rumsfeld's retention.

On the other hand, the Pentagon's sins have been of omission and misjudgment, not of commission and obstructionism, as at State and the CIA. Moreover, the war in Iraq is perhaps at a decisive crossroads--if the campaign in the Sunni heartland continues after a successful start in Falluja, and elections happen more or less on schedule in January. It's a moment for continuity and certainty of command. Finally, Rumsfeld's greatest shortcoming--his failure to fully and rapidly adapt his program of transformation to post-September 11, post-Iraq realities--can only be fixed by the White House in the form of an expansion of U.S. ground forces and increasing the baseline defense budget. It's above the secretary's pay grade.

In sum, although Rumsfeld has been part of the problem, he can still be part of the solution in ways that Powell could not. If the Pentagon has been slow to reshape itself to new missions in the Middle East, it's in part because it's got a lot of other worries: like rogue nuclear states and China. Besides, it's a Washington tradition to reward failures with a larger budget.

And sticking with the Pentagon for the moment, a reader who was able to see undersecretary of defense for policy Doug Feith speak this week offered highlights from Feith's remarks:

[...]
Q: Neocon influence on the rise for second term?
A: Neocon used to mean someone who believed (1) peace thru strength and (2) ideas matter; now is just used to mean "hawk, or Jew". [Said just like that.]

Q: Israel/Palestine two-state question.
A: Main problem in that conflict is the disastrous Palestinian leadership over the last 80 years. If the Palestinians can pick leaders now who are "untainted by terror" and not corrupt, then prospects for a solution are quite bright. Israel will engage with the right Palestinian leadership.

On topic of goals...3 overarching goals for war on terror:

(1) Homeland protection
(2) Attack & disrupt terrorist organizations
(3) Counter the ideological support for terrorism

If all we do is (2), we're on a treadmill that will only accelerate from here. More terrorists will get created, etc. So ideological component of the war is the essence.

"We need to change the way millions of people think" about the acceptability of terror. "There have been examples in history" of successfully changing the way millions of people think, specifically fascism, communism, and his favorite analogy (which he returned to later), the 19th century British war on the slave trade, which took 50+ years.

The goal is to get people thinking that terrorism is unacceptable, much the same way that slavery, piracy, and genocide are unacceptable.

He really does want to eliminate the whole idea of targeting civilians with violence for political purposes, like the idea of slavery and the slave trade were eliminated by the British in the 19th century.

[I found this the most interesting part. People are wrong to think that when neocons say "war on terror" they are mistaking a tactic for an enemy or that they are simplifying the war on radical Islam for mass consumption. He really does mean "war on terror" in the sense of "war on terror as an idea that anyone sensible in any society will accept". He was very clear about that.]

[Left unaddressed was the possibility that US invasion of Iraq has been a huge setback in his pursuit of this goal.]

Q: Iraq
A: Goal is for Iraqis to run their own country. Most important part of this is building Iraqi security capability. Security and intimidation are a huge problem, which he attributes primarily to Iraqi peoples' fear that the Baathist regime will return. Our major problem in the country is fear of the Baathists.

Insurgency -- we're making progress -- Najaf, Samarra, and now hopefully Falluja are largely under the control of the Iraqi government.

Key is still political progress... Iraq "moving toward elections"; "we hope" there will be elections in January.

...

Q: Abu Ghraib
A: Dreadful; hurt us with many people; will hurt us for a long time. Terrorists clearly exploiting it.

Q: Geneva Convention applied to prisoners in war on terror and in Iraq.
A: "Glad you asked that question", have worked on the issue for a long time. [Check this out:] "I'm a very strong supporter" of the Geneva Convention. But -- it is in accordance with the GC that the US is not extending POW status to all detainees. GC has incentive system built in where POW status is only given to combatants who behave the right way in war -- wear uniform, display weapons openly; obey laws of war -- incentive system is there to protect the interests of
noncombatants. It's against the GC to grant POW status to detainees who disobey those rules, and doing so would weaken the incentive system and hence be against the interest of noncombatants.

Q: Iraq/WMD.
A: "Strategic rationale" for invading Iraq still correct despite lack of WMD.

Q: Iran strategy
A: Wouldn't say much. Did say that in Iran, the population is discontented with the "oppressive and corrupt" clerical leadership, and implied that would be the leverage point somehow.

Said that military action "not a sensible option" for Syria, Iran, or North Korea.

Famous in Belgrade, along with Phil Carter and the Project for the New American Century. Update: Reader HE captured perfectly the spirit in which this comment was made:

It reminds me of a quote from the movie To Be or Not To Be, which was a classic WWII-era comedy that was remade by Mel Brooks in the early '80s. Brooks plays a Polish actor whose theater company has to cope with the German invasion. When someone claims never to have heard of Brooks' character, his character's wife says, "You haven't? But he's world famous in Poland!"

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shared information with reporters Wednesday about Iran's nuclear program that was classified and based on an unvetted, single source who provided information that two U.S. officials said yesterday was highly significant if true but has not yet been verified . . .

The information provided by the source, who was not previously known to U.S. intelligence, does not mention uranium or any other area of Iran's known nuclear program, according to the official with access to the material. It focuses instead on a warhead design and modifications to Iran's long-range Shahab-3 missile and a medium-range missile in its arsenal. The Shahab-3 has a range of 800 miles and is capable of hitting Israel.

The official said the CIA remains unsure about the authenticity of the documents and how the informant came into their possession. A second official would say only that there are questions about the source of the information.

Officials interviewed by The Washington Post did not know the identity of the source or whether the individual is connected to an Iranian exile group that made fresh accusations about Iran at a news conference Wednesday in Paris . . .

The lack of certainty about the source who approached U.S. intelligence had kept officials from talking publicly about the information, and Powell's comments caught the small group of informed officials by surprise and angered some of them.

Via a great friend of War and Piece who wishes to remain anonymous, here's Goss's letter to the captured enemy troops at Langley:

The following is the text of the DCI’s Statement to the Workforce dated 15 November 2004:

Not long after Director Tenet’s unexpected retirement, President Bush asked me to be the DCI and to take on the challenges identified in the various reviews of 9/11, in the reports about WMD, and in the global wear against terrorism. The President’s direction was very clear - the Intelligence Community must do all it can to keep Americans safe both here and abroad, and to accomplish that mission, the fifteen components of the Community must work more closely as a team.

As the flagship component, CIA has the vital role and the DCI has the direct responsibility and accountability to the President. I, and the DDCI on my behalf, perform that mission with your tremendous help.

CIA is, of course, a part of the Executive Branch primarily as a capabilities component. We do not make policy, though we do inform those who make it. We avoid political involvement especially political partisanship.

We are a secret Agency. Of necessity, we must assiduously follow the law to honor the trust placed upon us. We have rules to govern our conduct of business and rules designed to facilitate our mission’s success and to build public confidence.

Since 9/11 everything has changed. The IC and its people have been relentlessly scrutinized and criticized. Intelligence related issues have become the fodder of partisan food fights and turf-power skirmishes. All the while, the demand for our services and products against a ruthless and unconventional enemy has expanded geometrically and we are expected to deliver - instantly. We have reason to be proud of our achievements and we need to be smarter about how we do our work in this “operational climate.”

I want everyone in our workforce to know - I seek to encourage and expect the best from everyone in CIA. Our country demands it, our President needs it, and this institution deserves it. I also intend to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road. We support the Administration and its policies in our work. As Agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the Administration or its policies. We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.

To do so we have a strong organizational framework to support the President and the nation. These roles and responsibilities are well established and I intend to follow them.

- DDCI: The DDCI is my critical partner in the leadership of the CIA and the Intelligence Community. We have been extraordinarily well served by our retiring friend and colleague John McLaughlin. We will all miss his steady thoughtful hand, his wonderful clarity, and his special magic. I wish you all to know that I am working to identify a candidate as my new deputy and take that to the President for his consideration.

- EXDIR: The Executive Director is the chief operating official for the CIA. I have entrusted him with the leadership of our critical functions, and the requirement that Mission comes first.

- The Deputy Directors for Intelligence, Operations, Science & Technology and the MSO Chiefs are the principal leaders of their disciplines, and are fully charged by me to lead their organizations, consistent with my vision and direction.

- Chief of Staff/DCI: The Chief of Staff organizes and manages the duties and priorities of my staff.

- The Directors of OPA, OCA, and OGC lead our Agency with contacts outside of the Agency. These disciplines allow us, as Agency officers to scrupulously honor our secrecy oath. A simple rule of thumb should always apply - all Agency business with the media or Congress should be conducted solely through these elements to ensure that we protect against the release of unauthorized documents, sources or methods. We remain a secret organization.

Through this clear chain of command we are all charged with not only our mission, but also the leadership of our officers with integrity, intelligence, and an unfailing commitment to the work the President has asked of us.

In the days and weeks ahead of us, I will announce a series of changes - some involving procedures, organization, senior personnel, and areas of focus for our action. I am committed to sharing these changes with you as they occur. I do understand it is easy to be distracted by both the nature and pace of change. I am confident, however, that you will remain deeply committed to our mission. The American people, and the President on their behalf, expect nothing less.

Elliot Abrams to be US ambassador to Israel? So Ha'aretz hears. [thx to reader JH.]

Next up on Porter Goss's CIA chopping block? The head of the directorate of intelligence [DI], Jami Miscik, the LA Times' Greg Miller reports:

"They haven't gotten to the D.I. yet, but when they do, there will be more people screaming bloody murder," the official said, referring to the outcry this week in Washington over the resignations of the two top officials in the CIA's clandestine service. "There's going to be a new deputy director for intelligence, and there's going to be many senior-level positions that are going to be reassigned."

The lobbyists who own DeLay.

Fred Kaplan makes a key point here:

President Bush's second-term Cabinet is shaping up to be not a collection of separate agencies but a political arm of the Oval Office . . . This is a legitimate, if narrowly confining, style of leadership. But the CIA is different: Its success depends above all on whether its director can provide the president with disinterested analysis. So far, Porter Goss does not seem to be such a director.

For what it's worth, I hear Arnold Kanter is also being considered for Deputy Secretary of State.

Why is the Bush administration so soft on Pakistan and AQ Khan given this?

Iran obtained weapons-grade uranium and a nuclear bomb design from a Pakistani scientist who has admitted to selling nuclear secrets abroad, an exiled Iranian opposition group said on Wednesday.

The group, which has given accurate information before, also said Iran is secretly enriching uranium at a military site previously unknown to the United Nations (news - web sites), despite promising France, Britain and Germany that it would halt all such work.

"(Abdul Qadeer) Khan gave Iran a quantity of HEU (highly enriched uranium) in 2001, so they already have some," Farid Soleiman, a senior spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told reporters.

"I would doubt it was given enough for a weapon," he added.

Soleiman said Khan, who ran a global nuclear black market until it was shut down earlier this year, also gave Iran a Chinese-developed warhead design sometime between 1994 and 1996.

Jacob Heilbrunn gets this point exactly right, and proves those in the realist camp wrong:

There is only one problem with the critics' scenario: The opposite of what they predicted is actually occurring. Bush hasn't retreated an inch rhetorically and is stepping up the battle in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney is ensuring that the neocons are being promoted everywhere in the administration.

So how come Halliburton gets to do business in Iran, while the Iranian 2003 Nobel Peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, cannot publish her memoirs in the United States? University of Virginia's Farzaneh Milani explores the absurdity in this CS Monitor piece.

Meantime, Ken Pollack has an opinion piece in the LA Times, arguing that the US should not outsource to the European troika negotiations on the fate of Iran's nuclear program:

What we need in Iran is something closer to what we had in Iraq: a much larger inspection regime that has a considerable presence on a regular basis. None of this is going to be easy. The Europeans have steadfastly refused to countenance even the threat of sanctions against Iran, despite the fact that their nothing-but-carrots approach has so consistently failed, while the mere whiff of multilateral sanctions has often caused Iran to reverse course immediately. Similarly, we should expect that the Iranians will fight any expansion of the IAEA inspection program. But none of this is impossible either. It ought to be the first challenge taken up by Condoleezza Rice's State Department.

Pentagon cheers CIA shakeup, the Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough reports:

Defense officials said that while Mr. Rumsfeld and former CIA director George J. Tenet maintained a good working relationship, contacts between Pentagon policy-makers and CIA rank-and-file analysts were often testy.

They say analysts expressed opposition to going to war with Iraq and filed overly pessimistic reports that seemed to always leak to the liberal press.

One senior official told The Washington Times last year of an Iraq station chief's dire predictions on Iraq. The station chief's report leaked to the press within days of its arrival in Washington. What seemed odd to this Pentagon official was that the dispatch contained a long list of "CCs" all the way down to Navy battle group commanders at sea, meaning tens of thousands saw the report.

"This report was designed to leak," the official charged.

RIP, Margaret Hassan.

"Group Says Iran Has Secret Nuclear Program," the NYT reports:

An Iranian opposition group says it has new evidence that Iran is producing enriched uranium at a covert Defense Ministry facility in Tehran that has not been disclosed to United Nations inspectors.

The group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, is planning to announce its finding in Paris on Wednesday. The group says that inspection of the site would demonstrate that Iran is secretly trying to produce nuclear weapons even while promising to freeze a critical part of its declared nuclear program, which it maintains is intended purely for civilian purposes.

A senior official of the group, Muhammad Mohaddessin, said in a telephone interview late on Tuesday that the group had shared the new information "very recently'' with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But he and other officials of the group said it had not discussed the matter with the United States government, and its claims could not be verified.

Iran's mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment on the assertion.

The group, based in Paris, is the political arm of the People's Mujahedeen, which is listed by the United States government as a terrorist organization because of its involvement in attacks on Americans in the 1970's. But the group also has a successful track record in gathering intelligence on Iran, and was the first, in 2002, to disclose the existence of what was then the secret Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

United Nations inspectors "should not be fooled or deceived by the Iranian regime,'' Mr. Mohaddessin said.

A spokesman in Washington for the National Council for Resistance in Iran provided a seven-page summary of the assertion to The New York Times.

It says that the previously undisclosed site, in northeastern Tehran, covers 60 acres and houses biological and chemical warfare projects as well as nuclear activity. It says that the site, known as the Modern Defensive Readiness and Technology Center, now houses operations previously carried out at another Defense Ministry site in Tehran that was destroyed by the Iranian government this year before international inspectors could visit it.

This is all so familiar, isn't it? But where the INC was lying, the NCRI [the political arm of the People's Mujaheden/Mujahedeen-e-Khalq/MEK] could be telling the truth -- or not. More background here and here.

Update: Kevin Drum echoes the sense that this seems like Groundhog Day. But the IAEA says the NCRI's Iran nuclear intel has been spot-on -- unlike the INC's garbage.

Check out Spencer Ackerman's in-depth piece on Porter Goss's purge at the CIA, in Salon.

Is it just me, or does this seem like an unproductive way to treat someone cooperating in the war on terror, or for that matter, recruit more informants? to refuse to give his passport back so that he can visit his dying wife in Yemen?

Lawrence Kaplan:

With Condoleezza Rice at the helm--and, in all likelihood, with Undersecretary of State John Bolton as her deputy--the State Department will now be run by a team known for its rigid loyalty to the president. They, more than any other administration officials, represent authentic expressions of Bush's foreign policy--more realistic than the Bush team's neoconservatives but far more aggressive than its self-described "realists." Rice, to be sure, is neither a great thinker nor a great manager. But she is a great lieutenant--that is, someone who can be relied on to convey and translate the president's inclinations into official policy. For his part, Bolton is all of these things, plus a fierce conservative. Between the two of them, they could well transform Foggy Bottom into something that looks more like the Pentagon--only competently run. Even if the State Department doesn't become the center of foreign policy deliberations, it certainly won't stymie them.

As for the National Security Council, the very fact that Rice's former deputy will be running day to day operations at the NSC ensures that cooperation between Foggy Bottom and the White House will improve. If Stephen Hadley, like Rice, is essentially a technocrat, he is a loyal technocrat, known for his lawyerly-like implementation of orders from above. Moreover, with staunch realist and Powell ally Robert Blackwill out of the way as Hadley's competitor--and co-deputy national security adviser--philosophical objections to the direction of U.S. policy that often made their way from Foggy Bottom to the White House should effectively be silenced.

Nor will the expected departure of Rumsfeld and his lieutenants at the Defense Department dilute the president's robust foreign policy preferences...In contrast to the president's first term, personnel won't be policy in his second.

David Rothkopf, via this Washington Post piece, identifies the real crux of the problem of design in Bush's national security team: Cheney and Rumsfeld operate to an extraordinary degree outside the bounds of the National Security Council, of inter-agency debate and collaboration at all, a set up the President has chosen and Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley have facilitated.

David Rothkopf, who has written a forthcoming history of the National Security Council titled "Running the World," said that much of the success of a national security adviser is defined not by the adviser but by the president. He said Rice "could not be more effective" as a top staffer to Bush because of the closeness she has had with him.

But Rice's management of the interagency process has been lagging, according to Rothkopf and former and current officials. In part, this is because Rice not only had to manage two powerful Cabinet members with sharply different views -- Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- but also to deal with a player distinctive to the Bush administration: Vice President Cheney, who weighs in on every major foreign policy question.

Rothkopf said Bush undercut Rice in her running of the interagency process because he has allowed Cheney and Rumsfeld to operate outside the control of the NSC. "The president has to put his foot down and say, 'This has to stop,' " Rothkopf said, but Bush never did.

Greg Djerejian asks, "The big question is, will [Rice] really go to bat on policy issues where Cheney and Rummy are aligning on another side of the issue? Or will they all be operating in lockstep, as this Glenn Kessler piece suggests?"

I don't think there is any question that Rice will not go to bat on policy issues where Cheney and Rummy are aligning on the other side. Rice has had the president's ear for four years of foreign policy disaster and reactiveness. She appears the consummate yes-person for her bosses. When has she ever shown an iota of independence?

I saw her speak at the US Institute of Peace a couple months ago, a few months after I saw Powell speak there. She's smart, she's hyper-competent, she's articulate. But there was no energy in the room, no sense of a compelling vision, no twinge of inspiration as you get from Powell even as you're disappointed in him. It was just trying to do damage control, similar to her appearance at the 9/11 commission.

Does it matter? After all, the State Department hardly seemed to win many of the key inter-agency debates the past four years. Unfortunately, I am afraid it does. As this points out, Powell did win some important behind the scenes battle, particularly in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. With the departure of a powerful, moderate voice of reason, and his replacement with the consummate practitioner of getting rolled over by hardline heavyweights, there is no powerful counter to the radical ideologues. Partly it's a matter that Rice has made it her job the past four years to subsume her views, so it's hard to know what she really thinks. But she seems uniquely adept at basically becoming the party line of who she's working for, in a way that has proved disastrous at the NSC the past four years.

Update: James Wolcott gets this just right:

Rice's face is the game face of the Bushies, bony with Unwavering Resolve, eyes fanatical, mouth tensed. She has shown herself to be not a listener but a dictation machine on playback. "The President believes..." "The President has always said..." "The President has very consistent in arguing that..." "The President has said all along..." And now the dictation machine is in a position to dictate to other nations how they can fight terror and help make America a bigger, better empire. It'll be the President wants this, the President wants that, the President is firm in his belief that...

But her incompetence precedes her, as does her presumptuous statement that for their failure to support the U.S. in Iraq, France should be punished, Germany ignored, and Russia forgiven. Punished, ignored, and forgiven for being right in the first place and refusing to take part in this debacle?--such nerve.

As America gets more militarized and messianic under Bush, it's being economically and diplomatically outmaneuvered by the rest of the world...

NBC: "U.S. military investigating killing of a wounded, apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner in a Fallujah mosque."

Second term national security team scorecard: Rice to State, Stephen Hadley to become national security advisor, Rumsfeld to stay put, Porter Goss to continue his massacre of some seemingly very qualified people at the CIA. Still in the gossip sphere: whether John Bolton will be promoted to become deputy secretary of state or deputy national security advisor, and whether Danielle Pletka will be appointed to head the Near East Bureau at State. Also unclear: whether Wolfowitz will be promoted or stay put at Defense, and whether Feith will stay. Interesting side note? one proposed candidate to head the CIA's clandestine service, Richard P. Lawless, a former business partner of Jeb Bush, is apparently also close with Richard Armitage, who is a major target of neocon animosity.

Update: Fred Kaplan's take. Reading it, it's even more clear that who has really won this appointment-shuffle? Dick Cheney.

Late Monday Update: Strobel & Landay: Powell was pushed out a bit earlier than he would have wished.

U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts said Monday that by agreeing to Powell's departure and approving a purge by new CIA chief Porter Goss, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the U.S. national security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control.

Powell and his State Department team - quietly backed by the intelligence community - argued often for a foreign policy that was more inclusive of allies and that relied on diplomacy and coercion rather than on force to deal with adversaries.

They lost more battles than they won.

Powell, who friends said had hoped to stay on a little longer, will be replaced at the State Department by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, said a senior administration official. Rice is far closer personally to Bush.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a major architect of the Iraq war along with Bush and Cheney, appears to be staying for now, signaling that the White House believes its much-criticized Iraq policies are on the right track.

"Letting him go would be an admission of failure," said one senior administration official who, like others, requested anonymity because of the White House's distaste for dissent.

Tuesday update: Pletka is not going into this administration, I am told very authoritatively. And Feith's days "are numbered."

If you were in any doubt, Rumsfeld is staying. "Haven't discussed it with the president" is a pretty sure sign that he's not planning to quit -- and has not been asked to go.

George Tenet's confidential, but not classified, book proposal, not kind to the NSC advisor, the NY Daily News reports. With the Saturday night massacre occurring now at the CIA, Tenet's book will be especially interesting.

Talk about leaks! [But not the kind opposed by administration hawks.] This is a superb piece on Iranian mucking around in Iraq. But at 10 pages long sourced at numerous points to US military intelligence documents, one wonders who finds it in their interest to leak such material? Subtle hint: those who want the US to get tough on Iran. One source is all but explicit: the MEK, which would like to rehabilitate its image in Washington and get off the State Department's designated terrorist group list, and which apparently has provided the US very useful intelligence on Iran's nuclear program. But that's not the only source. And it's interesting to me that Larry Franklin, for instance, was indeed running around this summer pushing some of this same information. For instance, the bit about the Iranians targeting Israelis alleged to be operating in northern Iraq, that Seymour Hersh originally reported. [Thx to reader JH.]

Powell is starting to tell people at State that he is resigning. Update: Now it's appearing as "breaking news" at CNN that "Powell has submitted his resignation." More: Powell has resigned. My guess for successor? Danforth. Pleasing to religious conservatives who just lost Ashcroft. And I can't see Rice wanting to run State. And Rummy stays, at least a year or two and then Rice moves to Pentagon, perhaps.

P.S. Now they're saying the White House will announce four resignations at 4pm. Here they go: agriculture secretary, education secretary, energy secretary and secretary of state. One assumes, deputy secretary of state Armitage is leaving too.

P.P.S. Mark Goldberg and Matt Yglesias note that some Young Turks believe Powell can't clean out his desk fast enough.

Late Update: Everyone's reporting that Powell's successor is likely to be Rice.

Just out, a new Iran piece.

More on Porter Goss's new candidate to run the CIA's clandestine service, Richard Lawless, and his business ties to Jeb Bush. This from the St. Petersburg Times from September 20, 1998, sent by reader V:

In a 20-month stint as Florida Commerce Secretary in 1987 and 1988, Jeb Bush led trade missions from Latin America to Asia promoting economic development. Bush also made international contacts.

One key introduction was to Richard P. Lawless Jr. A former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department, Lawless by the late 1980s was swapping an intelligence career in Asia for the more lucrative world of foreign business consultant in the nation's capital.

Bush and Lawless quickly established a relationship that from 1989 through 1993 would bring Bush more than $500,000 in fees from commercial real estate deals.

Under Bush, the state commerce department in 1987 put out for bid a $160,000 contract to promote Florida exports in Asia. Among seven competing companies, the contract was awarded to Lawless and U.S. Asia Development Corp., his newly formed consulting business in Washington, D.C.

In September 1988, Bush left the commerce department to help his father's presidential campaign. Lawless dropped out of the state contracts but stayed close to Bush. When Bush became head of the Beacon Council, Miami's influential pro-business organization, Lawless received two Beacon contracts worth $60,000 to set up trade missions to Asia for Dade County."

V writes, Mr. Lawless and Jeb did a few real estate deals too:

Lawless set up U.S. Asia Realty, which guided Asian buyers looking to invest in U.S. commercial property. Bush and his brokerage company handled the real estate for Lawless in South Florida.

As investment deals multiplied, Lawless formed a series of corporations with names like U.S. Asia Florida, U.S. Asia of South Florida and U.S. Asia Broward. Together, Bush and Lawless formed Hubic Partners, a real estate concern.

In 1993, one of Bush's last commissions on a deal with Lawless totaled $213,000. Bush says little more about Lawless, except that he is "a good friend and business partner." Bush once called him a "patriot."

The Economist's John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in the LA Times that the Democrats can make themselves more electable by becoming Tony Blair:

Back in 1992, Tony Blair inherited a Labor Party in far deeper trouble than the Democrats are in today. His opponents in the Conservative Party — the most successful political machine of the 20th century — had just won their fourth straight election. People thought there would never be another Labor government.

Today, however, Labor rules the roost. The Tories* have been forced back into the rural shires, and the average age of their membership is in the 70s. Blair is likely to see his huge majority shrink as a result of the Iraq war in the next election, but nobody expects him to lose it.

Blair troubles Democrats in the United States because he symbolizes the gap in their party. The Michael Moore wing, for instance, views him as a traitor for joining the Iraq coalition and helping Bush steal another election. But Blair's achievement is not one that Democrats can afford to ignore at the moment because he has shown far more willingness than the Democrats to confront his opponents' strengths and limit his own weaknesses.

Blair's first lesson for Democrats is one that Bill Clinton never quite managed to teach them: You cannot be too close to the center. In Britain, Blair embarked on a series of gestures so dramatic that middle England — our Peoria — realized Labor had changed. He embraced privatization, upheld his promise to not raise the rate of income taxes, made the Bank of England independent of the government and ignored teachers' protests about introducing standards testing.

The Democrats desperately need a similar display...

*[And the Tories' great hope, Boris Johnson, has been felled by scandal.]

BTW, everyone who's read it says Micklethwait's and Wooldridge's new book, The Right Nation, is phenomenal.

Robert D. Kaplan has long counseled liberal interventionists of the folly of their ways. Now he's telling the neocons about the greater folly of their ways:

By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives - the most fervent of Wilsonians - simply took that liberal idealist argument of the 1990's to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

But rather than a replay of the Balkans in 1995 and 1999, Iraq has turned out like the Indian mutiny against the British in 1857 and 1858, when the attempts of Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers in London to modernize and Christianize India - to make it more like England - were met with a violent revolt against imperial rule. Delhi, Lucknow and other cities were besieged and captured, before being retaken by colonial forces.

The bloody debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for another century. But it did signal a transition: away from an ad hoc imperium fired by an intemperate lust to impose domestic values abroad, and toward a calmer, more pragmatic empire built on international trade and technology.

In that vein, it seems inevitable that the coming four years will be a time of consolidation for America rather than of expansion; for it may take that long to bring Iraq to a level of stability equivalent to that of the post-conflict Balkans. Only after Iraq is secure will it be possible for our diplomats to work credibly on behalf of democracy throughout the Middle East.

As for our overstretched military, increasingly it will have to work unobtrusively through native surrogates in the hunt for terrorists: for as the histories of Rome, France and Britain all reveal, the successful projection of power is less about direct action than about the training and subsequent use of indigenous troops...

Pragmatism is not about looking away, but it is about humility in the face of long-standing historical and cultural forces. In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will lead to discipline rather than indifference.

Who thinks like Kaplan? One suspects, many of the uniformed US military.

Update: Noah Feldman has almost the opposite take. From Robert Kagan's review of Feldman's new What We Owe Iraq:

... While many argue that the Iraqis are not ready for democracy, Feldman insists it is the only system that can work. Without exaggerating what elections can accomplish, he makes a practical point often overlooked by skeptics. The diverse complexion of Iraqi society, he observes, means that no single group has the power to impose peace and stability. In order to succeed, an Iraqi government must be accepted as roughly legitimate by a broad cross section of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. But how can American officials or any outsiders, or even any Iraqi, know what the people will consider legitimate without asking them? Democracy, Feldman writes, is ''not merely the best political arrangement,'' it is ''the only option other than chaos.''

This doesn't seem like a successful strategy to encourage risk taking at the CIA. Is this all about revenge, and nothing to do with US intelligence reform? It appears so. [via Atrios].

Lawless:

Another candidate to replace the [chief of the clandestine services], according to current and former CIA officials, is Richard P. Lawless Jr., a former CIA operations officer who is deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs, according to a CIA official who asked not to be identified. Lawless served in the agency from 1972 to 1987, when he left after running afoul of senior DO officers while carrying out secret missions for then-CIA Director William J. Casey.

Lawless then opened a private consulting firm that did business in Asia, particularly with Taiwan and South Korea. In a 2002 profile in the Taipei Times, Lawless was described as having "long-term ties to President Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush." The two met shortly after Lawless set up his consulting firm and Jeb Bush was Florida's secretary of commerce seeking business in Asia.

Is Belgrade hiding Mladic?

A very interesting story about Kurds in Iran (six million of them!) watching how events unfold for their brethen in Iraq. The verdict so far? Disappointment, the NYT's Nazila Fathi reports:

Lately, the Iranian Kurds are discouraged.

Their hope was that in Iraq, Kurds would build on the autonomy they had established for all practical purposes since 1991, when routine British and American flights over Iraq kept Saddam Hussein from ruling, and mistreating, the Kurdish region.

Iranian Kurds were jubilant when their brethren across the border won rights in the interim Iraqi constitution recognizing the autonomy of the Kurdish region and granting the Kurds extraordinary powers to protect it.

But now they fear that those powers will be ignored, as the interim Iraqi leaders talk of that constitution applying only until national elections are held. Further, the appointment of non-Kurdish Iraqis as prime minister and president raised fears that Kurds would once again become marginalized.

Rumblings in Berlusconi's media empire. The Guardian reports that Enrico Mentana, the respected newscaster at Berlusconi-owned Canale 5 for the past fourteen years, has been suddenly replaced by Carlo Rossella, the former editor of the Italian newsweekly Panorama. Rossella and Panorama were mixed up in the Niger docs business way back when, but he seems to have emerged no worse for the wear. The move to replace Mentana comes as prosecutors in Rome argued that Berlusconi should be sent to prison for corruption.

Interesting Matt Welch analysis of a new Defense Science Board report on Pentagon strategic communication. From the report:

But this is no Cold War ... Today we reflexively compare Muslim "masses" to those oppressed under Soviet rule. This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies -- except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends.

CBS has gone stark raving mad.

Update: Readers don't seem to agree with me that it was unreasonable of CBS to fire the producer who chose to break into CSI to announce Arafat's death. Example: "...Bottom line? Arafat's death did NOT warrant CBS breaking into their primetime broadcast ..."

Two top officials resign from the CIA, the Post reports. The problem? Goss's deputy Patrick Murray is threatening the staff:

Associates said [deputy director John] McLaughlin was disappointed by Goss's management style and was particularly disheartened by a series of recent confrontations between Murray and senior leaders.

Yesterday, Murray told the associate deputy director of counterintelligence that if anything in the newly appointed executive director's personnel file made it into the media, the counterintelligence official "would be held responsible," according to one agency official and two former colleagues with knowledge of the conversation.

All three sources gave the following account:

The woman, a highly respected case officer whose name is being withheld because she is undercover, told Michael Sulick, the associate deputy director of operations, about the threat. Sulick told [Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R.] Kappes, and both sought a meeting with Goss to complain.

Goss, Murray, Kappes and Sulick met to discuss the matter. After Goss left, Sulick "got in Murray's space," according to one of his associates whose account was corroborated by another. Murray then demanded that Kappes fire Sulick. Kappes refused, and told Goss that he would resign. Goss and other White House officials appealed to Kappes to delay his decision until Monday.

Here's the NYT's take. But while I read this that Patrick Murray is a dangerous bully, David Brooks says it's about imposing White House discipline at the Agency.

In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.

This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.

To his great credit, Brooks makes good on correcting an error Atrios, Kaus, Sullivan, and one of my readers pointed out. Brooks writes:

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.

Monday Update: Jeffrey Dubner is not feeling very generous to Brooks, apology or no apology.

The US official who attended Arafat's funeral today in Cairo, assistant secretary of State William J. Burns, is on the way out. Discussed to replace him? AEI's vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka, the LA Times reports:

Another sign of Bush's views is expected to come soon when he chooses a replacement for Burns as head of the State Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs.

One possible replacement is Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington public policy center. She has been an outspoken advocate of the Iraq war and Israel's interests.

One of the architects of the Oslo accords, Yossi Beilin, "unravels Arafat," statesman and terrorist, in this Forward piece. Arafat was buried today in Ramallah.

Update: Brent Scowcroft on a roadmap not likely to be taken [via TomPaine].

More: Amir Taheri has a piece worth reading. [Thx to F.]

Safe houses in border towns in Iran for Arab fighters in Iraq are being run - perhaps - by elements of the Revolutionary Guards, operating independently from the Tehran central government. So Iraqi Kurds and US intelligence officials tell the Associated Press' Lois Meixler. Many of the Arab fighters, including from Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, are heading to Mosul:

... Kurds living in mountainous villages near the [Iran-Iraq] border who have traveled inside Iran to visit relatives said they have seen Arabs living in what appeared to be safe houses in the Iranian border town of Mariwan.

Former Ansar prisoners held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- one of two Kurdish militias that control the north -- have backed up the claim as have PUK intelligence officials.

A U.S. official said Kurdish security forces found passports from Arab countries including Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia buried under the dirt floor in one safe house on the Iranian side of the border.

"We are not just talking about Iranians passively dealing with al-Qaida," one former U.S. official who worked in Iraq said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We are talking about al-Qaida at Revolutionary Guard bases and safe houses. This is active assistance."...

Update: Meanwhile, there are increasingly ominous rumblings on the Turkish-Iraqi border as well.

The Post reports a backstory as to why Robert Blackwill has abruptly departed the NSC, and joined the White House-connected lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith and Rogers. Meantime, on an entirely different matter, one notes, the Post's State Department correspondent Robin Wright is in Tehran. Meantime, this NYT story on the Gonzalez nomination suggests Bush's national security team is largely staying put for the moment -- Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld. Update: Greg is operating using IAEA standards of proof when it comes to interpreting the signs in Washington about where things are headed. Doesn't mean he's wrong. Just by the time we know, it may be too late.

UPI's Shaun Waterman reports that the CIA's not so Anonymous al Qaeda hunter, Michael Scheuer, has finally quit the Agency.

Israel plans anti-Arafat "crusade," Ha'aretz's Aluf Benn and Amos Herel report.

Israel arrests Vanunu.

Gilles Kepel on the "war for Muslim minds," is worth reading:

Kepel:... But the defining moment, shared by what we might call the “pre–neocons” and the jihadis, was engineered in the 1980s in Afghanistan under Ronald Reagan, when Richard Perle ... was – like Paul Wolfowitz today – under–secretary for defense. At the time, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al–Zawahiri were in training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan after their makeover turning them into freedom fighters against the Soviet army.

This, I would say – to reverse the title of Richard Perle’s book (with David Frum) An End to Evil: how to win the war on terror – was the beginning of evil: salafi jihadism born out of jihad in Afghanistan. The neocons and jihadis are equally in denial over this episode.

Neocons do not want to be reminded that help from Reagan’s administration made jihadism possible, then and now; United States backing alone made possible this breeding–ground where Qutbist thinking and salafi indoctrination coalesced.

The jihadis, claiming that they alone won the war against the evil empire of kufr (impiety) and its Red Army, also dismiss what they owe to American policy. But without the smart, ground–to–air, shoulder–borne Stinger missiles – brainchild of Albert Wohlstetter’s military thinking – the Soviet forces would never have been defeated. In this respect, the Afghan–bred mujaheddin is the metonymy or synecdoche – the best image of the geopolitical crossroads represented by 9/11.

openDemocracy: Is it significant that both traditions value the “noble lie”?

Gilles Kepel: In a way there is some sort of parallelism – though this is rather a general phenomenon in politics. I guess I would say it is not peculiar to them.

Much has been made of Paul Wolfowitz’s interview with Sam Tannenhaus in Vanity Fair (May 2003) when he said that the dossier about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a “winner” when it came to expediting the crucial prewar Congressional vote.

Wolfowitz’s formulation was defended at the time as a Straussian, Machiavellian, or even Platonist lie: the masses do not know what is good for them, but their leaders do, and moreover need to find some slogan with which to mobilise them – a slogan which, in Plato’s words, may always have more to do with rhetoric than truth.

Ayman al–Zawahiri’s pamphlet, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, considers jihad against Israel such a rhetorical device, one that will mobilise non–believers as well as the umma.

More of the interview by OpenDemocracy's Rosemary Bechler here. [Thx to DP]. The interview raises a question I have had since attending an AEI foreign policy event the other day, which put a whole bunch of threats and enemies on the map, but not, for instance, a nuclear armed Pakistan. Which is strange when one recognizes that elements of Pakistan's security services are so sympathetic to the terror groups committed to killing us, such as al Qaeda, thanks in some part to the fact that the US fostered the Pakistani ISI-Taliban-mujaheden relationship in the 1980s. Given that Pakistan already has nukes, and has already demonstrated large elements of its population and security services to be sympathetic to an al Qaeda which has actually killed three thousand Americans, one might think that a nuclear armed Pakistan would be considered at least as great a strategic threat to the US as a potential future nuclear armed Iran. But why does Pakistan not appear to be on the neoconservatives' list? Not even for democracy promotion? Is this related to what Kepel suggests -- a willful desire to forget the whole episode the neocons would rather think of as pure triumph -- or something else?

Accused Halabja poison gas attacks general now advising the Iraqi government, the BBC and others report:

Former Iraqi General Nizar Al-Khazraji, who lived in Sorø in central Zealand [Denmark] for a period, now appears to be gaining a foothold in the administration in Iraq.

Several of Saddam Hussein's former generals are now working as military advisors to the Iraqi government and these include General Nizar Al-Khazraji.

Arabic newspaper Arab News writes this on its Internet site, according to TV2 Øst [Danish local television station].

Nizar Al-Khazraji is suspected of having committed war crimes in Kurdistan in the late 1980s. When it emerged that he and his family had moved into a flat in Sorø the Danish authorities started an investigation into his military past.

But shortly before the Iraq War broke out Al-Khazraji left the country via Sweden. He is assumed to have been in the United Arab Emirates since then.

Here's an article pointing out Khazraji's role with other of Saddam's generals advising the new Iraqi government. And here's more on General Khazraji from IWPR. Talk about moral relativism.

More here.

Masha Gessen on why Russia's Vladimir Putin campaigned for Bush:

With Bush's reelection, Russian politicians don't just seem relieved; they seem ecstatic. On November 3, Putin praised American voters for "not letting themselves be frightened" in making their choice. The speaker of the Russian parliament, Boris Gryzlov, joined Putin in congratulating the United States on a wise pick and added that he thought Russian-American relations would grow "ever closer" during Bush's second term ....

In the last few weeks, Russian politicians have searched high and low to find commonalities between [Bush] and Putin. One has suggested that Bush is more attached to oil than Kerry, and that bodes well for keeping oil prices high and Russia happy. Another has said that it is a common enemy--international terrorism--that unites Bush and Putin. Izvestia, the highest-circulation broadsheet, published an editorial pointing out that Bush and Putin just plain like each other. What they all seem to be getting at is that the presidents are two of a kind.

Blood from Stones author Douglas Farah has an interesting post this week concerning the Antwerp trial of a dozen alleged blood diamonds/weapons dealers. It ends:

That might explain why U.S. intelligence officials are telling me now that those who are advocating a more active look at diamonds and commodities as a value transfer system for terrorists are being waved off still, despite what one source called "overwhelming evidence" that al Qaeda has had multiple tentacles into gemstone trading for years. This includes emeralds in Afghanistan, tanzanite and other precious stones. The diamond findings are consistant with everything the CIA has found, but they have not been allowed to pursue the story on the ground, my sources say. "There is a a feeling among alot of us that if we followed the diamonds we would find out alot of stuff about alot of interesting things we need to know," said one. "It would have been inconsistent for al Qaeda not to go into diamonds if they had the opportunity, given what we now know about their involvement in other gem stone issues." Well, if they ever bothered to read what the Belgians put together they could see the connection to both al Qaeda and global weapons trafficking, and the emerging patterns.

At the same time there is growing evidence that my hypothesis of the past year or so correct: That AQ simply moved its East Africa operation to West Africa in the aftermath of August 1998 bombings of the two U.S. embassies. More witnesses are corraborating to the Special Court what an American source told me, that several of the AQ East Africa people took up residence in Guinea, as well as Monrovia. Given the cell structure, the lack of contact among all in the group is not inexplicable. Look for the Special Court to unload some more evidence soon. There is a growing constituency in Congress for tackling these issue in a more forceful manner. There could be hearings early next year. Slowly, it will all come out in the wash.

It's worth watching Farah's site, and this one, which also follows l'affaire Victor Bout closely.

Ledeen on the Theo Van Gogh assassination and what it says about Europe's approach to Islamic radicalism.

Driven by its exploding energy needs, China has become a player in oil-rich Africa -- and a worry for Washington pursuing security arrangements there, argues Stephanie Giry in The New Republic:

...Beijing's tactics should worry Washington--not to mention average Africans. Increasing demand and shrinking domestic supplies are making the United States overly dependent on oil imports, and Washington's search for new suppliers in West Africa--which the Bush administration has called "the fastest-growing source of oil and gas for the American market"--seems to pit the United States against China. Yet, because Washington already has solid ties with the Gulf of Guinea's largest exporters and U.S. companies are better equipped than cnpc or Sinopec to perform the type of deep offshore drilling that will unlock the region's resources, China's hunt for African resources is not a direct threat to U.S. energy security.

It is, however, a threat to other U.S. interests on the continent. While Beijing courts African capitals for access to oil and gas, Washington is trying to convince African leaders to host U.S. military bases, battle terrorism, and emphasize human rights. After all, with growing concerns that unstable regions could become terrorist havens, Washington's commitment to democracy in Africa is becoming a security imperative ...

But China's march could scuttle Washington's efforts. In a searing 581-page report, Human Rights Watch recently argued that Chinese companies are complicit in Khartoum's efforts to displace populations in southern Sudan to clear the way for oil rigs...

This begins to explain some of the talk we heard at AEI today.

Via Kevin Drum, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resign.

The headline du jour. I used to always be annoyed in countries prone to this sort of thinking like Serbia and Russia because I saw it as an excuse by people not to take responsibility for their own situation, to blame everything on forces larger than themselves. That this sort of fatalism is emerging here is not a good sign.

Update: Along those lines, James Wolcott has found religion.

The problem with Pakistan's new envoy to Washington? Allegations from A.Q. Khan that the envoy, General Jehangir Karamat, knew about and sanctioned Khan's nuclear smuggling in exchange for missile technology from North Korea, reports David Armstrong in The New Republic:

Now it turns out that Pakistan's new envoy to Washington may have sanctioned his proliferation. In late September, Islamabad announced the appointment of former Pakistani military chief General Jehangir Karamat as its ambassador-designate to the United States. Karamat, who is a close friend of Musharraf, served as head of Pakistan's armed forces from 1996 to 1998. Last February, following exposure of his black-market network, Khan told Pakistani investigators that he traded in nuclear technology with the full knowledge of top military officials, including Karamat, Karamat's predecessor as army chief, and Musharraf, who succeeded Karamat in that post.

Khan made the allegations in an eleven-page signed statement in which he confessed to selling atomic secrets beginning in 1988. A senior Pakistani military official told reporters in early February that Khan had named Karamat and retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, who headed Pakistan's army from 1988 to 1991, as authorizing the sales. According to the official, Khan's statement accused Karamat and Beg of "indirectly instructing" him to make the transfers. The official said Khan told investigators he had acted on instructions Karamat and Beg passed through two middlemen--one a military advisor to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the other a friend of Bhutto's. Moreover, a friend of Khan's told reporters in February that the scientist had recently informed him that Karamat, Musharraf, and Beg were "aware of everything" he had done. (In response to questions from The New Republic, Karamat flatly denied Khan's assertions.)

Yet in debriefings by investigators, Khan reportedly asserted that Karamat was immersed in the details of an arrangement in which Pakistan received help with its ballistic missile program in exchange for providing North Korea with uranium enrichment technology . . .

Michael Ledeen shares his wishlist for a second Bush term war cabinet. Ledeen thinks the Secretaries of State, Defense and National Security Council advisor should be replaced. In their stead? He suggests Zell Miller to head State, Jim Woolsey to lead the Pentagon, and Wolfowitz or John Bolton as national security advisor.

Update: The American Prospect's Mark Goldberg has more on the AEI second Bush term foreign policy wishlist, from an event we attended today. It begins as you would expect with regime change at the US State Department.

Porter Goss hopes to usher in a return to the glory days at the CIA, the NY Sun's Eli Lake reports:

The New York Sun has learned that director Porter Goss is already setting up meetings with retired CIA officers whose service coincided with America's victory in the Cold War. They are reportedly being considered for senior management slots in the agency, according to a former CIA senior officer and a current administration official. These sources confirm that Mr. Goss, a former operations officer himself, is offering two-year temporary contracts to the retired officers to run key departments in the much-maligned spy service as a new generation of officers prepares for senior positions. . .

"They are going to take a lot of these managers and move them to the war
college. They have identified some 80 people who are holding jobs they should not be holding. He's going to clean house. I can't complain," a former CIA intelligence officer who worked with the Iraqi opposition in the mid 1990s, Robert Baer, said yesterday.

Mr. Baer, who has written a memoir of his work as a spy and a book predicting the fall of the Saudi royal family, added, "A lot of people in the CIA bet on the wrong horse. My feeling is Goss is going to clean house. He is looking for a legacy in terms of bringing the CIA back to what it was in his era, when we won the cold war and had penetrations of the Soviet Union." . . .

A former political appointee in the first Bush administration predicted that Mr. Goss would likely bolster the clandestine service, the branch of the CIA that collects intelligence, but would punish senior analysts inside the directorate of intelligence, the branch of the agency that analyzes intelligence.

"The directorate of intelligence has tried to actively undermine the president and the administration," said the source, who declined to be named. "There has been an aggressive campaign of leaks of classified data. It is good news for the young Turks in the clandestine service and some of the old bulls around in (President Reagan's director of central intelligence) Bill Casey's day. These guys who are used to going out there and getting it done."

I am not sure if this last quote is code for clandestine services operating without excessive concern for Congressional oversight, but it seems to have the whiff of nostalgia for the excesses of that era about it. It also seems to reflect a twinge of wishful thinking. And hearing from the 9/11 commission and others how very few human intelligence officers were actually operating in the greater Middle East in recent years, some sort of bolstering of the clandestine services would seem to make a great deal of sense. A well informed intel-observer friend writes, the kinds of people Goss is bringing back are in fact a good thing: "But in short, what this does mean is the return, in some way or form, of the better old hands...."

Brooks wonders how Rove managed to find ways to speak to the people of exurbia, as they have few institutions of [secular] civic life Brooks could find to sell his books about exurbia to them:

The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. Everybody is giving advice to Democrats these days, and mine is don't take any advice from anybody with access to the media - including me, just to be safe.

Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there.

Ken Pollack on policy towards Iran.

After Fallujah, then what? asks Slate's Fred Kaplan:

Bush probably intends the offensive to serve as a final showdown for the insurgents, but, regardless of the immediate outcome (and I write this with no pleasure whatever), it might be a final showdown for us instead. There are two factors at work here.

First, the offensive is billed as a joint operation by the U.S. military and the Iraqi national guard, but it hasn't worked out that way. National Public Radio's Anne Garrels, who is embedded with the Marines in Fallujah, reports that of the 500 Iraqi soldiers originally deployed to go in alongside U.S. forces only 170 were still on station when the operation began. The rest had deserted—whether simply to flee for their safety or to join the other side. And these Iraqis were members of the 36th Special Operations battalion, the elite of the country's new security forces. In short, quite apart from what happens in Fallujah, the Iraqis are not remotely ready to provide defense by themselves.

Second, coupled with this grim realization, the U.S. military is finding itself increasingly alone and isolated in this war. A small story in the Nov. 4 New York Times listed the various countries that are pulling out of this "coalition." Hungary had just announced, the day before, that it would withdraw its 300 troops from Iraq. This move would come on top of withdrawals, either actual or announced, by Spain (1,300 troops); Poland (2,400); the Netherlands (1,400); Thailand (450); the Dominican Republic (302); Nicaragua (115); Honduras (370); the Philippines (51); Norway (155); and New Zealand (60). Other countries will soon reduce their troop levels— Singapore, from 191 to 32; Moldova, from 42 to 12; and Bulgaria, from 483 to 430. For the most part, these aren't large numbers—the United States has always contributed the vast bulk of the forces, with Britain, Australia, and Italy trailing far behind—but that's not the point. Their joining the coalition was presented as a show of international support; their departing will be widely perceived as an erosion of that support.

So what to do? Bush may well see the Fallujah offensive as a last gamble to turn things around. My guess is that, if it goes "well," by any stretch of a definition—and if the elections proceed with the slightest semblance of order—he might make preparations to declare victory and pull out. Such a move would almost certainly trigger chaos, but could this chaos be much more rampant than the state of life there now?

Writing in Foreign Policy, Rise of the Vulcans author James Mann says neoconservative foreign policy aspirations of a second Bush term will be seriously constrained by reality (finally) largely of their own making in Iraq: few troops, and even fewer allies:

But it’s a mistake to leap from there to the judgment that the neoconservatives will have complete control of the second Bush administration. During the last four years, the neocons were the dominant influence on U.S. foreign policy when it came to Iraq (which was no small thing). The neocons did not control the Bush administration’s first-term policy toward China or Russia, which conformed to the classic realist principles of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

And the impact of the Iraq war has served to reduce further the neocons’ clout. The war they so strongly favored has lasted vastly longer than they predicted. It took more U.S. troops and cost much more money than they led the nation to believe. By early this year, even leading conservative Republicans, such as columnist George Will, were vehemently opposing the Iraq war and the larger goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East. That internal Republican opposition has been muted this fall during Bush’s reelection campaign, but it is sure to resurface.

I’m not suggesting that Bush’s approach to the world will be utterly transformed during a second term. The vision the Vulcans carried into office four years ago—a view of foreign policy based above all on overwhelming U.S. military power and a skepticism about accommodations with other countries—will not be abandoned.

But I also don’t think Bush’s reelection means that United States is gearing up for some new military invasion. There are limits. Iraq has proved that fact, even to the Bush administration. And a sense of limits may turn out to be one of the defining characteristics of Bush’s second term.

And though Iraq may keep them from invading anywhere new, there's always air power and clandestine activities. And they do set a strident tone, one that is focused on trying to preserve and expand US global hegemony. I noticed no talk of democracy promotion in Gaffney's list, nor any talk of intervention to stop genocide in Darfur or anywhere else.

More from Andrew Bacevich.

Does courting red state hearts and minds mean we are not allowed to point out that the Marine commanders leading the assault on Falluja are calling the enemy there "Satan?" Even as something interesting to note? This from the BBC.

But for the highly-professional marines, Falluja is also a return to the simplicity of combat after the complexities of peacekeeping and an enemy that never shows itself.

"The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy," said Colonel Brandl.

"But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."

The enemy does have a face, and you can see some of them thanks to the work of some truly crazy/brave photographers who're operating in Fallujah, here.

Neoconservative foreign policy checklist, from Frank Gaffney, via Jim Lobe:

The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq — a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;

Regime change — one way or another — in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;

Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;

Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland — including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;

Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons — i.e., our shared, "moral values") — especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;

Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution — as well as other international institutions and mechanisms — to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;

Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

Kevin Drum has an extensive breakdown of who voted for Bush, and who didn't, here. His "tentative conclusion:"

The "moral values" vote is a red herring. It played no bigger a role this year than in 2000.

Terrorism played a bigger role, mostly by being a more important issue to a lot more people. Bush's level of support among people who based their vote primarily on world affairs increased only modestly.

And that good old mainstay the economy was the most important of all. Compared to 2000, fewer people personally think they're doing better but more people believe the economy is in good shape anyway. And Bush was overwhelmingly successful in convincing those people that his policies deserved the credit.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that moral values don't hold one of the keys, and also that those who voted for Bush tend to vote based more on "identity" reasons, while those who voted for Kerry tend to vote more on "issues."

Kevin's most surprising finding, to my mind:

Finally, [Bush's] support was up by 10 points in urban areas and down by 2 points in rural communities, including a surprising 9 point decrease from residents of small towns. This goes against a whole bunch of conventional wisdom (including mine) about the growing urban/rural divide in America. If anything, it seems to have narrowed in this election.

Update: Gay Marriage referenda had no effect on Bush's reelection. So conclude Emerging Democratic Majority's Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira, bolstering Drum's major conclusion, above:

An analysis of the results of last week's election indicates that the presence of gay marriage referenda on the ballot had no effect on the outcome of the presidential election at the state level.

There was a very strong correlation between President Bush's share of the vote in 2000 and his share of the vote in 2004 across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The president consistently ran a few percentage points ahead of his showing in 2000, but he did not improve on his 2000 performance any more in states with gay marriage referenda than in other states. In 11 states with gay marriage referenda on the ballot, the president increased his share of the vote from an average of 55.4 percent in 2000 to an average of 58.0 percent in 2004--an improvement of 2.6 percentage points. However, in the rest of the country the president increased his share of the vote from an average of 48.1 percent in 2000 to an average of 51.0 percent in 2004--an improvement of 2.9 percentage points.

I guess we can put the culture wars to bed now.

Michael Tomasky:

We have crossed, with this election, an important historical marker. The reelection of a president such as George W. Bush for the reasons the exit polls tell us he evidently won is a culminating event in the political retreat of modernity, a condition of existence whose fundamental tenet was the triumph of scientific skepticism over what used to be called "blind" faith. . .

The age of skepticism has won a few and lost a few since Reagan's time, but let's face it, that age is now, in this country, dead. Today, religion and politics do mix. And they will keep mixing for the foreseeable future.

This does not mean that Democrats and liberalism should placate the Christian right or willingly succumb to Christian Nation. They should not. But it does mean that Democrats and liberals should work much harder to understand and win over the voters of the religious center. The Democratic Party should invest money in talking to -- not polling or focus-grouping; talking to -- these voters, learning the true extent to which they feel alienated from the party, finding out how they think about their religious and political selves, how they weigh their own interpretations of the Scripture with regard to gay rights on the one hand and helping people in poverty on the other. And liberal intellectuals -- who do tend to be secular, myself admittedly included, and who do sometimes exhibit contempt for religion, myself (I hope) very much not included -- need to understand clearly that the religious right is hardly speaking for every religious person. And we need to understand that we're beyond the point in history where the old arguments will be persuasive.

The religious right has opened up a new battlefield, and like it or not, we have to play on it. And the way to begin is by understanding clearly the difference between religious extremists and religious people.

Mail bag:

Laura: You are absolutely right. I grew up and live in red state Florida . . . A story my father has told me has alwasy stuck with me. He grew up a Catholic in the same town I did, went to the same public high school. In the late 50s and early 60s in rural Florida. For him, "school prayer" meant everybody was herded into the gym so the principal could ask Jesus "to help our Catholic brothers and sisters understand that they are part of a cult."

That's the difference between David Brooks' understanding of mob religion and ours. It's the difference between the abstract and the real. What if his formative church/state experience was being required to listen to his education authority plead with him to ask mercy for being a Christ-killer. Think that doesn't happen today? Well maybe not with Catholics and Jews - though The Passion has got em thinking, I suppose. The new target is gays. Last year, my daughter sang with her public school choir at a hospice agency's memorial service for people who had died during the year. That's right, it was basically a funeral. I went just to hear my daughter sing. There were several guest speakers. One was a local African-American minister, who doubles as a police chaplain. Somehow, he got to talking about 9/11 and why it happened . . . But then he went into the Pat Robertson/Franklin Graham meme about America's debauchery inviting the attacks. What did we expect when "so-called churches" put gay ministers in positions of power. (By the way, we were in an Episcopal Church). I can only assume that some of the hospice patients that year had been gay. I'm sure their families appreciated having their loved ones blamed for 9-11 at their own memorial service. Remember, this guy's a pillar of the community. I complained to my daughter's teacher the next day at her school. And she said yeah, I can't believe he insulted all Episcopaleans. But she agreed it's awful what they've done -- the Episcopaleans, that is.

Again, this is the real. Traditional values taken out of the abstract.

I don't want to give the wrong idea. I like my hometown. I like even better where I live now . . . I like most of the people here. Even the fundamentalists. For many of them I know, they don't hate anyone they know unless that person has given them a reason. . . Even if they do hate or fear gays or the secular or whomever in abstract, they don't when confronted with them. I see pleasant conversations and holding of doors and little gestures of kindness from person to person when people are confronted with one another on a daily basis. . . It's when you remove the human, make them abstract, that the bad things happen. . .

And the people who lead them, who head these empire churches, I see them driving their people more toward abstraction. The gay man they don't know. . .

Tell me where in all the Christian fulminating, any of the religious political leaders talked about love. Show me where they condemned, even once, rude, brutal speech or tactics that demonized gays. I fear these leaders are blurring the line for gays between abstract and real. And I fear they want it blurred, or obliterated, so that every gay is a fictional figure bent on destruction of what they hold sacred.

I would feel better if any, any leading conservative religious figure would come forward with some kind of conciliatory gesture of speech toward gays. That doesn't mean endorsing marriage; it means condemning Jim DeMint's [R-SC] anti-gay-teacher madness . . . Simply calling them our brothers and sisters. Anything. But yet, the heretofore reasonable conservatives have nothing to say except that what I see isn't real.

Here's one from a pro-life Democrat worth reading:

Laura,

Thanks for your blog. . . One thing I don't get re: Kinsley & others: Why does every columnist I read assume that being pro-life and anti-gay marriage are companion positions? They aren't for me. I think abortion should be illegal and gays should be able to get married. (I also think pot should be legal.) John Kerry and John Edwards also don't hold those two issues as companions: They believe that abortion should be legal and gays should not have the right to get married.

I also don't think my opposition to abortion "comes from God" as Kinsley says that I do. In my view, abortion is wrong for the same reason that capital punishment is wrong: A civilized society should not allow its people to kill one another.

The problem with all this talk about "values" voters is it's just annoying oversimplification: It all stems from a sampling of exit polls that found about 1 in 5 voters said that morals or values were most important to their vote. (Aren't war and peace moral issues?) How columnists extrapolate that statistic to mean people voted for Bush because of abortion and gay marriage is beyond me. But, again and again, every article I read contains that shared assumption.

Abortion has been a hot issue for decades on the right and that didn't stop Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton (or Al Gore) from winning the popular vote. Bush hasn't taken any steps that I know of on that front and, thus, hasn't given any pro-lifer more of a reason to vote for him than any usual Republican. And Bush and Kerry held the same position on gay marriage (only Cheney said freedom is freedom for everyone).

Somehow I just don't buy the Bush-owes-this-win-to-the-religious-right
reasoning.

And here's one from an Iranian reader now in the States who loves to torment me. She is more pro-Bush than Karl Rove:

Hi Laura,

I have been reading your blog since the election and I have spent some time reading many "left-wing" blogs. I know you are sad, but everyone one is blaming Kerry's defeat on many many things and no one yet talks about the candidate himself. Why is it that Kerry is still being protected? I think Ralph Nader is correct when he said, “They allowed Kerry to adopt ambiguous wishy-washy positions and they deprived him of the key to victory, which is bright lines,” Simply, Kerry was not a strong candidate and he had a very weak VP. Don't you think that Edward was a big drag for that ticket? Democrats should be mad at themselves for not electing the "right" guy at the Primary!

They also need to look into Terry McAuliffe's role in DNC. It was his idea to have the Primary so early and it was his idea that the nominees would not challenge each other directly. So during the primary season, it was Bush-bashing party and that strategy back fired big time.

I talked to many people in California that voted for Bush and they usually vote for Democrats. They did not vote for Bush for "values" or "security" issues. Almost all of them , did not feel comfortable with Kerry and they could not say one thing that Kerry has done in the past that will give them an assurance that he will lead. I assume, they are many many people that voted for the same reason. I think the "value" and "gay amendment" issue is just overblown again by the media. The media is still missing the point and It hurts to see they, the elite media, is still doesn't get it and they still do not realy know the average people!

I think media should and must point the finger at themselves.......(for once!)


Take care,

Hezbollah flew a drone over Israel air space yesterday, Ha'aretz reports:

Hezbollah succeeded yesterday morning in sending a drone, apparently equipped with a camera, into Israel's airspace, over the city of Nahariya in the western Galilee. The Israel Defense Forces identified the drone too late and was not able to shoot it down. Last night the air force and Northern Command began an investigation to look into the circumstances of the failure . . .

Two weeks ago Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah intimated that his organization was developing a response to Israel's incursions into Lebanese airspace . . .

However, yesterday's incident seems to have been aimed at public relations - embarrassing Israel and creating a "strategic equation" between Israel's overflights and Hezbollah's response.

The next stage may be an attempt to use the drones for reconnaissance, and possibly even for terror attacks using explosives.

Hezbollah did not provide information in its statement about the type of aircraft it used. It may have been a real drone provided either by the Syrians or Iranian, but it may also have been a model aircraft of the more common consumer type.

Maureen Dowd's open bitterness on Meet the Press is a welcome tonic. Wolfowitz, Rice, Hadley, Bolton up for promotion, and Rumsfeld stays while the adult supervision -- Powell, Armitage, Blackwill - leave. With Robert Blackwill's announced departure from the NSC, expect neocon dominance there - in fact, in all key agencies - Pentagon, NSC and State. Feith is out I'm told but that is a diversion from what's really happening.

Something to offend everyone. James Wolcott is busy thinking up slogans for the Democrats to compete in the Culture Wars:

It's a simple, catchy slogan that will look good on a bumperstickers, yet carry a multilateral strike: pro-guns, anti-gay, and unashamedly Christian.

Since abortion is so problematic for Democrats, "Shoot a Babykiller for Jesus" might do the trick in some of the battleground states as a supplemental bumpersticker.

Obviously this is all still in the brainstorming stage, and will need to be focus-grouped, but I believe it nudges us further along the path to success gently lit by Kristof's lamp of wisdom.

I think it is the first time I have laughed since Monday.

A Wisconsin school district has voted to teach Creationism. Here we go. [Hey, think they teach about global warming? or just Armageddon?] Lessons learned? Save your money to send your kids to private schools, I suppose. More seriously, in the longer term, members of the reality-based community should be learning from conservative Christians and running their candidates for local and state offices, including the school boards.

Did the European three reach a tentative deal with Iran on its nuclear program? If so, it would be a welcome delay for the Bush administration:

Iran and European nations reached a preliminary agreement about Iran’s nuclear program at talks hoped to avoid a U.N. showdown, but all countries involved still must approve it, Iran’s chief negotiator said Sunday.

If approved, the deal could be a major breakthrough following months of threats and negotiations and could spare Iran from being referred to the U.N. Security Council, where the United States has warned it would seek economic sanctions.

The preliminary agreement worked out with Britain, France and Germany could be finalized in the next few days, chief Iranian negotiator Hossein Mousavian told state-run Iranian television from Paris, where talks wrapped up Saturday.

Monday Update: It appears they have. We'll know as we approach November 25th, the date of the next IAEA Board of Governors meeting.

Michael Kinsley in the WaPo: Who's really trying to impose their values?

There's just one little request I have. If it's not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don't mind, that is.) It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values -- as deplorable as I'm sure they are -- don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

Writing in the NY Times, BeliefNet's Steve Waldman say Bush's conservative evangelical supporters expect him to deliver with amendments to ban gay marriage, abortion, and to break down the separation of church and state:

Finally, the "values voters" who helped keep him in Washington believe that God needs to be more present in public life. The Ten Commandments in the courtroom, prayer in school, "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance - these are all critical issues to many religious conservatives. They believe that we've kicked out God from our lives.

In other words, many religious voters also love Mr. Bush for reasons broader, more vague - and in some ways far more powerful - than merely his positions on specific issues like gay marriages. The professional activists, by contrast, have a very concrete agenda in mind: constitutional amendments on gay marriage and abortion, allowing churches to become more politically active, allowing more prayer in school and more.

In the past, Mr. Bush has tried to appeal to the rank-and-file evangelicals through his broad thematic statements and personal story, while remaining noncommittal on some specific policies. Now that neither Mr. Bush nor the conservative activists have to worry about his re-election, the big question is whether he will continue with that approach - and, if he chooses to, whether conservative activists will let him get away with it.

David Brooks by contrast tries to downplay that there are any policy implications of Bush's beholdenness to Christian conservatives, as he imagines the American red states as a bastion of goodness and religious tolerance where respect for religious pluralism flourishes:

It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.

Look, I see Brooks at my neighborhood DC synagogue, and as much as he says he travels in the red states, I grew up in one a religious minority with Christmas trees in the public elementary schools, in a state that just a few years ago voted to outlaw teaching evolution in the schools in favor of Creationism. This guy has no idea what he's talking about regarding red states. It's really a foreign country to him. He talks about liberals like they have never encountered red state values and so look down on them out of snobbery. He's the one out of touch. Now, if he sends his children to the Kansas public schools, I may feel differently, but he's an East Coast Jewish person trying to talk up red state religious pluralism and broad mindedness without seeming to demonstrate the slightest desire to go experience it for the duration.

Update: Andrew Sullivan got an interesting email in response to Brooks' piece today worth posting here:

"Have to disagree with David Brooks and evidently you. To point out that the evangelicals voted in the same proportion for Bush as they did in 2000 gets a fact right and misses the point. What matters is that the Bush vote by these folks did not erode in the face of catastrophic management of post-invasion Iraq, prisoner atrocities, transformation of the surplus into a suffocating deficit and terrible job performance. It seems to me that their religious views trump everything. You switched your vote - why didn't they? The answer is complex, but you can bet it includes homophobia deftly catalyzed by Mr. Rove et. al." He's got a point, no?

I'm extremely disturbed by the note of eerie triumphalism coming from the Christian right in response to Bush's reelection. And I am dismayed by people like Brooks' total smugness about it, as if there are no potential domestic policy implications to the Christian right seeing Bush's victory as a mandate for their radical agenda to be implemented. That Brooks doesn't see it reminds me that he is just another East Coast person content with his easy assumptions that his religious preferences and his family's religious minority status are utterly compatable with that agenda -- at least as long as he's living in a comfortably blue state neighborhood that respects diversity and religious pluralism.

Unlike Brooks, I have considerable respect for the intelligence and political sophistication and aggressiveness of the Christian right and those in the red states who want to promote and impose that agenda in the public sphere. Why doesn't Brooks? Why doesn't he take them at their word? And respect that they mean it when they say they want prayer in schools, to outlaw abortion, to ban the teaching of evolution in the schools, to deny gay people the rights enjoyed by others, and to allow the teaching of abstinence only? I believe they mean it. And I believe Bush is beholden to them to some degree for his election victory. And not to the "wider war" neoconservatives, who constitute a truly tiny minority.

More: George Scialabba has more.

Clearly, we have become caught in a civil war going on within the Christian church. This guy is intolerant, to put it charitably. I have a lot of Christian religious friends who do not consider that their political views should be held hostage by fanatics like this. Let's support the Christian moderates against those who tell others how they can worship and that they have to swallow their Christian fundamentalist definition of America. Will the children start having to pray to Jesus in American schools soon? Studying creationism? Or will that be up to the states?

Contrary to what some Republican contacts suggested in advance of the election, Bush's conservative backers seem set to fight for Bush to appoint judges and justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. The pro-choice Republican Senator Arlen Specter has been taking heat for statements he made yesterday that he would block such nominations - leading anti-choice activists to flood the White House and Congress with calls that he not get chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now, he's backpedalling:

On Thursday, as outraged conservatives tried to block Specter's rise to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Pennsylvania senator issued a statement clarifying his remarks, saying, "I did not warn the president about anything," and "I have never and would never apply any litmus test on the abortion issue."

The controversy suggests that, despite talk of a political mandate, the long-running battle over federal judgeships will be in full bloom when the new Congress convenes next year under strengthened Republican control. Although Republicans made significant gains on election day, their majority of 55 senators still falls five votes short of the 60 needed to break a Democratic filibuster.

"The magic number in the Senate is 60, not 50," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who sits on the Judiciary Committee. "If the president nominates people who are not part of the mainstream but who are far off, who will try to make law, not interpret it, and who will be way over to the ideological extreme, the controversy over judges will be alive," he said.

But Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., a staunch opponent of abortion rights, said in a statement he was looking forward to getting more judges approved.

"Senate Republicans are committed to approving all of the president's judicial nominations, despite the Democrats' rhetoric that they are committed to block judges who fail their litmus tests," Santorum said. With 55 Republicans, he said, "I am hopeful that with this increase we can overcome the Democrats' filibustering tactics."

Those who expected any moderation from a second term Bush administration are sadly mistaken.

Is this just brinksmanship? It it about optics, e.g. Specter should keep his opinions to himself so as not to offend anti-choice activists, or is this for real?

The Netherlands announces it is going to withdraw its troops from Iraq by March.

What's the Matter With Kansas? author Thomas Franks writing in the NY Times on the continuing power of the culture wars:

Still, the power of the conservative rebellion is undeniable. It presents a way of talking about life in which we are all victims of a haughty overclass - "liberals" - that makes our movies, publishes our newspapers, teaches our children, and hands down judgments from the bench. These liberals generally tell us how to go about our lives, without any consideration for our values or traditions.

The culture wars, in other words, are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency. . .

To short-circuit the Republican appeals to blue-collar constituents, Democrats must confront the cultural populism of the wedge issues with genuine economic populism. They must dust off their own majoritarian militancy instead of suppressing it; sharpen the distinctions between the parties instead of minimizing them; emphasize the contradictions of culture-war populism instead of ignoring them; and speak forthrightly about who gains and who loses from conservative economic policy.

E.J. Dionne:

What's required is a sustained and intellectually serious effort by religious moderates and progressives to insist that social justice and inclusion are "moral values" and that war and peace are "life issues." As my wife and I prepared our three kids for school the day after the day after, we shared our outrage that we in Blue America are cast as opponents of "family values" simply because we don't buy the right wing's agenda. No political faction can be allowed to assert a monopoly on the family. . .

An administration given to hubris will have to be checked by institutions outside what is likely to be a compliant Congress. This is no time for the independent media to be intimidated by trumped-up charges of liberal bias. Moderate Republicans will have to find the courage to say publicly what many of them say privately about this administration's habit of overreach and the excesses of right-wing legislative leaders.

Over at Tapped, The American Prospect's Mark Goldberg asks:

The question on my mind is this: Who will hold more influence over shaping a second Bush term's foreign policy agenda vis-à-vis Iran, Jack Straw and his European cohorts, or the American Enterprise Institute?

Mark, the answer is clear: AEI. The real question to ask regarding Iran policy is, does the new neoconservative foreign policy mandate mean that the Bush administration will support efforts to push regime change in Iran, or, if other measures fail, air strikes to target Iran's nuclear program. Straw is irrelevant.

Anyone who thought a Bush second term would be more moderate is sadly mistaken. This from the WSJ [via Atrios]:

We trust that the President will not now let those same opponents interpret his mandate for him. The effort is already under way to diminish the victory by insisting that Mr. Bush "move to the center," which is code for giving up the agenda that voters just endorsed. The country remains "deeply divided," we are told, so Mr. Bush is obliged to make concessions to Nancy Pelosi and George Soros.

Yet it wasn't Mr. Bush but Senate Democrats whose obstructionism was repudiated on Tuesday. South Dakota voters rejected Tom Daschle expressly on the grounds that he had made the Senate a "dead zone," as we once put it, for the Bush agenda. Mr. Daschle responded by saying he could bring more pork back home, but by blocking so much legislation he undercut his own credibility as a politician who could deliver. The men who really defeated Tom Daschle were Ted Kennedy, Chuck Schumer and the Filibuster Democrats, who also have other issues (see below).

Mr. Bush now has an opportunity to achieve much of what his opponents blocked in the first term. No doubt he will, and should, seek out coalitions of the willing among Democrats -- on Social Security private accounts, tort and tax reform, and creating a larger private health-care marketplace, among the other things he campaigned on. But we hope he and the GOP majorities on Capitol Hill don't flinch from large ambitions even if most Democrats rebuff their overtures. The center-right voters who just elected them are expecting progress on their priorities.

One of those is the federal courts, where voters sent a clear signal about the kind of judges they want. Referendums opposing gay marriage went 11 for 11 on Tuesday, winning even in Oregon where the 57% to 43% landslide was the smallest majority among the 11. This is not a message of intolerance toward gays; it is a rebuke to those liberals who insist that courts impose their values on venerable American institutions. Our guess is that the marriage referendums were partly responsible for driving pro-Bush turnout in Ohio, and for making the race as close as it was in Michigan.

Mr. Bush could send an early message here if Chief Justice William Rehnquist decides to retire soon due to illness. He could do worse than elevate Antonin Scalia to Chief Justice and nominate Miguel Estrada as an Associate Justice, even as a recess appointment if that becomes necessary. Mr. Estrada is a distinguished lawyer who had the support of enough Democrats to be confirmed for the federal bench but was filibustered by Mr. Daschle. Mr. Bush's voters do not want another David Souter.

What would an Estrada nomination mean?

And are those centrists who voted for Bush for national security reasons content with his radical agenda to curtail individual liberties?

Tom Friedman on Two Nations:

But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do - they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.

Is it a country that does not intrude into people's sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn't trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us - instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?

At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.

The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.

This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, "Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?" the Electoral College would have broken the exact same way.

I share Friedman's question. I've talked to a couple of "the wider war" Republicans in the past few days who insist Bush has no intentions to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade because a majority of Americans oppose overturning it. But all the evidence I see from the past two days leads me to wonder how it would be possible to get through the next four years without Roe v. Wade being overturned. Bush owes this election to the Christian evangelicals and that is surely one of their key values.

Two nations and under this leader, seeing how we can live together is shrinking. There are those of us who believe in real individual freedoms, and those who believe in imposing their religious beliefs on others.

Jockeying for positions in the next Bush cabinet. The NY Sun reports that Rumsfeld is staying, Rice to State, and talk of Wolfowitz for national security advisor:

Republican insiders expect that Secretary of State Powell, Attorney General Ashcroft, and the director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, will leave the administration in the near future. Meanwhile, administration officials tell The New York Sun that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has indicated to his senior staff that he plans to stick around for a second term.

"If Rummy is leaving, he showed no signs of it," an administration source said. "He has been assigning aides projects he wants completed in 2005." . . .

If the president decides to use his term to make his policy match his rhetoric of advancing freedom in the Middle East, he will be more likely inclined to promote those advisers most closely linked to the Iraq war and recently pilloried by Congressional Democrats for failing to plan for its aftermath.

While no decisions have been made, the latest speculation has the White House tapping former deputy attorney general Larry Thompson to take the job of Mr. Ashcroft. If Mr. Thompson becomes attorney general, he will be the first African American to hold the position. Governor Pataki has been mentioned to take over the Department of Homeland Security, filling the shoes of another moderate northeastern governor, Mr. Ridge. But this job also has its risks to ambitious politicians. If there is another terrorist attack on American soil, the man in charge of homeland security will likely be blamed.

Administration officials also say there is a strong possibility that the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, will become secretary of state once Mr. Powell leaves. Mr. Powell ruffled many feathers this summer when Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward published a book that had Mr. Powell complaining about how he was often shut out of major policy deliberations in the Bush administration.

Should Ms. Rice move to Foggy Bottom, the fiercest internal competition opens up for her old job. Among those names in circulation are the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the man largely credited as the intellectual architect of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an early candidate in 2001 for the slot of deputy secretary of state and a skeptic of international agreements with rogue states. Also in the running in this scenario is senior National Security Council director, Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who is credited with drafting the strategy to marginalize Ahmad Chalabi from the interim government in Baghdad.

The advantage of the national security adviser post is that it does not require congressional confirmation. In this respect, it is ideal for controversial figures such as Mr. Bolton and Mr. Wolfowitz, who have come under heavy fire from democrats on Capitol Hill for their alleged manipulation of pre-war Iraq intelligence.

The president, however, has also been counseled by allies to embrace the international community in his second term. . . If Mr. Bush is to heed the advice of the foreign leader most supportive of the Iraq war, Mr. Blackwill, or the deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, would likely emerge as frontrunners to run the National Security Council.

Ms. Pletka cautioned the administration's critics though from assuming that a second Bush administration would reverse those policies the president has championed in the campaign.

"There are a lot of people who have suggested the second Bush administration foreign policy would be a departure from the first," she said. "One thing we learned in this campaign is that President Bush ran on his foreign policy record, he did not run away from Iraq, his war on terror or his approach to Iran and North Korea. So I think you should expect continuity because that is where his mandate is."

I think Wolfowitz as national security advisor may be farfetched, but that's based on pure speculation. But otherwise, I absolutely agree that Bush's second term foreign policy is likely to remain every bit as neocon-driven as the first. [Those like Greg Djerejian who said otherwise are, I believe, misinformed.]

Update: Here's the NYT/IHT take.

What the **** is happening in Darfur? What, when the US was voting, Sudanese government troops attacked a refugee camp? Is there any humanitarian leadership to be found in the world, any at all? None in Washington, to be sure.

Hungary is pulling its troops out of Iraq.

What happened in Florida? The AP is reporting that rural voters and older voters pushed Bush over the line:

President Bush's victory in the Sunshine State provided ample breathing room compared to 2000, helped by triumphs in key counties in central Florida, the flexing of Republican power in rural counties and by pulling even with U.S. Sen. John Kerry among women.

Voters in all three of the categories ranked Bush's key issues of terrorism and moral values as their top concerns, turning to him by wide margins, an Associated Press exit poll found. Voters between the ages of 45 to 59, who comprised about three in 10 voters, backed the president with considerable force in a decisive win.

"We beat them by margins that we never thought possible," said former state GOP chairman Al Cardenas, a co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida.

Bush captured about 52 percent of the vote compared with Kerry's 47 percent, defeating him by about 375,000 votes. It was a marked turnaround from 2000, when Bush eked out a controversial 537-vote win against Democrat Al Gore in a race that wasn't decided until a Supreme Court ruling halted a 36-day recount.

In central Florida, rich with unaligned and independent voters, Bush carried several counties won by Gore - Hernando, Pasco and Osceola - while reducing the Democrats' winning margins in Volusia and Pinellas counties. For the second straight election, the president carried Hillsborough County in the Tampa Bay area, the nexus of intense political advertising.

Moral values and terrorism issues attracted Bush to Florida swing voters, older voters and new voters registered in the state:

Bush beat Kerry 54 percent to 44 percent in central Florida, where both campaigns heavily courted the region's mass of swing voters, the exit poll found. Bush also had an edge with Florida's Hispanics, a growing presence in the area. Hispanics supported Kerry more on the national level and were split between Bush and Gore in 2000 in the state.

Bush's strength along the Interstate 4 corridor was due in part to issues - terrorism and moral values were the top concerns of about half the voters in the area, home to more than a third of the 1.5 million new voters who registered since 2000. Bush won overwhelmingly on those two issues.

Among voters age 45 to 59, Bush trounced Kerry 57 percent to 42 percent, a group which split evenly between Bush and Gore. Terrorism and moral values were the top issues for about half of that age group.

Kerry's strong areas of Iraq and the economy and jobs were only chosen by about a third of voters as the most important issues, according to polls of 2,862 voters conducted for the AP and television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.

The Jewish Vote. Haaretz reports that Kerry won 78% of the Jewish vote:

Democratic presidential challenger Senator John Kerry secured an overwhelming 78 percent of Jewish votes in Tuesday's presidential election - just two percent less than the Jewish vote Al Gore received four years ago. . .

The amount is an improvement over the 19 percent Bush received in the 2000 elections, indicating his improved standing among the Jewish electorate.

The statistics on voting patterns, which were broadcast on CNN late on election night, are based on unconfirmed results made available to senior Jewish activists in New York. . .

"The support for Israel that President Bush demonstrated during his first term was unrelated to the extent of support for him in the Jewish public, or to a desire to increase the extent of Jewish support in the current elections," Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman said Wednesday. "Bush backed Israel because of mutual values and overlapping interests."

For that reason, Foxman maintains, "there is no reason to fear that because of the low rate of Jewish support for his candidacy, the president will change his pro-Israel policy in his second term."

ADL experts who examined the lists of major donors to the Bush campaign found that Jewish donations were higher than donations made in previous Republican campaigns.

After a brief rally, Arafat's health has taken a turn for the worse. Haaretz reports that he is in intensive care:

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Wednesday that officials were closely monitoring Arafat's health, following criticism last week when they were caught off guard by the sudden change in his health.

"We are tracking his condition very carefully," he told Israel Radio. "Our aim is to prepare for the day after, if he dies."

I agree with Matt Yglesias here that Heather Hurlburt's article on why the Democrats can't think straight on national security is one of the great pieces of political journalism and well worth another read. But I am not sure I agree with Matt that security was the key issue dividing Republican and Democratic voters this election. It was [and I am already tired of the phrase] moral values. Sure some people were voting for the status quo on the war on terror. But yesterday's results reflect even more the South and the Midwest, voting against gay marriage. The people in the actual places hit on 9/11 -- New York and Washington, D.C. -- voted overwhelmingly for Kerry and have huge mistrust of Bush's national security policy. We need a Dem with real appeal to the South and Midwest, such as Clinton had and has, who can combine authentic appeal to religious voters and tolerance. Barack Obama is clearly a leading future candidate with that sort of appeal, for the Midwest [whether for the South, I don't understand the social dynamics there enough to say].

Who will stay, who will go? Powell and Armitage will leave. Will Rice take over State? Danforth? Wolfowitz? Would Bush reach out and give it to a moderate Republican, esp. now that the Republicans have made gains in the Senate, someone like Lugar? Will Rumsfeld stay? Will Blackwill take over NSC, or Hadley?

Slate's Fred Kaplan asks if Bush will learn from first term mistakes and get rid of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. I doubt he will get replace any of them, unless Rumsfeld or Feith decide to leave on their own after a year or so.

My predictions? Rice to State.* Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to stay put for now as is at Defense. Hadley or Blackwill to head the NSC. Ashcroft to stay. Perhaps a moderate Republican -- or even a Democrat [Evan Bayh?] -- for HHS or DHS. I think the neoconservatives will have a foreign policy mandate, constrained however by lack of troops and a lack of allies willing to contribute troops.

*I forgot: Bolton will become deputy secretary of State. And I am starting to have second thoughts. Perhaps Danforth at State and Rice -- does a Karen Hughes and really gets out. Danforth would have appeal for the base...

This is a bit rich coming from someone who has a significant gambling addiction. Next up: marital advice from Newt Gingrich?

Reflecting many of the letters of heartbreak I am getting today, reader M writes:

I am pretty sure that the election turned on the gay-baiting tactics of the right wing. I have read some articles to that effect, and I've been reading comments of that sort on blogs. This is truly a terrible turn for this country. I just can't fathom how large the threat of gay marriage looms in the eyes of the Christian right wing. The only response I can see is to use the technique of mirroring. We need to shine the light on the prejudice that re-elected Bush, and ask people why the "threat" of gays was worse than any of the truly serious issues facing the country.

Framing the election as having turned on gay marriage is important. For the first time in my life, I have some fear that my personal safety and my civil rights
may be in jeopardy because of my government, and it's not a pleasant feeling.

Please, please shine the light on the ugliness. It's the only way to fight right now.

Absolutely. Let me say, I share M's and many other readers' disappointment and dismay at the intolerance demonstrated by the poll results.

But I truly believe in my heart of hearts that at some point not far off, our country will be represented by someone who reflects the very best qualities of Americans -- tolerance, idealism, hope -- someone like Barack Obama.

Keep your head up.

Kerry to concede at 1pm.

We are going through the seven stages of mourning here pretty rapidly. Last night was anger and denial, disbelief, grief, today we may be moving to some sort of dawning acceptance: our country is far more conservative than me and my friends. But there's a lot of us moderates and liberals and progressives too, and we're ghettoized on the coasts and upper midwest. So what's the answer? Exile or fight it? How about some sort of loose federation, a la the Kurds? Can we have our own foreign policy?

My mother in law in Boston reports there are planes at Logan airport in Boston heading for Ohio.

Update: A friend up with an advisor to the Kerry campaign in Boston blackberries that it's over. No chance to query whether there will be a fight over Ohio.

2:30am update: John Edwards vowing they will "fight for every vote."

More: Talked with a friend up in Boston as a staffer to an advisor to the Kerry campaign. She said that the atmosphere changed noticeably there not over Ohio but over Florida. She said about an hour after Florida was called, a lot of the big money donors just walked out of the room. That was it. Younger staffers are still there and I could hear music in the background and lawyers did fly to Ohio, but Florida may have been more decisive in the campaign's thinking than I have heard reported.

22% of the electorate voting today are evangelical Christians, Steve Waldman, the founder of Beliefnet is saying on NPR. Waldman: "For evangelical voters, they have a very emotional connection to President Bush, that goes beyond policy, to a sense that he is one of them, a sense that they have arrived in American culture because he is there, a connection and sense of empowerment that goes beyond the issues of gay marriage or abortion," etc.

Ohio. Kevin Drum says that CNN is reporting that there are 200,000 provisional ballots in Ohio. "So if anyone wins by less than 100,000 or so, we won't know the winner until the provisionals are counted." And that could take ten days.

Minnesota for Kerry. New Hampshire for Kerry. Salazar won in Colorado. But it looks like -- more than any one other issue -- the Iraq war and post-war, or the economy -- it was 'moral issues' like gay marriage that helped Rove put Bush close to the line in the US.

ABC calls Florida for Bush.

As of 11:30pm, Nick Confessore is hearing:

that John Kerry has run up huge numbers in Ohio that are not yet reflected in the count -- and that's why the Republicans are engaging in scorched-earth challenges at the eleventh hour. Florida looks worse for Kerry, but as far as I can tell the South Florida numbers are not reflected in the totals we're seeing on TV. Given early info on George W. Bush's poor returns among Hispanics, that might be crucial. We'll see.

Keep in mind, apropos of my earlier post, that the totals you see on TV do not include provisional votes -- and we don't know how many Democratic votes have been forced into the provisional rolls, as per the GOP strategy. Stay tuned.

Pennsylvania for Kerry. It looks like Florida may be headed to Bush and Ohio is apparently headed to the lawyers. How will this country ever unite again?

A long night. Kevin Drum meanwhile reports that exit polls show Kerry beating Bush 52% to 48% in Ohio.

Also based on exit polls, Drum reports Kerry is expected to win both Minnesota and Michigan. "Wisconsin and Florida are dead heats," he reports.

Andrew Sullivan reports, the youth vote doubled in this 2004 presidential race. Why is National Review's the Corner suggests there was no increase? And why are they happy if the turnout is not bigger? Bizarre.

Update: We were wrong. Kos reports that not only did the 18-29 year old voter bracket did not grow from 2000, but that "the 30-44 group was down."

The AP has a different take: While 18 to 24 year olds accounted for about one tenth of the total turnout -- same as 2000, overall turnout today was higher. In other words, the actual number of young people voting today did increase.

A thought as I saw that bans on gay marriage were passed in several states, including Ohio. Is this really people trying to ban gay people, per se? As a married person, I find it hard to understand how people feel like who someone else marries affects their own life. It seems like this speaks to something else.

Barack Obama will be only the third* African American to serve in the US Senate. Incredible. Congratulations, Senator Obama! Future presidential material if we're ever seen it.

*Third African American Senator since Reconstruction, fifth ever, according to this. [Thx to reader MH].

Via The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta, Zogby calls it (early) for Kerry. As of 5pm:
Electoral Votes:

Bush: 213

Kerry: 311

Too Close To Call: Nevada (5)

Too Close To Call: Colorado (9)

Early returns from The Nelson Report. As he suggests, take with caution, but looking good so far:

Subject: The Nelson Report 11/2 2 PM EXIT POLL NUMBERS...USE WITH CAUTION

TUES, NOV. 2, 2004...3:30 p.m.

1) 2 pm numbers from Voter News Service exit polling: TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF
SALT, OBVIOUSLY, KERRY WON'T WIN PA BY 20 POINTS BUT TRENDS SEEM TO BE ESTABLISHING THEMSELVES. THERE ARE OTHER NUMBERS, BUT THESE TRACK THE EARLIER NUMBERS.

Kerry totals are shown first.

Nationwide: 50-49

Ohio 52-48
Florida 52-48
Pennsylvania 60-40
New Hampshire 58-41
Arizona 44-55
Wisconsin 52-47
Minnesota 58-40
Michigan 51-48
New Mexico 50-49
Iowa 49-49
New Jersey 56-43
Virginia 49-50
Arizona 45-55
Colorado 41-58
Missouri 45-55
West Virginia 40-54
North Carolina 47-52
Louisiana 42-57

2) NOON NUMBERS FROM DEMOCRATIC SOURCES...BEAR IN MIND THAT DUE TO EARLY VOTING, ALL EXIT POLLS THIS YEAR WILL BE SOMETHING OF AN EXPERIMENT...WE WILL SEND ALONG NEW NUMBERS AS THEY COME IN...

Florida - 30 percent of state -- 53-47 for Kerry

Iowa 57 to 41 percent for Kerry (compared to about +6 margin in early vote
in 2000)

Oregon - early vote (which is the whole electorate) 53 to 47 percent for Kerry

New Mexico 51-48 for Kerry

Nevada 48 to 50 with Bush ahead

Thanks to my neighbor Jessica who sent these along. As she suggests, "Whatever prayers or incantations you are using, please continue...." And who said the Dems weren't religious??

U.S. Voters Wait for Hours to Cast Ballots for Kerry, Bush:

Voters around the country waited in line for hours for a chance to help select the next U.S. president, as independent election experts predicted a record turnout.

Thousands of observers, some independent, others working for the competing campaigns of President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, are monitoring the voting in such swing states as Florida and Ohio.

``We're in line for record numbers of voters, record numbers of people supervising the process, record numbers of people watching the process and record numbers of people concerned the result might not be what they hoped for,'' said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan electionline.org, which monitors voting reform.

Ohio Republican party spokesman Jason Mauk, sending an e- mail while in line in Columbus, said he had waited more than 2 1/2 hours to vote. In Cincinnati, Kerry voter Elizabeth Day waited an hour and a half with her two children. She said there was no line at her polling place at about the same time of day four years ago.

Voters streamed into East Hills Middle School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, casting 185 ballots by 8:40 a.m., a pace that poll workers said is unprecedented for the suburban district. Voters waited 40 minutes in a line that stretched to about 120 people at its longest.

In Palm Beach County, Florida, a Democratic stronghold, the wait was as long as an hour and a half. In Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, voters who arrived when the polls opened at 6 a.m. had to wait an hour

Heavy Turnout

Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, predicts that up to 121 million people will vote, compared with 105 million in 2000. That would make the 2004 turnout the highest percentage of eligible voters to cast ballots since 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. The 2000 turnout was the largest-ever number of voters...

There does seem to be unusually high voter turnout, despite predictions (wishful thinking?) over at the Corner that the turnout is likely to be the same as always.

The Village Voice's Rick Perlstein has a new blog, Operation Eagle Eye, devoted to reporting on voter suppression and shenanigans.

Here's Ohio Voter Suppression News (speaks for itself, I guess).

The Washington Monthly's Paul Glastris has more.

Comments on voter lines, and what you see today here.

"Kerry Leads in 4 Pivotal States, Bush Ahead in 2," Zogby Says:

Senator John Kerry leads President George W. Bush in four of 10 states that both campaigns agree may tip today's election and Bush is ahead in two, Reuters/Zogby polls show. The candidates are tied in the other four.

Kerry, the four-term Massachusetts senator, leads in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, which together have 44 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. Bush leads in Nevada and Ohio, which have 25 electoral votes.

The candidates are statistically even in Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, which together have 62 electoral votes. Zogby surveyed about 600 likely voters in each of the 10 states Oct. 29 to Nov. 1. The state polls each have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

Nationally, the candidates were statistically even, with Bush backed by 48 percent to Kerry's 47 percent, in a Zogby poll of 1,208 likely voters Oct. 29-31 released yesterday. This poll's margin of error is 2.9 percentage points.

The state-by-state electoral tally, not the nationwide popular vote, determines the winner. The electoral votes are apportioned among states based on congressional representation.

Kerry leads in Iowa by 50 percent to 45 percent, in Michigan by 52 percent to 46 percent, and in Wisconsin by 51 percent to 45 percent. He also led in those states yesterday. In Minnesota, where the candidates were statistically tied yesterday, Kerry now leads 51 percent to 45 percent.

New NAACP report on GOP voter suppression efforts against minority voters in America, here:

In the last two weeks leading up to the election, a clear pattern has emerged across the country. Republican Party officials in several states have launched twin initiatives. First, the Party mailed out hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of letters to new and existing voters, and is making last-minute challenges to voter eligibility before Election Day on the basis of returned mail. Second, the Party is placing extraordinary numbers of poll challengers at the polls to challenge individual voters on Election Day as they attempt to cast their ballots.

The first initiative is a strategy that has long been employed by the Party on the state and national level. These initiatives, undertaken in the name of “ballot security” or “ballot integrity,” have resulted in three court decrees, in which the party has been forced to agree that it will no longer base its challenges of voters on race, a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In each of the past court cases, the decrees came long after the election, far too late to help voters who were disenfranchised. This year, the strategy has been reported in Ohio and Wisconsin, and may be underway in other states.

The second is an initiative that uses various state laws permitting vote challenges by partisan poll watchers stationed inside the polls, or by individual electors or voters. Huge numbers of such partisan poll watchers have been registered where prior registration is required, including Florida and Ohio . . .

Voter Intimidation/Suppression

There are a discouraging number of incidents where actions taken by individuals, political party organizations, or elected officials are clearly intended to intimidate, misinform, confuse, hamper or otherwise discourage potential voters from casting a ballot.

· In Lake County, Ohio, a fake letter appearing to come from the Lake County Board of Elections was sent to newly registered voters. The letter said voter registrations gathered by the Kerry or Capri Cafaro campaigns or the NAACP are illegal and those voters will not be able to vote. The incident is being investigated by the Sheriff, who says “It will be a federal offense because you have interfered with the constitutionally protected right to vote.”

· Dolores Cuellar, a first time voter in the Orlando area, received a visit from a woman with a clipboard, asking how she was going to vote. Cuellar said, “Not Bush. The other one.” The woman said that Cuellar didn’t need to bother to go to the polls, that her vote had been recorded on the clipboard and that she could record Cuellar’s daughter’s vote, as well. When Cuellar told her daughter about the visit, her daughter became suspicious and contacted county election officials.

The week before the election, flyers were circulated in Milwaukee under the heading “Milwaukee Black Voters League” with some “warnings for election time.” The false information on the flyer included warnings that anyone who had already voted this year cannot vote in the presidential election; that anyone convicted of any offense, however minor, is ineligible to vote; that any family member having been convicted of anything would disqualify a voter; and that any violation of these warnings would result in ten years in prison and a voter’s children being taken away.

· In Columbia, South Carolina, a fake letter purportedly coming from the NAACP made similar claims, saying that voters with any outstanding parking tickets or unpaid child support will be arrested. The letter also says voters must provide a credit check, two forms of photo ID, a Social Security card, a registration card and a handwriting sample.

· A flyer designed to look like an official announcement from McCandless Township in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, was designed to misinform voters on a partisan basis. The flyer claimed that “Due to the immense voter turnout that is expected on Tuesday, November 2 the state of Pennsylvania has requested an extended voting period.” The flyer claims that voters will be able to vote on both November 2 and November 3 and says that, in “an attempt to limit voter conflict,” Allegheny County is requesting that Republicans vote on November 2 and Democrats on November 3.

· A flyer being distributed in Jefferson County, Alabama simply gave out the wrong date for voting. “Attention: Jefferson County!!!!! See You At The Poles [sic] November 4, 2004.

· In Florida, the St Petersburg Times reported, “Across Florida, elections officials say voters are being approached by individuals misrepresenting themselves and offering misleading or inaccurate information about voting.” The paper reported on incidents of people coming to voters’ homes and telling them their vote could be recorded by the canvasser and they didn’t have to vote, that people were asking voters at an early voting center whether they had been arrested or had outstanding parking tickets or any debt.

· In Florida, Haitian voters were challenged at the polls by individuals who allegedly identified themselves as “Republican lawyers” who tried to prevent volunteers from assisting Creole-speaking voters. Democratic activists have accused Republican observers of demanding that volunteers speak English when assisting Creole-speaking voters. Though the ballot questions are printed in Creole, some voters are illiterate and are turning to volunteers for assistance. Republicans have alleged that some of the Democratic volunteers have been threatening voters not to vote for President Bush.

· In Atkinson, County, Georgia, almost 100 Hispanic residents apparently identified by having a Hispanic surname received notice that their registrations were challenged on the basis of citizenship and that they had to appear before hearings on October 28. The challenges were rejected by the County Board of Registrars on October 28 for lack of evidence and over concerns that the challenges could be violations of the Voting Rights Act.

· A caller to the Election Protection voter hotline from Bell County, Texas reported that when she went to vote early she was not allowed to fill out the entire ballot, but was told to write her party and the machine would do the rest. She asked other voters leaving the polling place and determined that white voters were allowed to fill out the whole ballot and black voters were told the machine would fill out the rest for them.

· In Ohio, the state Republican Party has registered thousands of people to serve as partisan “vote challengers” and said they would challenge up to 35,000 voters, a plan that could create confusion and congestion at polling places, discouraging even more voters from attempting to vote. They have been assisted by rulings by Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to maximize the number of partisan challengers allowed in polling places and create confusion and chaos at the polls that could drive potential voters away. At the last minute, Blackwell shifted gears and asked the state attorney general to seek a court order barring the challengers, but the attorney general refused. A federal appeals court quickly rejected the Ohio Republican Party’s attempts to force thousands of newly registered voters to attend hearings and prove that they are eligible to vote. On November 1, a federal judge barred political party challengers from polling places throughout Ohio; state Republicans said they would appeal to the Sixth Circuit.

· In Arizona, a Fox Network affiliate accused a student group of illegally registering voters. A women’s studies group at the University of Arizona was conducting a voter registration drive on campus when a reporter and film crew showed up to film the event. The reporter accused the students of participating in felony voter fraud, claiming that Arizona law prohibits students from out of state from registering in Arizona. Though students attempted to explain that Arizona law requires only that those registering be residents of the state 29 days before the election, the reporter remained unconvinced. That evening’s broadcast included an interview with an official from the County Registrar’s office that echoed the reporter’s charges.

· In Arizona, a local anti-immigrant activist turned his attention to the voting booth and created a furor over possible voter intimidation as a result of his activities. Local officials and civil rights groups alike became concerned after Russ Dove became “bent on discovering” how many “illegal immigrants” were voting. During the September 7 primary election, Dove visited five polling places wearing a black shirt with the words “U.S. CONSTITUTION ENFORCEMENT” on the back and the image of a badge on the front. Dove also wore a tool belt that carried tools, a camera and a video recorder.

Dove runs a web site called Truth in Action and has been an active supporter of Proposition 200, a ballot initiative that would, among other things, require that voters prove their citizenship at the voting booth. He began his current efforts after campaigning door-to-door for the initiative and hearing “verbal evidence from individuals on the street who said, ‘Yes, illegal immigrants are voting.’”

Dove says that more people want to help him monitor the polls in November and that the “only people we will bother are people who are in violation of the law.” He elaborates by saying that, for example, if he sees “a busload of Hispanic individuals who didn't speak English and who voted,” he plans to follow that bus to make sure they aren't voting more than once. Following the September primary, Pima County Election Director Brad Nelson said that it appeared that Dove had violated laws limiting activities near polling places and that he planned to contact him and tell him to “basically stop it.”

· In New Mexico in September 2004, Republican U.S. Attorney David Iglesias formed a task force—involving the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and the secretary of state's office —to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the run up to the election. The move came at the request of the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign for Bernalillo County, who claims that thousands of voter registration forms from Democratic-leaning groups are suspect. Civil rights advocates argue that by starting the investigation mere weeks before the presidential election, Iglesias runs the risk of intimidating legitimate voters. These concerns are echoed by the Justice Department's own manual on election crime, which states that "Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful to not conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period" so as to avoid "chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities." Other battleground states, including Ohio and West Virginia have initiated similar criminal investigations into voter fraud as part U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft "Voting Access and Integrity Initiative."

· In Alamance County, North Carolina, the sheriff directed his deputies to single out Latino voters in a voter fraud investigation. Sheriff Terry Johnson sent a “sample list” of 125 Latino registered voters to the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said that the agency could only confirm that 38 were in the country legally. He told county commissioners that illegal immigrants used false documents to obtain drivers licenses and, at the same time, registered to vote. The director of a local group serving the Latino community expressed concern: “The sheriff has asked for a list of those who have Hispanic last names and then he is assuming that group is committing fraud. If the people in that list are citizens and they are being investigated, that is worrisome.”

· Controversy has erupted over the use in the Orlando area of armed, plainclothes officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to question elderly black voters in their homes. The incidents were part of a state investigation of voting irregularities in the city's March 2003 mayoral election. Critics have charged that the tactics used by the FDLE have intimidated black voters, which could suppress their turnout in this year’s elections. Six members of Congress recently called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate potential civil rights violations in the matter.

· In Kentucky, the Jefferson County Republican Party announced plans to place vote challengers in predominantly Democratic and African-American precincts for the second year running, raising concerns of voter intimidation. "The threat of challengers being placed in African-American and white districts is a form of intimidation of voters," said Raoul Cunningham of the Non-Partisan Coalition for Civil Rights. A group of black Republicans called on Jefferson County GOP Chairman Jack Richardson to resign over the challenger plan, calling it "rogue and racist behavior." Although dismissing calls for resignation, Richardson appeared to soften his stance on vote challengers, stating that he would only use them if they were necessary to insure a fair election. Still, Richardson remains a source of controversy. In July, his office distributed bumper stickers that read, "Kerry is Bin Laden's man/President Bush is mine."

· In preparation for the November elections, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett requested 938,000 ballots, arguing that extra were needed in case of spoiled ballots and noting that Wisconsin law allowing same-day voter registration makes turnout unpredictable. However, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker refused Barrett's request, voicing concerns of vote fraud and even going so far as to suggest that unruly voters might try to steal extra ballots from polling places. Walker offered Milwaukee 679,000 ballots, fewer than were distributed in either the 2000 presidential election or the 2002 gubernatorial race. Barrett and civil rights groups charged that Walker was attempting to suppress Milwaukee voters. The controversy was politically charged, as Walker is a state co-chair of President Bush's re-election campaign and Barrett is state co-chair of the John Kerry campaign.

Walker's decision sparked demonstrations from African-American residents concerned about disenfranchisement. African Americans make up nearly forty percent of Milwaukee's population. In addition, Wisconsin's governor, Democrat Jim Doyle cried foul: "I've personally never seen or heard anything like this…that anybody is somehow suggesting that we shouldn't have enough ballots for people." Doyle called for a state probe of Walker .

Ultimately, a compromised was reached. Milwaukee got all of the ballots originally requested, the cost of the additional ballots was split between the city and the county, and unused ballots will be returned to the County Election Commission to allay concerns of vote fraud.

· Minnesota's Secretary of State, Republican Mary Kiffmeyer, came under fire in September for distributing flyers that raise the specter of election-related terrorism. The flyers, which Kiffmeyer asked be displayed in polling places, urged voters to be wary of people appearing at precincts with "shaved head[s] or short hair" who "smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume," wear baggy clothing or appear to be whispering to themselves, as they might be "homicide bombers." Many local election officials refused to distribute the posters, arguing that they could trigger harassment of certain ethnic, racial, or religious groups. One state senator claimed that the warnings were "a Chicken Little attempt" to discourage voting. In addition, some raised concerns that the posters could "unnerve" poll workers. It appears that no other state has produced similar posters .

· State officials in Rhode Island distanced themselves from a list of Election Day security precautions suggested by a US Attorney. Among the suggestions were the use of bomb-sniffing dogs at polling places or directing additional scrutiny toward “higher value targets,” limiting the type of articles that could be brought into polling places and searching bags prior to entry. State officials said the suggestion were not practical because the state didn’t have the money to hire additional security or nearly enough dogs to protect the more than 500 polling places. While Rhode Island does have many more metal detectors than bomb-sniffing dogs, the use of metal detectors wasn’t even suggested. According to John Enright, director of counterterrorism for the US Attorney’s office in Providence, metal detectors weren’t suggested because that “would not be reasonable.” “[W]e aren't concerned about small weapons," Enright said. "You can't keep somebody with a gun out of a polling place.”

· Republican operatives in Pennsylvania working in support of President Bush failed in a last-minute bid to relocate 63 Philadelphia polling places, most of which are located in African-American neighborhoods. The Republicans argued that they had made the request in the interest of voter "comfort" and to make polls more accessible to disabled voters. However, some of the requests were clearly racially motivated. Matt Robb, the GOP leader in South Philadelphia's 48th ward, said that he pressed for changes because he felt uncomfortable going to a polling place in an African-American neighborhood. "It's predominantly, 100 percent black," said Robb, who is white. "I'm just not going in there to get a knife in my back." The voter registration administrator for Philadelphia's City Commission refused the GOP's request, arguing that it was designed to suppress voter turnout and that it had come too soon before the election to be considered by the Commission. However, a successful effort by Republicans resulted in the last-minute relocation of 21 polling places in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The move is likely to confuse voters and suppress turnout in an area where citizens typically vote Democratic more that 60 percent of the time.

More here.

The party of Jim Crow.

Election Protection Hotline:
1-866-MYVOTE1 to report problems
1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) for immediate legal assistance

Remembering when other thugs recently tried to steal the vote -- and how the opposition prevailed:

By the September 24th [2000] election, independent groups had trained 30,000 volunteer election monitors assigned to some 10,000 polling places to prevent fraud. By midnight, independent tabulations showed that Kostunica had won.

When a desperate Milosevic demanded a runoff vote, a transparent ploy to buy the time needed to manipulate the official count, Kostunica called for a general strike. As more and more workers joined, and as Otpor mobilized to build road blockades, the country ceased to function. Ten days after the election, hundreds of thousands of Serbs - miners, farmers, men and women from all walks of life -- converged angrily on the capital, in convoys that clogged the highways in every direction. Police, with whom Otpor and the opposition had quietly worked for months, acknowledged their orders but refused to carry them out. On October 6th, Milosevic conceded defeat and stepped down. He was "finished" at last. In his victory speech, Kostunica declared, "We have answered their violence with nonviolence!"

On April 1, 2001 - April Fool's day - Milosevic was arrested. He was extradited to The Hague for trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. His trial began February 12, 2002.

And this and this.

David Brooks never really liked Bush after all. And I agree with the whole first half of his piece today:

As I look back over the course of this campaign, I should confess I've gone through several periods convinced I should vote against President Bush. I know I'm not the only conservative to think this way. I look at my favorite conservative bloggers and see many coming out for John Kerry. I talk to my friends at conservative think tanks and magazines and notice that they are deeply ambivalent about the administration, even those who would never vote for a Democrat.

Like all these folks, I look at the Bush administration with a mixture of admiration, frustration and anger.

I'm frustrated that Bush didn't build the governing majority that was there for the taking. He came to power with good ideas on how to move the G.O.P. beyond the Gingrich stall. But time and again, he abandoned his reformist strategy to give spoils to the G.O.P. donor base.

To take one small example: on environmental policy, he showed interest in moving to a flexible, market-based system that would have cleaned the environment better than the current system. But too often rules were written to please key industries. Voters who could have been turned on by new, effective approaches were instead appalled at unseemly self-dealing.

I'm exasperated at the Bush communications strategy. His advisers came in with one rule: no concessions to elite opinion. They decided not to be open on how they make decisions. They would never admit mistakes. They would not fully engage with Washington or even with Republicans on Capitol Hill. In so doing, they pushed away many who could have helped them - most important, pro-war Democrats. They fed the misconception that this is an administration that does not deliberate. They further polarized the political climate, in ways that only make it more difficult to get anything done.

I'm angry at the decision not to send enough troops into Iraq. The history of the 1990's suggested that when societies are transformed, establishing law and order is the most important thing. Yet that lesson was ignored. People from the center to the right were screaming for more boots on the ground, but the administration never performed the elementary task of statecraft: matching the tools at your disposal to the goals you hope to pursue.

There are moments when I think, These are exactly the sorts of mistakes that administrations should be thrown out of office for.

So on domestic policy, ideological blindness, troop strength, his record of environmental disaster, hatred of the press and communications policy, Bush is a dangerously divisive ideologue, and a loser. Agreed. I don't agree with the second half of his piece.

The party of Jim Crow. This from the NY Sun, the Bush appointed head of the Election Assistance Commission says he has hard evidence the GOP is trying to prevent African Americans from voting in Florida:

In an interview last night with The New York Sun, DeForest Soaries Jr. said: "As long as national leaders are willing to engage in vitriolic discourse, their followers on the ground are being motivated to irrational behavior. You can be passionate and be civil. But it's uncivil to lie, uncivil to defraud, and uncivil to suppress. Are there orders from Washington to do it? No. But the mean spirits in politics today give tacit approval to this outlaw behavior."

Mr. Soaries is the chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, a four-person committee created in October 2002 by legislation meant to correct in future elections the irregularities in the 2000 presidential race.

As such, one of the commission's responsibilities is to be a watchdog for fraud and suppression of votes this year in the presidential election.

While Mr. Soaries is a Republican and was appointed by President Bush, he told the Sun there were credible reports of both voter suppression, a charge leveled in the last month by Democrats, and voter fraud, the countercharge from Republicans.

Mr. Soaries spoke with the Sun yesterday from Florida, where he had just completed meetings with officials of the state's NAACP.

He said he had in his pocket a phony flier distributed in a black neighborhood in Volusia County directing voters to the wrong address for polling stations, giving the contact information for the local NAACP.

"I know it happened. Law enforcement and election officials need to get to the bottom of it. It's an aberration. It's not the norm. But this needs to be taken seriously," he said.

Mr. Soaries also said, "There have been instances where voter registration forms have been submitted for people who do not exist and who do exist and are already registered to vote in other places."

Let's turn these thugs out of office and get some democracy going here. I was in Serbia when Milosevic tried the same stuff - and when the pro-democracy forces were able to defeat the dictator even with all his intimidation efforts. We can do the same thing here. Go vote!

Here's more to get your blood boiling while you wait in line:

Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported on a letter that falsely purported to be from the South Carolina NAACP to black voters, saying they couldn't vote if they owed more than $50 in parking tickets.

Voters in New Jersey received recorded phone calls Monday purporting to be from a Gulf War hero, General Norman Schwarzkopf, endorsing Senator Kerry, when Mr. Schwarzkopf has endorsed Mr. Bush.

Voters in Michigan received recorded phone calls saying Mr. Kerry favors gay marriage, an arrangement the Democratic presidential nominee opposes.

In Ohio, the Portsmouth Daily Times reported Sunday that a man in a mask barged into a Republican call center in Scioto County and let a skunk out of a pillowcase.

"Anybody breaking the law should be prosecuted," the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, Tony Welch, told the Sun yesterday. Mr. Welch declined to respond to charges that groups with Democratic affiliations were registering phony voters, or that national labor unions sympathetic to the party were vandalizing Republican headquarters. "We're not going to get into a back and forth with the Republican Party," Mr. Welch said.

You can send names and photos of those thugs trying to intimidate voters here.

And know your rights.

If anyone challenges your right to vote:
Talk to the Voting Rights attorney at your polling place.
Ask for the name of the person who is denying you the right to vote and write it down.
Ask to talk to a supervisor and lodge a complaint.

Election Protection Hotline:
1-866-MYVOTE1 to report problems
1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683) for immediate legal assistance

Atrios notes an encouraging shift in pundit expectations.

Just what the 9/11 commission did not recommend -- more CYA mentality over at the CIA. In case you had any doubt, Bush's new spy chief is a major league demonstrated wuss. This from the NYT:

The director of central intelligence has asked the C.I.A.'s inspector general to modify a draft report on the Sept. 11 attacks to avoid drawing conclusions about whether individual C.I.A. officers should be held accountable for any failures, Congressional and intelligence officials said Monday.

The request by Porter J. Goss, the intelligence chief, would affect an 800-page report that is the result of nearly two years of work. Congressional officials said they were reviewing Mr. Goss's request, spelled out in an Oct. 27 memorandum to the inspector general, John Helgerson, to determine whether it was consistent with a request by the joint Congressional committee that looked into the Sept. 11 attacks. . .

Mr. Helgerson's draft report is widely understood to identify officers and officials who should be considered for discipline because of breakdowns in the collection, analysis and distribution of intelligence before the attacks. . .

Goss' time at the agency increasingly looks set to be cut short. Perhaps he can still get a memoir out of it.

Tenet's book should be quite interesting....

Some prominent Republicans cancelling their elections night parties....Apparently, the sense is that Bush does not have it.

National Review's The Corner reflecting that GOP anxiety:

CLIFF [Ramesh Ponnuru]
I've been taking your second piece of advice, but I think I'm going to have to start on the first one, too.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Electoral College Meta-Analysis from Princeton's Prof. Sam Wong:

Monday, November 1, 2004 at 12:00PM noon Eastern time...

Predicted median with undecideds: Kerry 280 EV, Bush 258 EV (probability map)

Electoral prediction with undecideds and turnout: Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV (probability map)

Popular vote prediction with undecideds and turnout: Kerry 50%, Bush 48%, Nader/other 2%

Proof that even al-Tawhid & al-Jihad has been infiltrated by the Zionists. [sixth photo down]. [Stolen verbatim from reader SC.]

Who's Afraid of IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei?

FDA Withholding Flu Docs?

This from TNR's Jonathan Cohn:

IS THE FDA WITHHOLDING DOCUMENTS?: In [Friday's] Wall Street Journal "Washington Wire," a Bush political advisor confesses that political fallout from the flu shot shortage "scares" him. So maybe that explains the administration's recent behavior regarding the flu vaccine shortage.

If you've followed this issue, then you know that one key question is why the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which guards the vaccine supply, reacted so slowly to this summer's warnings of problems in the British vaccine plant, which was supposed to produce half the entire U.S. supply, when British regulators knew enough to inspect the plant immediately (which eventually led to the discovery of contamination that shut the plant down) and begin buying up extra supplies on the world market. And given that the Bush administration has spent much of the last few years defanging the FDA, it's fair to ask whether some of its appointees--or policies they put in place--were responsible for slowing the agency's response.

The surest way to know would be to see internal FDA documents, including last year's inspection report from the British plant documenting past inspections and the plan's history of problems. And in a joint request, the ranking majority and minority members of the House Government Reform Committee--Tom Davis and Henry Waxman, respectively--requested those documents about two weeks ago. The FDA responded by saying it needed more time, given that its staff was preoccupied finding extra vaccines to make up for the shortage.

But now Waxman says he's heard from a confidential source within the FDA that it's a lie, alleging the following in a letter to FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford:

"I received a confidential communiction from inside your agency that the FDA Center for Biologics sent a set of responsive documents to your office prior to the letter of October 22. According to this communication, you or someone working for you made a decision not to release these documents to Congress until after the election. I was also informed that FDA has decided not to release these or other documents to the media under the Freedom of Information Act prior to the election. According to the communication I received, e-mails within FDA can confirm the transfer of documents to your office."

In response, HHS spokesman Bill Pierce has called Waxman "a political hatchet man" for exploiting the vaccine issue for partisan gain. And Waxman, certainly, is a partisan Democrat. On the other hand, today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports some curious activity from the administration, as well. Earlier this week, it seems, HHS organized a "flu education tour" that is taking the surgeon general, the FDA commissioner, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), plus some other public health officials to cities in the big midwest battleground states--Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio, plus Pennsylvania and Florida. The Journal-Constitution said it heard about the tour from somebody within the CDC worried that the agency's director, Julie Gerberding, was riding a bus around the countryside in the middle of the crisis.

Update: Barbara Dreyfuss has much more on this at The American Prospect:

Over the past four years, the agency has been largely taken over by free-market ideologues and officials with close ties to regulated industry. Key Bush administration appointees at the FDA include acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, who worked for the food manufacturers; an assistant legislative commissioner who worked for the biotechnology industry; and an acting deputy commissioner of policy who worked for the chemical industry. But perhaps most important in bringing the FDA into a cozy relationship with the drug industry has been its chief counsel, Daniel Troy.

With Troy's appointment, the agency's top legal post went -- for the first time in decades -- from being run by a civil servant to being run by a political appointee. Troy, a staunch free-market ideologue and a leading member of the Federalist Society, clerked for one of the nation's most conservative judges, Robert Bork. In the 1990s, before coming to the FDA, Troy represented a major tobacco company, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., and helped win a Supreme Court ruling against FDA oversight of tobacco. He also did legal work for Pfizer and filed legal briefs against FDA oversight of drugmakers' off-label marketing of medicines. With the FDA operating under an acting commissioner during much of Bush's tenure, Troy has wielded enormous power.

Under his guidance, the FDA has filed legal briefs asking courts to side with drugmakers and device manufacturers against plaintiffs. . .