Very interesting joint Mother Jones, Frontline, Center for Investigative Journalism investigative article by Mark Shapiro on the Hungarian-born Israeli-South African businessman, Asher Karni, recently arrested in Colorado for nuclear smuggling. Karni has been jailed in Brooklyn after a sting found him to have been selling export-controlled US-made trigger spark gaps with false end user certificates to a supplier of Pakistan's nuclear program. One mystery -- who was the tipster who informed on Karni's arrangements with the Pakistani buyer, Humayun Khan, to the US Commerce Department? More on Karni in a Sunday post. (Thanks to Nick S. for the link). Late Thursday Update: More on why Bush would sell Pakistan F-16s from Juan Cole.

RIP, Terri Schiavo.

Ha'aretz on Bibi Netanyahu "breaking to the right":

He did not succeed in bringing down Sharon through a referendum, and now he is coming out against the entire disengagement plan...

Netanyahu says there is no partner on the other side, but based on the conditions he is setting, there never will be.

The writer, Nehemia Strasler, comes out against Netanyahu's evident ambition to be the next Israeli prime minister:

Netanyahu is not suited to a people that wishes to arrive at a solution with the other side. He is not suited to a people that wants to invest in the Negev and Galilee, and not in Gaza and the West Bank. He is not suited to a people that wishes to reduce unemployment and fight poverty - and no longer invest in bypass roads and army bases. He is not suited to be prime minister.

A friend recently back from Israel reports that Israeli officials believe the biggest threat facing the country currently comes not from Palestinian terror, but the Israeli far-right.

The Guardian's Martin Jacques on the neocon revolution:

There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November's presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace.

New must-read blog. A great thing has happened. Two of the smartest and most articulate Democratic national security thinkers I know, Heather Hurlburt and Lorelei Kelly, have started blogging, at Democracy Arsenal, with a team of top-drawer like-minded national security experts. Hurlburt, a former presidential speech writer, wrote the best article the Washington Monthly has seen a few years back, and Kelly is an expert on peace and security issues on the Hill and at the Stimson Center. They are blogging as part of a team that includes former staffers to Richard Holbrooke and John Edwards. Check them out! (Thanks to Praktike, whose blog you should also be reading, for the heads up).

MoDo on the tragi-comedy of the WMD panel's findings:

The hawks don't want to learn any lessons here. If they had to do it again, they'd do it the same way. The imaginary weapons and Osama link were just a marketing tool and shiny distraction, something to keep the public from crying while they went to war for reasons unrelated to any nuclear threat...

Like "Melinda and Melinda," the other side of this wacky saga is deadly serious. There are, after all, more than 1,500 dead American soldiers, Al Qaeda terrorists on the loose and real nuclear-bomb programs in Iran and North Korea that we know nothing about. No laughs there.

Here's the .pdf of the WMD panel report.

This theory, again? Corriere della Serra reports today that Stasi files purport to show that the KGB ordered the 1981 attempted assassination of the pope. Italy's Mitrokhin commission dredged it up. (Ever wonder why Foucault's Pendulum was written by an Italian?)

Tonight's Nightline will feature Azar Nafisi, author of the hugely successful (and highly recommended) Reading Lolita in Tehran, and reportedly among a group of people thinking about opportunities for democratizing Iran. (Thanks to DP for the link.) Thursday Update: There was something just a bit elegiac and valedictory about the press release above, reminiscing as it did about Nightline's beginnings 25 years ago covering the Iran hostage crisis. As everybody has now reported, its host Ted Koppel announced today he is leaving the show, along with his producer. Sad as that is, who watches TV news anymore?

This interview with the Pakistani ambassador to Washington, Jehangir Karamat, was mentioned a few times at an event I went to this morning. Karamat's verdict? "Pakistan's ambassador said yesterday the U.S. push for democracy is forcing countries around the world to re-examine their governmental and human rights practices and that Pakistan too will be strongly affected," the Washington Times' Sharon Behn reports. Could it be the F-16s talking? Perhaps. There was also a big caveat: no need for too much democracy, mind you:

Even with growing international pressure to become more democratic, Mr. Karamat said Mr. Musharraf's decision to remain both as head of the military and the president was necessary to maintain stability in Pakistan.

"That gives him enough power ... to be able to take some of the very difficult decisions as we move" toward parliamentary elections in 2007. "I tend to see that as a sort of watershed in our move toward democracy," he said.

Wonder what those very difficult decisions might be. More from Slate's Fred Kaplan.

"Kofi Annan cleared in corruption probe," all the dailies report. Update: A reader writes in to say, "(The report) found no evidence that Kofi knew about the Cotecna contract before the bidding process. Everything else from his former chief of staff shredding documents, to the failure to report the corruption to the proper oversight panels, implicates Annan." It does seem to implicate Annan's former chief of staff Iqbal Riza in ordering destroyed his own computer copies of relevant documents on the first three years' work of oil-for-food the day after the Volcker commission's formation was announced (although other copies of the relevant documents were available elsewhere), and to have found Annan's son guilty of deception and conflict of interest regarding his Cotecna work.

Journalists accompany Khatami to Natanz.

More on Curveball from the WMD panel, in a report from Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay and John Wolcott. The WaPo reports that the panel is recommending that more dissenting viewpoints be built into US intelligence estimates.

Writing in the NY Times, journalist Elinor Burkett explains why Kyrgyzstan's recent revolution is less velvet, and less hopeful, than other recent ones witnessed in other former Soviet republics. More from Greg Djerejian.

Commission on Redundant Commissions. Did we really need a new commission to tell us this? More intelligence sharing and the CIA screwed up on Iraq pre-war intelligence? Thanks, WMD panel. Next? Meantime, the Senate Intel committee has defaulted on its promise to release the findings of its investigation of administration influence on those faulty pre-war intel estimates. Update: A reader writes, regarding the above:

Why on earth did you not take the next step?

Without the political angle - and without the threat of formal future study of the political angle - the WMD commission will cement the Bush Administration's line that any and all misdeeds and errors regarding pre-war intelligence came out of the intel community. The WMD commission is going to report the "what" not the "why" of the pre-war intel.

In plainer English, we're going to hear "The CIA exaggerated the nuclear threat" when the more complete sentence might read "The CIA exaggerated the nuclear threat under pressure from the OSP and the Vice President's office."

And we're going to be one step further away from ever getting the low-down on the "why."

The WSJ's Karby Leggett on China in Africa:

When this east African country went to war against neighboring Eritrea in the late 1990s, the U.S. responded by evacuating its Peace Corps volunteers, scaling back military aid and issuing a security warning to U.S. citizens and companies.

The Chinese government had a different reaction. Beijing saw the war -- and the reduced U.S. presence -- as an opportunity to expand its influence. It dispatched even more diplomats, engineers, businessmen and teachers to Ethiopia...

Today, China's influence in Ethiopia is overwhelming...

It's all part of Beijing's broad push into Africa. Aiming to secure access to the continent's vast natural resources, China is forging deep economic, political and military ties with most of Africa's 54 countries. There's more at stake than just fuel for an economic juggernaut, however, say senior Chinese officials, executives and Western diplomats. In Africa, as in many other parts of the developing world, China is redrawing geopolitical alliances in ways that help propel China's rise as a global superpower...

For the U.S., China's Africa initiative poses new challenges...

One of the key geopolitical events those who want to preserve US global hegemony cite often.

Bush Lingo Watch. Praktike notes that the Bush administration's first term frequent talk of "war on terror" has deliberately morphed in the second term to talk of targeting "extremism." Praktike writes:

The Bush administration's use of the term "extremism" gets at the importance of finding a way to deal with transnational groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir that are hard to label as simply "terrorists." There's also Hezbollah...Moving on in the Rice interview ... for now, it looks like Venezuela's [Hugo] Chavez is still viewed in Foggy Bottom as a populist...If you start seeing Chavez described as an extremist, however ...

Check out the whole post which deconstructs a recent interview of Condoleezza Rice for more clues of where the policy is headed. More Jargon Watch from Kevin Drum.

Tuesday Update: My friend JR notices another new one: weapons of mass "effect." He writes, "Term is apparently migrating from the DoD thoughout the Beltway...the 'Mass Effect' is undefined...perhaps these mythical weapons attract a mass of 100,000+ American troops for wars of opportunity...?" From his google search:

US more secure since 9/11, WNC native says
Asheville Citizen-Times, NC - Mar 25, 2005
... its buck. "Our goal is to prevent weapons of mass effect from entering the United States of America," he said. "Clearly everyone ...

Myers Describes Nightmare Scenario, How to Avoid It
I-Newswire.com (press release) - Mar 27, 2005
Terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass effect is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the “nightmare scenario,” he told the Navy ...

The Military Family Network
eMilitary.org - Mar 24, 2005
Terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass effect is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the “nightmare scenario,” he told the Navy ...

Myers Describes Nightmare Scenario, How to Avoid It
Defenselink.mil - Mar 24, 2005
WASHINGTON, March 24, 2005 – Terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass effect is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls the ...
...

Anticipating Surprises
National Review Online - Mar 3, 2005
... they are easier to employ [than other WMD], we believe terrorists are more likely to use biological agents." And DHS sees Weapons of Mass Effect [WME] as a way ...

Upon the release of the State Department's new human rights report, the NY Sun's Eli Lake reports that Iranian dissidents want the Bush administration to come out more vocally in support of regime change in Iran:

The report's section on Iran highlights recent American statements from the president as well as other senior officials condemning Iranian crackdowns on press freedom and other political matters. It also says American policy is to raise concerns about Iranian human rights abuses in international forums and the United Nations.

But in the last two years, American policy has been inconsistent. For example, only the State Department spokesman last February condemned the exclusion of most of the so-called reform candidates from running for Parliament, a decision that has empowered Iranian hard-liners in the government.

"Pakistan's ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons," writes Robert Scheer, in an LAT oped, echoing my sentiments:

Even as the Bush administration continues to confront Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, Islamabad has admitted that Pakistani nuclear weapons trafficker Abdul Qadeer Khan — the father of his nation's nuclear bomb — provided Iran with the centrifuges essential to such a program. Further, new evidence reveals that Khan marketed to Iran and Libya not only the materials needed for a nuclear bomb but the engineering competence to actually make one.

Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insists Khan was running his nuclear smuggling operation under the radar of the military government that brought Musharraf to power. And although this is a highly implausible claim given the reach of the military's power and the scope of the operation, the White House has found it convenient to buy it hook, line and sinker — all the better to remarket Pakistan to the American people as a war-on-terrorism ally.

While Pakistan was receiving such heaping helpings of benefit of the doubt, North Korea became the Bush administration's scapegoat for the rapid nuclear proliferation happening on its watch, according to the Washington Post...

One result of the United States shortsightedly pulling this fast one has been the collapse of multilateral nonproliferation talks with Pyongyang. Yet in the long term, the cost is much greater: a dramatic erosion of trust in U.S. statements on nuclear proliferation.

Reihan Salam reviews Andrew Bacevich's The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War:

He traces the origins of the new militarism to America's catastrophic defeat in Vietnam. Reeling from a newfound sense of American weakness, military officers seeking to recover lost prestige and autonomy, neoconservatives enthralled by Wilsonian rhetoric, and religious leaders transfixed by an apocalyptic reading of the cold war reached the same conclusion, namely that American military strength had to be restored, and once restored multiplied several fold. The culture industry followed, with 1986's Top Gun representing the apotheosis of Hollywood's newfound love affair with the American fighting man...

Though one can quibble with many aspects of Bacevich's retelling, he does his due diligence when it comes to the origin and spread of ideas, acknowledging his own biases and taking care to avoid constructing strawmen. The discussions of several key figures and events, particularly a vivid consideration of General Wesley Clark and the Kosovo campaign, make the book an indispensable resource. Apart from a quick invocation of "the Fuehrer principle" in describing an alleged neoconservative fetish for presidents, Bacevich avoids cheap shots. His treatment of the role of Israel is illustrative. Absent from the author's discussion of neoconservatism, enthusiastic support of Israel instead plays a prominent role in his discussion of Protestant evangelicals, thus suggesting a subtler, keener appreciation of American realities than tends to be found among antiwar conservatives.

Unfortunately, this deftness does not extend to Bacevich's reading of geopolitics. Without ever demonizing those in charge, Bacevich is harshly critical of America's involvement in the Middle East, focusing on the period dating from the end of the Carter administration to the present...

Fred Kaplan on Future Combat Systems and military transformation:

If your guide to this future is the first 30 days of the war in Iraq, then the vision of transformation that underlies FCS might seem appropriate. However, if your guide is the subsequent two years of combat, then the vision seems out of whack...

The Army is—and, to some degree, always has been—split into two factions: the procurement commands, which are most interested in buying new, ever more complex weapons systems, and which funnel billions of dollars to large defense contractors; and the operational commands, which are most interested in fighting and winning wars. FCS is the fanciful wish list of the former faction...

Over the past year, the operational faction has been on the ascendancy, emboldened by the vindication of their objections to Rumsfeld's rosy-eyed war plan in Iraq...They are writing new doctrinal manuals and conducting new training exercises on how to secure and stabilize a country after the battlefield phase of war—a focus that emphasizes boots on the ground, cultural awareness, language skills, and intelligence-gathering based on eye-to-eye contact with the population.

Select pieces of FCS might fit into this conception, but the overall scheme does not...

Via Atrios, Billmon identifies someone who should be institutionalized. (And more reasons).

Promising to be less staid than the Brookings event on new media last week, 'Jeff Gannon' is apparently to appear at a National Press Club event on blogging and journalism. More here.

Bob Novak reminds us that back in September, he predicted Condoleezza Rice would succeed Colin Powell to become Secretary of State, that her deputy Stephen Hadley would succeed her to become national security advisor, and that he predicted that Paul Wolfowitz would succeed Rumsfeld (he got two out of three right). Novak insists that the other prediction in that September piece -- that the Republicans would push for the US to leave Iraq by the end of this year -- is even more in evidence now. Meantime, reader LZ writes to point to this Bill Gertz piece from a few days back that reports that Cheney Mideast advisor I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is under contention to succeed Wolfowitz as deputy defense secretary, along with Navy secretary Gordon Englund and Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone.

Is the Bush administration's policy towards the Middle East starting to look Clintonian? So charges the New York Sun in this editorial. (It's not meant as a compliment coming from them). Also a piece from the Sun's Richard Miniter about a US diplomat in Pakistan who allegedly blocked distribution of wanted posters and material to encourage tips on the capture of Osama bin Laden. I'm skeptical the ambassador is entirely to blame for the Bush administration not putting more priority on capturing bin Laden.

From the WaPo, Indonesia's take on Wolfowitz, who served as US ambassador there in the late 1980s.

Interesting LAT Greg Miller piece on a CIA operation homing in on Iranian-backed militants operating in South America:

Iran and its spy service, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, have long had a significant presence in South America. U.S. intelligence officials said the region's lax border security and active trade routes are attractions to an Islamic republic eager to use illicit means to acquire technology and materials that the country cannot otherwise get because of restrictions on trade with the United States and other nations...

Hezbollah, the militant Iranian-backed Islamic organization, has a significant presence in South America, officials said. Hezbollah, which also has a prominent political presence in Lebanon, is considered by some experts to be among the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world.

Iran and Hezbollah are believed to have used South America as an operational and recruiting base for at least two decades. Iran was suspected of involvement in devastating attacks in the 1990s, including the 1994 bombing that killed nearly 100 people at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a 1992 attack that destroyed the Israeli embassy in that city.

The five-year operation was shut down when CIA resources were pulled to devote to al Qaeda and Iraq, Miller reports.

More on the FBI Franklin investigation from Ha'aretz. Late Sunday Update: Top AIPAC officials have appeared before a grand jury, the Jerusalem Post/JTA reports.

This is encouraging.

Worst Idea Imaginable? Back when the Shah was in power, the US tried to help Iran get nuclear technology, the WaPo's Dafna Linzer reports, interviewing some of the Ford era officials involved, including Henry Kissinger:

Ford's team endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium -- the two pathways to a nuclear bomb. Either can be shaped into the core of a nuclear warhead, and obtaining one or the other is generally considered the most significant obstacle to would-be weapons builders.

Iran, a U.S. ally then, had deep pockets and close ties to Washington. U.S. companies, including Westinghouse and General Electric, scrambled to do business there.

"I don't think the issue of proliferation came up," Henry A. Kissinger, who was Ford's secretary of state, said in an interview for this article.

The U.S. offer, details of which appear in declassified documents reviewed by The Washington Post, did not include the uranium enrichment capabilities Iran is seeking today. But the United States tried to accommodate Iranian demands for plutonium reprocessing, which produces the key ingredient of a bomb...

Nuclear experts believe the Ford strategy was a mistake. As Iran went from friend to foe, it became clear to subsequent administrations that Tehran should be prevented from obtaining the technologies for building weapons. But that is not the argument the Bush administration is making. Such an argument would be unpopular among parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which guarantees members access to nuclear power regardless of their political systems...

U.S. involvement with Iran's nuclear program until 1979, which accompanied large-scale intelligence-sharing and conventional weapons sales, highlights the boomerang in U.S. foreign policy. Even with many key players in common, the U.S. government has taken opposite positions on questions of fact as its perception of U.S. interests has changed.

Boomerang indeed. Linzer also notes the presence of Bush-era national security figures Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Cheney in Ford's security team at the time the decision to sell Iran nuclear technology was taken:

The Ford administration -- in which Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as chief of staff and Wolfowitz was responsible for nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency -- continued intense efforts to supply Iran with U.S. nuclear technology until President Jimmy Carter succeeded Ford in 1977.

What were the stakes perceived then? It seems, primarily big contracts for Westinghouse and General Electric.

Charles Naas, who was deputy U.S. ambassador to Iran in the 1970s, said proliferation was high in the minds of technical experts, "but the nuclear deal was attractive in terms of commerce, and the relationship as a whole was very important."

Documents show that U.S. companies, led by Westinghouse, stood to gain $6.4 billion from the sale of six to eight nuclear reactors and parts. Iran was also willing to pay an additional $1 billion for a 20 percent stake in a private uranium enrichment facility in the United States that would supply much of the uranium to fuel the reactors.

Joseph Cirincione pretty much sums up my reaction:

"It is absolutely incredible that the very same players who made those statements then are making completely the opposite ones now," said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Do they remember that they said this? Because the Iranians sure remember that they said it," said Cirincione, who just returned from a nuclear conference in Tehran -- a rare trip for U.S. citizens now.

In what Cirincione described as "the worst idea imaginable," the Ford administration at one point suggested joint Pakistani-Iranian reprocessing as a way of promoting "nonproliferation in the region," because it would cut down on the need for additional reprocessing facilities.

Tuesday Update: Former Dan Quayle advisor Henry Sokolski responds to Linzer's story. Shorter translation: The Ford administration sold Iran nuclear technology until it decided 18 months later to stop selling it. Carter visited Iran. Sokolski neglects the next chapter, featuring the Reagan administration secretly selling Iran TOW missiles, and diverting the proceeds to fund the Contras.

Guess Greg Djerejian's readership is more Republican than he thought! Be that as it may, I don't think he should feel compelled to apologize for his anti-torture, anti-Rumsfeld posts.

With the help of a "South African electronics salesman and former Israeli army major" Asher Karni, Pakistan has apparently illlegally purchased US high-tech oscilloscopes for its nuclear program. An Islamabad businessman with close ties to Islamic militants, Humayun Khan, purchased the technology, the LA Times' Josh Meyer reports:

Aided by Karni, who pleaded guilty to violating export control laws and began cooperating with U.S. authorities shortly after his arrest 15 months ago, investigators have traced at least one shipment of oscilloscopes from Oregon to South Africa and on to Humayun Khan.

The trail did not end there, however. According to recently unsealed Commerce Department documents, agents followed the shipment to the Al Technique Corp. of Pakistan, which had not been listed on any of the shipping or purchasing documents.

Al Technique describes itself as a manufacturer of precision lasers and other military-related products. But for federal investigators, "it was a big red flag," one U.S. official said.

"It's definitely a front for nuclear weapons, for their WMD project," the official said. The company is on a U.S. list of firms banned from buying equipment such as the special oscilloscopes that can be used to test and manufacture nuclear weapons.

Matt's right. Why on earth is the Bush administration selling Pakistan F-16s? It's not like they've produced the real goods on al Qaeda, have they? When al Qaeda gets WMD it will be because of sympathizers in the Pakistan bureaucracy, no doubt; can we spare ourselves a new independent commission to investigate and act more effectively now? It is just unconscionable that the Bush administration allows itself to be bullied by the Pakistanis. Get this, from lower down in Meyers' piece:

U.S. agents began gearing up for an investigative trip to Pakistan in early 2004. They had recently completed a mission to South Africa that produced a wealth of evidence. They hoped to question Humayun Khan and others, locate missing components and pursue further leads.

But when the Commerce and Homeland Security departments asked the State Department to clear the investigators' trip, they did not get permission. Law enforcement officials complain that the delay has allowed the trail to grow cold.

Several senior officials said that the United States had made high-level requests to Islamabad for cooperation in the case, but that none was made forcefully or publicly. Two State Department officials dealing with nonproliferation said the Bush administration voiced concerns about Pakistan's ties to the nuclear black market, most recently during private meetings Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had with Musharraf and other Pakistani leaders last week.

Pakistan has refused to allow access to Abdul Qadeer Khan.

No Osama, no AQ Khan, no F16s, Mr. Musharaff. Why is Bush so soft on Pakistan? And where are the howls from the usual sources? Is a Pakistan with close ties to al Qaeda and nukes really such an acceptable bulwark against Iran for the neocons? I just don't understand this policy of utter expedience that is sure to bite us hard in the neck later. More from Arms Control Wonk on what Pakistan intends for the F-16s. (Thx to PE and NW).

Sunday Update: Juan Cole disagrees that Pakistan hasn't been effective in going after al Qaeda. Thanks to Juan for a plug of my recent article on Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar co-written with Toronto journalist Jeet Heer.

Belarus next?

AEI's Tom Donnelly on the new U.S. National Defense Strategy:

...[It's] pretty good stuff. It's vintage Rumsfeld, preaching the gospel of "continuous transformation," which, when you think about it, is a uniquely American idea.

The strategy document is an attempt to begin to wrestle with the challenges of a post-Iraq world. "Irregular challenges" like the Iraq insurgency and the reconstruction of Afghanistan are "key" missions for "the foreseeable future," and we will need units capable of "sustained stability operations." You might regard this as an overwhelming obvious conclusion, but then, you probably don't work in government. Secretary Rumsfeld was one of the first to talk about a "long, hard slog" in the Middle East, but most of the government and too much of the military is still resisting this logic. "The United States is a nation at war," the document proclaims--and that's still controversial.

Another significant change is new language about alliances. Recent past strategy reviews have either yearned for the good old days of the Cold War and solidarity with our NATO European buddies. Now the Defense Department says it wants to "broaden" and "adapt" its partnerships, acknowledging that "shared values" and "a common view of threats" are the real adhesives in any useful alliance. In short, the United States is ready to reach out to new partners like India, or revitalizing the relationships with past partners, like Japan, in response to changing geopolitical and military circumstances. This might seem like simple common sense, but it's taken the awful experience of Iraq to awaken Americans to these new realities. Waiting for Europeans is, increasingly, wasted time. It would be nice if Europe adjusted to life in the 21st century, but don't hold your breath. Free security courtesy of the United States is a pretty attractive bargain.

Underlying this all is a renewed commitment to retaining strategic "freedom of action" and "access" to important reaches of the globe; as the document observes, "The United States cannot influence that which it cannot reach." This is likely to set off another round of tut-tutting about American unilateralism, with Democrats and realists of the Brent Scowcroft variety fretting about imperial overstretch and the dangers of hubris. But the central task of building any enduring coalition is to create the impression that we intend to win. The challenges of transforming the Middle East and containing China are tremendous--new allies aren't signing up for a free ride of the European sort, but rather for the strenuous life.

Unfortunately, a lot of old conceptual baggage remains in the defense strategy. For example, it still insists that the current moment is one of strategic "uncertainty." It's a little disconcerting to be told that we're a nation at war, but maybe we're not sure with whom.

Here's the whole piece. And here's an adobe acrobat .pdf of the March 2005-released new National Defense Strategy document.

Spy fiction (and non fiction). A review by the CIA journal of Frederick Hitz's The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage:

...The 17 chapters in The Great Game deal with a variety of functional espionage topics. For example, Hitz shows how agent recruitment in the literary world is seen to follow the classic real world model of spotting, contact, and development of potential agents by the recruiting agency. To illustrate his point, he uses the case contained in David Ignatius's book Agents of Influence, an account of agent operations in the Middle East. The central character, case officer Tom Rogers—"loosely modeled on a real CIA case officer killed in the Beirut Embassy bombing in 1983" (p. 10)—cultivates the deputy chief of Fatah intelligence. His intent is to get early warnings about planned terrorist threats to US citizens in the region. Rogers painstakingly develops a rapport with the prospective agent, called PECOCK, who gradually becomes a source of this vital data. This approach to recruitment, Hitz points out, is based on a very basic principle of human behavior that operates when someone is trying to get someone else to do something he might not otherwise consider—people like to talk and often say more than they should under the right conditions. Recruitment under these circumstances is more cooperative than coercive, at least initially. In this particular case, Ignatius shows how conflict can develop when CIA Headquarters decides to place tighter control on the agent than the relationship, as originally established, permits. The consequence is conflict between the officer in the field, the agent, and Headquarters. And while the story makes for good reading, Hitz uses it to make two points. The first of these is that, when it comes to such interpersonal issues, fiction can illustrate the basic human stresses of espionage as well as non-fiction, but it doesn't capture "all the ways in which a human spy can scheme, rationalize, justify, and alter his behavior to perform his espionage mission."

The second point, which applies to both fiction and non-fiction, is that the classical recruitment approach is largely theoretical. In the real world, suggests Hitz, most CIA and KGB agents, at least during the Cold War, were walk-ins—volunteers...

When it comes to motivation, Hitz finds le Carré's works most impressive. Those are followed by Philby's autobiography, My Silent War, and Graham Greene's Human Factor. In the non-fiction arena, David Wise's treatment of Robert Hanssen and Miranda Carter's recent biography of Anthony Blunt, are both good examples.2

A cautionary note is worth considering. Hitz does not directly suggest that fiction can be a source of learning the espionage business, and this should not be inferred.

Readers of spy fiction often do not realize that CI is the theme of most espionage books, with the mole and the double agent dominating the topics. Hitz cites John le Carré's Smiley trilogy as excellent examples and spends considerable space on the CI problems developed in several non-fiction books about the Ames, Hanssen, and Edward Howard cases to illustrate the complexities. CI is less of a problem for some countries, Hitz suggests, and he quotes "Paul Redmond, America's version of George Smiley—and a profane, brash, outspoken, caustic, courageous one at that" [p. 62]—as saying that "Americans are just too nice to do counterintelligence well."

With regard to assassination in the world of spy fiction, Hitz describes the dilemma created when the British intelligence service, as described by Graham Greene in The Human Factor, poisons a staff member erroneously thought to be a KGB penetration. The issue developed is not so much whether the death solved the immediate problem but whether it is ever right. In the nonfiction world, although the KGB under its legendary leader Lavrenty Beria once employed this alternative, Hitz shows that today the method is "emphatically not on among the Western intelligence services in handling problems with their countrymen." (p. 115).

Am reading incidentally Daniel Silva's The Kill Artist now, it's good. A reader/colleague has a profile of Silva coming out next week which I'll post.

Bolton hearings scheduled for April 7. Check out the take action page here.

This Jerusalem Post article by David Kimche made me doubletake. Is this the David Kimche from the Iran Contra episode? It appears it is. (If I'm mistaken, no doubt, I'll hear about it). Saturday Update: Seems it is the same Kimche indeed. Here's a recent piece by Ha'aretz on Kimche's role in facilitating renewed ties between Israel and Chad:

Kimche now works as a representative of the Scandinavian Milcom cellular company that is seeking to operate in Chad. In August 2004, he had attempted to arrange a visit by then Foreign Ministry Director General Yoav Biran to Chad's capital city of N'Djamena. Kimche met with Chad's Foreign Minister Nagoum Yamassoum but nothing came of the meeting.

Kimche refused to discuss the matter.

Israeli businesspeople have been operating in Chad for a number of years. One of them, Gabi Peretz of the Air Defense company, had negotiated the sale of a number of Soviet-made helicopters from an eastern European nation to Chad's military. The deal was worth several million dollars.

In the 1980s, Chad was engulfed in a civil war and Israeli military experts provided advice to the then president. Israel Defense Forces Major General Avraham Tamir even visited Chad at the time.

Today, refugees from the conflict in the Darfur region of adjacent Sudan are fleeing into Chad.

Haaretz was made aware of the renewed ties between Israel and Chad a number of days ago but acceded to a Foreign Ministry request not to publish the information so as not to harm the relations.

Hmm.
(Thx to J for the link.)

Among several excellent points made by Amy Sullivan in the latest post on women and blogging/opinion writing at Political Animal is the lack of tolerance by some readers for those writers they do not consider ideologically consistent on every political and social point made. Get a little tolerance, people, for disagreement! It's healthy. How boring to always agree with everything. And whether there is more vituperation for women making points not considered ideologically consistent over men, I don't know. Jonathan Chait expressed much the same experience of being put through the blender a couple weeks back, as did Andrew Sullivan at the Brookings new media event the other day. Update: One of the benefits of the discussion going on at Kevin Drum's site and some recent links by Matt Yglesias as well is I have been introduced to several fascinating women-written political blogs I was previously unfamiliar with; several have been added as links below (hey, we can all do with an occasional nudge to expand our reading habits). Thanks for getting those on my radar. One other point I thought I'd throw out there. I haven't done any formal surveys of my readers. But from email I get, I'd estimate about thirty percent of the reader mail I get is from women readers. Just wondering if that is true of the more male-centric blogs which don't seem to link to a single woman. Come on, guys, are you running a monastery or what? Why not be a bit more generous with the links? Who does it hurt?

What happens when North Koreans get a glimpse of the outside. Two stories, from the Washington Monthly's Soyoung Ho at Slate, and the NY Times' Howard French. A friend in town this week pointed me to this interesting group blog on North Korea, NK Zone.

Ha'aretz reports on developments in the FBI investigation of the Franklin case. Franklin is back at work at the Pentagon. (To its credit, Legal Times noted this a couple months ago.) (Thx to J for the link).

Knight-Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports on an allegation that Iran is building a secret underground facility to enrich uranium inside a guarded military compound at Parchin. The accusation comes from Alirezah Jafarzadeh, the Washington-based former spokesman for the political wing of the controversial militant Iranian opposition group, the MEK, designated as a terrorist group by the State Department:

...Jafarzadeh said in a telephone interview that the secret underground uranium enrichment facility is located in Plan One, a southern sector of the massive Parchin military complex, 20 miles southeast of Tehran, which produces chemicals...

If Jafarzadeh's latest assertion is verified, Iran could be accused of breaking an agreement to suspend uranium enrichment activities while it negotiates with the European Union to resolve suspicions that it has a nuclear weapons program.

Many important qualifiers in the piece, which repeatedly asserts the claims cannot be verified at this point, but should lead to the IAEA returning to Parchin.

Worth reading...Christopher Hitchens on misunderstanding Wolfowitz. I actually think there's much truth in this. (Thx to DP for the link).

The neocons vs. OPEC....and Republican orthodoxy.

Greg Djerejian tips us off to a phone-tapping scandal in Paris involving French president Jacques Chirac and his political-pet-turned-rival, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Richard Holbrooke, who has reached out to Republicans on UN issues in the past to broker compromise, warns Bolton's confirmation as UN ambassador is no sure thing, Steve Clemons reports.

Lawrence Kaplan argues that one thing unites the three bickering camps within the Bush administration on their preferred Iran policy -- they will all fail:

Within the administration, [national security advisor Stephen] Hadley leads a camp of true believers, making a case for the European initiative that puts him at odds with more skeptical members of the Bush team...

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their hard-line aides mounted a campaign to scuttle the administration's embrace of the European position, beginning with a principals' meeting the day after the president's return from Europe and continuing until the moment the initiative was unveiled last Friday. Their opposition derives from more than bureaucratic pique. They don't trust the Europeans to be firm with Iran, and they don't trust Iran, period. Cheney, in particular, resisted to the end, arguing that, if negotiations collapse, the Europeans cannot not be counted on to support a tougher U.S. stance...

Ultimately, Cheney and the Pentagon backed down but demanded two crucial conditions. First, Cheney insisted late last week that the Europeans agree, in writing, that they will support the United States hauling Iran before the Security Council if negotiations fail. Which the Europeans did...Second, according to officials, administration hawks have insisted on a timeline for Europe's talks, with a drop-dead date probably arriving in the fall, a few months after Iran's election this summer.

There is a third, and ultimately dominant, position in the administration: the cynical one. Its adherents split the difference between Hadley's and Cheney's arguments--they want to offer Iran incentives, but under the assumption they will likely be refused. Europe, not Iran, is the audience here...

For all their differences, each camp's strategy has one thing in common: It is unlikely to work...

I agree with Kaplan's diagnosis, but am not sure I agree with his conclusion: the bickering will continue until Iran gets the bomb. I think Cheney's camp will ultimately prevail in pushing a hardline option to the fore in the Bush administration. Here's Kaplan's whole piece.

Was outting Valerie Plame as a CIA operative a crime? The WaPo's Dan Eggen reports that "A federal court should first determine whether a crime has been committed in the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's name before prosecutors are allowed to continue seeking testimony from journalists about their confidential sources, the nation's largest news organizations and journalism groups asserted in a court filing yesterday." Here's the piece.

Free in Iraq. Ahmad Chalabi's American advisors Francis Brooke and Margaret Bartel have been cleared of charges of obstructing an investigation in Iraq, the Washington Post reports:

"Peg and I are free people in Iraq," Brooke e-mailed us from Baghdad, where he's still advising Chalabi, the suave ex-banker who lobbied the White House to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Brooke attached the order throwing out the charges, which he argued were fomented by occupation officials as part of a "political vendetta" after Chalabi fell from favor with the Bush administration.

Brooke, 43, and Bartel, 52, were charged with interfering with the well-publicized raid, which was carried out by Iraqi police, U.S. troops and police trainers from Reston-based Dyncorp. The defendants not only denied the allegations but also pointed out that they were in Iraq working on a Defense Intelligence Agency-funded program to provide intel and documents to coalition forces.

"The raid was to discredit Chalabi," said Bartel, who braved a trip to Baghdad to answer the charges. And she remains a loyalist, telling us: "Chalabi is someone we feel is good for the United States and for Iraq."

(Thanks to reader RMS)

The Kyrgyz president flees the capital, and as NPR just alerted me, the Kyrgyz Republic becomes the third former Soviet republic to see its opposition take control from entrenched leaders through peaceful protests, after Georgia and Ukraine, in just the past fifteen months. More from Susan, who is alleged in some rarefied circles of being the Zelig like character actually responsible for freedom's march. Update: The Kyrgyz president has resigned. Great coverage from this site (via Tapped). Update II: Roger Simon reports that the Kyrgyz president has flown to Russia, which apparently backed one more unpopular former satellite republic's leader. Friday Update: More from Mr. Regime Change.

The sky has fallen. Susan reports on a tragic development I had somehow missed while flying on the blessedly comfy Cathay Pacific to Asia a few weeks back. US carriers have stopped serving complimentary drinks on international flights in economy class? Is there no mercy?

Remember a couple years back, when it was reported that a former Guantanamo detainee was unceremoniously dumped by the Americans without passport or documents, winding up in the former Yugoslavia? I noted the strangeness of that story here. Well, as it turns out, that story was a sham, and the released detainee, Abdulrahman Khadr, was in fact a CIA informant the whole time, even during his detention in Guantanamo. Frontline has the tale. (via Praktike).

Ze'ev Schiff has a very interesting analysis of the continuing dispute between Washington and the Israeli Defense Ministry over Israeli arms sales to China:

...Douglas Feith, the assistant secretary of defense, has always demanded that Israel provide every detail of its arms deals with China, and would occasionally assert that Israel was continuing to sell the Harpy drones to China. It was explained to the Pentagon that Israel's current policy is not to sell China "firing weapons"; in its sales to China, Israel would do everything possible so as not to jeopardize American defense interests; and Israel would uphold its right not to disclose every commercial detail in advance, in relation to other defense equipment that is not included in the two previous categories. The U.S. did not take well to this last principle.

This was the case until Feith alleged a few months ago that the director general of the Ministry of Defense, Amos Yaron, had deceived him in the matter of spare parts for the Harpy. Feith bases his allegations on a note that Yaron wrote him during a meeting, when he was asked if Israel was still selling, or maintaining, spare parts for the Harpy. During a break in the meeting, Yaron telephoned the relevant parties in Israel and asked them about it; he received a negative answer.

When the meeting recommenced, this time in the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Yaron handed Feith a note in which he'd written that Israel did not have any spare parts sent from China. One week after his return to Israel, a shipment of spare parts arrived from China, for repair. Yaron dispatched an emissary to the Pentagon to report the matter. This new report raised a storm, and an accusation that Yaron had deceived Feith, even though he had hurried to inform the Pentagon of the change.

The spare parts sent by the Chinese were not repaired, and remain in Israel to this day, in accordance with a request from Washington. For now, the Chinese are being patient, but they have already begun to ask questions.

Since then, the Pentagon has turned a cold shoulder to Defense Ministry representatives. Requests from Israel Aircraft and other defense industries are being held up. At first they tried to demand that Yaron not take part in meetings in Israel with high-ranking American representatives, but Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz rejected this demand, and has even asked Yaron to join him on his upcoming visit to Washington....

Granted, I was in China for half a month and had more limited access to the news, but why has there been no major US press coverage of this issue which has been endlessly reported by credible Israeli press sources? No one can accuse Feith of being anti-Israel, and yet it sounds like quite a heated dispute between Feith and the Israelis. And what about the implications of Bush policy towards China?

Perhaps a bit more than you wanted to know about Paul Wolfowitz's private life.

Praktike gets this post on Bolton and his "he's not so bad" defenders in the media and blogosphere so right too:

Meanwhile, Greg Djerejian has violated our truce and is excited to inform us with a jab in my specific direction that Jim Hoagland's sources in Europe say Bolton is not all that bad once you get to know him. So, we have been told repeatedly by Hoagland, was that nice man Ahmed Chalabi who is busy as we speak anti-helping the duly elected UIA to assume power (those two groups that peeled to support Allawi off are his allies, and his foray to Kurdistan was followed by an announcement that the agreement had fallen apart.

Not to pick on Greg too much. He links to an interesting Ha'aretz report today on Israel bowing to American pressure to finally curtail arms sales to China.

Spies and academia. David Glenn publishes a fascinating report on a new US government program that will send academics into the intelligence agencies and abroad:

It is the program's semisecrecy that most alarms its critics. After all, they point out, it is intended to train deskbound analysts, not people who will serve in the agencies' covert, or "operations," arms. Why, then, the need for opacity?

For skeptics, the presence of anonymous intelligence personnel on campus raises memories of the cold-war era, when the FBI kept elaborate files on professors' political affiliations, and the research agendas of area-studies centers were shaped by the CIA's needs. If the government wanted a forecast of Ukraine's potato harvest for 1956, Harvard University's Russian Research Center would produce one. In 1951 the CIA secretly financed (and guided) the anthropology association's first effort to create a comprehensive database of its members. The roster included information about what languages the scholars spoke, which countries they had visited, and their political contacts overseas...

More notoriously, American social scientists occasionally joined secret research projects that were intertwined both with the CIA and with authoritarian regimes overseas. In the late 1960s, several anthropologists worked on classified projects designed to stabilize the government of Thailand. Among other things, they surveyed villagers about their attitudes toward communism. It is believed (although not known for certain) that the Thai military used the survey data when deciding where to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

Read the whole piece.

Man, does Katha Pollitt get this right!

But ultimately it's the editors, not the slush pile or the volume of queries from freelancers, that determine what goes in a magazine. The phone works both ways! From what I have seen, editors are much more open to men and men flourish accordingly. Older editors, who are mostly men, mentor younger men in whom they see their younger selves, and these young men richly pay them back in admiration, even (surely not!) flattery and sycophancy.

Editors socialize with these acolytes, form friendships with them, offer them important career-making assignments (how often have you seen a "think piece" by a woman that wasn't about a "woman's issue"?), encourage them to take risks and give them more chances if they screw up. Marty Peretz at The New Republic was famous for this kind of mentorship, as was the Washington Monthly's Charles Peters. It wouldn't have occurred to me to approach the Washington Monthly when I was a free lancer — partly because my politics were further to the left, but also because it was such a notorious masculine preserve. Everything about it suggested that I had as much chance of appearing in its pages as in Popular Mechanics. I'm not saying no woman could get the odd assignment at the magazines that mostly publish men, but to make a career you need to be part of the family, you need to be the person to whom the magazine offers plum assignments and sudden opportunities, that gives you a kind of carte blanche (what's on your mind? what's on your plate? when are we going to see that piece on Outer Mongolia?), and that lets you develop as a voice and a personality. Women rarely get that kind of opportunity — and the thing is, they know that. So what looks to you, Amy, like being easily discouraged or not trying is actually women assessing, fairly accurately, their chances.

To understand the absence of women's opinions, I look at the gatekeepers. Because the women are already there!...

Definitely go read the whole post. Pollitt should absolutely get a column in the New York Times or the like. And kudos to Kevin Drum for providing a forum for the discussion. BTW, Andrew Sullivan at the Brookings event liveblogged below said that he thinks the blogosphere will remain a province for men. Paraphrased, "It's a function of who wants to read them and who wants to write them and I think that will be mostly male." Hmm.

Brookings Live Blogging, Impact of the New Media, Part II (11am to noon). (For the first hour's proceedings, see the post below):

Andrew Sullivan: I hired an intern who would run the most critical emails he could find, and I would personally pick an email of the day, which would add some new detail. I was quite impressed with the quality of the writing of the letters I received. But having a comment section could be a mess. That means reading 800 messages a day.

Bloggers are most vicious to each other. There's a whole website devoted to attacking me: Sullywatch. My boyfriend reads it, rather than me.

Audience member question: talk radio, is there a place for the voice of the religious among political moderates...

EJ Dionne: the opinion world in general seems to reward conservatives (?).

Andrew Sullivan: the money thing is a sign of fanatical commitment. But readership continued to rise, even when I annoyed both sides...People went to my site, 'wonder what he's going to make of that.' When you're not as predictable...

I don't think it's depressing. I think there is nothing inherent in the blogosphere that doesn't make for a heterogeneous diverse atmosphere. It's the culture that polarizes, not the blogosphere.

Ellen Ratner: I'm a liberal columnist at Fox and Worldnetdaily, and they treat me very well. No other takers. World Net Daily people are very nice in their daily skills. I don't always find that from some of the people I would have a political affiliation with.

E.J. Dionne: A reader writes in to nominate Ana Marie Cox to replace Richard Leiby as the Reliable Sources columnist at the Washington Post.

Ana Marie Cox: Question about, is blogging journalism?

One of my favorite things about the "Jeff Gannon" case was that Howard Kurtz called Gannon "a blogger." Because he got his facts wrong. Kurtz seemed to think, if a journalist got their facts wrong, they must be a blogger.

E.J. Dionne: This blogging/journalism question is either very important, or it's not....And yet, for those of us who started out in old fashioned journalism, there are standards.

Andrew Sullivan: I think it's not an interesting question. I think people are writing about the world. Journalism is done in England with much less sense of importance than here. Journalists are hacks. All journalists are hacks. Committing journalism is one of the easiest things in the world. There's no elite of journalists, and there should not be schools of journalists. I think the next generation of journalists, are people who are writing their own blogs, 21 year olds who will be noticed by editors of magazines who will notice their distinctive voice.

Andrew Finkel, British journalist based in Istanbul: The US has just reelected a president who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...
Does the media market reward truth?

Jack Shafer: Michael Massing at NY Review of Books deduced Knight Ridder did the best job on reporting on pre-war WMD Iraq intelligence issue, because perhaps they didn't have the top access.

Jodie Allen: It's cheaper to send someone to sit in the White House to cite anonymous sources than to send someone out to do the reporting.

Andrew Sullivan: One advantage of the blogosphere is it takes advantage of people out there who know stuff. If they trust you, people who know inside stuff will write you....///

Blogosphere gets people to read the actual reporting. The blog, the opinion, attracts the audience, then provides the link to the original reported story, which is then read.

Ana Marie Cox: You can't change what you say because it upsets people.

Andrew Sullivan: I change my mind and consider the blog part of a conversation with my readers. It's not about a monologue. Best blogs interact with people. Creates new literary genre, a way of writing that is neither prose, nor journalism, somewhere between the oped page and talk radio.

Jack Shafer: The first amendment doesn't belong to journalists. It belongs to everyone. I am with Andrew on this: Who is, or who isn't a journalist -- anybody I pull out of this room to write a story for Slate, and their story appears with their byline, voila, they are a journalist. And I think that is how it should be.

I'm with Jodie (Allen): All these media are collapsing into one media. A Newsweek story appears in print, but also appears on the Web. Is CBS strictly a broadcaster, or also a news medium? All these first amendment rights will extend to the blogosphere, I predict.

Jodie Allen: (Who's now at Pew, addressing the recent controversy of a Pew official's videotaped off-the-cuff remarks about liberal foundations funding the campaign finance reform media blitz). Very worrisome that at Pew we are constantly vetting things. It's mostly fear of criticism from conservatives, liberals are not quite so militant...

E.J. Dionne: I am speaking only for myself (I'm affiliated with Pew only for my religion project.) I think there is an excessive defensiveness for people who may find themselves on the liberal side. My conservative friends fund some interesting projects. I think funding the campaign finance issue is a perfectly respectable thing to do...(the above paraphrased).

Jack Shafer: As I remember from the NY Post story, this Pew official was bragging on the video about having created the illusion of grass roots demand for campaign finance regulation -- sort of gloating over the fact that they had created this Potemkin village and made it look like it was rising from the earth. There's a term for that, astroturf.

*Andrew Sullivan: The end of privacy is happening independently of blogging.

Question from audience member: Two questions. Does the blogosphere do a particularly good job of covering the Terri Schiavo case? And there's been this discussion between Michael Kinsley and Susan Estrich: why are there so very few women bloggers....

*Sullivan: Newspapers are great for the facts of the case, blogs are good for reading the temperature of the right on the Schiavo case. Reading the zealot blogs on the right gives me a much better understanding of what is motivating the religious right. I understand the religious right much better by reading the blogs than from the mainstream media, partly because they never cover them. The blogging there can really help you understand what is happening inside a movement. What makes them excited, which tells you a lot about where American politics is going. It's like going into a thousand town hall meetings, the emotional quality. Blogs are very emotional. Mainstream media is designed to be very cool.

Ana Marie Cox: Blogs are really good because blogging is so personal, you get a lot of personal history, that is part of the story. That is what blogs also are good for.

As for women in blogging, I've been involved in three areas in my career: technology, journalism and blogging. Women are not well represented in any of those spheres. Don't think solution is just to call for more women. There has to be some kind of organic solution.

Blogging - more conversational - happen to be things women are known to be comfortable with perhaps - way into other areas.

Question from audience member Chris Conroy: blogs are more active, and interactive, you link to the original source, and people go read that. My friend Nick and I have a small blog, Renaissance Man. We get read by people all over the country, and have been linked to by Sullivan. It seems blogging creates a more informed electorate. Can blogs educate people?

Ruy Teixeira: Think it's interesting we're having this very civilized Brookings event on blogging. A few years ago no one took blogging very seriously. Talking about this new media universe that's evolved, the blogs have a place in it...

But it seems to me most people say blogs do have a role to play, part of uber media that is evolving, here to stay, and that's a good thing. That's what I heard.

Final comments:

Andrew Sullivan: Absolutely agree with Chris that the blogs are an educational tool. Actively seeking out information on the blogs you learn more. What blogging is doing in places like Iran and Iraq in terms of getting rid of the fear, are actually beginning to build an underground political movement for change through blogging. The Iranian government has jailed and tortured bloggers. Far from being weird, it's going to be a huge tool for political change in the world.

I do think blogging will remain predominantly male. I think the atmosphere of charged political debate will attact more men then women. No one is not hiring women bloggers. It is entirely a function of who wants to read them and who wants to write them. And for some reason, this tends to be male.

Jodie Allen: Blogging will be a tool for political change. But I do think we need to worry about the state of American journalism and how it's going to be paid for. This is not the blogs' fault. But we as a society have to recognize that it's costly to gather news and it's a very very valuable commodity.

Why are women less represented? Political journalism is basically thumb sucking. And women are less likely to think their thumbs are tasty than men are.

Maureen Dowd's columns the last two Sundays address the gender issue...(The late) Meg Greenfield, one of the most opinionated journalists in the world, when she went to write, always wrapped her acerbic observations around a joke. (softened them in print).

Jack Shafer: Whenever there's new media, there's always this concern about 'the barbarians at the gates.' In the end, the media will totally coopt the new media...

Posted by Laura at 10:59 AM

Brookings Live Blogging, Impact of the New Media. Part I. Washington Post columnist and Brookings fellow E.J. Dionne is introducing the panel: Jodi Allen, senior editor at the Pew Research Center, Ellen Ratner, White House correspondent for Talk Radio News service, Wonkette, Slate's Jack Shafer, and coming shortly, Andrew Sullivan. (Warning, my space key is on the blink)....

Ana Marie Cox discussing, do bloggers get things wrong....'I am a proud parasite, a media vampire.' ...

Jack Shafer ... without a doubt, blogs have attacked the dominant media from below and created a process with their frequent email readers and if they're wise they're hitting Technorati to see what the blogs are saying about them. There's a professor, Jay Rosen, who calls blogging 'distributed journalism,' taking page out of the computer world. Allows thousands of people to analyze data, analyze weaknesses, communicate it, in a short amount of time. Blog world does cast this wider net of fact checking and source verification.

EJ Dionne: Webcaster comment -- they like my tie, and if there are no true liberal bloggers on this panel, then it is also true that there are no true conservative bloggers on this panel. So strike one for balance.

Jodi Allen: Foot in both camps, print journalism and web journalism. I joined Slate before Jack did, am a web addict. All media will converge...This is going to happen pretty soon. The problem is, who's going to pay for it? This is not going to pay for having a (news) bureau in Beijing. And print media is already seeing their advertising base split apart....Important to remember that big newspaper like the WaPost loses money on each edition its delivers to the doorstep, it does that so that it can charge money for the advertising. Nobody has figured this out. The question is, who's going to pay?

Tom Rosenstiel has just put out a very thoughtful paper on this subject -- journalism based on reporting - and reporting is expensive - is being replaced by the journalism of assertion. 'I read this and here's what I think.' Opinions are a lot cheaper than facts. They are a lot easier to come by. That is where I fear journalism is headed.

Blogs, the web certainly have a role. But reporting is expensive. Who is going to pay for it?

Thirty percent of the public use the Internet. Nine percent of Dean activists have visited Wonkette.

(10:30am...Andrew Sullivan has arrived).

E.J. to Ellen Ratner: how polarized is the new media?

Ellen Ratner: the blogosphere has been more the territory of liberals...

EJ: On this question of politics, I looked at Andrew Sullivan today... People tend to denounce more those who they do not see as ideologically consistent. (ain't that the truth).

Andrew Sullivan: I just write what I think... At the National Review or the Nation, you are not going to find any more dissidents. In blogs, the joy of it, is, I can write what I want...

When I was very pro-war, at my fundraiser (for AndrewSullivan.com), I raised $80,000. The following year, when I was critical of the administration, I only raised $20,000. The following fundraiser, $12,000. Readers want you to be ideologically consistent. But I just write what I want.

Wonkette: One reason the bloggers have been such effective critics of the mainstream media, is because they don't socialize with the MSM. But now it is getting to be clique-ier, more hierarchical. Blogging is a lot like punk rock. Once your band gets signed to Geffen...

E.J. Dionne: Bloggers for hire? for political campaigns?

Jack Shafer: Andrew Sullivan took heat a few years ago. He has been critical of the pharmaceutical industry. Then, the pharm industry took out an ad on his site. He ultimately kicked them out. I don't think he should have....

Jodi Allen: It just seems to me, paid sponsorship should be openly declared.

...By and large, people who access the Internet start at the big news organizations, and then follow their self-created news threads...

Andrew Sullivan: I never actually ran the ad...I wrote about the offer. The NYT picked this up. I raised it, huge amounts of protests, and I just didn't think it was worth it. I never actually got the money... I was a coward.

This was four years ago. I wanted to see if blogs could be financially self-sustaining. Now, thanks to BlogAds, it is starting to pay for itself.

Ann Pincus, Center for Public Integrity: I love blogs, but I think a lot of them are inaccurate, libelous... Should there be any standards?

Ana Marie Cox: Hard to get away with baseless accusations, because swarms of people will write back to you. If you keep writing stuff that is inaccurate, people will stop reading you. Do you have a specific example?

Jack Shafer: The NYT publishes about 4,000 corrections every year. Fairly responsible. Can't reduce all blogs to slanderous piles of lies. One person's slander is somebody else's truth.

EJ Dionne: I think that last sentence is not true...

Posted by Laura at 10:17 AM

Along with Juan Cole, Daniel Drezner, and Ruy Teixeira, I'll be live blogging a Brookings Institution event on "the impact of the new media" this morning, from 10am to 12pm EST. Tune in to the webcast here.

The Harvard Alumni Association has just cordially invited yours truly to a luncheon with Larry Summers next month here in DC. At $65, I think I'll skip it. But seems he has called in the professional crisis communications specialists...

Via one astonished Atrios, David Brooks evokes the sludgepit in which Tom DeLay's go-to lobbyist Jack Abramoff flourished. And it's pretty unflattering all around to the Republicans.

Coming soon: new Diet Coke variety, Coca Cola Zero. Random fyi, your War and Piece field researcher recently noted that you can buy not only diet Coke, and diet Pepsi, but lemon Diet Pepsi, etc. etc. etc. in most every corner grocery store in Wuhan, China, a city where most homes have no heat, and you can't drink the water without boiling it (and there are not so many foreign tourists). I'm sure there's some larger meaning to it, a la the McDonald's theory of conflict prevention, but I will leave it to the emailers.

Kevin Drum has invited the Nation's Katha Pollitt, the Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan, and The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta, to take on the issue of women in opinion writing and the blogosphere. Watch that space. More here and here.

Michael Tomasky has an interesting story on the role of UN ambassador nominee John Bolton in a 1994 outfit that illegally funnelled money from a Hong Kong businessman to the Republican National Committee.

Just Out: Dubious Iran Intelligence. Yesterday the LA Times reported on Los Angeles, with its huge Iranian diaspora, as a center of Iranian intelligence intrigue. Today, my colleague Jeet Heer and I have a long-reported piece out in the new April edition of The American Prospect on Paris as the European center of Iranian exile intrigue, with appearances by former Iran contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and his elderly business partner, who has been meeting with and funneling documents on Iranian terror schemes to an American Congressman. At issue: just where is the Bush administration getting its intelligence on Iran? Check it out.

The Boston Globe's Farah Stockman has a great piece today on a Gulf Stream used for extraordinary rendition that is owned by one of the Boston Red Sox owners:

Team vice chairman Phillip H. Morse, a businessman who made a fortune developing cardiac catheters, leases the Gulfstream IV jet with a Hudson, N.Y., charter agent when he is not using it. The jet sometimes has a small Red Sox logo on the fuselage near the door.

The jet, which used registration number N85VM and now uses N227SV, was spotted in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003, shortly after a suspected extremist preacher disappeared from his home in Milan in a case that Italian prosecutors are investigating as a kidnapping, according to the Chicago Tribune...

The preacher, known as Abu Omar, but whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was also taken to the Cairo airport the same day in 2003, the Tribune reported. The newspaper also reported that the plane has made at least 51 trips between June 2002 and January to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the United States is holding about 540 people at the base as terror suspects.

Omar called his relatives months later to say that Italian and American agents had kidnapped him and flown him to Cairo, where he was tortured, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica and Italian government documents.

Read the whole piece.

Update: "Phillip H. Morse, a minority partner of the Boston Red Sox, confirmed yesterday that his private jet has been chartered to the CIA and said he was aware that it had been flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 terrorism suspects are held, as well as other overseas destinations..."

The Bush administration is indisputably soft on Pakistani nuclear proliferation. Check out the latest bombshell from the WaPo's Dafna Linzer. Meantime, the Boston Globe's Drake Bennett profiles political science professor Kenneth Waltz who argues some more countries acquiring nuclear weapons is stabilizing:

Especially in a unipolar world, argues Waltz, the possession of nuclear deterrents by smaller nations can check the disruptive ambitions of a reckless superpower. As a result, in words Waltz wrote 10 years ago and has been reiterating ever since, ''The gradual spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared.''

Scary forgeries. It's a bit ironic that Bill Gertz, master of publishing the leaked Pentagon document, was pursuing an article based on an apparently forged leaked DIA document accusing NBC military analyst Bill Arkin of having been on Saddam's payroll. (Arkin has just published a book on military operations code names, which are themselves classified).

As a tactic to prevent doctors from removing her feeding tube, Congressmen have subpoenaed Terri Schiavo in her hospital bed. Honestly, why doesn't the judge just transfer guardianship of Schiavo from her awful husband to her parents?

Katha Pollitt proves she is no potted plant. And she offers plenty of excellent suggestions of worthy voices to get opinion columns at the Bigs:

The tiny universe of political-opinion writers includes plenty of women who hold their own with men, who do not wilt at the prospect of an angry e-mail, who have written cover stories and bestsellers and won prizes--and whose phone numbers are likely already in the Rolodexes of the editors who wonder where the women are. How hard could it be to "find" Barbara Ehrenreich, who filled in for Thomas Friedman for one month last summer and wrote nine of the best columns the Times has seen in a decade? Or Dahlia Lithwick, legal correspondent for Slate, another Friedman fill-in, who actually possesses a deep grasp of the field she covers--which cannot always be said for John Tierney, who begins his Times column in April? What about Susan Faludi? The Village Voice's Sharon Lerner? Debra Dickerson? Wendy Kaminer? The Progressive's Ruth Conniff? Laura Flanders? Debbie Nathan? Ruth Rosen, veteran of the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle? Our own Patricia Williams and Naomi Klein? Natalie Angier, bestselling author and top New York Times science writer, would be a fabulous op-ed columnist. And, not to be one of those shrinking violets everyone's suddenly so down on, What about me? Am I a potted plant?

Policy Gossip. A friend and colleague points out, doesn't Wolfowitz's main squeeze, Shaha Ali Riza, work at the World Bank? Update: More on the Wolfowitz nomination from Jason Vest, Michael Lind, and Joe Conason.

"War architects quickly departing the Pentagon," Eli Lake declares in the New York Sun:

The Pentagon's often-reliable vote for tough action against state sponsors of terror in interagency meetings is in jeopardy as Mr. Wolfowitz leaves his position as deputy secretary of defense along with the no. 3 civilian at the Defense Department, Doug Feith, whose departure was announced this summer.

The names floated as possible replacements for Mr. Wolfowitz have built their
reputations as managers willing to work closely with a bureaucracy often
hostile to the president's broad foreign policy vision. Among those said to be
eyeing the job Mr. Wolfowitz is leaving are Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence Stephen Cambone, the secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, and
the outgoing administrator for NASA, Sean O'Keefe.

"I am nervous about what this will mean for the inner councils of the Bush
administration," an American Enterprise Institute defense policy analyst,
Thomas Donnelly, told The New York Sun yesterday. "I would also say that on the other side of the ledger, the president is the alpha neoconservative at this
moment and we have no reason to doubt the president's commitment to policies.
That said, the number of lieutenants who generally share the values of the Bush
doctrine has always been limited, and it is dwindling."

Matt Yglesias would seem to agree that the neoconservatives are not celebrating recent top tier personnel changes, saying Wolfowitz and UN ambassador nominee John Bolton are effectively being "kicked upstairs." But as Fred Kaplan pointed out yesterday, for all Condoleezza Rice's expanded influence as a more pragmatic and moderate voice in Bush's second term, the center of foreign policy gravity in Bush II is still the Vice President's office. And as Tom Donnelly points out in the above quote, President Bush in many ways has become the alpha neoconservative. To be seen what the departure of some Vulcans from the Pentagon for other arenas means for decisions on US policy towards Iran, North Korea, and China over the next four years. Update: Agree with every point Praktike makes here.

Juan Cole dives into the debate on diversity in the blogosphere, rounding out his post with recommendations for some blogs that offer a diverse smattering of experience and expertise on the Middle East and other subjects. Jeanne D'Arc and Kevin Drum have more thoughts on women and blogging. Dahlia Lithwick too.

Samantha Power attacks Bush's choice to represent Washington at the UN:

It is easy to catalogue the things that John Bolton doesn’t “do”—encourage payment of U.N. dues, support the International Criminal Court, strengthen international disarmament treaties. What he does do is less obvious. As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he has rightly been given credit for the Proliferation Security Initiative, which attempts to interdict shipments of fissile material and which is supported by sixty nations, including France and Germany. But on his watch North Korea, the chief target of his ire, reprocessed enough plutonium to make six new nuclear weapons. Bolton boasts of “taking a big bottle of Wite-Out” to President Clinton’s signature on the statute for the International Criminal Court (“a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism” that is “not just naïve but dangerous”). Yet the Administration’s assault on the I.C.C. has, in fact, bolstered the court’s legitimacy internationally. Powerful middle-tier countries (like Germany) have helped make up the loss of American funds and personnel, and the court is now deep into investigations of mass slaughter in Congo and Uganda.

Bolton is also a longtime skeptic of tools that are increasingly part of the Bush Administration’s arsenal. Nation building is a “fallacy,” he thinks. “The U.S. is still engaged in nation building here two hundred and twenty-five years plus after the Declaration of Independence, and we still have a long way to go,” he said in 2002. “The idea that we can nation build for somebody else is just unrealistic.” When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Bolton’s nomination, last Monday, she said, “We who are on the right side of freedom’s divide have an obligation to help those who are unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side of that divide.” But Bolton, who stood stoically next to her, has never believed that spreading freedom is America’s business.

Many have rumored that personal dislike between Rice and Bolton have led to his being dumped in New York, but that surely doesn't justify the decision.

Via Will Bunch, Wolfowitz tapped for World Bank. Who's going to succeed him at DoD? Cambone? Armitage? Update: I agree with Sarah Wildman at the American Prospect that Bono would have been the most inspired choice for the World Bank job. Update II: The NYT reports that Rumsfeld confidant and Pentagon intelligence czar Stephen Cambone and Navy Secretary Gordon England are being considered to succeed Wolfowitz at Defense. Slate's Fred Kaplan explains what the accumulation of top tier personnel changes may mean.

Great Deborah Tannen oped in the LA Times addressing the male/female issue in opinion writing:

...Dowd put her finger on one reason fewer women than men are comfortable writing slash-and-burn columns. But she didn't take her argument to the next level and question the fundamental assumption that attack-dog journalism is the only kind worth writing.

That is the blind spot that explains why women are missing from many of the arenas of public discourse, including science (as noted by Larry Summers of Harvard) and opinion writing. (The Los Angeles Times was recently criticized for not running more women on its opinion pages.)

No one bothers to question the underlying notion that there is only one way to do science, to write columns — the way it's always been done, the men's way...

As Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has put it, we tend to think that if you're not an attack dog, you're a lap dog, taking everything politicians say at face value.

But the true role of journalism should be a third way: a watchdog. And a dog who is busy attacking is not watching.

More on this later.

Italy to begin pulling troops from Iraq, and after the latest Sgrena/Calipari episode, who can blame them? But this NYT piece suggests it's because Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi will run for reelection in 2006, against the anti-war Romano Prodi, and public opinion in Italy is very much against being in Iraq.

And talk about spy novels. The NYT's Scott Shane has an article on the newest budding literary hothouse, the CIA:

Since December, three former C.I.A. case officers who did the most sensitive work of the government - persuading foreigners to betray their countries or their causes - have published memoirs. Two more such books will be out in May, making a dozen firsthand accounts published since the late 1990's...

The number of manuscript pages submitted to the agency's Publications Review Board has nearly doubled over the last eight years.

Overcoming Anti-Semitism in Europe's Most Arab City....Regular readers may be aware that I like spy fiction (and non fiction). So I was drawn into this Jerusalem Post interview today with American spy novelist Claire Berlinski. The interview is not really about Berlinski's spy novel, but about a fascinating article the Oxford-educated PhD recently published about why France's most Arab immigrant-dense city, Marseille, has seen among the least amount of anti-Semitic violence plaguing much of France:

The launching of the second Palestinian intifada, in late 2000, ignited the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the Holocaust. The crimes have been perpetrated almost entirely by the beur – Arab immigrants...

Yet while in other French cities the violence continues, in Marseille the animus soon fizzled out. This is largely because the city reacted with revulsion to these crimes: City-wide protests against anti-Semitism were immediately organized. Significantly, Arabs participated in these protests.

Islamic leaders were also present for the burial of the synagogue's charred Torah scrolls, and were photographed comforting Jewish religious leaders. These symbolic actions have been surprisingly successful in dampening outbreaks of ethnic violence.

Marseille's success is particularly impressive when one considers its demographics.

Fully a quarter of Marseille's population is of North African origin, and demographers predict that Marseille will be the first city on the European continent with an Islamic majority. Moreover, its Jewish community is the third-largest in Europe.

The most ethnically diverse city in France, then, has paradoxically been the most successful in containing its outbreak of ethnic violence.

A key reason for the city's calm is an entity called Marseille Esperance, a group of religious leaders convened by the mayor in a regular discussion group. Created in 1990 to stave off ethno-religious conflict between Jews and Muslims, it includes delegates from each of the city's religious communities who meet regularly to discuss civic problems... Whenever tension threatens to rise, the group meets and, at the mayor's urging, makes a public display of solidarity.

Most striking about Marseille Esperance, however, is this: It challenges the core principles of the French republican ideal, and the historic concept of what it means to be French.

This is an important article that certainly deserves more attention. Also don't miss the interview with Berlinski, which features some interesting observations about anti-Americanism in Europe, including this bit:

In some ways, anti-Americanism is not really irrational, if you completely ignore what the Europeans keep nattering on about their desire for human rights and international brotherhood of man. If you see that for the total bulls--t it is, and look at it in terms of traditional power politics and traditional European interests, you can see it as the traditional impulse that most nation states have for power.

Europe was divided, occupied, razed to the ground – some parts literally levelled by American bombers. And the US has dominated the continent for the entire post-war period.

Finally, the Cold War is over and we're looking at a new generation of people growing up who do not feel any personal guilt for past events. What they do feel is that they are Europeans – with a grand tradition of an extremely powerful Europe...

Is it any surprise, then, that these countries are now concerned with establishing and asserting their power on the world stage? Their biggest obstacle to this end, of course, is the United States. Structurally, what you would expect to see is a resentment of American power and a yen to curb it in any way possible. In the European case, curbing American power can only be done through diplomatic means, not military ones. In this sense, we're not talking about a psychotic illness; we're talking about something quite rational.

Interesting stuff.

(Editorial Note: I am taking the liberty of doubleposting this post from the Washington Monthly, where I am among a bevy of guest bloggers for a couple days, because I think the issue will be of particular interest to some of my regular readers.)

Back from China, we're all a bit worse for the wear. In any case, between episodes of Asian flu, I will be guest blogging at the Washington Monthly website until Tuesday while Kevin Drum enjoys a few days vacation in northern California. Visit me there.

Lame Congress. Spencer Ackerman reports that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has put on the back burner the promised second part of their investigation of how the US government came to conclude Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The second part of the report was to investigate administration influence on the intelligence community. Unbelievable.

Check out Jason Vest's piece in the American Prospect on the context of the recent incident in which US troops' fired on the convoy of freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sregna in Iraq, killing an Italian secret service agent who helped negotiate her release.

Housekeeping Notes: Departing after a wonderful few days in Guangzhou today, back to the States late Saturday, shortly after which normal posting should resume.

Mark Goldberg has a round up of news surrounding the surrender of Kosovo prime minister and former KLA commander Ramush Haradinaj to the Hague Tribunal.

Torture as byproduct. David Ignatius on what may be the real reason for the CIA's disturbing practice of extraordinary renditions:

What's gained by transferring a prisoner to his home country for interrogation is emotional leverage, according to Arab and American intelligence chiefs. A hardened al Qaeda member often can't be physically coerced into giving up information, no matter how nasty the interrogator. But he may do so if confronted by, say, his mother, father, brother or sister. That family contact is possible if he's near home; it's impossible if he's in an orange jump suit and warehoused at Guantanamo Bay...

These "nice" interrogation stories don't change the fact that hideous methods have been used in rendition cases. And in some instances, the CIA should have known that torture was likely -- and stopped it. That's wrong; no agency of the U.S. government should ever turn a blind eye to torture.

Update: My friend Andras Riedlmayer writes, "... I think Ignatius is being too naive and trusting of his sources. As recently seen in Iraq, the use of family members of detainees for leverage has a "hard" side as well -- one can get someone to do just about anything by detaining and threatening to torture, rape, or kill their sisters, mothers, fathers or lovers. I find it hard to believe that this sort of thing is not part of the prescribed treatment for detainees in the "fingernail factory" or similar institutions operated by the CIA's "friends" and confreres in Egypt, Syria, Morocco and other countries."

US intelligence on Iran. From the NYT:

Among the major setbacks, former intelligence officials have said, was the successful penetration in the late 1980's by Iranian authorities of the principal American spy network inside the country, which was being run from a C.I.A. station in Frankfurt. The arrests of reported American spies was known at the time, but the impact on American intelligence reverberated as late as the mid-1990's...

The last National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was completed in 2001 and is now being reassessed, according to American intelligence officials. As a first step, the National Intelligence Council, which produces the estimates and reports to Mr. Goss, is expected this spring to circulate a classified update that will focus on Iran and its weap