The Dish

Polling analysis crack from Charles Franklin. Newsweek’s latest has him at 26 percent. The broad trend is 27.9. Before the Libby news.

An insight into why this war will end next spring, period.

A chilling account of the intellectual legacy of one Abu Musab al-Suri, an Islamist who helped pioneer the tactics we have just seen among middle-class religious fanatics in Britain:

Al-Suri’s ideal would be to isolate the self-created cells completely from one another before and during their attacks in the West, although in practice this has rarely been the case. A study by John W. Books at the University of North Texas, who is looking into links among terrorist networks in Britain, shows that contacts among several groups that operated in the U.K. from 2004 to early 2007 were much more extensive than initially reported when arrests were made or bombs went off. So, too, were the visits of their ringleaders to secret training camps in Pakistan. "There seems to be a strong urge by these people to reach back to the leaderships of Al Qaeda," Books told me over the phone. "It seems like this [terrorism] is not something you can just do on your own. There’s this need to be touched on the shoulder and told, ‘Yes, you are a member of the larger global jihad’."

According to Brynjar Lia, al-Suri offers "a comprehensive war-fighting theory" in which "individual terrorism" is just one element. The idea is to carry out terror attacks in the West while at the same time fighting somewhat more conventional guerrilla wars like, say, the one in Iraq. The attacks on the home front make it harder to sustain support for faraway combat on Muslim lands. When "spontaneously organized and self-radicalized cells" in the West can’t get the job done alone, al-Suri allows for "cell builders" to work with them. The facilitators might supply some start-up money and training, but they’re supposed to "vanish from the scene completely before any jihadi operations commence," says Lia. They don’t want to leave any telltale footprints that could compromise the rest of the network.

Untangling this is hard, lengthy police work, whether done by law enforcement or parts of the military. I see no other option.

Mark Kleiman has a suggestion for the next step in investigating the Plame affair.

The latest "stab-in-the-back," analysis-free, Instapundit-approved grand-standing blog-post on the Iraq civil war. Sooner rather than later, the far right will surely have to accuse Dick Cheney of "surrendering". A better term, I think, would be cutting our losses in a war we never backed with enough resources or intelligence to win.

When Pete Wehner leaves the Bush administration, there truly is no one left to turn the lights off.

The NYT detects panic in the White House. And we have surging opposition among Republican senators to the current policy that cannot last beyond next March whatever Bush says. Then this from Hagel:

"If we do not see this administration take some initiatives to make some changes, significant strategic policy changes over the next 90 days, then of course it will be forced on [Mr Bush]."

Is it possible that withdrawal and redeployment could happen far sooner than most of us have expected?

"Mr. Solomon asked Mr. Habich to be his guest at a White House dinner. Mr. Habich, 54, said: "I thought, this early in our relationship, we should keep everything on an even footing, so I invited him to an occasion of state, too: the Minnesota State Fair."

The fair gave Mr. Solomon, who has written about his travels to places like China, a chance to learn about Midwestern exotica like butter sculptures and dairy princesses…

Mr. Habich wore traditional English morning dress, Mr. Solomon an Asian tunic made of 19th-century salmon-colored silk fabric, tailored by Hardy Amies Ltd., the Savile Row clothiers, with touches added by Han Feng, a New York fashion designer. They listened as the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, urged the couple to remain ‘outre’"- from the NYT account of the Solomon-Habich wedding in a country estate in England. Don’t miss the photo-slide-show.

Just worth remembering, given the president’s recent burst of compassion for a man facing thirty months in jail:

In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, a number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn’t meet with any of them", he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed.

"I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’" "What was her answer?" I wonder. "’Please,’" Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "’don’t kill me.’" I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel — because he immediately stops smirking.

Thanks, Tucker. Odd and cruel. Sister Helen Prejean wrote a good essay on Bush’s record in Texas here. Money quote:

As governor, Bush certainly did not stand apart in his routine refusal to deny clemency to death row petitioners, but what does set him apart is the sheer number of executions over which he has presided. Callous indifference to human suffering may also set Bush apart. He may be the only government official to mock a condemned person’s plea for mercy, then lie about it afterward, claiming humane feelings he never felt. On the contrary, it seems that Bush is comfortable with using violent solutions to solve troublesome social and political realities…

At the time of the thirteen death row exonerations in Illinois, Bush stated publicly that although states such as Illinois might have problems with a faulty death penalty system, he was certain that in Texas no innocent person had ever been sent to death row, much less executed. That remains to be seen. What is clear is that he had, as governor, no quality of mercy.

Finally, we have a strategy for success in Iraq from the blogosphere’s "stab-in-the-back" right. Yes, it had to come during a fisking of a NYT editorial, but at least we now have an actual agenda for Iraq, a rare and valuable glimpse into what the Instapundit crowd actually thinks is going on in Iraq, and what we should actually do about it. Here’s Jules Crittenden’s Instapundit-approved summary of the war aims that we’re fighting for right now in Iraq:

[C]ontinuing the path of progress toward eliminating al-Qaeda, exposing and hopefully acting against Iran’s influence, training increasingly effective Iraqi troops, working with a nascent democratically elected government in its fits and starts.

Yes, I know these are not exactly what you were told the war was for in the first place. But, come on. We all know by now that the WMD argument was just game. The WMD evidence was not "slam-dunk" as Tenet has now explained. We misunderstood him. What was "slam dunk" was the challenge of persuading the American people in the wake of 9/11 that Iraq had active WMDs and was able to hand them over to terrorists. And, boy, was Tenet right about that one. We all trusted them to be honest with us, suckers that we were, because we didn’t think that after a tragedy like 9/11, the president would scam us. oh well. He nearly got away with it. Can’t we just move on now? Scooter Libby has. Let us rather unite in

"continuing the path of progress toward eliminating al Qaeda."

Notice the lovely premise: continuing. You’re no doubt unaware of the slowly building triumph against al Qaeda that the Iraq war has helped accelerate. Close Open your eyes. Read more Instapundit links.

Don’t read the papers. Ignore the boom in Qaeda-franchise terrorism since the Iraq invasion, terror that has now gone directly from anti-Shiite anger in Iraq to the attempted murder of Westerners in London and Glasgow. Ignore the two new bases for Islamist terror the Bush administration has handed al Qaeda in Anbar and Waziristan. Ignore the Bush decisions not to take out Zarqawi in 2002 or Zawahiri in 2005, when we had both Jihadists in our gun-sites. Just focus on "continuing the path of progress," which I think means helping the Anbar tribes fight back against the Qaeda invaders Bush’s literally invited in for years ago last week. Yes, we should absolutely do what we can there. But grownups recognize that the national potential is limited. Or is John Burns also now a quisling leftist terror-sympathizer, another demented victim of Bush Derangement Sydrome? Along with, at last count, around half the voters in the US.

Current war-aim number two, then, per Crittenden:

"exposing and hopefully [sic] acting against Iran’s influence."

Well, so far, the same genius president that Crittenden is asking us to throw our patriotic support behind has done more to enhance and legitimize Tehran’s ruling mullahs – and increase their leverage over the region – than any president since Jimmy Carter. We should now trust him to handle this matter more judiciously in future? On what grounds? Crittenden somehow fails to say. But we are to infer, I think, an eagerness to extend the war to Iran. And why not? How do we actually act against Iran, given that the Iraq war has all but exhausted our current military capability and tied 160,000 troops down in someone else’s civil war? Er, move right along quickly and blame the "left" or the "Defeatocrats". Even though we have no option but to draw down troops by next spring or break the military completely, just watch Crittenden and Reynolds blame the Democrats for "surrender."

Pillars three and four: training Iraqi troops to be more effective. Translation: to be better-armed and better-equipped militia members for when our own troop drawdown occurs next spring. Working with a "government" that is by all accounts completely non-functional, divided helplessly along sectarian lines, and coopted in large part by the militias now preparing to fight the next phase of the civil war. The same government that is apparently on the verge of total collapse, a collapse that would not make much difference to the reality of its actual power.

So that’s it. Support this strategy and this administration – or you’re for the terrorists. Anything else isn’t "continuing the path of progress." I think I got that right.

(Photo: Baghdad by Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty. The first draft of this item muddled Jules Crittenden with Don Surber. My apologies.)