Fire Hydrant of Freedom

If Iran unleashes Hezbollah in the north if/when Israel goes into Gaza, we could see a real excrement storm.
======================

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
Israel's actions in Gaza are justified under international law, and Israel should be commended for its self-defense against terrorism. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only limitation international law places on a democracy is that its actions must satisfy the principle of proportionality.

Since Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, Hamas has fired thousands of rockets designed to kill civilians into southern Israel. The residents of Sderot -- which have borne the brunt of the attacks -- have approximately 15 seconds from launch time to run into a shelter. Although deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime, terrorists firing at Sderot are so proud of their actions that they sign their weapons.

When Barack Obama visited Sderot this summer and saw the remnants of these rockets, he reacted by saying that if his two daughters were exposed to rocket attacks in their home, he would do everything in his power to stop such attacks. He understands how the terrorists exploit the morality of democracies.

In a recent incident related to me by the former head of the Israeli air force, Israeli intelligence learned that a family's house in Gaza was being used to manufacture rockets. The Israeli military gave the residents 30 minutes to leave. Instead, the owner called Hamas, which sent mothers carrying babies to the house.

The Opinion Journal Widget
Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it. They also knew that if Israeli authorities did not learn there were civilians in the house and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead. Israel held its fire. The Hamas rockets that were protected by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

These despicable tactics -- targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians -- can only work against moral democracies that care deeply about minimizing civilian casualties. They never work against amoral nations such as Russia, whose military has few inhibitions against killing civilians among whom enemy combatants are hiding.

The claim that Israel has violated the principle of proportionality -- by killing more Hamas terrorists than the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets -- is absurd. First, there is no legal equivalence between the deliberate killing of innocent civilians and the deliberate killings of Hamas combatants. Under the laws of war, any number of combatants can be killed to prevent the killing of even one innocent civilian.

In Today's Opinion Journal
 

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

The Euro Decade and Its LessonsTreasury to Ford: Drop Dead

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

Declarations: In With the New
– Peggy NoonanPotomac Watch: The Senate Goes Wobbly on Card Check
– Kimberley A. Strassel

COMMENTARY:

Conservatives Can Unite Around the Constitution
– Peter BerkowitzLet's Be Worthy of Their Sacrific
– Karl RoveLet's Write the Rating Agencies Out of Our Law
– Robert RosenkranzObama Promises Bush III on Iran
– John R. BoltonIsrael's Policy Is Perfectly 'Proportionate'
– Alan M. DershowitzSecond, proportionality is not measured by the number of civilians actually killed, but rather by the risk posed. This is illustrated by what happened on Tuesday, when a Hamas rocket hit a kindergarten in Beer Sheva, though no students were there at the time. Under international law, Israel is not required to allow Hamas to play Russian roulette with its children's lives.

While Israel installs warning systems and builds shelters, Hamas refuses to do so, precisely because it wants to maximize the number of Palestinian civilians inadvertently killed by Israel's military actions. Hamas knows from experience that even a small number of innocent Palestinian civilians killed inadvertently will result in bitter condemnation of Israel by many in the international community.

Israel understands this as well. It goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties -- even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians.

Until the world recognizes that Hamas is committing three war crimes -- targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations -- and that Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity, the conflict will continue.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "The Case Against Israel's Enemies" (Wiley, 2008).

http://www.maniacworld.com/are-you-going-to-finish-strong.html

Mexico: Cartel Sources in High Places
Stratfor Today » December 29, 2008 | 1834 GMT


A Mexican army major has been arrested for allegedly passing information to the Beltran Leyva drug-trafficking organization. The arrest represents a double blow to the Mexican government and demonstrates the reach of the country’s cartels.


Mexican army Maj. Arturo Gonzalez Rodriguez was arrested the week of Dec. 21 for allegedly assisting Mexican drug trafficking organizations for $100,000 per month, the Mexican attorney general’s office announced Dec. 26. Gonzalez was assigned to the Presidential Guard Corps, the unit responsible for protecting Mexico’s president. Based on statements from a former cartel member turned witness code-named “Jennifer,” the attorney general’s office has accused Gonzalez of passing information related to the activities and travel plans of Mexican President Felipe Calderon to the Beltran Leyva organization (BLO). Gonzalez also stands accused of leaking military intelligence, training BLO hit men through a private security company and supplying military weapons to various drug-trafficking organizations, including Los Zetas.


In light of other high-level Mexican government corruption charges over the past months, this case is unsettling but certainly does not come as a surprise.


The revelation that Gonzalez was providing intelligence and materials to drug cartels represents a double blow to the Mexican government. First, the fact that a member of an army unit responsible for protecting the president was passing information about presidential movements to the cartels exposes a potentially fatal gap in Calderon’s protective detail. While it is not known what specific information Gonzalez had access to, or what exact details he was passing to the cartels, this is a security breach at the highest level. According to the attorney general’s office, the informant Jennifer has said the cartels were tracking the president’s movements with the intent of avoiding the high level of government security that surrounds him, but had no specific plan to target Calderon. But capability is more important than intent, as intent can change quickly. Tracking Calderon’s movements to avoid him could easily have been altered to targeting Calderon if the need arose.


It is unclear exactly how involved Gonzalez was in the daily movements of Calderon. Because he was on the staff, it is safe to assume that he was at least involved in briefings and the general movements of the president, but this information would not necessarily be enough for the cartel to have been able to assassinate Calderon. Most valuable to such a plot would have been information related to presidential transport strategy, namely, how the guard worked to protect Calderon, how it arranged transportation, and how it gathered intelligence on specific threats. Insights into how the guard operated would have given the cartels a glimpse into Calderon’s security vulnerabilities — something far more dangerous to Calderon than simply the knowledge of where the president would be at any given time.


The second aspect of the blow is that Gonzalez apparently had been on the cartel payroll since 2005, during which time he held different positions in the government. As he changed assignments, he was kept on as a cartel asset, and the nature of his involvement with the cartels changed. It is entirely feasible that he fed information on other departments of the army (not just the Presidential Guard Corps) over his three-year relationship with the cartels.


A primary reason for the Mexican government to rely on the military to fight the cartels is because state and local law enforcement are considered far too corrupt to be trusted. One of the military’s strengths was its perceived lower level of corruption due to its low-level involvement with the cartels, but this case (along with other military corruption arrests this year) confirms that members of the Mexican military also are prone to corruption.


More details must emerge about Gonzalez’s exact role in the Presidential Guard Corps and the nature of the intelligence he passed to the BLO in order to more accurately assess the threat he posed to the president. Even so, the fact remains that the cartels’ intelligence capabilities have extended to those charged with protecting Mexico’s president — and hence to Mexico’s political stability.

Second post of AM

Part 3: Making It on Its Own
December 19, 2008 | 1218 GMT
Summary
Constrained by its geography since its inception in 1947, Pakistan has found it virtually impossible to develop a strong economy, so it has had to think outside the box. One effective strategy has been to leverage the political and security aspects of its geography, posed by the confluence of countries and cultures in the region. This mix of Iran, India, Afghanistan, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam and Hinduism has meant that powers beyond Pakistan’s immediate frontiers have had a vested interest in its survival. But this could be changing as the world moves away from Pakistan and as it moves closer to its day of reckoning as a functioning nation-state.

Analysis
Related Special Topic Page
Countries In Crisis
Related Links
Part 1: The Perils of Using Islamism to Protect the Core
Part 2: A Crisis in Indian-Pakistani Relations
The Geopolitics of India: A Shifting, Self-Contained World
Editor’s Note: This is the third part of a series on Pakistan.

Very few developing states boast strong economies. Even those that do, such as Brazil, suffer from a host of problems, including insufficient infrastructure and technical personnel, high levels of corruption, shallow local capital markets, currency risk and overdependence on commodities. Pakistan suffers from all of these ailments — and more, as we have discussed in earlier installments of this series.

As we look at the economic factors contributing to Pakistan’s problems, we will first evaluate the Pakistani economy on its merits (or lack thereof). Then we will explain how things are just about as good as they can possibly get.

Security, Debt and Deficit
Pakistan historically has been an economically weak, mismanaged and corrupt state. The Pakistani military elite, deeply entrenched in the economy, holds much of the country’s wealth as well as a number of key assets in the corporate and real estate sectors. The agricultural industry remains the country’s economic backbone, employing some 44 percent of the population, yet accounting for only 21 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP). The remainder of the GDP comes from services (53 percent) and industry (27 percent).

Pakistan’s most fundamental economic problem is that it has very few natural resources to tap in the first place. And it is not necessarily a matter of lacking the resources; security issues in the country’s northwest have long constrained even basic exploration in much of the country, going back to times that predate the British colonial experience. In order to industrialize, therefore, Pakistan has been forced to import whatever materials it needs without first being able to establish a source of income. The unavoidable results are high debt and a sustained, massive trade deficit. As of 2008, the country’s national debt was more than 60 percent of GDP, and the trade deficit about 9.3 percent of GDP.

Even agriculture, the cash cow of many developed states, is a bit of a no-go for the Pakistanis. The Indus River Valley might be productive — indeed, Pakistan has leveraged it to become the 11th-largest producer of wheat — but the country remains a net importer of foodstuffs largely due to the a burgeoning population of 168 million. Though Pakistan is the fifth-largest exporter of rice and 14th-largest exporter of cotton, floods and pest pressure over the past year have hit rice and cotton production hard, with the growth rate last reported by the agricultural sector (for fiscal year 2008) at a dismal 1.5 percent.

Related Links
Pakistan: Grabbing the IMF Lifeline
Pakistan: Biting the IMF Bullet
Pakistan: IMF the Only Option
Pakistan: Flirting With Bankruptcy
The bulk of Pakistan’s exports come from low-value-added products such as textiles and chemicals, but the relative income from such sources has been declining for three decades and is somewhat in danger of disappearing altogether. Pakistan used to enjoy access to the broad Commonwealth market, but starting in 1973, when the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community (EEC, a predecessor to the European Union), that market evaporated, forcing Pakistan to compete internationally on its own merits. And now that textiles are subject to the full/normal trading rules of the World Trade Organization, Pakistan lacks much of a competitive advantage. China, Bangladesh and India can regularly produce textiles at lower cost. In fact, the only true growth industry in Pakistan is its near-monopoly on fuel supply to NATO forces in Afghanistan. Aside from refining, nearly all of Pakistan’s economic sectors face massive challenges at best, and are flirting with collapse at worst.

The net result is not only a low level of development (with the notable exception of Karachi, the center for Pakistan’s international trade, and Lahore, the country’s agricultural capital), but also a chronic lack of capital to invest in the sorts of projects, such as infrastructure, education and finance, that could enable Pakistan to make true economic progress. Pakistan’s only substantial source of capital comes from abroad, and access to that capital is dependent upon factors such as currency rates, the global economic situation and the price of oil — factors that remain firmly beyond Islamabad’s influence.

And the need for new sources of capital is now greater than ever. In recent years, Pakistan has witnessed a collapse of its infrastructure, with power outages of up to six hours a day across the country. The 2008 spikes in energy and food prices almost bankrupted the state. In the year to date, Pakistan’s food bill has jumped by 46 percent over 2007 figures, and its oil bill by 56 percent. Simultaneously, the deteriorating security environment has manifested itself in major cities in the form of suicide bombings — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi have not proved immune — and has done an excellent job of chasing away foreign and even domestic investors. Foreign direct investment (FDI) per capita in Pakistan has plunged to a barely noticeable US$32 per year. (By comparison, sub-Saharan Africa’s per capita FDI is US$50 per year.)

Pakistan is holding the line only by spending money that it does not have to spare. What social stability that remains can largely be credited to food and energy subsidies, which have contributed to an annual inflation rate of more than 25 percent. The costs of those subsidies, along with ongoing military deployments, have landed the budget in deficit to the tune of 7.4 percent of GDP, among the world’s highest. Recent spending has reduced Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves by 75 percent in the course of one year to US$3.45 billion. This is only enough to cover one month of imports, bringing the country dangerously close to defaulting on its debts. Though it has seen some respite in the form of sharply declining oil prices, Pakistan’s ability to finance the debt through bond issues has effectively ended; during a credit crisis, few investors want to lend to well-managed countries, much less a badly run country like Pakistan.

The Economic Limits of Geography
What truly sets Pakistan apart from other countries in terms of economic performance is a geography that greatly curtails its economic opportunities. Of Pakistan’s cities, only Karachi remains globally competitive by most measures. Karachi is the country’s only real port and has easy access to major trade lanes. Moving north along the Indus Valley, one becomes tightly hemmed in by marshes and deserts to the east and arid highlands to the west. The result is that Karachi functions as a city-state unto itself, with the bulk of Pakistan’s population found much farther upstream, where the Indus Valley widens.

The upper Indus is where the country’s best infrastructure is located and where any deep, integrated development might take place. But such development is impossible for three reasons. First, the region’s high population has required extensive irrigation, which has drawn down the Indus’ water level, making it unnavigable by any but the smallest of ships. The upper Indus region is, in effect, cut off from Karachi except by far more expensive rail or road transport. Second, the upper Indus’ natural market and trading partner is none other than India. Indian-Pakistani hostility denies the region the chance for progress. Finally, what water the Indus does have is not under Pakistan’s control; the headwaters of not just the Indus but nearly all of its major tributaries lie not in Pakistan, but in Indian-controlled territory. India is damming up those rivers, both to generate electricity and to further tilt the balance of power away from Pakistan.

The remainder of Pakistan’s population is split off (or perhaps more accurately, sequestered) into the mountainous region of the North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a region that is simply too remote to justify developing under normal circumstances. With the notable exception of Karachi, economic development in Pakistan is virtually impossible without the country somehow getting past its conflict with India.

Thus, the question must be asked: How is Pakistan able to survive? Economic development has been nearly impossible since partition from India, and certainly since the United Kingdom joined the EEC. The answer, put simply, is that Islamabad has been very creative. What Pakistan has succeeded in doing is leveraging the political and security aspects of its geography in order to keep its system going. Just as geography has been Pakistan’s curse, to a great degree it also has become its lifeline. Pakistan sits at the intersection of many regions, countries and cultures, including Iran, India, Afghanistan, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam and Hinduism. This mix makes ruling Pakistan a major headache on the best of days, but it also means that powers beyond Pakistan’s immediate frontiers have a vested interest in seeing Pakistan not fail.

British diplomatic and economic support has maintained the Pakistani-Indian balance of power. All manner of Chinese support, including the sharing of nuclear technology, has strengthened Pakistan against a far superior India. Economic and energy support from Arabs of the Persian Gulf has lent strength to Pakistan when it seemed that India would overwhelm it. And support from the United States, which proved critical in backing the Pakistanis against the Soviet-leaning Indians during the Cold War, continues today in exchange for Pakistan’s support in the war against militant Islamism.

Islamabad’s success in leveraging its geography means that the country has not had to succeed economically on its merits for decades. Put another way, Pakistan has leveraged its geopolitical position not only to push for softer security policies from the United States or India, but also to pay the bills.

This has certainly been replicated in current times. None other than U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus was reported to have personally intervened with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ensure that Pakistan received a US$7.6 billion loan in November, a loan for which Pakistan certainly did not qualify. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates chipped in another US$2 billion in credit, while China contributed US$500 million and the Asian Development Bank provided another US$300 million — all in the past few weeks.

While these funds certainly will delay Pakistan’s day of reckoning, they are unlikely to prevent it. Pakistan’s economy is flirting with becoming nonfunctional, and it cannot operate in the black any more. Doing that would at a minimum require slashing military and subsidy expenditures, an impossible move for a socially seething country operating on a war footing (and, incidentally, a move the IMF loan supposedly will require).

But the real danger is that the world is shifting away from Pakistan, and with that shift, Pakistan’s ability to leverage its geography diminishes. The United States views Pakistan to be as much part of the problem of the Afghan insurgency as it is part of the solution. Oil prices have dropped by US$100 a barrel in less than five months, drastically limiting the Gulf Arabs’ ability to dole out cash. China has many concerns, and fighting Islamist extremism that has leaked into its own western provinces is something Beijing is now weighing against its commitment to Pakistan. The result might not prove to be a total cutoff of funds, but a slackening of support certainly seems to be in the offing. And without such outside support, Pakistan will have to make it or break it on its own — something it has never proved capable of doing.

 

Part 1: The Perils of Using Islamism to Protect the Core
December 17, 2008 | 1203 GMT
Summary
The fundamental challenge to Pakistan’s survival is twofold. First, the only route of expansion that makes any sense is along the Indus River Valley, the country’s fertile heartland, but that path takes Pakistan into India’s front yard. Second, Pakistan also has an insurmountable internal problem: In its efforts to secure buffers, it is forced to include various ethnic groups that, because of mountainous terrain, are impossible to assimilate. When the government used religion as a tool to unify the buffer regions with the Indus Valley core, it did not anticipate that the strategy would threaten the state’s survival.

Analysis
Related Special Topic Pages
Countries In Crisis
Pakistani Democracy and the Army
Related Link
The Geopolitics of India: A Shifting, Self-Contained World
Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a series on Pakistan.

While Pakistan’s boundaries encompass a large swath of land stretching from the peaks of the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, the writ of the Pakistani state stops short of the country’s mountainous northwestern frontier. The strip of arable land that hugs the Indus River in Punjab province is the Pakistani heartland, where the bulk of the country’s population, industry and resources are concentrated. For Pakistan to survive as a modern nation-state, it must protect this core at all costs.

But even in the best of circumstances, defending the Pakistani core and maintaining the integrity of the state are extraordinarily difficult tasks, mainly because of geography.

The headwaters of the Indus River system are not even in Pakistan — the system actually begins in Indian-administered Kashmir. While Kashmir has been the focus of Indo-Pakistani military action in modern times, the area where Pakistan faces its most severe security challenge is the saddle of land between the Indus and the broader, more fertile and more populated Ganges River basin. The one direction in which it makes sense to extend Pakistani civilization as geography would allow takes Pakistan into direct and daily conflict with a much larger civilization: India. Put simply, geography dictates that Pakistan either be absorbed into India or fight a losing battle against Indian influence.

Controlling the Buffers
Pakistan must protect its core by imposing some semblance of control over its hinterlands, mainly in the north and west, where the landscape is more conducive to fragmenting the population than defending the country. The arid, broken highlands of the Baluchistan plateau eventually leak into Iran to the southwest. To the north, in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), the Federally Administered Northern Area (FANA) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), the terrain becomes more and more mountainous. But terrain in these regions still does not create a firm enough barrier to completely block invasion. To the southwest, a veritable Baluch thoroughfare parallels the Arabian Sea coast and crosses the Iranian-Pakistani border. To the northwest, the Pashtun-populated mountains are not so rugged that armies cannot march through them, as Alexander the Great, the Aryans and the Turks historically proved.

To control all these buffer regions, the Pakistani state must absorb masses of other peoples who do not conform to the norms of the Indus core. Russia faces a similar challenge; its lack of geographic insulation from its neighbors forces it to expand to establish a buffer. But in Pakistan, the complications are far worse. Russia’s buffers are primarily flat, which facilitates the assimilation of conquered peoples. Pakistan’s buffers are broken and mountainous, which reinforces ethnic divisions among the regions’ inhabitants — core Punjabis and Sindhis in the Indus Valley, Baluch to the west and Pashtuns to the north. And the Baluch and Pashtuns are spread out over far more territory than what comprises the Punjab-Sindh core.

Thus, while Pakistan has relatively definable boundaries, it lacks the ethnic and social cohesion of a strong nation-state. Three of the four major Pakistani ethnic groups — Punjabis, Pashtuns and Baluch — are not entirely in Pakistan. India has an entire state called Punjab, 42 percent of Afghanistan is Pashtun, and Iran has a significant Baluch minority in its Sistan-Baluchistan province.

Thus, the challenge to Pakistan’s survival is twofold. First, the only route of expansion that makes any sense is along the fertile Indus River Valley, but that takes Pakistan into India’s front yard. The converse is also true: India’s logical route of expansion through Punjab takes it directly into Pakistan’s core. Second, Pakistan faces an insurmountable internal problem. In its efforts to secure buffers, it is forced to include groups that, because of mountainous terrain, are impossible to assimilate.

The first challenge is one that has received little media attention of late but remains the issue for long-term Pakistani survival. The second challenge is the core of Pakistan’s “current” problems: The central government in Islamabad simply cannot assert its writ into the outer regions, particularly in the Pashtun northwest, as well as it can at its core.

The Indus core could be ruled by a democracy — it is geographically, economically and culturally cohesive — but Pakistan as a whole cannot be democratically ruled from the Indus core and remain a stable nation-state. The only type of government that can realistically attempt to subjugate the minorities in the outer regions, who make up more than 40 percent of Pakistan’s population, is a harsh one (i.e., a military government). It is no wonder, then, that the parliamentary system Pakistan inherited from its days of British rule broke down within four years of independence, which was gained in 1947 when Great Britain split British India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. After the 1948 death of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, British-trained civilian bureaucrats ran the country with the help of the army until 1958, when the army booted out the bureaucrats and took over. Since then there have been four military coups, and the army has ruled the country for 33 of its 61 years in existence.

While Pakistani politics is rarely if ever discussed in this context, the country’s military leadership implicitly understands the dilemma of holding onto the buffer regions to the north and west. Long before military leader Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) began Islamizing the state, the army’s central command sought to counter the secular, left-wing, ethno-nationalist tendencies of the minority provinces by promoting an Islamic identity, particularly in the Pashtun belt. At first, the idea was to strengthen the religious underpinning of the republic in order to meld the outlands more closely with the core. Later, in the wake of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (1978-1989), Pakistan’s army began using radical Islamism as an arm of foreign policy. Islamist militant groups, trained or otherwise aided by the government, were formed to push Islamabad’s influence into both Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir.

As Pakistan would eventually realize, however, the strategy of promoting an Islamic identity to maintain domestic cohesion while using radical Islamism as an instrument of foreign policy would do far more harm than good.

Militant Proxies
Pakistan’s Islamization policy culminated in the 1980s, when Pakistani, U.S. and Saudi intelligence services collaborated to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan by arming, funding and training mostly Pashtun Afghan fighters. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Pakistan was eager to forge a post-communist Islamist republic in Afghanistan — one that would be loyal to Islamabad and hostile to New Delhi. To that end, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency threw most of its support behind Islamist rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hizb i-Islami.

But things did not quite go as planned. When the Marxist regime in Kabul finally fell in 1992, a major intra-Islamist power struggle ensued, and Hekmatyar lost much of his influence. Amid the chaos, a small group of madrassah teachers and students who had fought against the Soviets rose above the factions and consolidated control over Afghanistan’s Kandahar region in 1994. The ISI became so impressed by this Taliban movement that it dropped Hekmatyar and joined with the Saudis in ensuring that the Taliban would emerge as the vanguard of the Pashtuns and the rulers of Kabul.

The ISI was not the only one competing for the Taliban’s attention. A small group of Arabs led by Osama bin Laden reopened shop in Afghanistan in 1996, looking to use a Taliban-run government in Afghanistan as a launchpad for reviving the caliphate. Ultimately, this would involve overthrowing all secular governments in the Muslim world (including the one sitting in Islamabad.) The secular, military-run government in Pakistan, on the other hand, was looking to use its influence on the Taliban government to wrest control of Kashmir from India. While Pakistan’s ISI occasionally collaborated with al Qaeda in Afghanistan on matters of convenience, its goals were still ultimately incompatible with those of bin Laden. Pakistan was growing weary of al Qaeda’s presence on its western border, but soon became preoccupied with an opportunity developing to the east.

The Pakistani military saw an indigenous Muslim uprising in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989 as a way to revive its claims over Muslim-majority Kashmir. It did not take long before the military began developing small guerrilla armies of Kashmiri Islamist irregulars for operations against India. When he was a two-star general and the army’s director-general of military operations, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf played a leading role in refining the plan, which became fully operational in the 1999 Kargil War. Pakistan’s war strategy was to infiltrate Kashmiri Islamist guerrillas across the Line of Control (LoC) while Pakistani forces occupied high-altitude positions on Kargil Mountain. When India became aware of the infiltration, it sought to dislodge the guerrillas, at which point Pakistani artillery opened up on Indian troops positioned at lower-altitude base camps. While the Pakistani plan was initially successful, Indian forces soon regained the upper hand and U.S. pressure helped force a Pakistani retreat.

But the defeat at Kargil did not stop Pakistan from pursuing its Islamist militant proxy project in Kashmir. Groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Al Badr spread their offices and training camps throughout Pakistani-occupied Kashmir under the guidance of the ISI. Whenever Islamabad felt compelled to turn up the heat on New Delhi, these militants would carry out operations against Indian targets, mostly in the Kashmir region.

India, meanwhile, would return the pressure on Islamabad by supporting Baluchi rebels in western Pakistan and providing covert support to the ethnic Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s main rival in Afghanistan. While Pakistan grew more and more distracted by supporting its Islamist proxies in Kashmir, the Taliban grew more attached to al Qaeda, which provided fighters to help the Taliban against the Northern Alliance as well as funding when the Taliban were crippled by an international embargo. As a result, al Qaeda extended its influence over the Taliban government, which gave al Qaeda free rein to plan and stage the deadliest terrorist attack to date against the West.

The Post 9/11 Environment
On Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States put Pakistan in a chokehold: Cooperate immediately in toppling the Taliban regime, which Pakistan had nurtured for years, or face destruction. Musharraf tried to buy some time by reaching out to Taliban leaders like Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden, but the Taliban chief refused, making it clear that Pakistan had lost against al Qaeda in the battle for influence over the Taliban.

Just a few months after the 9/11 attacks, in December 2001, Kashmiri Islamist militants launched a major attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi. Still reeling from the pressure it was receiving from the United States, Islamabad was now faced with the wrath of India. Both dealing with an Islamist militant threat, New Delhi and Washington tag-teamed Islamabad and tried to get it to cut its losses and dismantle its Islamist militant proxies.

To fend off some of the pressure, the Musharraf government banned LeT and JeM, two key Kashmiri Islamist groups fostered by the ISI and with close ties to al Qaeda. India was unsatisfied with the ban, which was mostly for show, and proceeded to mass a large military force along the LoC in Kashmir. The Pakistanis responded with their own deployment, and the two countries stood at the brink of nuclear war. U.S. intervention allowed India and Pakistan to step back from the precipice. In the process, Washington extracted concessions from Islamabad on the counterterrorism front, and official Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban withered within days.

The Devolution of the ISI
The post 9/11 shake-up ignited a major crisis in the Pakistani military establishment. On one hand, the military was under extreme pressure to stamp out the jihadists along its western border. On the other hand, the military was fearful of U.S. and Indian interests aligning against Pakistan. Islamabad’s primary means of keeping Washington as an ally was its connection to the jihadist insurgency in Afghanistan. So Islamabad played a double game, offering piecemeal cooperation to the United States while maintaining ties with its Islamist militant proxies in Afghanistan.

Related Links
Pakistan: Islamists and the Benefit of Indo-Pakistani Conflict
Pakistan: Anatomy of the ISI
The Jihadist Insurgency in Pakistan
Pakistan and Its Army
But the ISI’s grip over these proxies was already loosening. In the run-up to 9/11, al Qaeda not only had close ties to the Taliban regime, but also had reached out to ISI handlers whose job it was to maintain links with the array of Islamist militant proxies supported by Islamabad. Many of the intelligence operatives who had embraced the Islamist ideology were working to sabotage Islamabad’s new alliance with Washington, which threatened to destroy the Islamist militant universe they had created. While the ISI leadership was busy trying to adjust to the post-9/11 operating environment, others within the middle and junior ranks of the agency started to engage in activities not necessarily sanctioned by their leadership.

As the influence of the Pakistani state declined, al Qaeda’s influence rose. By the end of 2003, Musharraf had become the target of at least three al Qaeda assassination attempts. In the spring of 2004, Musharraf — again under pressure from the United States — was forced to send troops into the tribal badlands for the first time in the history of the country. Pakistani military operations to root out foreign fighters ended up killing thousands in the Pashtun areas, creating massive resentment against the central government.

In October 2006, when a deadly U.S. Predator strike hit a madrassah in Bajaur agency, killing 82 people, the stage was set for a jihadist insurgency to move into Pakistan proper. The Pakistani Taliban linked up with al Qaeda to carry out scores of suicide attacks, most against military targets and all aiming to break Islamabad’s resolve to combat the insurgency. A major political debacle threw Islamabad off course in March 2007, when Musharraf’s government was hit by a pro-democracy movement after he dismissed the country’s chief justice. Four months later, a raid on Islamabad’s Red Mosque, which Islamist militants had occupied, threw more fuel onto the insurgent fires, igniting suicide attacks in major Pakistani cities like Karachi and Islamabad, while the writ of the state continued to erode in the NWFP and FATA.

Musharraf was forced to step down as army chief in November 2007 and as president in August 2008, ushering in an incoherent civilian government. In December 2007, the world got a good glimpse of just how dangerous the murky ISI-jihadist nexus had become when the political chaos in Islamabad was exploited with a bold suicide attack that killed Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Historically, the Pakistani military had been relied on to step in and restore order in such a crisis, but the military itself was coming undone as the split widened between those willing and those unwilling to work with the jihadists. Now, in the final days of 2008, the jihadist insurgency is raging on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, with the country’s only guarantor against collapse — the military — in disarray.

Kashmiri Groups Cut Loose
India has watched warily as Pakistan’s jihadist problems have intensified over the past several years. Of utmost concern to New Delhi have been the scores of Kashmiri Islamist militants who had been operating on the ISI’s payroll — and who had a score to settle with India. As Pakistan became more and more distracted with battling jihadists within its own borders, the Kashmiri Islamist militant groups began loosening their bonds with the Pakistani state. Groups such as LeT and JeM, who had been banned and forced underground following the 2001 Indian parliament attack, started spreading their tentacles into major Indian cities. These groups retained links to the ISI, but the Pakistani military had bigger issues to deal with and needed to distance itself from the Kashmiri Islamists. If these groups were to continue to carry out operations, Pakistan needed some plausible deniability.

Over the past several years, Kashmiri Islamist militant groups have carried out sporadic attacks throughout India. The attacks have involved commercial-grade explosives rather than the military-grade RDX that is traditionally used in Pakistani-sponsored attacks, another sign that the groups are distancing themselves from Pakistan. The attacks, mostly against crowded transportation hubs, religious sites (both Hindu and Muslim) and marketplaces, were designed to ignite riots between Hindus and Muslims that would compel the Indian government to crack down and revive the Kashmir cause.

However, India’s Hindu nationalist and largely moderate Muslim communities failed to take the bait. It was only a matter of time before these militant groups began seeking out more strategic targets that would affect India’s economic lifelines and ignite a crisis between India and Pakistan. As these groups became increasingly autonomous, they also started linking up with members of al Qaeda’s transnational jihadist movement, who had a keen interest in stirring up conflict between India and Pakistan to divert the attention of Pakistani forces to the east.

By November 2008, this confluence of forces — Pakistan’s raging jihadist insurgency, the devolution of the ISI and the increasing autonomy of the Kashmiri groups — created the conditions for one of the largest militant attacks in history to hit Mumbai, highlighting the extent to which Pakistan has lost control over its Islamist militant proxy project.

Summary
Artillery rockets impacted the Israeli town of Beer Sheva on Dec. 30, much farther than Hamas’ rocket arsenal was thought to be able to reach. Their impact offers clues to the status of the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Analysis
Related Links
Israel, Palestinian Territories: Hamas and the Israeli Offensive
Geopolitical Diary: The Latest Phase of Israeli-Palestinian Fighting
Israel: Countering Qassams and Other Ballistic Threats
Geopolitical Diary: A New Shield for Israel
The Geopolitics of Israel: Biblical and Modern
Related Special Topic Pages
Israel’s Military
Israeli-Palestinian Geopolitics and the Peace Process
Two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in Beer Sheva, Israel, some 25 miles from their point of origin, Haaretz news reported Dec. 30. This is the farthest inside Israel a Palestinian rocket has ever reached from Gaza. It almost certainly indicates a larger rocket than Hamas and the jihadist groups in Gaza were previously thought to possess.

For years, Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip have used Qassam rockets, which are made out of materials readily available in the territory and essentially assembled in garages. Last year, there were indications that changes to the fuel mixture had given a new version of the Qassam a greatly increased shelf life. (Older versions had to be fired a few days after being assembled.) Though range varies, Qassams have a range of around 6 miles.

Also last year, there were indications that Hamas had obtained a quantity of 122mm BM-21 Grad artillery rockets. These rockets, while crude, are manufactured to comparatively exacting military standards in a number of countries and have proliferated widely. They have a range of more than 12 miles.





(click image to enlarge)
The 25-mile range indicated by the latest strikes in Beer Sheva is more than favorable wind conditions could likely account for, suggesting a larger rocket in Hamas’ arsenal. The range is consistent with the Iranian-made Fajr-3, though of course there are multiple rockets that could reach 25 miles.

While this is still far short of the roughly 50-mile distance to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Dimona (home to the Israeli nuclear weapons program), this escalation in Hamas’ reach will be a major concern for Israel.

But what matters most is not where the rockets came from, but what the rocket strike in Beer Sheva says about the progress of the Israeli campaign in Gaza. As artillery rockets increase in range, they also generally increase in size and weight. A single Grad rocket (there are multiple variants) is more than 10 feet long and weighs in at 100-175 pounds, and requires multiple people to carry it. Whatever hit Beer Sheva at the end of the fourth day of the Israeli operation was almost certainly larger.

Destroying these rockets should have been one of the first objectives of any Israeli military assault on Gaza. While Israel was never going to destroy every last cache of rockets, especially from the air, it does not bode well for Israel that Hamas is demonstrating a new capability at the end of several days of bombardment by the Israeli Air Force — which is specifically targeting, among other things, that very rocket arsenal.

Of course, a potential ground incursion is looming. Israel has already called up some 7,000 reservists and moved tanks and armored vehicles to the border, and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak reportedly has asked for the authority to activate an additional 2,520. The Israel Defense Forces are preparing for weeks of protracted fighting to eliminate as much of Hamas’ fighting capability as they can. But the “use-it-or-lose-it” moment for Hamas with its rocket arsenal likely already has passed. The Dec. 30 strike is probably better understood as a defiant Hamas demonstrating how much capability it has retained, which suggests that Israeli air power and intelligence may not have achieved early hoped-for gains.

Whether more of these longer-range rockets appear as the conflict continues will be telling. If Hamas had only two left, and the rest have been destroyed, that is one thing. But if the longer-range barrage continues unabated, then it says something very different about the Israeli campaign. Indeed, the 40 shorter-range rockets that struck the western Negev on Dec. 30 alone also do not bode well for the success of the Israeli air campaign.

Ultimately, Barak’s push to activate more reservists suggests the Israelis know they have probably achieved what can be achieved from the air, and now are preparing for extended ground raids.

Rachel:

I deeply value your presence here and our mix is greatly improved by your contributions.

The Adventure continues,
Marc

And we know how it turned out for her-- which is why I am a "Never Again Jew".

Second post:

By TRENT ENGLAND
Olympia, Wash.

Sorry Minnesota, but the sequel is never as good as the original.

For those who watched the Washington State governor's race recounts in 2004, the ongoing recount drama in Minnesota is just another rehash of the same script -- albeit for a U.S. Senate seat that might put Democrats one vote away from a filibuster-proof majority.

Four years ago in Washington, Democratic Party candidate Christine Gregoire lost the first count, lost the recount, and then won a second, highly dubious recount by 133 votes. In Minnesota, where Sen. Norm Coleman is defending his seat against comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken, the first count showed Mr. Coleman up 725 votes. Today, thanks to another dubious recount, Mr. Franken is apparently in the lead.

Razor-thin margins like these put election systems to the test. As the old proverb goes, they are a crisis and an opportunity. Yet the crises keep coming and the opportunities continue to be squandered. It's time to learn the lessons of the recount wars and address the systemic flaws in our election processes. Indeed, the price of a continued decline in voter confidence is too troubling for most Americans to comprehend.

In Washington's 2004 gubernatorial election, at least 1,392 felons illegally voted, 252 provisional ballots were wrongly counted, and 19 votes were cast from beyond the grave, according to Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges's opinion in a case brought by Dino Rossi, Ms. Gregoire's Republican opponent.

The Opinion Journal Widget
Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
Election workers in King County (where Seattle is located) "enhanced" 55,177 ballots to make it easier for tabulating machines to read them -- even though the county had failed to establish written procedures as required by state law. In some cases, individual election workers modified voted ballots using black felt markers and white-out tape while observers were kept at a distance that prevented meaningful observation. Nine separate times, King County "discovered" and counted unsecured ballots.

Nevertheless, Ms. Gregoire lost to Mr. Rossi by 261 votes.

An automatic recount reduced Mr. Rossi's lead to just 42 votes. The Gregoire campaign demanded a state-wide hand recount, a time-consuming and expensive process that state law says the challenger must pay for (if the result changes, the challenger is reimbursed). Big labor unions joined with far-left groups like MoveOn.org to put up the money for Ms. Gregoire's third-time's-the-charm ballot shuffle.

During the recount process, five counties found new, uncounted, unsecured ballots and added them into their totals. King County officials admitted publicly that ballot reconciliation reports were falsified in an attempt to conceal variations between the number of votes counted and the number of voters who voted (two elections workers were disciplined as a result).

By the end, 3,539 votes more than the number of voters who voted were tabulated. Four other swing counties provided an additional 4,880 mystery ballots. Ms. Gregoire was the victor by a margin of 133 votes.

That margin -- 133 votes -- happens to be the same number of ballots that Minneapolis election officials are currently missing. The initial vote tally in one Democrat-leaning precinct counted 133 more ballots than officials have been able to find for the Senate recounts. The Minnesota canvassing board decided on Dec. 12 to allow Minneapolis simply to ignore the recount and go with the original number. This provided a 46-vote boost for Mr. Franken, about the same as his current projected lead. The board also "requested" that counties reconsider rejected absentee ballots, a new and novel part of the recount procedure that is also expected to favor Mr. Franken.

Something is wrong when a victorious candidate owes more thanks to vote counters than to voters. Such was the case in Washington in 2004, and Minnesota is poised to follow in its footsteps in 2008.

It need not be this way. After 2004, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation produced a 42-page report offering a dozen solutions. While a few were implemented, most were simply ignored by officials content to cross their fingers and hope the next close election is in someone else's jurisdiction.

Some reforms are simply educational and cultural; others are fundamental and essential. Election officials need to understand current federal and state laws and regulations governing the entire election process, including recounts. Those responsible for elections must also inculcate a culture of compliance among election staff, including temporary staff hired at election time.

From the moment they are printed, ballots should be isolated and guarded and their chain of custody recorded. Officials with rule-making authority are responsible for establishing processes that clarify how ballots are to be handled, stored, counted, and, if necessary, recounted.


Most important to maintaining and increasing public faith in elections is improving openness, especially leveraging Internet technology to make anyone a potential election observer. The Minneapolis Star Tribune's project to put all 6,700 contested ballots in the Senate race on the Web, so people can compare their own judgments to those of the canvassing board, is but one example. Election officials who have nothing to hide should be putting as much as possible online as quickly as possible.

Citizens and the media might also take a closer look at some of the individuals and organizations involved in monkeying with and even overturning elections. Both Mr. Franken and Ms. Gregoire were endorsed by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- Acorn -- a group under investigation in several states for suspected voter registration chicanery.

The man overseeing the Senate recount, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, was also endorsed by Acorn, and his election campaign in 2006 was funded in part by something called "The Secretary of State Project." This latter group, founded by MoveOn.org's former grass-roots director, exists solely to install far-left candidates as secretaries of state in swing states.

Close elections will always stir controversy. They will often require recounts to validate the results. Yet the Washington and Minnesota recounts offer cautionary tales. The democratic process is too important to be disregarded until a virtual tie forces us to pay attention. Regardless of which candidates win our elections, the voters -- not the vote counters -- should win every time.

Mr. England is director of the Citizenship and Governance Center at the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

For those who thought the new era of Democratic governance would be dull, we present this year's Senate replacement follies. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich kept the entertainment going yesterday by defying just about everyone and nominating former state Attorney General Roland Burris to the seat being vacated by President-elect Obama.

Recall that federal prosecutors had gone public with their criminal complaint against Mr. Blagojevich earlier this month expressly to deter him from making such an appointment. Mr. Obama had then declared that the Governor should not make an appointment, and Senate Democrats had said they wouldn't seat anyone Mr. Blagojevich did appoint. Majority Leader Harry Reid repeated that pledge yesterday regarding Mr. Burris, who lost to the Governor in a primary in 2002 but then was vice chairman of his transition team.


Democrats who run the state assembly are still trying to impeach Mr. Blagojevich, but meantime they've stepped back from allowing a special election for the seat. Democrats hope to dump the Governor and then have his replacement appoint a different Democrat. No doubt they're afraid Republicans might win given this exquisite display of competent, honest Democratic government.

Meanwhile, Democrats in New York are fighting over Caroline Kennedy's campaign to be appointed to the Senate seat being vacated by Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton. Former Democrat and former Republican and now independent Mayor Mike Bloomberg is all for the idea, as reportedly is Mr. Obama, whom the daughter of JFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy endorsed at a crucial moment during the Presidential primaries. Not so happy is New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the son of a former three-term Governor, who would like the seat himself and was once married to a Kennedy.


Caught in the middle is Democrat David Paterson, who will appoint a new Senator but is Governor himself only because Eliot Spitzer flamed out with a prostitute. Ms. Kennedy hasn't helped herself with a recent spate of interviews showing she doesn't know very much about many public issues. But then how much worse could she be than the professional politicians who populate Albany or represent New York in Washington? Democrats will outnumber Republicans in New York's House delegation next year, 26-3, and it speaks volumes about their abilities that Mr. Paterson might choose a dynastic neophyte over any of them.

Lest it be overlooked, there's also the spectacle in Delaware, where the soon-to-depart Joe Biden has arranged to have a crony appointed to take his Senate seat of 36 years. Edward "Ted" Kaufman, a former aide to Mr. Biden, is expected to keep the seat away from a more ambitious Democrat for two years, until Joe's son Beau Biden, the state attorney general, can return from his National Guard tour in Iraq and run in 2010 to maintain the family business.

And don't forget Colorado, where a mooted Senate replacement for Secretary of Interior nominee Ken Salazar is his brother, Congressman John Salazar. Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, who has benefited from the money and organization of the Salazar political machine, will make that appointment.

So to recap all of this change you can believe in: A Kennedy and Cuomo are competing to succeed a Clinton in New York; the skids are greased for a Biden to replace a Biden in Delaware; one Salazar might replace another in Colorado; and a Governor charged with political corruption in Illinois wants one of his cronies to succeed the President-elect. Let's just say we're looking forward to 2009.

In today's Political Diary:

- Note to Readers
- Obama Senate Seat Becomes a Test of 'Chicago Politics'
- Republicans vs. Bailout Nation
- Fannie, Freddie and Hankie (Quote of the Day I)
- Nosey Parker (Quote of the Day II)
- Advice from Voters for the GOP


Note to Readers

PD will be getting an early start on goofing off in '09. We'll be back on Monday. Happy New Year!

-- The Mgmt.


Where Obama Comes From

Barack Obama's Senate seat has been vacant for a month now and looks like it will remain vacant as long as embattled Governor Rod Blagojevich resists efforts to remove him from office or persuade him to resign. The governor has said he won't be naming anyone to fill the Obama vacancy because the U.S. Senate wouldn't likely seat such a tainted appointee.

A special election to fill the vacancy was initially proposed by leading Democrats such as U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn and Senate President Emil Jones. But they backed off as realization dawned that Republicans might actually have a chance of winning a special election in the person of Congressman Mark Kirk, a respected moderate from the Chicago suburbs who has $5 million in his campaign fund.

So Democrats are stuck. As long as Mr. Blagojevich remains in office, Illinois will have only one senator and the voting public will be upset at the failure to call a special election.

That's why one Democratic state legislator is proposing a stopgap solution. Chicago Democrat Will Burns is introducing a bill that would require anyone Governor Blagojevich might appoint to the Senate to undergo hearings before both houses of the state legislature, followed by a confirmation vote. "Balancing the fiscal problems the state is facing with the need for more disclosure and a better process, I thought that this hybrid proposal provides the public with more transparency," Mr. Burns told Illinois Public Radio.

But his bill doesn't envision any long-term change in the process by which vacated U.S. Senate seats are filled in Illinois. The new bill would be a "one ride only" piece of legislation applying solely to the Obama vacancy.

Illinois pols can come up with any number of Rube Goldberg solutions to avoid a straightforward special election that would put the choice in the hands of voters. But if a special election were called, it could be held in conjunction with local elections already scheduled for most of the state in February or April. The cost would be minimal and voters would have real input in who will be representing them in Washington. Of course, that would mean the pols would lose control of the process, something which can't be allowed to happen in machine-dominated Illinois.

-- John Fund


The Bush Hangover

The Republican National Committee, which consists of two representatives from every state and territory, is technically the governing body of the Republican Party. In reality, it has normally been a rubber-stamp for the incumbent president whenever the White House is in GOP hands. "I've never seen much of any debate, much less a contested vote, in the years I've been on it," one RNC member told me.

But the debacle of the last two election cycles, coupled with an increasingly erratic set of policy choices by the Bush White House, is finally prompting a mini-revolt. A group of RNC members has initiated a special meeting to hear presentations from the six candidates running for the job of chairman. Even more significantly, the RNC's vice chairman and other officials are sponsoring a resolution that will oppose the Bush White House's support of seemingly bottomless bailouts for Wall Street and the auto industry.

"We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," Solomon Yue of Oregon, a cosponsor of the resolution, told the Washington Times. The resolution was written by James Bopp, a noted constitutional law attorney who is the RNC's national vice chairman.

"Articulating a political philosophy is equally important as applying it consistently," says Mr. Yue. "Failing to do so, we have today's identity crisis, which resulted in our losses in 2006 and 2008."

The resolution is scheduled to be presented during the RNC's next general meeting in Washington D.C., which will be held between January 28 and 30. While the fact that some RNC members have finally developed a policy backbone is commendable, their declaration of independence comes a bit late. The Bush administration will be safely out of town by the time the resolution comes up for a vote.

-- John Fund


Quote of the Day I

"By mid-2006 there was a new actor in this long-running drama: Hank Paulson, the former Goldman Sachs C.E.O. who had just become Treasury secretary. Unlike the advisers who surrounded Bush, Paulson did not believe that the G.S.E.'s [government-sponsored enterprises, notably Fannie and Freddie] were the bogeymen of the financial system. After all, they had been major clients of his for years, and the ties between Goldman and Fannie ran deep. Nor did Paulson want any part of what he called 'the closest thing I've witnessed to a Holy War.' Paulson quickly began to move away from what one observer calls the 'extreme rigidity' of the administration's position. . . . 'I was aghast,' says a longtime G.S.E. foe, expressing a common attitude. 'Here we were fighting trench warfare with Fannie and Freddie, and Paulson says, "Let's cut a deal and say we won." Some of us really did believe they were a house of cards''' -- Vanity Fair writer Bethany McLean, on the federal government's failure to rein in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.


Quote of the Day II

"Given the holidays and the press of business in preparation for the new administration, we have not reconstructed the circumstances behind each ticket. However, Congressman Rangel is confident that the National Leadership PAC and Rangel for Congress complied with all applicable laws and regulations in connection with these expenses, which were fully reported consistent with FEC requirements" -- Emile Milne, spokesman for Rep. Charlie Rangel, on revelations that Mr. Rangel used campaign funds to pay $1,540 in parking tickets in the District of Columbia, an illegal use of donations unless the fines were incurred as part of campaign events.


The GOP's 12 Steps to Recovery

The first comprehensive poll on why voters voted the way they did in November has just been released by the communications firm Target Point Consulting. I received a full briefing from the pollster Alex Lundry on what these 1,000 voters think of Republicans. The short answer is: not much.

The GOP is "in great disfavor with the electorate right now. Republicans are blamed for fiscal mismanagement, overspending, and the bad economy," says Mr. Lundry. "Democrats are seen as a center-right party, while Republicans are seen as dominated by the right."

That's a big problem because even though 84% of voters say they are center or right on the ideological spectrum, the 48% in the middle, i.e., independents, are tilting heavily toward Democrats. The fairly narrow victory by Barack Obama in the popular vote disguises an "enthusiasm gap" among Democratic and Republican voters. Some 65% of Obama voters "strongly supported" him, whereas only 33% of John McCain voters "strongly supported" the Arizona Republican. This helps explain the river of money for Mr. Obama and the massive grassroots advantage for the Democrats.

But the biggest problem revealed by the poll for Republicans is that "voters no longer believe that the party cares about the middle class in a meaningful or credible way," Mr. Lundry explains. "Democrats cleverly frame every issue as for the middle class."

What issues have Republicans hurt themselves most on? Three that jump out are immigration, where Republicans are seen as too strident; the War in Iraq, where voters are eager for closure; and bailouts, where voters have become angry and resentful at throwing money at failing giant corporations. Furthermore, as economic anxieties have escalated, independent voters are now more favorably inclined toward protectionist trade policies. Free marketeers need to make a better case for the positive benefits of international trade or more restrictions are certainly on the way.

The good news is that voters are very fearful that Democrats will go too far with their liberal agenda. When voters are asked what they "like least about the Democrats," the most common answers volunteered were: "taxes going up," "big government," "liberal," "raise spending," and even "socialism." These broad economic and fiscal principles appear to present the GOP with its biggest opening.

The poll also reveals that Republicans can win back voters by opposing Democrats on several specific policies coming down the pike in 2009: card-check labor union elections, bailouts for banks and auto makers, welfare expansions and affirmative action.

The key for the months ahead is for Republicans to posture themselves, advises Mr. Lundry, "not as obstructionists, but as a check on the Obama agenda."

-- Stephen Moore

Stratfor
---------------------------

 

GEOPOLITICAL DIARY: THE LATEST PHASE OF ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN FIGHTING

The Israeli military attacked Hamas-controlled Gaza this weekend. On Friday, Hamas had terminated its unilateral truce with the Israelis. The decision was accompanied by rockets fired into Israel and claims by Hamas that it had longer-range rockets capable of striking even deeper into the country. The Israelis responded with a massive attack that was designed to smash Hamas' infrastructure, impose heavy penalties on Gaza for Hamas' decision, and attempt to preempt not only rocket attacks but also a new campaign of suicide bombers. Whether the campaign will achieve Israel’s goals or trigger an escalation from the Hamas side is now the issue. What is not at issue is that a new round of fighting in Gaza had been expected for weeks. Hamas had made it clear that it was going to end the truce, and Israel had made it clear that it would consider the war resumed and respond accordingly.

The first question is why Hamas chose to end the truce, opening the door to an Israeli attack. The answer might lie in the fact that Palestinian elections are coming up. While Hamas was a pure opposition party, it was an effective critic of Fatah's governance. But having been responsible for Gaza for a while, Hamas now bears criticism for the conditions there, and thus the party's popularity had slipped. Having failed to make significant inroads into the West Bank -- where Fatah dominated -- and having drawn criticism for its administration in Gaza, Hamas saw its momentum blunted.

Hamas was much more effective as a combat party, fighting the Israelis, than as an administrative party dealing with the intractable problem of Gaza. The longer it remained passive toward the Israelis and the longer it remained responsible for Gaza, the less it was likely to appeal to Palestinian voters. Hamas made a strategic decision to re-establish its credentials as the only Palestinian force effectively fighting Israel. In doing so, it also reinforced the perception of Fatah as collaborating with the Israelis (and an Israeli attack is also a mechanism to prompt Palestinians to rally behind Hamas). From Hamas' point of view -- facing a hopeless situation governing Gaza and a showdown with Fatah -- ending the truce made sense in the long term, on the premise that a conventional attack by Israel would not decisively break Hamas' capability.

The Israeli response was also, on one level, driven by public opinion. Hamas' ability to attack Israeli positions with rockets, or potentially to launch another round of suicide bombings in Israeli population centers, was quite real. If it happened, Israeli public opinion not only would create a crisis for any Israeli government, but also would strengthen those forces that felt that any peace process with the Palestinians was impossible.

Ehud Olmert, still prime minister pending a new government, saw the Hamas move as an opportunity. Hamas created a situation that had to be dealt with. Waiting for his successor to deal with the problem would bog that successor down in an issue with the international community that would cripple any ongoing diplomacy. Launching a security campaign as a lame-duck prime minister takes the issue off his successor's plate. In an odd way, this increases the chance of some sort of settlement with the Palestinians, by allowing Olmert to be cast as a villain.

If this seems more complicated than it should be, that is not an incorrect impression. Underneath all of this is a core reality: A Palestinian state on the 1948 borders is an impossibility for both Palestinians and Israelis. For the Palestinians, it would mean a state divided physically between Gaza and the West Bank, without an independent economic foundation. It would be a fiasco. For the Israelis, the 1948 borders would allow the Palestinians to rocket Tel Aviv easily, with no guarantee that a Palestinian state would or could put a stop to it. The Palestinians need more than the 1948 borders, and the Israelis can't even give that.

Therefore, the current cycle of violence is simply one of many such cycles that are hardwired into the geography of Israel and Palestine and from which there is no escape. It is almost unnecessary to go through the political reasoning that has led each side to this point, except to explain why it is happening now instead of earlier or later. The politics simply determine the time and shape of conflict. Geography determines that the conflict is intractable.

"She is the federal employee who Monica Lewinsky took her tale of presidential trysts to."

"She is the federal employee to whom Monica Lewinsky took her tale of presidential trysts." 

I must be slow this morning , , , I am still not understanding.

Thank you.

Who is Lucianne?

Speaking of the American Creed, here's this:
==============================

By FOUAD AJAMI
The last of Samuel Huntington's books -- "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," published four years ago -- may have been his most passionate work. It was like that with the celebrated Harvard political scientist, who died last week at 81. He was a man of diffidence and reserve, yet he was always caught up in the political storms of recent decades.

 
Zina Saunders"This book is shaped by my own identities as a patriot and a scholar," he wrote. "As a patriot I am deeply concerned about the unity and strength of my country as a society based on liberty, equality, law and individual rights." Huntington lived the life of his choice, neither seeking controversies, nor ducking them. "Who Are We?" had the signature of this great scholar -- the bold, sweeping assertions sustained by exacting details, and the engagement with the issues of the time.

He wrote in that book of the "American Creed," and of its erosion among the elites. Its key elements -- the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals -- he said are derived from the "distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an "argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people." The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America's national identity. "The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast," he wrote in "Who Are We?", "and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities."

The Opinion Journal Widget
Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments -- and falseness -- of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.

Huntington made no secret of his own preference: an American nationalism "devoted to the preservation and enhancement of those qualities that have defined America since its founding." His stark sense of realism had no patience for the globalism of the Clinton era. The culture of "Davos Man" -- named for the watering hole of the global elite -- was disconnected from the call of home and hearth and national soil.

But he looked with a skeptical eye on the American expedition to Iraq, uneasy with those American conservatives who had come to believe in an "imperial" American mission. He foresaw frustration for this drive to democratize other lands. The American people would not sustain this project, he observed, and there was the "paradox of democracy": Democratic experiments often bring in their wake nationalistic populist movements (Latin America) or fundamentalist movements (Muslim countries). The world tempts power, and denies it. It is the Huntingtonian world; no false hopes and no redemption.

In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into global renown, with his "clash of civilizations" thesis. In an article first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest -- Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.

In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal challenge to the West. "The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity."

He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs -- 19 of them -- would weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of the truth of Huntington's vision. With his typical precision, he had written of a "youth bulge" unsettling Muslim societies, and young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of this radical age.

In Today's Opinion Journal
 

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

The Wizards of OilThe Philanthropy ShakedownYou Are Your Record

TODAY'S COLUMNISTS

Global View: Hamas Know One Big Thing
– Bret StephensMain Street: New Jersey Is the Perfect Bad Example
– William McGurn

COMMENTARY

Samuel Huntington's Warning
– Fouad AjamiWhy Detroit Has an Especially Bad Union Problem
– Logan RobinsonObama Will Ration Your Health Care
– Sally C. PipesThe FDA Is Killing Crohn's Patients
– Gideon J. Sofer
If I may be permitted a personal narrative: In 1993, I had written the lead critique in Foreign Affairs of his thesis. I admired his work but was unconvinced. My faith was invested in the order of states that the West itself built. The ways of the West had become the ways of the world, I argued, and the modernist consensus would hold in key Third-World countries like Egypt, India and Turkey. Fifteen years later, I was given a chance in the pages of The New York Times Book Review to acknowledge that I had erred and that Huntington had been correct all along.

A gracious letter came to me from Nancy Arkelyan Huntington, his wife of 51 years (her Armenian descent an irony lost on those who dubbed him a defender of nativism). He was in ill-health, suffering the aftermath of a small stroke. They were spending the winter at their summer house on Martha's Vineyard. She had read him my essay as he lay in bed. He was pleased with it: "He will be writing you himself shortly." Of course, he did not write, and knowing of his frail state I did not expect him to do so. He had been a source of great wisdom, an exemplar, and it had been an honor to write of him, and to know him in the regrettably small way I did.

We don't have his likes in the academy today. Political science, the field he devoted his working life to, has been in the main commandeered by a new generation. They are "rational choice" people who work with models and numbers and write arid, impenetrable jargon.

More importantly, nowadays in the academy and beyond, the patriotism that marked Samuel Huntington's life and work is derided, and the American Creed he upheld is thought to be the ideology of rubes and simpletons, the affliction of people clinging to old ways. The Davos men have perhaps won. No wonder the sorrow and the concern that ran through the work of Huntington's final years.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

 

The book "Liberal Fascism" (the author's name slips my mind at the moment) discusses TR at some length.  TR was McCain's idol/hero.  After McCain's terrible response to the market meltdown I'm finding it less upsetting that he lost.

Bush, McCain, and BO all were/are Keynesians and with the utter stupidity, vapidity, and disingenuity of how the story of the meltdown is being told (the market did it ) it looks like we are set to repeat the same policy errors of FDR and with the same results of FDR and the Japanese's "lost decades".

Our cultural memory of what this country is about grows dimmer and dimmer.

Israel's air assault on Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks is inspiring familiar international denunciations. But the best commentary we've heard might be this one: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing."

 
AP
Northern Gaza Strip as seen from Netiv Hasara, Israel, Dec. 27, 2008.
Barack Obama said those words in July while visiting Israel as a Presidential candidate.

Now as President-elect, Mr. Obama is maintaining an appropriate silence while deferring to the Bush Administration before his Inauguration. But his July remarks capture the essence of Israel's right to self-defense. Moreover, the more successful Israel is this week in damaging Hamas as a terrorist force, the better chance Mr. Obama will have to make progress in facilitating a genuine Mideast peace.

Naturally, the conventional diplomatic and journalistic wisdom is that the longer the fight goes on the more difficult the "peace process" becomes. The usual suspects at the United Nations are condemning Israel and blaming it for "excessive" force. Even Nicolas Sarkozy -- who holds the rotating European Union presidency and is considered Israel-friendly for a French president -- criticized Jerusalem's "disproportionate" response.

The Opinion Journal Widget
Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
But as Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi explain, the Israeli public isn't about to make territorial concessions on the West Bank or the Golan Heights if Gaza is allowed to become a neighboring terrorist state that can launch attacks with impunity. Israel has already had a bad enough experience letting that happen with Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, the stronger Hamas becomes, the more resistance Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will face to making any concessions to Israel.

The chronology of this latest violence is important to understand. Israel withdrew both its soldiers and all of its settlers from Gaza in August 2005. Hamas won its internal power struggle with Mr. Abbas's Fatah organization to control Gaza in 2007. Since 2005 Hamas has fired some 6,300 rockets at Israeli civilians from Gaza, killing 10 and wounding more than 780.

Hamas did agree to a six-month cease-fire earlier this year, during which the rocket attacks declined in number but never completely stopped. But Hamas refused to extend the truce past December 19, and the group has since resumed attacks, firing nearly 300 missiles, rockets and mortars. The 250,000 Israelis in the southern part of the country live under constant threat, often in bomb shelters, and the economy has suffered. Yet the world's media seem to pay attention only when Israel responds to that Hamas barrage.

Israel's air assault has resulted in more Palestinian casualties, but that is in part because Hamas deliberately locates its security forces in residential neighborhoods. This is intended both to deter Israel from attacking in the first place as well as to turn world opinion against the Jewish state when it does attack. By all accounts, however, the Israeli strikes have hit their targets precisely enough to do significant damage to Hamas forces -- both to its leadership and, on Sunday, to the tunnels from Gaza to Egypt that Hamas uses to smuggle in weapons and build its growing army.

In Today's Opinion Journal
 

REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Israel's Gaza DefenseOrszag's Health WarningSudan's Slaves

TODAY'S COLUMNIST

The Americas: Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara
– Mary Anastasia O'Grady

COMMENTARY

Palestinians Need Israel to Win
– Michael B. Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi'Stimulus' Doesn't Have to Mean Pork
– Clifford WinstonThe War on Terror Has Not Gone Away
– Thane RosenbaumCarbon Limits, Yes; Energy Subsidies, No
– William Tucker
Hamas claims the goal of its rocket attacks is merely to force Israel to ease its strict travel restrictions into and out of Gaza. But those restrictions are intended to prevent suicide bombers from blowing up Israeli citizens in cafes as they did during the intifadah earlier this decade. If Hamas wants its people to have freer movement, it can stop sponsoring terror killings.

Even as Arab leaders have formally condemned Israel's attacks, they have also noted Hamas's escalation. Mr. Abbas yesterday said "We talked to them [Hamas] and we told them 'please, we ask you, do not end the truce. Let the truce continue and not stop' so that we could have avoided what happened." Egypt's Foreign Minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, assailed Israel's air strikes but also held Hamas responsible. They understand that Hamas, like Hezbollah, is increasingly allied with Iran and its goals for fomenting regional instability.

Israel itself faces a difficult decision of whether to escalate with a ground attack on Gaza. That would help further diminish Hamas, though at the cost of more casualties and greater international disapproval. The worst outcome would be a ground assault, a la the one in Lebanon in 2006, that stirred anti-Israel sentiment but stopped short of achieving its military goals.

The Bush Administration's support for Israel is welcome, though we should note the violence comes at the end of a four-year Bush effort to midwife a Palestinian peace. There's a lesson here for Mr. Obama, who is about to discover that the terrorists of the Middle East aren't about to change their radical ambitions merely because America has a new President.

Forgive me CCP, but I am baffled why you would post such twaddle.

Hamas, in contravention to "Palestine's" international legal obligations, is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  Exactly why is Israel supposed to faciliate it and its actions towards that end? 

Peace through victory is the only option left to Israel.

Africa: Obama's Victory, Our Hypocrisy

Chris Agbiti
26 December 2008

November 4th, 2008 will, undoubtedly go down in world history as epoch making.

It was a day that signposted the final internment of the age-long divisive philosophy that held one race superior to another (apology to the legend, Bob Marley); it was a day the entire world came together, irrespective of creed and religion, to recite Dune Dimitis (however, not with long faces) for the monster of racial discrimination that had for long defined the political climate of America but now chased away; it was the day Barack Hussein Obama won in landslide, the U.S Presidential election.

The U.S. Presidential Election has come and gone but the echoes of it continue to reverberate in every nook and cranny of Africa especially in Kenya where Obama traces his patrilineal descent from. The euphoria of Obama's victory will for long continue its ripples in the Negroid race of Africa.

However, the point is worth making that for the Americans, the euphoria of joy sweeping through its entire nation is understandable: That, at last, someone who has a clear vision and a good grasp of the issues that need to be addressed to restore U.S. lost glory, consequent upon the lacklustre performance of the out-going president, was not held back from realizing that ambition by prejudices. But for Africans, what other reason beside the sentimental consideration that a fellow brother African now becomes President of U.S., can we adduce to bedrocks our own euphoria at the election of Obama?

If one may ask, what business do African countries, together with their stinking leaders, have in rejoicing over Obama's victory at the U.S. poll when we know in our hearts of hearts that we will never allow the kind of system that has produced Obama in U.S. election to be replicated in our own land?

Or, are we under a delusion that, with Obama's presidency, African countries shall wake up one morning, like the fabled Alice in Wonderland, and find all the good things of life in sufficiency for all as obtain in the western world, even while our leaders and people continue in their culture of greed, corruption, ethnic hostilities and all such practices antithetical to the dictate of modern civilization?

It bears repeating to state here that it borders on crass hypocrisy for African countries such as Zambia, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria, et al, to rejoice at Obama's victory even when they are all still involved in various acts of prejudices, this time around, not even against a coloured person but against their own black brothers.

We have witnessed instances in Zambia where the first post independent Kenneth Kaunda had his citizenship withdrawn on the allegation that his ancestry is somewhere in another African country! Similar acts have played out in Ivory Coast and Nigeria (Shugaba's case). The xenophobic hostilities in South Africa and Zimbabwe are all still fresh in our memories. Africans must be reminded not to expect too much from the presidency of Obama any more than they expected from the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Our only obvious claim to Obama is his blood ties to his Kenyan father. But we must call to memory that, for all the time the elder Obama lived, his conduct in juxtaposition to what Obama Jr. is and stands for today shows, in very lucid details, those sad commentaries of a pure bred African man. The elder Obama came to America and deceitfully led Obama's mother into marriage, even while he was already married to another Kenya woman back home.

He was to later abandon Obama's mother and returned to Kenya, leaving young Obama in the care of his maternal grandparents in America. It was recorded that he died drunk-driving. Should Obama's father were to be alive, one imagines that he too may be rejoicing just like the other African leaders are hypocritically doing.

We must stop deceiving ourselves. It is high time we told ourselves a few home truths. Whatever Obama is today or stands for, he owes it all to the American society.

If he were to be brought up in Kenya, his fatherland, with all his seeming immeasurable grace of intelligence, he would have ended up, at best, as a very brilliant but frustrated university don holed up somewhere in one of our glorified secondary schools, called university, like many other frustrated Obamas in our African society today. The American society that shaped Obama to become what he is to day places a higher premium of kinship of ideas over and above that of blood.

That explains the acceptance of Obama's candidature across the racial divides. If Obama were not of the rare breed of mankind (who recreates themselves independent of genetic force), he would not even be identifying his African root. It is only for Obama's high sense of humility and decency that he does so and I commend him for it. Africans must be reminded that as we cheer Obama's victory, we must cast away that extra baggage of hypocrisy and begin to reflect on the need for us to home-grow a system similar to what sustains in the U.S. that has made possible the Obama phenomenon.

The world today is ruled by ideas. It is not enough for us bank on blood kinship to Obama and think that alone will be the open sesame to our El Dorado.

In today's modern world, kinship of ideas, as aforesaid, rather than of blood or ethnicity is one of the driving force of attraction. In doing so, we must remind ourselves that until we jettison that negative attitude that encourages subjugation of fellow man rather than our environment which is what the white man has effectively achieved, we shall continue in our collective grope.

Chris Agbiti wrote from Port Harcourt.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200812260007.html

The most thoughtful and interesting debate of the two-year-long presidential campaign occurred last August at Saddleback Church between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren. So it is notable that President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month has brought forth hyperpartisan invective from the Democratic left. It has spent the past week conveying to the world its disappointment and disgust with the choice of Pastor Warren because he opposes gay marriage and abortion.

 
APJoe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said that "By inviting Rick Warren to your Inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender [LGBT] Americans have a place at your table."

The head of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, is "deeply disappointed." She says Mr. Obama should have picked someone with "consistent mainstream American values."

Perhaps the most telling comment came from a "very disappointed" Rep. Barney Frank, who pointed out that during the campaign Senator Obama's "stated commitment to LGBT rights won him the strong support of the great majority of those who support that cause." Mr. Frank is putting down a marker; the left will monitor whether the new President deserves their continued support after the Warren-blessed Inauguration.

The Opinion Journal Widget
Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
During the famous and corrosive Culture Wars, both sides accused the other of unremitting intolerance. Our own longstanding view has been that conferring protected legal status on the most politicized issues in those disputes, such as abortion and gay marriage, properly belongs inside the political system of the states, where diverse populations can work toward a political settlement.

Californians did so in November when they voted to pass Prop. 8, in effect disapproving of legal status for gay marriage. Rick Warren, an evangelical minister, as well as the Mormon Church worked for Prop. 8's passage. It won by about 52% to 47%.

Afterwards, some gay leaders said their side would have to work harder to make more voters understand their arguments. More publicized, though, were the acts of retribution taken by gay activists in California against individuals whom campaign-contributions showed to have supported Prop. 8. Some were forced out of their jobs.

For about a generation, many on the left have believed that active and unapologetic intolerance of the right was justified because its views on matters such as abortion and gay rights were simply unacceptable. This moral somersault may work for them, but to the average American voter, a full-throated assault on the likes of Rick Warren for being "wrong" on two of many issues looks like simple intolerance.

The person in this drama for whom the leftwing Democratic habit of moralized intolerance could be a problem is Barack Obama. The left loaded up heavily in its support of candidate Obama, first against the Clinton machine -- always thought to be too willing to compromise with the center -- and then in the general campaign. These elements in the Democratic Party know what they want Barack Obama to deliver on judges, the environment, global warming and lifestyle rights litigation.

Mr. Obama's choice of Rick Warren for the Inaugural's invocation suggests that he is intent on using the momentum of his remarkable victory to build a governing coalition for the long haul. The silver lining for Republicans may be that the left won't let him do that.

 View First Unread    Thread Tools   Search this Thread   Rate Thread   Display Modes   

  #1       Today, 05:11 PM 
Little Teapot 
Member   Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Texas
Posts: 51
 
 
 Viagra Helps CIA Win Friends in Afghanistan

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Washington Post
By Joby Warrick
updated 6:01 a.m. ET Dec. 26, 2008


The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills. For U.S. intelligence officials, this is how some crucial battles in Afghanistan are fought and won. While the CIA has a long history of buying information with cash, the growing Taliban insurgency has prompted the use of novel incentives and creative bargaining to gain support in some of the country's roughest neighborhoods, according to officials directly involved in such operations.

'Whatever it takes'
In their efforts to win over notoriously fickle warlords and chieftains, the officials say, the agency's operatives have used a variety of personal services. These include pocketknives and tools, medicine or surgeries for ailing family members, toys and school equipment, tooth extractions, travel visas, and, occasionally, pharmaceutical enhancements for aging patriarchs with slumping libidos, the officials said.

"Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people — whether it's building a school or handing out Viagra," said one longtime agency operative and veteran of several Afghanistan tours. Like other field officers interviewed for this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity when describing tactics and operations that are largely classified.

Officials say these inducements are necessary in Afghanistan, a country where warlords and tribal leaders expect to be paid for their cooperation, and where, for some, switching sides can be as easy as changing tunics. If the Americans don't offer incentives, there are others who will, including Taliban commanders, drug dealers and even Iranian agents in the region.
The usual bribes of choice — cash and weapons — aren't always the best options, Afghanistan veterans say. Guns too often fall into the wrong hands, they say, and showy gifts such as money, jewelry and cars tend to draw unwanted attention.

"If you give an asset $1,000, he'll go out and buy the shiniest junk he can find, and it will be apparent that he has suddenly come into a lot of money from someone," said Jamie Smith, a veteran of CIA covert operations in Afghanistan and now chief executive of SCG International, a private security and intelligence company. "Even if he doesn't get killed, he becomes ineffective as an informant because everyone knows where he got it."

The key, Smith said, is to find a way to meet the informant's personal needs in a way that keeps him firmly on your side but leaves little or no visible trace.

"You're trying to bridge a gap between people living in the 18th century and people coming in from the 21st century," Smith said, "so you look for those common things in the form of material aid that motivate people everywhere."

Sex as a motivator
Among the world's intelligence agencies, there's a long tradition of using sex as a motivator. Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer and author of several books on intelligence, noted that the Soviet spy service was notorious for using attractive women as bait when seeking to turn foreign diplomats into informants.

"The KGB has always used 'honey traps,' and it works," Baer said. For American officers, a more common practice was to offer medical care for potential informants and their loved ones, he said. "I remember one guy we offered an option on a heart bypass," Baer said.

For some U.S. operatives in Afghanistan, Western drugs such as Viagra were just part of a long list of enticements available for use in special cases. Two veteran officers familiar with such practices said Viagra was offered rarely, and only to older tribal officials for whom the drug would hold special appeal. While such sexual performance drugs are generally unavailable in the remote areas where the agency's teams operated, they have been sold in some Kabul street markets since at least 2003 and were known by reputation elsewhere.

"You didn't hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones," said one retired operative familiar with the drug's use in Afghanistan. Afghan tribal leaders often had four wives — the maximum number allowed by the Koran — and aging village patriarchs were easily sold on the utility of a pill that could "put them back in an authoritative position," the official said.

Both officials who described the use of Viagra declined to discuss details such as dates and locations, citing both safety and classification concerns.

'Think out of the box'
The CIA declined to comment on methods used in clandestine operations. One senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the agency's work in Afghanistan said the clandestine teams were trained to be "resourceful and agile" and to use tactics "consistent with the laws of our country."

"They learn the landscape, get to know the players, and adjust to the operating environment, no matter where it is," the official said. "They think out of the box, take risks, and do what's necessary to get the job done."

Not everyone in Afghanistan's hinterlands had heard of the drug, leading to some awkward encounters when Americans delicately attempted to explain its effects, taking care not to offend their hosts' religious sensitivities.

Such was the case with the 60-year-old chieftain who received the four pills from a U.S. operative. According to the retired operative who was there, the man was a clan leader in southern Afghanistan who had been wary of Americans — neither supportive nor actively opposed. The man had extensive knowledge of the region and his village controlled key passages through the area. U.S. forces needed his cooperation and worked hard to win it, the retired operative said.

After a long conversation through an interpreter, the retired operator began to probe for ways to win the man's loyalty. A discussion of the man's family and many wives provided inspiration. Once it was established that the man was in good health, the pills were offered and accepted.  Four days later, when the Americans returned, the gift had worked its magic, the operative recalled.

"He came up to us beaming," the official said. "He said, 'You are a great man.' And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area."

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s religious businessmen spent years building empires on curtains, candy bars and couches. But as observant Muslims in one of the world’s most self-consciously secular states, they were never accepted by elite society.

Now that group has become its own elite, and Turkey, a more openly religious country. It has lifted an Islamic-inspired political party to power and helped make Turkey the seventh largest economy in Europe.

And while other Muslim societies are wrestling with radicals, Turkey’s religious merchant class is struggling instead with riches.

“Muslims here used to be tested by poverty,” said Sehminur Aydin, an observant Muslim businesswoman and the daughter of a manufacturing magnate. “Now they’re being tested by wealth.”

Some say religious Turks are failing that test, and they see the recent economic crisis as a lesson for those who indulged in the worst excesses of consumption, summed up in the work of one Turkish interior designer: a bathroom with faucets encrusted with Swarovski crystal, a swimming pool in the bedroom, a couch rigged to rise up to the ceiling by remote control during prayer. “I know people who broke their credit cards,” Ms. Aydin said.

But beyond the downturn, no matter how severe, is the reality: the religious wealthy class is powerful now in Turkey, a new phenomenon that poses fresh challenges not only to the old secular elite but to what good Muslims think about themselves.

Money is at the heart of the changes that have transformed Turkey. In 1950, it was a largely agrarian society, with 80 percent of its population living in rural areas. Its economy was closed and foreign currency was illegal. But a forward-looking prime minister, Turgut Ozal, opened the economy. Now Turkey exports billions of dollars in goods to other European countries, and about 70 percent of its population lives in cities.

Religious Turks helped power that rise, yet for years they were shunned by elite society. That helps explain why many are engaged in such a frantic effort to prove themselves, said Safak Cak, a Turkish interior designer with many wealthy, religious clients. “It’s because of how we labeled them,” he said. “We looked at them as black people.”

Mr. Cak was referring to Turkey’s deep class divide. An urban upper class, often referred to as White Turks, wielded the political and economic power in the country for decades. They saw themselves as the transmitters of the secular ideals of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder. They have felt threatened by the rise of the rural, religious, merchant class, particularly of its political representative, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The old class was not ready to share economic and political power,” said Can Paker, chairman of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a liberal research organization in Istanbul. “The new class is sharing their habits, like driving Mercedes, but they are also wearing head scarves. The old class can’t bear this.”

“ ‘They were the peasants,’ ” the thinking goes, Mr. Paker said. “ ‘Why are they among us?’ ”

Ms. Aydin, 40, who wears a head scarf, encountered that attitude not long ago in one of Istanbul’s fanciest districts. A woman called her a “dirty fundamentalist” when Ms. Aydin tried to put trash the woman had thrown out her car window back inside.

“If you’re driving a good car, they stare at you and point,” Ms. Aydin said. “You want to say, ‘I graduated from French school just like you,’ but after a while, you don’t feel like proving yourself.”

She does not have to.

Her father started by selling curtains. Now he owns one of the largest home-appliance businesses in Europe. Ms. Aydin grew up wealthy, with tastes no different from those of the older class. She lives in a sleek, modern house with a pool in a gated community. Her son attends a prestigious private school. A business school graduate, she manages about 100 people at a private hospital founded by her father. Her head scarf bars her from employment in a state hospital.

Her husband, Yasar Aydin, shrugged. “Rich people everywhere dislike newcomers,” he said. In another decade, those prejudices will be gone, he said.

The businessmen describe themselves as Muslims with a Protestant work ethic, and say hard work deepens faith.

===========

Page 2 of 2)



“We can’t lie down on our oil like Arab countries,” said Osman Kadiroglu, whose family owns a large candy company in Turkey, with factories in Azerbaijan and Algeria. “There’s no way out except producing.”

Fortunes were made, forming new patterns of consumption. Istanbul, Turkey’s economic capital, is No. 4 in the world on the latest Forbes list of cities with the highest number of billionaires. Luxury cars stud its streets. Shopping malls, 80 at last count, are mushrooming.

“Now, unfortunately, there is a taste for luxury, excessive consumption and comfort, vanity, exhibitionism and greed,” said Mehmet Sevket Eygi, a 75-year-old newspaper columnist, who has written extensively about Muslims and wealth.

An Islamic concept called israf forbids consuming more than one needs, but the line is blurry, leaving rich Muslims struggling with questions like whether luxury cars can be offset by donations to charity, a central tenet of Islam.

“You have money, but do you buy whatever you want?” said Recep Senturk, a sociologist at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul. “Or should you keep a humble life? This is a debate in Turkey right now.”

Islam requires that the wealthy give away a portion of their income to the poor. In the Ottoman Empire, it paid for everything from hospitals to dishes broken by maids in rich houses.

Donations to Deniz Feneri, one of the largest charities in Turkey, jumped almost 100-fold in the six years ending in 2006, when they topped $62 million.

Even house designs take charity into account. Mr. Cak described a multimillion-dollar house whose design included an industrial-size kitchen where food was cooked daily and distributed in trucks.

Ms. Aydin, for her part, supports 25 families. The real problem is not finding a place to pray on a busy day out (mall fitting rooms work), but being truly charitable and putting others first when the frenzied pace of life pushes in the opposite direction. She holds onto traditions, like Muslim holidays, tightly.

“The world is changing but I don’t want to lose this,” she said.

Friday, Dec. 26, 2008
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City

For a confessed drug cartel hood whose alias is "The Nut Job," Marco Vinicio Cobo is remarkably calm and plain-looking. Sitting in the blue-walled interrogation room of a Mexican army base, the chubby, goatee-bearded 30-year-old coolly describes his work for the Zetas, a feared paramilitary force responsible for thousands of brutal murders. And even when he details how his bosses kidnapped and chopped the head off a soldier, he appears relaxed and unemotional, as if he were discussing the weather. But despite the unsettling indifference of its tone, Cobo's confession — of which a video has been obtained by TIME — offers some extraordinary insights into how the cartels have grown into a formidable threat to the Mexican government, outwitting and outgunning the armed forces in great swathes of the country.

In the statement made on video following his arrest in southern Mexico last April, Cobo explains how the cartels use a disciplined cell structure with a vertical, military-style chain of command to control thousands of men at arms. "I began as an H — the code they use for Hawk," he says. "After a time, I became a Central. I gave information to all the local H's in the community." He also reveals how his "family" stays one step ahead of the authorities by paying a vast network of informants, from local journalists to high-ranking federal agents. (See images of fighting crime in Mexico City)

In the worst year for Mexican law enforcement in recent history, cartel gunmen have killed more than 500 police and military personnel, including eight soldiers who were beheaded near Acapulco on Sunday. Cobo's own life story also sheds light on the machinations of the crime empires behind this killing spree. From a lower-middle class family, Cobo had worked for a while as a journalist in the poor state of Oaxaca before joining the cartel in his late 20s because it was the best job opportunity available. "They first paid me $300 a fortnight, and then it went up to $400," he explains. "The money was deposited at the local Elektra [a chain store that provides low-cost banking]". His modest wage shows how many cartel foot soldiers such as Cobo live a world apart from the extravagant kingpins with their million-dollar mansions and fleets of luxury cars, but it was still five times the country's minimum wage. And it's the swelling of the narco armies with tens of thousands of low-paid recruits that helps explain the scale of the bloodshed here, with more than 5,300 drug-related killings over the past year alone.

Cobo claims he first came into contact with the Zetas while covering crime for the small-town newspaper Sol del Istmo. "Journalists were threatened," he said. "One time, they told me not to publish a story about some men who were arrested with guns. They said the story couldn't come out." When he joined up with these gangsters, he said his first job was to monitor the local roads. Later he helped set up the abductions of any cartel targets on those routes. "They kidnapped people who had committed what they said was a crime," he said. "Many were people who worked as drug traffickers." He lost count of how many victims they abducted, but said three had had been killed and buried in the yard of a suburban house.

The Zetas act as the enforcement wing of the Gulf Cartel and extort payments from anyone who moves narcotics through their territories. The Oaxaca coast, where Cobo joined, is strategically important in trafficking routes of cocaine from Colombia to the United States. It is also the thinnest point between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. "The Gulf Cartel controls the drug trade along the Gulf of Mexico and dominates the movement of drugs into this country primarily through Texas," said Michele M. Leonhart, Acting Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in a recent statement. "They are known, even among their rivals, for their extreme violence."

As a "Central", Cobo had 13 "Hawks" under his command. Above him were Second Commanders. The Zeta ranking system is based on the Mexican military, which is unsurprising considering that the organization was founded by soldiers from the army's special forces who defected to the gangsters in the late 1990s. Cobo knew his superiors only by aliases, in order to protect their identities. "There was Franco, Tarzan, Texas, and Zorro," he said. He saw a book with names of dozens of police under the unit's payroll, he said, including officers from many nearby towns and federal agents stationed there. The corrupt police were also given aliases, including Papa and Brother.

In late March, Cobo's unit kidnapped a military officer, decapitated him and stuck his body out on a road, along with several bags of cocaine and about $2,000 in cash. "Franco told me that the officer was from military intelligence and he was getting too close," Cobo said. "The drugs and the money were planted so it would seem like he was involved in narco trafficking." Following the slaying, soldiers arrested Cobo and 13 others, along with semi-automatic rifles and radio equipment. His confession led the military to the suburban house where they dug up the bodies he had mentioned. Cobo was eventually sent to a civilian prison, where he awaits his court date on organized crime charges. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on whether his cooperation will lead to a more lenient sentence.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...868666,00.html
__________________

It being the NYT the enemy's indignation at UAV attacks goes unquestioned even as they deliberately target civilians and throw acid at little girls for attending school. 
======================================

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — This frontier city boasts a major air base and Pakistani Army and paramilitary garrisons. But the 200 Taliban guerrillas were in no rush as they methodically ransacked depots with NATO supplies here two weeks ago.

An important NATO supply line goes over Khyber Pass.
The militants began by blocking off a long stretch of the main road, giving them plenty of time to burn everything inside, said one guard, Haroon Khan, who was standing next to a row of charred trucks.

After assuring the overmatched guards they would not be killed — if they agreed never to work there again — the militants shouted “God is great” through bullhorns. They then grabbed jerrycans and made several trips to a nearby gas station for fuel, which they dumped on the cargo trucks and Humvees before setting them ablaze.

The attack provided the latest evidence of how extensively militants now rule the critical region east of the Khyber Pass, the narrow cut through the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that has been a strategic trade and military gateway since the time of Alexander the Great.

The area encompasses what is officially known as the Khyber Agency, which is adjacent to Peshawar and is one of a handful of lawless tribal districts on the border. But security in Khyber has deteriorated further in recent months with the emergence of a brash young Taliban commander who calls news conferences to thumb his nose at NATO forces, as well as with public fury over deadly missile attacks by American remotely piloted aircraft.

Khyber’s downward spiral is jeopardizing NATO’s most important supply line, sending American military officials scrambling to find alternative routes into Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia. Three-quarters of troop supplies enter from Pakistan, most of the goods ferried from Karachi to Peshawar and then 40 miles west through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

A half-dozen raids on depots with NATO supplies here have already destroyed 300 cargo trucks and Humvees this month. American officials insist that troop provisions have not suffered, but with predictions that the American deployment in Afghanistan could double next year, to 60,000 soldiers, the pressure to secure safer transportation is even more intense.

For NATO the most serious problem is not even the depots in Peshawar but the safety of the road that winds west to the 3,500-foot Khyber Pass. The route used to be relatively secure: Afridi tribesman were paid by the government to safeguard it, and they were subject to severe penalties and collective tribal punishment for crimes against travelers.

But now the road is a death trap, truckers and some security officials say, with routine attacks like one on Sunday that burned a fuel tanker and another last Friday that killed three drivers returning from Afghanistan.

“The road is so unsafe that even the locals are reluctant to go back to their villages from Peshawar,” said Gul Naseem, who lives in Landi Kotal, near the border.

The largest truckers’ association here has gone on strike to protest the lack of security, saying that the job action has sidelined 60 percent of the trucks that normally haul military goods. An American official denied that the drop-off had been that severe.

“Not a single day passes when something doesn’t happen,” said Shakir Afridi, leader of the truckers’ group, the Khyber Transport Association. He said at least 25 trucks and six oil tankers were destroyed this month. “Attacks have become a daily affair,” he said.

There are new efforts to deter Taliban raids, including convoy escorts by a Pakistani paramilitary group, the Frontier Corps. But now militants are attacking empty — and unguarded — trucks returning to Pakistan. The road from Peshawar to the border has become far more perilous than the route on the other side in Afghanistan, truckers say.

“Our lives are in danger and nobody cares,” said Shah Mahmood Afridi, a driver who was in the returning convoy attacked on Friday. “They fired at the trucks and killed three men inside. There is no security provided when we are empty.”

Escalating violence on the Khyber road has paralleled the rise of Hakimullah Mehsud, a young Taliban commander and lieutenant of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the main Pakistani Taliban faction.

Earlier this year, Hakimullah Mehsud’s forces took control of Orakzai Agency and instituted the strict Islamic laws known as Shariah. At a news conference there one month ago, Hakimullah Mehsud declared his intention to intensify attacks on NATO supply convoys. Some security officials say they believe that he was behind the assassination in August of a rival militant leader, Hajji Namdar, in Khyber.

====================

Page 2 of 2)



At the same time, another powerful Khyber warlord, Mangal Bagh, who officials say has not been attacking the convoys, has seen the geographic range of his influence narrow somewhat, easing the path for Mr. Mehsud’s authority to expand inside some parts of Khyber. “I have no love for Mangal Bagh, but the fact remains that Mangal Bagh does not do these attacks,” said Tariq Hayat, the Khyber political agent, the top government official in the region.

Pakistani employees two weeks ago inspected trucks burned by Taliban guerrillas at a depot with NATO supplies in Peshawar.
Increased missile attacks by remotely piloted American aircraft — like one that killed seven people in the South Waziristan Agency on Monday — have enraged residents in Khyber and other tribal areas near the border, increasing sympathy for attacks on convoys. Mr. Afridi, of the truckers’ association, condemns the strikes and blames them for increased assaults on his drivers. “We are a tribal people, and if the Americans hit innocent people in Waziristan, we also feel the pain,” he said.

Raising the prospect of an even wider threat to the convoys, an influential Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, staged a rally last week in Peshawar, turning out thousands to condemn the missile strikes. The marchers demanded that Pakistan end the NATO convoys, and they vowed to cut the supply lines themselves.

Taliban militants have also moved into Khyber after Pakistani military campaigns in nearby areas like Bajaur Agency. Their migration is reminiscent of a tactic that bedeviled the American military in Iraq for years — dubbed “whack a mole” by combat officers — in which guerrillas eluded large American combat operations and moved to take up positions in areas with understaffed troop contingents.

All those factors have been amplified, in the view of some officials, by the torpor of the Pakistani government. Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier who until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal regions, said the government had the manpower to drive militants out of Khyber but had mounted only a weak response.

He recounted a recent conversation with a senior Pakistani government official. “You have the chance to wake up,” he said he told the official. “But if you don’t wake up now, there is a good chance you won’t wake up at all.”

AMMAN, Jordan — Muhammad Fawaz is a very serious college junior with a stern gaze and a reluctant smile that barely cloaks suppressed anger. He never wanted to attend Jordan University. He hates spending hours each day commuting.


As a high school student, Mr. Fawaz, 20, had dreamed of earning a scholarship to study abroad. But that was impossible, he said, because he did not have a “wasta,” or connection. In Jordan, connections are seen as essential for advancement and the wasta system is routinely cited by young people as their primary grievance with their country.

So Mr. Fawaz decided to rebel. He adopted the serene, disciplined demeanor of an Islamic activist. In his sophomore year he was accepted into the student group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s largest, most influential religious, social and political movement, one that would ultimately like to see the state governed by Islamic law, or Shariah. Now he works to recruit other students to the cause.

“I find there is justice in the Islamic movement,” Mr. Fawaz said one day as he walked beneath the towering cypress trees at Jordan University. “I can express myself. There is no wasta needed.”

Across the Middle East, young people like Mr. Fawaz, angry, alienated and deprived of opportunity, have accepted Islam as an agent of change and rebellion. It is their rock ’n’ roll, their long hair and love beads. Through Islam, they defy the status quo and challenge governments seen as corrupt and incompetent.

These young people — 60 percent of those in the region are under 25 — are propelling a worldwide Islamic revival, driven by a thirst for political change and social justice. That fervor has popularized a more conservative interpretation of the faith.

“Islamism for us is what pan-Arabism was for our parents,” said Naseem Tarawnah, 25, a business writer and blogger, who is not part of the movement.

The long-term implications of this are likely to complicate American foreign policy calculations, making it more costly to continue supporting governments that do not let secular or moderate religious political movements take root.

Washington will also be likely to find it harder to maintain the policy of shunning leaders of groups like the Brotherhood in Egypt, or Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, which command tremendous public sympathy.

Leaders of Muslim countries have tried to appease public sentiment while doing all they can to discourage the West from engaging religious movements directly. They see the prospect of a thaw in relations with the West, and see these groups as a threat to their monopoly on power.

Authoritarian governments view relative moderation as more of a political challenge than extremism, which is a security problem that can be contained through harsh methods.

“What happens if Islamists accepted the peace process and became more pragmatic?” said Muhammad Abu Rumman, research editor at the newspaper Al Ghad in Amman. “People see them as less corrupt and as the only real opposition. Israel and the U.S. might look at them differently. The regime is afraid of the Brotherhood when it becomes more pragmatic.”

The financial crisis only adds to the anxiety of governments in the Middle East that had hoped economic development could appease their citizens, create jobs for legions of unemployed and underemployed young people and dilute the appeal of Islamic movements. But the crisis and the drop in oil prices have hit hard, throwing the brakes on once-booming economies in the Persian Gulf region, and modest economic growth elsewhere in the region.

In this environment, governments are forced to confront a reality of their own creation. By choking off democracy and free speech, the only space where groups could gather and discuss critical ideas became the mosque, and the only movements that had room to prosper were religion-based.

Today, the search for identity in the Middle East no longer involves tension between the secular and religious. Religion has won.

The struggle, instead, is over how to define an Islamic society and government. Zeinah Hamdan, 24, has traveled a typical journey in Jordan. She says she wants a more religious government guided by Shariah law, and she took the head scarf at a younger age than anyone else in her family.

========================

(Page 2 of 3)



But when she was in college, she was offended when an Islamist student activist chastised her for shaking a young man’s hand. She wants to be a modern religious woman, and she defines that as working and socializing in a coed environment.


“If we implement Shariah law, we will be more comfortable,” she said. “But what happens is, the people who come to power are extremists.”

Like others here, she is torn between her discomfort with what she sees as the extreme attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood and her alienation from a government she does not consider to be Islamic enough. “The middle is very difficult,” she said.

Focus on Popular Causes

Under a bright midday sun one recent day, Mr. Fawaz and his allies in the Islamic student movement put on green baseball caps that read, in Arabic, “Islamic Current of Jordan University” and prepared to demonstrate. Mr. Fawaz carried a large poster board reading, “We are with you Gaza.”

The university protest reflected the tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country as a whole: precisely organized, deliberately nonthreatening and focused on popular causes here such as the Palestinians. The Brotherhood says it supports democracy and moderation, but its commitment to pluralism, tolerance and compromise has never been tested in Jordan.

Mr. Fawaz and about 200 other students stood in a straight line, extending nearly two city blocks, parallel to the traffic on the major roadway in front of the university. More than half of the students were women, many with their faces veiled.

State security men in plain clothes hurried up and down the line. “Brother, for God’s sake, when will you be angry?” one security agent screamed into his phone, recording for headquarters the slogan on a student’s placard.

At 12:30 p.m., the male students stepped into the road, blocking traffic, while the women rushed off to the sidewalk and melted back into the campus. One minute later, they walked out of traffic, took off their caps and folded up their signs, tucked them into computer bags and went back to school.

“I want to be able to express what I want; I want freedom,” Mr. Fawaz said, after returning to the campus. His glasses always rest crooked on his face, making him look younger, and a bit out of sorts. “I don’t want to be afraid to express my opinion.”

Mr. Fawaz grew up in a small village called Anjara, near Ajloun, about 50 miles from Amman. His father grew up in the Jordan Valley and worked as a nurse in Irbid. Mr. Fawaz said he was 8 years old he was first invited to “leadership retreats” with a youth organization of the Brotherhood.

When he was 13, the youth group took him on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca. So, he said, he had been enticed by religion at an early age. But he only decided to become politically active — and to join the Brotherhood — when he was denied a scholarship to study abroad.

While there are no official statistics on student membership in the Brotherhood, only a fraction of Jordan University students are formally affiliated. Yet many others say they share the same vague sense of discontent and yearning, the same embrace of the Brotherhood’s slogan, “Islam Is the Solution,” a resonant catchall in the face of many problems.

The university, with about 30,000 students from across the country, has long served as a proxy battlefield for Jordan’s competing interests.

Competing Loyalties

In Jordan, unlike Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is legal, with a political party and a vast network of social services. It also has a political party, called the Islamic Action Front. While some fear it as too extreme, others argue that it has sold out by working within a political system they see as corrupt and un-Islamic. On campus, the Islamists try to build sympathy, handing out study sheets or copying notes for students.

Mr. Fawaz decided this year to run as an Islamist candidate for the student council, an influential organization with its own budget and the right to put up posters, distribute fliers and hold on-campus events.

The Islamic students’ movement had boycotted the elections for years to protest a change of election rules that called for appointing — not electing — half of the council’s 80 members. The rule change, decreed by the former university president, was made in order to block the Islamists, who were the most organized group on campus, from controlling the council.

==============

Page 3 of 3)



That is a direct echo of how the state has long tried to contain the Islamist movement in Jordan. The Brotherhood is allowed to operate, but the government and the security services broadly control the outcome of elections.


Indeed, as Islamist movements have swelled, governments across the Middle East have chosen both to contain and to embrace them. Many governments have aggressively moved to roll back the few democratic practices that had started to take root in their societies, and to prevent Islamists from winning power through the voting booth. That risks driving the leaders and the followers of Islamic organizations toward extremism.

At the same time, many governments have tried to appease popular Islamist fervor. Jordan recently granted a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned newspaper the right to publish daily instead of weekly; held private talks with Hamas leaders; arrested a poet, saying he had insulted Islam by using verses of the Koran in love poems; and shut down restaurants that had served alcohol during Ramadan, though they had been licensed by the state to do so.

This year, the new president of Jordan University permitted all student council seats to be elected, but with rules in place that would, again, make it nearly impossible for the Islamist bloc to have control.

Two days before the voting took place, Mr. Fawaz was campaigning on the steps of the education building, dressed in his best suit and tie. His campaign message to the students was simply, “For your sake.”

Running as an Islamist risks consequences: Mr. Fawaz said that he was approached by a student in his class who he believed was delivering a message from the security services. “He told me that they will write about me; I will never get a job,” Mr. Fawaz said.

But even when the police ordered him to take down his posters on election day, he remained resolute and confident.

“Everybody knows that I am going to win,” Mr. Fawaz said, without sounding boastful. “Because I represent the Islamic movement.”

But he did not win. Instead, a candidate representing a large tribe from the city of Salt won, reflecting the loyalty to bonds of kinship and family heritage even as tribal culture has begun to absorb more conservative Islamic practices and beliefs.

Yet Mr. Fawaz was untroubled. “What is important for me,” he said, “is to serve the movement by spreading the word among the students.”

Amjad al-Absy, 28, remembers the moment when he pledged to join the Muslim Brotherhood. He was 15 and he was identified by Brotherhood recruiters when he was playing soccer in a Palestinian refugee camp. He described how the Brotherhood monitors young men — when they play soccer, go to school, to mosque, to work, as well as in the street and singles out those who appear receptive.

“Once you say yes, they put you in a ring, in a family,” said Mr. Absy. “Outside of the Brotherhood, there is no concern for young men, there is no respect. You are alone.”

Mr. Absy and his friend Tarak Naimat, 24, said that while they were students at the university, they had helped to recruit other young men.

“In the computer lab, in the mosque, you buddy up,” Mr. Naimat said. “Then you participate in events together. Then he becomes a member. If he’s advanced, it can take six months. If less, maybe two years.”

The appeal, Mr. Naimat said, was simple: “It gives you the feeling you can change things, you can act, you can be a leader. You feel like you are part of something important.”

Recruiters to the movement operate in a social atmosphere far more receptive than in the past. Every one of five young men talking near the cafeteria of the university recently insisted that the only way Jordan would have democracy was under an Islamic government, which is what the Brotherhood says it wants to achieve.

Muhammad Safi is a 23-year-old with neatly gelled hair and a television-white smile who described himself as the least religious student at the table. He said he had lived in the United States for five years and was eager to marry an American so he could return. Yet he declared: “An Islamic state would be better. At least it would take care of people.”

A Political Crossroads

The task facing Middle East governments and Islamic leaders is to figure out how to harness the energy of the Islamic revival. The young — the demographic bulge that is defining the future of the Islamic world and the way the West will have to engage it — have embraced Islam with all the fervor of the counterculture.

But the movement is still up for grabs — whether it will lead to greater extremism, even terrorism in some cases, and whether the vague dissatisfaction of young people will translate into political engagement or disaffection.

So the cycle is likely to continue, with religious identification fueled not only by the Islamic movements, but also by governments eager to use religion to enhance legitimacy and to satisfy demands of their citizens. That, in turn, broadens support for groups like the Brotherhood, while undermining support for the government, said many researchers, intellectuals and political scientists in Jordan.

The battle lines are clear on the campus of Jordan University. Bilal Abu Sulaih, 24, is a leader in the Islamic student movement. He returned to school this year to study Islamic law after being suspended for one year for organizing protests, he said. During the year off, he said, he worked as a student organizer for the political party office of the Brotherhood. “We are trying to participate,” he said of the movement’s role on campus. “We do not want to overpower everyone else.”

But his reassurances were brushed aside as another student confronted him. “It’s not true,” shouted Ahmed Qabai, 28, who was seated on a nearby bench. He thrust a finger in Mr. Sulaih’s direction.

“You want to try to control everything,” Mr. Qabai said. “I’ve seen it before, your people talking to women and asking them why they’re not veiled.”

Mr. Sulaih, embarrassed by the challenge, said, “It’s not true.”

Mr. Qabai made it clear that he detested the Muslim Brotherhood, getting more and more worked up, until finally he was screaming. But what he said summed up the challenge ahead for Jordan, and for so many governments in the region: “We all know Islam is the solution. That we agree on.”