Monthly Archive for December, 2005

“Munich”: Hollywood's bad guy problem (part 1)

Published on 12/31/2005 in Counter Terrorism and Media . Closed

Max Boot critiques two year-end and clueless Hollywood efforts “Syriana” and “Munich”. Unfortunately many people learn their “history” from Hollywood:

WHEN YOU THINK about it, World War II was far from black and white. Sure, the German and Japanese militarists were evil, but Britain and the United States did terrible things too. They killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, and they allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which was every bit as awful as the Axis. The outcome was ambiguous because, although Germany and Japan were defeated, the Iron Curtain descended from Eastern Europe to North Korea.

Yet for 60 years, Hollywood has had no problem making movies that depict World War II as a struggle of good versus evil. Rightly so. Because for all the Allies’ faults, they were the good guys.

For some reason, Hollywood can’t take an equally clear-eyed view of the war on terrorism. The current conflict, pitting the forces of freedom against those of Islamo-fascism, is every bit as clear cut as World War II. Yet fashionable filmmakers insist on painting both sides in shades of gray, as if Israeli secret agents or American soldiers were comparable to Al Qaeda killers. Two of the most serious holiday flicks — “Syriana” and “Munich” — are case studies in mindless moral relativism and pathetic pseudo-sophistication.

NSA Intercepts: More secrets about secrets

Published on 12/31/2005 in Counter Terrorism and Media . Closed Tags: , .

An excellent piece by Jeff Jarvis on the NYT national security leaks (with resource links):

Times public editor Byran Calame writes his first almost-tough column taking The Times to task, properly, for not revealing why they did not reveal what they know about warrantless NSA spying — and why they did reveal it when they did. He called the paper’s explanation “woefully inadequate” and said he had “unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper’s repeated pledges of greater transparency.” He accused the editor and publisher of The times of “stonewalling,” a word that carries all too much irony in those halls.

The Big Story of 2005 (Someone Tell The New York Times)

Published on 12/28/2005 in Counter Terrorism and Middle East . Closed Tags: .

Austin Bay nails it:

In December 2004, I wrote a column that led with this line: “Mark it on your calendar: Next month, the Arab Middle East will revolt.”

The column placed the January 2005 Palestinian and Iraqi elections in historical context. These were not the revolutions of generals with tanks and terrorists with fatwas, but the slow revolutions of the ballot box, with political moderates and liberal reformers the genuinely revolutionary vanguard. To massage Churchill’s phrase, these revolts were the beginning of democratic politics, where “jaw jaw” begins to replace “war war” and “terror terror.”

These slow revolts against tyranny and terror continue, and are the “big story” of 2005 and the truly “big history” of our time.

Partisan, ignorant, fear-filled rhetoric tends to obscure this big history, in part because the big story moves slowly. The democratic revolt is grand drama, but it doesn’t cram into a daily news cycle, much less into “news updates” every 30 minutes.

Television, the medium where image is a tyrant, finds incremental economic and political development a particularly frustrating story to tell. A brick is visually boring — a bomb is not. The significance of a brick takes time to explain, time to establish context, while a spectacular explosion incites immediate visceral and emotional responses. In the long term, hope may propel millions — hope that democracy will replace tyranny and terror. But in the short haul, violence and vile rhetoric, like sex and celebrity, guarantee an immediate audience.

So the “big stories” get lost in the momentum of the “now.”

. . .

Indeed, do tell the New York Times.

Self-rule in the Middle East will have a religious component, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work

Published on 12/27/2005 in Middle East . Closed Tags: , , .

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Seekerblog “reliable source”, is an ex CIA Directorate of Operations officer. This longish essay, datelined Kabul, is another valued Gerecht analysis – this time investigating the parallels between Afghanistan and Iraq:

AFGHANISTAN AND Iraq are geographically and historically in two distinct parts of the Muslim Middle East. Scholarly works on the region with an Arab slant tend to throw Afghanistan into Central Asia and the subcontinent, while books with an axis running through Iran pull Afghanistan back into the Middle East proper. Yet the two countries are now joined at the hip, and they are so joined by America. We are running simultaneous experiments in democracy in two countries that, despite their cultural and political differences, have much in common. Morally, at least for us and the natives, the two efforts are-or ought to be-indistinguishable.

If you believe that vanquishing fanaticism and establishing democracy in Afghanistan is a thing worth fighting for-and I recently ran into dozens of British, Italian, German, Lithuanian, and even Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan who seem to believe so sincerely-then it is ethically challenging to apply a different calculus in Iraq. You may not have initially favored the war in Iraq, but it seems morally awkward to argue that the Iraqis now deserve less support than the Afghans. It is heartening to hear senior Italian and British officers attached to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan affirm that they’re planning on being there for 10 years, provided the locals want them. (And odds are the Afghans will.)

. . .

SUICIDE BOMBING POSSIBLY ASIDE, a comparison of Afghanistan and Iraq ought to calm American nerves about the political evolution in Mesopotamia. What doesn’t really bother us in Afghanistan-the participation of devoutly religious Muslims in the political process-shouldn’t bother us elsewhere. We may view Afghanistan with the bigotry of low expectations: Since Afghans have been calling themselves mujahedeen, holy warriors, for nearly three decades, and political Islam has been swirling through the Afghan bloodstream for even longer, we don’t expect their political system to be all that secular. That Afghans, who have developed a certain penchant for making personal and political differences a casus belli, can sit together under one roof and scream but not shoot is an achievement for the new parliament. However imperfect, this is the birth of tolerance. For Americans and their European allies in Afghanistan, and for the Afghans themselves, watching ultraconservative turbaned men, veiled women, and opium–enriched warlords rub shoulders with expatriate suits and ties and women showing hair and a bit of a female form is a very good beginning.

We should have, mutatis mutandis, similar expectations in Iraq. Iraqis, we were told by a long list of Iraqi exiles, journalists, and scholars, are much less fervent believers. On the Shiite, Sunni, and even Kurdish side, this assumption of rather advanced secularization was misplaced and, more important, harmful to our understanding of how democracy would take root in Iraq. We should realize that in Mesopotamia, as in Afghanistan, democracy will be either made or broken by men and women of serious, not particularly reformed faith-not by secular liberals, Muslim progressives, or “moderates” (probably best defined as Muslims who act more or less like ordinary faithful Christians). All of the explicitly secular and moderate candidates did rather poorly in Iraq’s national elections on December 15, even though the United States, with the Central Intelligence Agency in the lead, probably poured a small fortune into helping their cause. One can feel considerable sympathy for the liberal Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who recently gave an analytical cri de coeur in the New York Times, dissecting all the reasons we should fear Iraq’s new constitution, with its fissiparous potential. It is, without doubt, a flawed document. One can easily wish for a little less federalist enthusiasm on the Shiite and Kurdish sides.

. . .

And there remains the huge fact of the Shiite population in Baghdad, which would be excluded from any Shiite semi–autonomous zone in the south. Baghdad is a majority Shiite city. And it simply cannot be compared to any other city in Iraq-certainly not impoverished and broken Basra, the other possible pole of Shiite urban influence. (The impoverished Shiite south of Iraq actually reminds one of Afghanistan.) For the foreseeable future, the centripetal power of Baghdad will remain. The exclusionary, defensive, federalist impulses of the Iraqi Shiite community, which Makiya rightly fears, can go only so far before they provoke real, paralyzing Shiite resistance from Baghdad. If for no other reason, the Baghdad Shiite factor will likely guarantee sufficient tolerance toward the Sunnis for democratic progress to continue.

I hope you’ll read the entire article.

My optimism index will peg if the Iraqis can negotiate an oil-trust to ensure every citizen shares in the nation’s wealth. Ahmed Chalabi is the most prominent Iraqi politician backing the concept – wish him well.

Why “intelligent design” simply isn’t science

Published on 12/27/2005 in Education and Science . Closed

Biologist James Q. Wilson concisely refutes the argument that “intelligent design” should be taught as a “theory” competing with the theory of evolution:

When a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down the efforts of a local school board to teach “intelligent design,” he rightly criticized the wholly unscientific nature of that enterprise. Some people will disagree with his view, arguing that evolution is a “theory” and intelligent design is a “theory,” so students should look at both theories.

But this view confuses the meaning of the word “theory.” In science, a theory states a relationship between two or more things (scientists like to call them “variables”) that can be tested by factual observations. . .

Second draft and the al Durah case: evidence vs. advocacy

Published on 12/23/2005 in Israel and Media . Closed Tags: .

Boston University historian Richard Landes has released the Second Draft Mohammed al Durah analysis. Definitely review the material – draw your own conclusions.

As preparation, I recommend Neo-Neocon’s thoughts on this controversial case:

There are thousands of sites for pure advocacy, but usually those end up preaching only to the choir. What Landes is trying to do here is far more valuable: he’s trying to present a fair case, and let the reader be the judge and/or jury. A fair trial presents the evidence on both sides, and then a verdict is rendered. Fairness does not preclude judgment–on the contrary, judgment requires fairness.

There’s no need to be afraid of this process, if one believes that truth is based on a critical evaluation of evidence. Perhaps, though, Israpundit may not have a great deal of faith in the public’s critical thinking skills.

I have long thought that critical thinking should be taught far more; it’s one of the most important–perhaps the single most important–skill to learn. But, just as I have faith in the jury system (however imperfect), I have a basic faith in people’s ability to judge critically and well, if the evidence is clearly presented.

Perhaps the problem is patience; it takes a lot of time to look at the evidence, study it, evaluate it, and come to a conclusion. That’s actually the basic process I followed myself in my post-9/11 learning (as my next “change” post will describe, whenever I manage to get it finished).

It’s one of the most powerful processes on earth, especially when the evidence is so overwhelming that one ends up changing one’s mind. Take it from me; I know.

Back in February 2005 I wrote three posts on investigations of the iconic France 2 video. These posts include a number of links to other research:

Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?

Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? Part 2

Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? Part 3

And don’t miss Solomania’s two interviews with Richard Landes, with more background on the Second Draft research. The most recent interview is here, the first interview here.

Washington’s year of living unseriously

Published on 12/23/2005 in Politics . Closed

Daniel Henninger profiles the 2005 year of hyper-unserious politics:

There are many criticisms one can make of Washington, and most of them, the result of the intended imperfection of our politics, fall under the heading of “it was ever thus.” But the men and women we send to the nation’s capital have always purported a certain pretense to seriousness on things that mattered–foreign policy and the larger domestic issues. The year 2005 was a large fall from seriousness.

Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, kicking off the campaign theme on which the Democrats say they will ask for the people’s vote in 2006, has just called this Congress “the most corrupt in history.” “Corrupt” is a word with more meanings than Senator Reid intended. In the world of software, something that is “corrupt” doesn’t work.

Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington’s man of the year is Jack Abramoff.

Washington’s response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV’s anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.

With images of the city’s bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation’s politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.

With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.

Episodes in the Year of Unseriousness abound: The bipartisan highway bill with its Bridge to Nowhere; the Abramoff lobbying sleaze; a truly feckless year-long media hunt to identify who “outed” Valerie Plame, a story with virtually no resonance beyond the Beltway and whose special prosecutor charged no violation of the supposed underlying crime; and now pretend outrage from the likes of Senators Reid and Arlen Specter over the “exposure” of the Bush surveillance program, which much of official Washington knew about and which turns out not to have violated anything. Like radio’s six-second delay to catch obscenities, maybe Washington needs a 12-hour delay on the public comments of senators to spare the public’s ears of offensive inanities. . .

Washington’s year of living unseriously

Published on 12/23/2005 in Politics . Closed

Daniel Henninger profiles the 2005 year of hyper-unserious politics:

There are many criticisms one can make of Washington, and most of them, the result of the intended imperfection of our politics, fall under the heading of “it was ever thus.” But the men and women we send to the nation’s capital have always purported a certain pretense to seriousness on things that mattered–foreign policy and the larger domestic issues. The year 2005 was a large fall from seriousness.

Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, kicking off the campaign theme on which the Democrats say they will ask for the people’s vote in 2006, has just called this Congress “the most corrupt in history.” “Corrupt” is a word with more meanings than Senator Reid intended. In the world of software, something that is “corrupt” doesn’t work.

Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington’s man of the year is Jack Abramoff.

Washington’s response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV’s anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.

With images of the city’s bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation’s politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.

With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.

Episodes in the Year of Unseriousness abound: The bipartisan highway bill with its Bridge to Nowhere; the Abramoff lobbying sleaze; a truly feckless year-long media hunt to identify who “outed” Valerie Plame, a story with virtually no resonance beyond the Beltway and whose special prosecutor charged no violation of the supposed underlying crime; and now pretend outrage from the likes of Senators Reid and Arlen Specter over the “exposure” of the Bush surveillance program, which much of official Washington knew about and which turns out not to have violated anything. Like radio’s six-second delay to catch obscenities, maybe Washington needs a 12-hour delay on the public comments of senators to spare the public’s ears of offensive inanities.

Michael Yon: “Three Times the Charm”

Published on 12/23/2005 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

Michael has just posted a 21 Dec dispatch upon his return to the U.S. A must-read as always:

Three times now—three times this year—millions of Iraqis have come out swinging and voting. Hearing the news about the high turnout (as high as 75% in some regions) and low incidence of violence during the elections in Iraq yesterday, I have to wonder how many times Iraqis have to demonstrate their commitment to freedom and democracy before the world starts to believe it.

Media Images Disp 3Xtc Large Dispatch-Photo-5 Lg Michael has posted many new, remarkable photos, like this one titled “An Iraqi School Teacher: We know so little about these people and they so little about us”

Once I returned to the US, the primary question for most people seemed to be who are the Iraqi people? Many Americans seem genuinely surprised to hear that Iraq is a country of educated people who are accustomed to modern conveniences and who know how to run a modern country. Iraqis love their kids, educate their women, and they will fight, but they are up against determined enemies. They are also up against the relentless tide of history. . .

NSA intercepts: “Vital Presidential Power”

Published on 12/21/2005 in Counter Terrorism , Media and Politics . Closed Tags: , .

Bill Kristol and Gary Schmitt explain the constitutional law very clearly in today’s Washington Post:

A U.S. president has just received word that American counterterrorist operatives have captured a senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan. Among his possessions are a couple of cell phones — phones that contain several American phone numbers. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, what’s a president to do?

If the president were taking the advice offered by some politicians and pundits in recent days, he would order the attorney general to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The attorney general would ask that panel of federal judges for a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to begin eavesdropping on those telephone numbers, to determine whether any individual associated with those numbers was involved in terrorist activities.

But the attorney general might have to tell the president he might well not be able to get that warrant. FISA requires the attorney general to convince the panel that there is “probable cause to believe” that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. Yet where is the evidence to support such a finding? Who knows why the person seized in Pakistan was calling these people? Even terrorists make innocent calls and have relationships with folks who are not themselves terrorists.

The difficulty with FISA is the standard it imposes for obtaining a warrant aimed at a “U.S. person” — a U.S. citizen or a legal alien: The standard suggests that, for all practical purposes, the Justice Department must already have in hand evidence that someone is a problem before they seek a warrant.

Consider the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who came to the FBI’s attention before Sept. 11 because he had asked a Minnesota flight school for lessons on how to steer an airliner, but not on how to take off or land. Even with this report, and with information from French intelligence that Moussaoui had been associating with Chechen rebels, the Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of his computer files. Had they opened his laptop, investigators might have begun to unwrap the Sept. 11 plot. But strange behavior and merely associating with dubious characters don’t rise to the level of probable cause under FISA.

. . .

This is not an argument for an unfettered executive prerogative. Under our system of separated powers, Congress has the right and the ability to judge whether President Bush has in fact used his executive discretion soundly, and to hold him responsible if he hasn’t. But to engage in demagogic rhetoric about “imperial” presidents and “monarchic” pretensions, with no evidence that the president has abused his discretion, is foolish and irresponsible.

The MSM has once again diverted attention from the priority issues to another fruitless scandal hunt. Sadly, the damage to world security has already been done.

Wretchard’s analysis is also well worth a read:

. . . But whatever the legalities of the wiretapping, the fate of this particular operation was effectively decided — not by the New York Times, it’s fair to say — but by whoever took it upon himself to leak it to them. The judgment on the wiretap’s operational security had been handed down, as effectively as a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court. If your life had to depend on this operation’s secrecy, then kiss your a… goodbye. President Bush had futilely lamented an earlier leak.

“In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak,” he said.

The comments to Wretchard’s post are useful – e.g., this from Wretchard:

In way, the NYT used private ‘wiretap’, information acquired through a leak — without the benefit of a court order — to expose a government wiretap. Now events may prove them justified in their actions, but how did they make that determination except through their own judgment?

Emily Francona notes that there is an oversight system, which includes, among others, Congressional leaders from the Democratic Party. Unless those Congressmen knew less than the NYT then the newspaper acted even though those charged with oversight chose not to. Now the NYT may claim it knew more than the Democratic Congressmen; because Bush misled them, etc, and was therefore justified in acting differently. But how did they know they knew more? No one is going to admit to comparing notes, as that would be tantamount to confessing a security violation. But you can see the difficulties.

The NYT’s argument, I think, must rest on the assertion that this expose was of exceptional public interest, because I do not think you can argue it should be standard operating procedure for a newspaper to arbitrate what military secrets should remain so, unless one is also willing to assert that newspapers ought to replace the oversight system. In which case they ought to write that provision into the newspaper Shield Law.

Of one fact I am certain – such a diversionary furor would not be happening today if the Bush policies had been unsuccessful in preventing another 9/11 tragedy.

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