Month: June 2007

A TV journalist rebels against the Paris Hilton story on live cable:

A reader in Britain’s capital writes:

I went out to lunch today with about a dozen workmates. I don’t recall last night’s attempted bombing coming up in conversation.

It would seem that we "ain’t bothered".

For those without the cultural capital to engage this narrative, some background on the "ain’t bothered" meme:

I’m sure this will prompt more expert legal commentary than I can provide. But, at first blush, it seems a big deal to me:

In a startling turn of events in the legal combat over the war on terrorism, the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to reconsider the appeals in the Guantanamo Bay detainee cases. It vacated its April 2 order denying review of the two packets of cases. The Court then granted review, consolidated the cases, and said they would be heard in a one-hour argument in the new Term starting Oct. 1. Such a switch by the Court may not have occurred since at least 1968 (Kolod v. U.S., 390 U.S. 136), according to Court sources.

The order also said that new briefs will be sought, after the D.C. Circuit rules in pending cases on how judicial review is to work for detainees under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. The cases to be reheard are Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. U.S. (06-1196).

The Piccadilly foiled bomb attack sure looks like a Jihadist plot to me. The attempt to kill those out for the night in the heart of London’s theater district (Jihadists hate nightlife) is a clear sign. Less puritanical maniacs would be bombing shoppers in daylight. And the timing of Blair’s handover to Brown is  obviously significant. This is the most worrying aspect, though:

Whitehall sources said that the police and security services were looking at possible international links – including similarities to car bombs used by insurgents in Iraq.

"It is entirely possible. There are various things – it is outside a nightclub, it is a vehicle-borne device, it is close to the anniversary of the July 7 attacks," one source said.

There’s no point in speculating further till we get more data. But this should surely be part of our current debate about Iraq. It may well be that this attempted attack is a consequence of the Iraq war and occupation, which has fueled anti-Western sentiment and given al Qaeda a new base. But this leads to the harder question: would redeploying out of Iraq sooner rather than later make such attacks more or less likely? I’m not sure we can truly know the final answer to that. My own fear is that redeployment will indeed make us more vulnerable in the short term, if it emboldens the enemy – but that staying indefinitely will make us more vulnerable in the long term and make such attacks a permanent feature of our lives.

But that is surely the deeper point. What happened in Piccadilly is part of the future, whatever we do. They will come at us in some form regardless of our actions in the Middle East. If we are unable to withstand and endure such violence, the Jihadists will only become more self-confident in rocking our nerve. The good news is that this was detected by vigilant police. It failed. But it will succeed one day soon. In this, the Brits do have experience. They have long dealt with Irish terrorism. I recall growing up to the news of bombings quite regularly. But we endured and eventually won peace.

There’s a lesson in this, and it isn’t just the need for vigilance. Stay calm and carry on.

A Michael Moore-style anecdote from Ontario. Demagogery is a two-way street:

"Ann Coulter is owed an apology from those outlets, including NBC’s Nightly News, The Washington Post and CNN’s American Morning, which have mis-reported her comments. And conservatives, take note: Today it’s Coulter, tomorrow it may be you. The left has demonstrated that it will stop at nothing, including flat-out dishonesty, to undermine our leaders," Brent Bozell, in a press release. If Ann Coulter is now a leader of the conservative movement, it really is time to close it down.

Yesterday, I linked to a detailed attempt to lay out the military and political logic behind the surge in Iraq. I said I remained unpersuaded, but that the piece was worth reading. At Intel-Dump, some serious military commentators have had their  say on the piece. Here’s the best post. Money quote (Kilcullen’s piece is in italics):

"It is about marginalizing al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that “80% of AQ leadership have fled” don’t overly disturb us: the aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return."

Okay, so let me try and break this down a little bit.

"… al Qa’ida, Shi’a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on…to drive them off the population and keep them off, so that we can work with the community to prevent their return…"

So the fundamental basis for this strategy is that the guerillas are a bug, not a feature; a parasite, not the body.

First, has there ever been an insurgency in history (OK, I’ll give you the MRLA in Malaya) that hasn’t included substantial numbers of the "population they prey on"? Is there any reason or empirical evidence that these fighters are NOT Cadmus warriors springing from hatreds and grievances between groups, rather than infiltrators from the outside "preying" on the population? Do we have anywhere an external source of intel … that provides this supposition with factual support?

Second, consider Sun Tzu’s maxim: the ultimate is to defeat the enemy without fighting, that is, to have such an advantage in preparation and intelligence that the enemy is offbalance and defeated before the first shot is fired. Conversely, if our goals and the knowledge of the enemy is not just lacking but wrong, the blow has already gone astry before it begins. If our fundamental assumptions regarding the source and strengths of the enemy are wrong, how will anything else we do be right?

The rest is here. The other comments are worth a look as well. Alas, I think the surge is premised on a fantasy – that the Iraqi "people" exist, that they want to be free from a civil war foisted on them by "outside agents," etc. There is no Iraqi people and there are no Iraqi security forces. There are Shiites and Sunnis and any number of bewilderingly fractured, irredentist entities within them. That’s the problem. It has no solution.

A reader writes:

It’s a little bit of a stretch to attribute all the outcomes you list to price regulation. A lot of the change in where research is done is due to large pharmaceutical firms forming collaborations with small research intensive firms and biotech firms. The venture capital markets in the U.S. are better at supporting these types of firms. The European pharmaceutical firms relocate here to access that research.

Hmmm. And why do small biotech firms attract more investment money in the US? It couldn’t have anything to do with potential major profits which alone make such investment worthwhile, could it? But when the government threatens to abscond with all our profits with price controls if you happen to strike lucky, you’d be sensible to invest that money somewhere else, wouldn’t you? Yes, there are many factors involved in medical research. But the basic rule is: the more government regulates and controls and rations something, the more it kills the life-blood of creativity and progress. That’s what the Democrats are threatening us with. It’s good to know what’s coming.

A reader writes:

I realize that in a rhapsody like Krikorian’s, myth is more relevant than actual history, but given that he chooses the 1389 battle of Kosovo as an illustration of the exact opposite, it’s worth pointing out that that battle was, in fact, a draw.  Militarily, the real defeat of the Serbs was at Maritsa in 1371.  Maritsa was lost in large part because the Serb nation was internally divided between factions, and half the Serb lords preferred to let their rivals take the loss rather than unite against the common foe.  Kosovo was more of a mop-up action, in which the rest of the Serb nobility (ie, the ones that sat out Maritsa) were finished off.  In battle, they acquitted themselves reasonable well, with both sides being exhausted, but the Ottomans were in a position to quickly recover their strength and the Serbs were already depleted.

National myth notwithstanding, the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan peninsula was accomplished primarily with a strategy of divide-and-conquer, in which the Ottomans chose vassals looking for outside support against internal opponents.  Medieval Serbia collapsed from internal dissension; the Ottoman conquest was the instrument of its extinction but not the cause.

Al Gore keeps scoring really well in many Democratic polls. Charles Franklin writes about the issues involved in figuring out how this affects the race here. Mark Blumenthal looks at New Hampshire here. I can’t help but notice in the new Fox Poll that when you remove Gore from the list, almost all his support goes to Clinton. Gulp.