Month: April 2007

Iran is ramping up centrifuge production. Many new estimates of when Iran might have the potential for nuclear weaponry are beginning to come out – and all of them suggest a sharp decrease in the amount of time we have to prevent a nuclear theocracy in Tehran. This might help explain the recent British sailor hostage-taking. It may have been a device to further split Britain from the US, and to weaken the alliance that’s attempting to tighten sanctions on Iran. What the mullahs see, I think, is the inherent brittle weakness and deep strategic incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. If you think of Bush as another Carter with respect to the collapse of US soft and hard power under his presidency, then you can see the Iranians forcing an end-of-administration crisis for him, just as they did for Carter. Any Cheney-led military attack on Iran in response would result in massive bloodletting in Iraq, with Shiite and Sunni militias unleashing rage on the US forces, without even an assurance of much delay in nuclear potential for Iran (and a possible Islamist revolt in Pakistan that could easily topple Musharraf). And with 170,000 troops in Iraq, and more and more of them in smaller, more exposed urban outposts, the US will be at its most vulnerable at the very time Tehran may be engaging in nuclear brinkmanship.

Stanley Kurtz is absolutely right that the conditions in Iran are far more worrying by any measure than those the neocons feared existed in Iraq before the invasion. The stakes are also much higher now that we have so incompetently started a war we cannot win in any realistic time-frame. What to do then? By fall, the Congress will have the first and last chance to make the critical decision the country is now fighting with the White House over: to pull out of most of Iraq or to double-down for another decade of Muslim civil war policed by Americans. At the same time, we may have to decide whether to acquiesce in a nuclear-armed Iran. We can and must make every effort between now and then to build, cajole and support the U.N.-based coalition against a nuclear Iran. And since Bush will not relent in Iraq, we must pray that the surge manages to work some kind of miracle.

And as these dual crisis in Iraq and Iran come to a head, we will be facing a general election. The most important hope, as far as I’m concerned, is that the heart of the crisis does not occur under the current president and vice-president. We know they can be relied on to damage our security and also have the capacity for spectacular error and recklessness. Tehran knows this as well, which is why I suspect they’re rushing their nuclear plans to be ready before Bush leaves office. It’s going to be a nail-biting two years. And the president who inherits the Bush legacy in the Middle East will be less like Reagan inheriting Carter, than Churchill inheriting Chamberlain – with all the troops still stuck in Dunkirk.

(Photo: Technicians prepare to wash the reactor of the Bushehr nuclear power plant at the Iranian port town of Bushehr, 1200 Kms south of Tehran, 03 April 2007. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)

Some helpful background.

A Baghdad insider tells the story of one of the most inept invasions and occupations in modern times.

"That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech. Free speech is enhanced by civility," – Tim O’Reilly, a person the blog-clueless NYT deems to be relevant to the blogosphere.

Sorry, Tim, but "managed civil dialogue" may be better in your enlightened eyes than, er, free speech, but it sure isn’t freer. You can choose or not choose to have comments sections; you can already monitor such sections, if you so choose. But the blogosphere is about freedom – not codes of conduct on sites for free exchange of views.

The contrast in the national cricket teams of Pakistan a generation ago and today is quite startling. The overt Islam on display today was much more subdued in the past. Here’s an interesting article on recent shifts in the team – and in Pakistan as a whole, including the conversion of one star cricketer from Christianity to Islam:

In recent months, two of the more heated domestic debates have been whether or not to retain a column that asks you to identify your faith in the Pakistani passport (after much debate, the column has been retained) and the impending implementation of a Hisba bill in the North-West Frontier Province. The bill essentially puts forth yet another parallel legal Islamic system, one which liberal circles decry as an act of Talibanisation, so strict are its moral codes.

Younger players in the current team are children of this era, unlike players such as Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and even Akram. When Salman Butt says, as he did in a recent Wisden interview, "we are Muslims and we believe in Allah. We do whatever Islam says and we try to be what we are supposed to be. Religion is the complete code of life and we follow its guiding principles," it is but natural for someone born in 1984, at the peak of Zia’s rule, to not just say it, but stress upon it.

And so fundamentalism creeps into everything, as it must.

(Photo: Pakistani cricketer Mohammad Hafeez bows down to the ground after scoring a century (100 runs) against West Indies during the fourth day of the third and final Test match between Pakistan and West Indies at the National Stadium in Karachi, 30 November 2006. Pakistani batsman Mohammad Yousuf broke West Indian Vivian Richards’ 30-year-old record for the most Test runs scored in a calendar year. By Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty.)

The New York senator may have pushed a little too hard too soon with some donors – helping them realize why Obama is a better candidate in the first place:

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and for some fund-raisers the Clinton team crossed it. "They clearly communicated a message that this candidacy is inevitable because we’ll have more experienced consultants, more political insiders, more money and more of every resource that is vital to being nominated," says a prominent New York donor who joined the Obama camp but declined to be named to protect friendships with Clinton supporters. "Therefore, you are politically stupid if you don’t get it, if you can’t add."

Sounds like her.

Van Buren County, Tennessee, 2 pm.

This one has been going the rounds of the internets:

Happy Easter … or else.

Meet Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University. He’s a former Marine, with five years of active service and 19 years in the reserve, and a legal critic of Roe vs Wade and supporter of the Alito confirmation. He’s also on the Terrorist No-Fly List:

"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That’ll do it," the man said."

Just a heads up about what these people are up to.