Category Archives: Middle East

The Snapping Point II

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Via Crooks and Liars, we see that CNN’s Lou Dobbs reported on Bush family business connections with the UAE. As I wrote in the last post, this is just more of the same stuff the Bush Regime has been engaged in all these weary years since January 2001. Righties, are you finally waking up?

Um, not Charles Krauthammer, who blames the UAE mess on the fall of the British Empire:

If only Churchill were alive today … The United Arab Emirates would still be a disunited bunch of subsistence Arab tribes grateful for the protection of the British navy in the Persian Gulf. And we hapless Americans — already desperately trying to mediate, pacify and baby-sit the ruins of Churchill’s Empire: Iraq, Palestine, India/Pakistan, Yemen, even (Anglo-Egyptian) Sudan — would not be in the midst of a mini-firestorm over the sale of the venerable P&O, which manages six American ports, to the UAE.

Krauthammer’s denial of reality is so vast it’s almost majestic. I can hear the ghost of Rudyard Kipling whispering “The White Man’s Burden.” Somebody send ol’ Charles a monocle and a pith helmet, quick.

Other righties are struggling to justify the UAE deal against years of Bushie conditioning. Some columnists at FrontPage note that the UAE has close ties to Hamas. And Rich Moran of Right Wing Nut House complains,

I don’t like waking up in the morning and discovering that I’m an “Islamaphobe” or “Un-American” for calling the Administration a bunch of rabbit heads for the way they’ve managed the unveiling of this idiocy. To tell you the truth, I resent it. It bespeaks a certain kind of intellectual laziness when the best one can do to counter an argument is to indulge in an orgy of name calling and finger pointing. Better to have the facts at one’s disposal and try and counter an opponent’s argument in a logical and rational manner.

I’ll pause here so that lefties reading this can howl and roll about on the floor for a while. Come back whenever you’ve stopped laughing and/or crying. Take your time.

At Newsweek, Michael Hirsh argues that the UAE episode reveals just how out-of-control the alleged “war on terror” really is.

The way the war was supposed to have been fought—a way that would really have distressed bin Laden and Zawahiri—was that Al Qaeda was supposed to be so isolated by now that we had most of the Arab world on our side. Deals like Dubai Ports World ‘s takeover of the London company that administers some U.S. ports were supposed to be pretty much routine. After all, as one commentator said to me during an appearance on al Jazeera the other day, isn’t this the way globalization is intended to work: you co-opt everyone, even your rivals, into the international system? Instead, so mistrusted is the Bush administration—and so out of control has the war on terror become—that even leading Republican politicians this week sought to cancel the Dubai contract (Bush, to his credit, did manage a presidential response, vowing to veto).

The Hirsh article is excellent; I highly recommend that you read all of it.

If righties have been slow to catch on, so has Congresss (which, after all, is dominated by righties these days). From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

It’s easy to imagine how the Bush administration might have defused much of the uproar over a deal to allow a company owned by the Dubai royal family in the United Arab Emirates to run six American ports. Members of Congress asked for consultation and reassurance that the deal would not compromise already iffy security at one of the most vulnerable parts of the nation’s homeland defense system. What they got was a veto threat and a presidential suggestion that they were all anti-Arab.

If the administration is in trouble with Congress, it’s long overdue. For years now, the White House has stonewalled Congressional committees attempting to carry out their oversight duties. Administration officials appearing before Senate and House committees have given testimony that was, to put it generously, knowingly misleading. Requests for information have been simply waved away with an invocation of national security. Just recently, the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to get information on the administration’s extralegal wiretapping, but was told that it would compromise national security to tell the senators how the program works, how it is reviewed, how much information is collected and how that information is used.

The chickens are coming home to roost. A White House that routinely brands anyone who disagrees with its positions as soft on terrorism is now complaining that election-bound lawmakers are callously using the ports deal to frighten voters. A White House that invaded Iraq as a substitute for defeating Al Qaeda is frustrated because Congress is using the company, Dubai Ports World, as a stand-in for all the intractable perils of the Middle East.

Today in the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne writes,

Americans owe a debt to Dubai Ports World for the storm the company has created with its pending takeover of operations at six U.S. seaports. Let us count the hypocrisies and the inconsistencies, the blind spots and the oversights that this controversy has revealed.

Until this fight broke out about a week ago, it was impossible to get anyone but the experts to pay attention to the huge holes in the security of our ports. Suddenly, everyone cares.

Dionne writes that the Bush Administration is too secretive for its own good.

Most Americans had no idea that our government’s process of approving foreign takeovers of American companies through the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States was entirely secret. When Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.) asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about the Dubai Ports deal at a hearing on Feb. 15, Chertoff declined to answer because the committee’s work was “classified.” Treasury Secretary John Snow told another congressional committee that he was not permitted to discuss specific transactions considered by the foreign investment panel.

Why shouldn’t the public have a right to know about the deliberations of this interagency committee? Hasn’t the secrecy surrounding this decision aggravated the uproar it has caused?

The way this administration keeps secrets strikes me as pathological. Time and time again, we’re told just to trust them. Yet they don’t seem to trust us or our elected representatives in Congress. They don’t want to have honest public discussions about policy; instead we get sales jobs. And manipulation. And fear-mongering.

After Dick’s shooting incident a New York Times editorial said “The vice president appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door.” But that’s how the Bushies strike me all the time. There’s a furtive guiltiness about them, a whistling nonchalance that’s just a little too practiced.

Finally, David Ignatius, who catches a clue now and then, said something else that needs to be said.

The real absurdity here is that Congress doesn’t seem to realize that an Arab-owned company’s management of America’s ports is just a taste of what is coming. Greater foreign ownership of U.S. assets is an inevitable consequence of the reckless tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning fiscal policies that Congress and the White House have pursued. By encouraging the United States to consume more than it produces, these fiscal policies have sucked in imports so fast that the nation is nearing a trillion-dollar annual trade deficit. Those are IOUs on America’s future, issued by a spendthrift Congress.

The best quick analysis I’ve seen of the fiscal squeeze comes from New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, in his useful online survey of economic information, rgemonitor.com. He notes that with the U.S. current account deficit running at about $900 billion in 2006, “in a matter of a few years foreigners may end up owning most of the U.S. capital stocks: ports, factories, corporations, land, real estate and even our national parks.” Until recently, he writes, the United States has been financing its trade deficit through debt — namely, by selling U.S. Treasury securities to foreign central banks. That’s scary enough — as it has given big T-bill holders such as China and Saudi Arabia the ability to punish the U.S. dollar if they decide to unload their reserves.

But as Roubini says, foreigners may decide they would rather hold their dollars in equity investments than in U.S. Treasury debt. “If we continue with our current patterns of spending above our incomes, by 2013 the U.S. foreign liabilities could be as high as 75 percent of GDP and an increasing fraction of such liabilities will be in the form of equity,” he explains. “So, let us stop whining about the dangers of unfriendly foreigners owning our firms and assets and get used to it.”

Tell the righties and the Bush White House they support to get used to it. It’s their game, and they won’t let anyone else have the ball.

The Snapping Point

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I’ve been saying for some time that cognitive dissonance can only be stretched so far. Eventually it either snaps or surrenders to pure delusion.

This week I ‘spect a whole lot of Americans finally reached a snapping point.

The UAE-port deal is being attacked from both the Left and the Right, and lefties and righties are voicing many of the same objections. But on a more fundamental level, Left and Right are seeing two entirely different “Portgates.” Many on the Right are befuddled; like this fellow, Portgate is an inexplicable anomaly. Suddenly Muslims who boycott Danish goods and practice female genital mutilation are “moderate” Muslims who can be trusted, arch-foe Jimmy Carter is a Bush ally, and Presidential Brother Neil Bush is auditioning for the next Michael Moore film. The world has turned upside down.

But on the Left, we’re not surprised at all. This is the same old Bush we’ve disliked all along. And if righties still don’t get it, I suggest they rent “Fahrenheit 911” and watch it carefully for clues.

But our alarm at Bush is about more than selling out our security to Bush’s Arab business cronies. It’s true that the Bushies began to compromise our security as soon as they took office — for example, by interfering with FBI investigation of the U.S.S. Cole bombing because justice for the Cole was less important to the Bush White House than good relations with Yemen. But we lefties have been objecting to many other practices and characteristics of Bushism. We are alarmed because our national resources are being sold off at bargain-basement prices to big GOP donors; our children’s future is mortgaged to foreign bankers, the federal government cloaks itself in unprecedented secrecy even as it threatens citizens’ constitutional rights to keep their personal lives private. Among other things.

Yet these past five + years, every time we on the Left bring up these issues, the Right hoots us down and calls us “looney” and “unhinged.”

Well, my dears, who’s unhinged now?

If history is our guide, most righties will eventually find a way to rationalize the UAE deal and come back to the Bush cultie fold. But at least this episode reveals that years of carefully cultivated fear can’t be erased overnight. And make no mistake, the Bush Administration has spent nearly every waking moment since 9/11 carefully cultivating fear. And until now the fear-mongers have not been, shall we say, overly discriminating about who it is we’re supposed to be fearing.

Paul Krugman writes,

When terrorists attacked the United States, the Bush administration immediately looked for ways it could exploit the atrocity to pursue unrelated goals especially, but not exclusively, a war with Iraq.

But to exploit the atrocity, President Bush had to do two things. First, he had to create a climate of fear: Al Qaeda, a real but limited threat, metamorphosed into a vast, imaginary axis of evil threatening America. Second, he had to blur the distinctions between nasty people who actually attacked us and nasty people who didn’t.

The administration successfully linked Iraq and 9/11 in public perceptions through a campaign of constant insinuation and occasional outright lies. In the process, it also created a state of mind in which all Arabs were lumped together in the camp of evildoers. Osama, Saddam — what’s the difference?

To be fair, President Bush himself has not spoken about the “clash of civilizations,” I don’t believe. He has plenty of proxies to do it for him. But if you know anything at all about the hard-core Right, you know most of ’em are looking at the “war on terror” and seeing a war against Islam — just as their counterparts in the Muslim world see themselves engaged as a war against the West. And the White House hasn’t worked real hard at discouraging that point of view. As Krugman writes, “After years of systematically suggesting that Arabs who didn’t attack us are the same as Arabs who did, the administration can’t suddenly turn around and say, ‘But these are good Arabs.'”

At The Nation, William Greider gloats at bit at David Brooks, who called Portgate an instance of political hysteria.

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defense spending by more than 40 percent. Hysteria has been used to realign US foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world. Hysteria will justify the “long war” now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush’s butt in 2004.

I do hope that someone digs up one of Bush’s 2004 campaign speeches in which he derides John Kerry for his “global test” remark. As Digby reminded us,

Bush has been playing politics with this complicated situation for years now, saying things like “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” He spent the entire presidential campaign taunting John Kerry for allegedly requiring a “global test” and using his applause lines like a bludgeon:

    I will never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.

If you’ve forgotten the “global test” spin, you can find an explanation of what Kerry actually said and how the Bushies twisted it at Media Matters. Bush actually said that Kerry “would give foreign governments veto power over our national security decisions.” Oh, please, please, somebody find a video of that and plaster it about the Blogosphere, please. And email the link to Keith Olbermann.

But this is 2006. And now, bless us, the Bush Administration is telling us that turning six American ports over to the government of the United Arab Emirates is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do, and anyone who says otherwise is just a racist. Ellen Terich writes,

The Bush administration is aggressively fighting this objection to their cozy deal with the UAE on two fronts. First, it is insisting that the business deal has been thoroughly and legally vetted and thus should be of no concern. In other words, King George is saying “Trust me. I’ll tell you when to be afraid.” Secondly he is sending out the message, through surrogates, that the objection is racist. We shouldn’t object to this company running some of our ports, in other words, if we haven’t objected to companies from other countries running our ports, countries like Britain, Denmark and Singapore.

Is he serious? The monarch who called a “crusade” against Islamic terrorists, who made sure there was an Islamic terrorist alert every month before the 2004 election (and none since), who rounded up countless Muslims, imprisoned them without due process and tortured them, who lied to the people so he could go to war and expand American empire in the Islamic Middle East, and exploited the people’s fear of “Islamo-Fascists” to ensure his re-election, is now chastising the people for being concerned about an Islamic country running U.S. ports? What you reap, you will sow, your majesty! You succeeded beyond your wildest dreams in exploiting the fears, the prejudices, and lack of sophistication of many of your supporters, and now it is possible (although no sure thing considering how the Congress always ends up bowing to your commands) that this little tactic will backfire and cause you to lose what you and your cronies have really been all about: the acquisition of corporate wealth and power.

As Mahablog reader k commented earlier this week, “We are being dismantled brick by brick and sold on the international market. We will be enslaved one way or another because we have lost our economic independence.” Yes, this is how Bush handles national security; by selling us all out.

Are you paying attention, righties?

It’s Us, Too

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Roger Ailes’s objections notwithstanding — I’ll come back to them in a minute — David Ignatius’s column in today’s Washington Post comes close to saying the same thing I said in the “Patriotism v. Paranoia” post below. I wrote,

In the past century or so our species, worldwide, has undergone some seismic social shifts. People no longer remain neatly sorted by skin color, language, and cultural history. All over the globe people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds are having to learn to live together. Once upon a time “foreign” places were far, far away. But air travel has brought them closer in terms of travel time; now every foreign place on the globe is just over the horizon. Soon foreigners will be sitting in our laps.

I think nationalism arose and became dominant in the 20th century largely because of these seismic social shifts. People who can’t handle the shifts retreat into nationalism as a defense.

Ignatius describes what he calls the “connectedness to conflict” paradox, which says that more “connected” people become, the more conflicts seem to arise.

… as elites around the world become more connected with the global economy, they become more disconnected from their own cultures and political systems. The local elites “lose touch with what’s going on around them,” opening up a vacuum that is filled by religious parties and sectarian groups, Sidawi contends. The modernizers think they are plugging their nations into the global economy, but what’s also happening is that they are unplugging themselves politically at home.

In his column Ignatius quotes Francis Fukuyama and a couple of over over-educated ivory-tower types as they try to figure out why it is that the Middle East is in such turmoil because of its contacts with the West. And that’s the problem; these guys are all westerners trying to figure out what’s wrong with Middle Easterners and not noticing that a variation of the same thing is going on right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., not to mention Europe and other western-type spots.

If by “elites” you substitute “people who aren’t afraid of other cultures and of social and cultural change” I think you get a clearer picture. I don’t think the not-afraid people are necessarily “elites.” Some of the most retrenched nationalists are wealthy, well-educated and well-connected. What they’re not, is modern.

And in a kind of double-paradox, many people who are working hard at “plugging their nations into the global economy” are some of the same people who exploit local nationalistic and xenophobic feelings to stay in political power. Think Republicans Party.

Ignatius, Fukuyama, et al. scratch their heads over democracy and alienation, and of “elites” becoming “disconnected” with their own cultures, and write up a lot of verbose papers expressing highfalutin’ theories. Look, guys, this isn’t difficult. People are afraid of change. They are especially afraid of change that seems to threaten their autonomy and self-identity. And if they think this change is being imported by odd-colored people with exotic accents, don’t expect ’em to roll out the welcome wagon.

This rebellion against change, this retreat into nationalism, is happening all over the globe. It’s happening in Europe, big-time. It’s in the Middle East. And it’s happening here, too, although we’re a bit more subdued about it. So far. But as I noted here, the ongoing Muslim cartoon crisis, for example, amounted to Middle Eastern anti-modernists and western right-wingers whipping each other into a mutual hate frenzy. Granted the western wingnuts haven’t resorted to riots and destruction; they’ve been content with escalating hate speech. But the distinction is merely one of degree, not of kind.

Here’s where Roger Ailes comes in — in the remainder of his column, Ignatius postulates that all these people around the world are going berserk because they have the internets. Ignatius writes,

McLean argues that the Internet is a “rage enabler.” By providing instant, persistent, real-time stimuli, the new technology takes anger to a higher level. “Rage needs to be fed or stimulated continually to build or maintain it,” he explains. The Internet provides that instantaneous, persistent poke in the eye. What’s more, it provides an environment in which enraged people can gather at cause-centered Web sites and make themselves even angrier. The technology, McLean notes, “eliminates the opportunity for filtering or rage-dissipating communications to intrude.” I think McLean is right. And you don’t have to travel to Cairo to see how the Internet fuels rage and poisons reasoned debate. Just take a tour of the American blogosphere.

The connected world is inescapable, like the global economy itself. But if we can begin to understand how it undermines political stability — how it can separate elites from masses, and how it can enhance rage rather than reason — then perhaps we will have a better chance of restabilizing a very disorderly world.

Oh, good. Just cut ’em off from the Web and the natives won’t be so restless. Roger Ailes writes,

Oh, for the good old days — pre-1990s — a time when our sectarian wars and riots and lynchings and genocides were civilized affairs, based on pure, sweet reason. Oh, paradise lost!

I’d like to apologize personally to David Ignatius and Tom Friedman and Francis Fukuyama and Thomas P.M. Barnett and, most of all, to Charles M. McLean, who runs a trend-analysis company called Denver Research Group Inc., for coarsening the discourse. It was wrong of me to think that my opinions might be worth consideration even though I knew I didn’t have a book contract. Clearly, it was my rage that blinded me to the fact that I was poisoning reasoned debate and undermining political stability and separating elites from masses.

And I was such a nice fellow before October 2002; really, I was.

Let the healing begin.

Snark.

Hate Speech and Its Consequences

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James Wolcott provides a good follow up to my “Patriotism v. Hate Speech” post.

The incredible shrinking Dennis the Peasant lets loose with a thumping j’accuse against fellow conservatives who use their blogs as bonfire sites to promote hate speech, demonize Muslims, and cheerlead for the “Clash of Civilizations.” …

    “So… when I see people yucking it up over at Little Green Footballs over the deaths of 300+ religious pilgrims – innocent human beings whose crime was, evidently, that they weren’t Christians and just like us… and whose deaths are therefore something to gloat over – and Charles Johnson [maitre’d of Little Green Footballs and co-founder, with Roger L. Simon, of Pajamas Media] doesn’t think it appropriate or necessary to remove those comments and ban those people from his site, then I’ve got one mother of a problem on my hands. …

    Does anyone want to argue that a collective lack of knowledge of, and a persistent misunderstanding of, of the religion, culture, politics and history of the Middle East didn’t play a huge part in facilitating the success of al-Qaeda on September 11? And if our ignorance of the peoples, religion, history and politics played into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his followers, just how do the actions of ‘thought leading, tipping point’ bloggers like Charles Johnson and columnists like Ann Coulter help to rectify that situation? How does the mocking of the faith of over a billion souls serve our interests in winning the War on Terror? How does the dehumanization of those same billion souls make us stronger – either materially or morally – in the fight against al Qaeda?

    “Answer? They Don’t.

It’s Mahablog policy not to link to Little Green Footballs even when I refer to it, because the site and its followers are so viciously hateful. And also because of an episode a couple of years ago in which LGF faithful tried to shut The Mahablog down with comment spam. Needless to say, I’m not exactly a fan. But there is a link to LGF buried in the “hate speech” post. If you find it, it will take you to a post yukking it up over the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie. Mr. Corrie died when she was crushed by a bulldozer, an episode that inspired a regular festival of humor on the Right. The nice doggie, for example, christened her “St. Pancake” and regailed his readers with song lyric spoofs. (Note that the doggie has removed these items from his web site; thank goodness for google cache.)

Of course, in Rightie World, this doesn’t qualify as hate speech.

A few days ago when Michelle Malkin went on her cartoon jihad I suggested that just maybe goading Muslims into hating us more is not the best way to win hearts and minds in Iraq. Not too many righties put those pieces together, though.

I will have more to say on this later.

Quote du Jour

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Via Crooks and Liars — Arthur Silber addresses rightie reaction to the Muslim cartoon controversy —

To be absolutely clear: you unquestionably have “the freedom to foster hatred,” if that is what you choose to do. But if that is indeed your choice, don’t dress it up as a noble and valiant fight for freedom of speech and for “Western values” — unless, of course, you think that accurately represents “Western values.”

Read Arthur’s whole post. Good stuff.

Taking the Bait

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Via Buzzflash — what they’re not telling us about the Mohammed cartoon controversy and why the violence is erupting now and not when the cartoons were first published in September 2005.

According to this blogger, the cartoon controversy erupted because of a classic rightie-style misdirection campaign perpetrated by the Saudis. The plan was to get people worked up about the cartoons to take public attention away from the deaths of 350 pilgrims at the Hajj.

These were not unavoidable accidents, they were the results of poor planning by the Saudi government.

And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media’s radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Most of the pilgrims who were killed came from poorer countries such as Pakistan, where the Hajj is a very big story. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.

Their plan was to go on a major offensive against the Danish cartoons. The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons. The Saudi government asked for a formal apology from Denmark. When that was not forthcoming, they began calling for world-wide protests. After two weeks of this, the Libyans decided to close their embassy in Denmark. Then there was an attack on the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And that was followed by attacks on the embassies in Syria and then Lebanon.

Many European papers, including the right-wing German Springer media group, fanned the flames by reprinting the cartoons. And now you have the situation we are in today, with lots of video footage of angry crowds and the storming of embassies and calls for boycotts of Danish and European products. [emphasis added]

What did I say about not taking bait?

Meanwhile the Right Blogosphere has gone foaming-at-the-mouth, hair-on-fire crazy over the cartoon controversy. They’ve worked themselves up to a screaming pitch about the mad dog Muslims who are fixing to massacre Europe. They have gone off the insufferable self-righteousness scale because most American newspapers will not republish the cartoons, and those newspapers and the State Department and, of course, liberals are all wussie sell-outs of democratic principles.

Can we say they’ve come unhinged? I think we can.

Michelle Malkin, who must have steam coming out of her ears by now, wants to know what the Left has to say. In the past couple of days a few leftie bloggers have offered opinions, including me. Here’s a sampler.

Via Roxie, Josh Marshall says,

… there is a hint of the absurd in this story, the way continents of people get swept up in reaction to some simple pictures. But this episode seems like a model for what I imagine we’ll be living with for the rest of our lives. There’s something peculiarly 21st century about this conflict — both in the way that it’s rooted in the world of media and also in the way that it shows these two societies or cultures … well, all I can think of to use is the clunky 21st centuryism — they can’t interface. The gap is too large. The language is too different. One’s coming in at 30 degree angle, the other at 90.

He’s not letting rioting Muslims off the hook:

An open society, a secular society can’t exist if mob violence is the cost of giving offense. And that does seem like what’s on offer here. That’s the crux of this issue — that the response is threatened violence and more practical demands that such outrages must end. … So liberal mores versus theocratic mores. Where’s the possible compromise? There isn’t any. On the face of it this gets portrayed as an issue of press freedom. But this is much more fundamental. ‘Press freedom’ is just one cog in the machinery of a society that doesn’t believe in or accept the idea of ‘blasphemy’. Now, an important cog? Yes. But I think we’re fooling ourselves to reduce this to something so juridical and rights based.

And it’s not just Muslims:

I don’t want to imply this is only a Muslims versus modernity issue. I know not all Muslims embrace these views. More to the point, it’s not only Muslims who do. You see it among the haredim in Israel. And I see it with an increasing frequency here in the US. Is it just me or does it seem that more and more often there are public controversies in which ‘blasphemy’ is considered some sort of legitimate cause of action — as if ‘blasphemy’ can actually have any civic meaning in a society like ours. Anyway, you get the idea.

The idea I get is that this entire clash appears to be happening on the Right end of the political scale. Muslim extremists and western wingnuts are whipping each other into a mutual hate frenzy. Liberals, for the most part, aren’t getting caught up in it. We’re not taking the bait.

This next paragraph of Josh Marshall’s is brilliant, so I’m going to quote it even though it stretches the scope of this post a tad.

Much, probably most of what gets talked about as the ‘war on terror’ in politics today is a crock — a stalking horse for political power grabs, a masquerade of rage and revanchism, a running excuse for why we’ve made so many stupid decisions over the last five years. In some cases, on a more refined plain, it’s rooted in intellectual or existential boredom. But beyond all the mumbojumbo about how we’re helping ourselves by permanently occupying Iraq and running the country’s finances into the ground, there is a conflict. There is a basic rupture in the world.

Wow, that’s good.

Anyway, elsewhere on the Left Blogosphere, Dr. Atrios says,

I’m not too sympathetic with the notion that anything under the cover of religion is automatically entitled to deference. On the other hand, “don’t be an asshole” about peoples’ religious beliefs when they aren’t trying to impose them on you seems to be reasonably good etiquette. The cartoons weren’t funny and the visual portrayal of Mohammed was done just to “be an asshole” without any larger point to it. It’s like parading around in blackface just for the hell of it. There’s no point other than “I’m doing this to see who I can piss off.” I certainly defend the right to piss people off, though not always the decision to do so.

Sensible. Shakespeare’s Sister takes note of Atrios, and adds,

I’m not totally sure I would classify radical Islamists as not trying to impose their religious beliefs. I believe that is, in fact, one of their primary goals, both religious and political, which makes me inclined to feel that commentary on those goals, even in the form of cartoons likely to offend, is fair game, and therefore defensible. (The flipside of that is that I find this response of radical Muslims, including calls to kidnap Danes and “cut them into as many pieces as the number of newspapers that printed the cartoons,” and assertions that this conflagration never would never had erupted “if a 17-year-old death edict against writer Salman Rushdie been carried out” because “then those lowlifers would not have dared discredit the Prophet,” indefensible.) I’m a bit concerned that in our attempts to rebuke the rightwing onslaught to denigrate all of Islam as fundamentally violent, we have begun to minimize the reality that there is indeed a segment of Islam that actively seeks to convert infidels and slaughter those who refuse. It strikes me as dangerously naïve to ignore the ambitions of an extremist Islamic element who, given the first opportunity, would happily impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us, and just because a jihadist hasn’t knocked on one’s door peddling their wares doesn’t make it any less true.

Steve Gilliard has a long post that I urge you to read. It includes an interlude by Steve’s blogging partner, Jen, who is more sympathetic to the Danes than is Steve.

Jazz at Running Scared links to and explicates a rightie blog post, and observes:

The bottom line is this: Shackleford is at least coming very close to admitting what many on the far Right clearly seem to believe, but are not willing to openly state. That is, we are not simply fighting terrorists and radical extremists, but are in fact engaged in a holy war against Islam.

This, IMO, gets to the heart of why the Right Blogosphere is obsessed with this story, the way they were obsessed with the recent French riots. They want a holy war against Islam. They are itching for it. Not that any of them would volunteer to fight, of course … See also Jazz’s post “The Bloodlust of the Unhinged Right Wing.”

The Green Knight sums it up:

There’s still the fact that the rioters are being idiots. Sometimes, there’s no good guy. A newspaper prints cartoons that are meant to “test the limits of political correctness” (i.e. to offend people on purpose, i.e. to be an asshole); the completely over-the-top result is riots around the world.

Nope. No good guy here.

Not that Malkin will ever link any of this.

See also a Muslim’s opinion.

Update: See also Amanda at Pandagon: “We’re All Batshit Crazy Crusaders Now.” Georgia10 asks, “Where the hell is Karen Hughes?” And Steve M writes to Michelle Malkin.

Update update: Malkin is still claiming the Left is “silent” on the cartoon issue. If you want to click on Malkin’s links to other rightie comments on the so-called “silence” of the Left, you see a whole lotta straw man arguments — e.g., “I’m hearing this argument – that only Muslims are fair game for criticism, and that editorial cartoonists never, ever savage Christianity or Judaism” — followed by examples of anti-Bush cartoons that skewer Bush’s religiosity. And one crude cartoon savaging Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Likud party is provided as an example of something “anti-Semitic.” The examples are all from the British press, btw; apparently the blogger couldn’t find examples from American media that were nasty enough to suit him.

Then the fellow goes on to say (in effect; I am, of course, paraphrasing) that because these British cartoons offended him, then American newspapers had better publish the Mohammed cartoons to defend freedom of expression. Yes, once again we see the foundation of all American conservative moral principles — they do it too.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This

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Sometimes, from diverse news stories, a shaggy dog emerges.

Item one: The recent drone attack that failed to kill al Qaeda’s “number two” guy had the unfortunate side effect of killing 17 other people, including six women and six children. According to Griff Witte and Kamran Khan in the Washington Post:

Tens of thousands of Pakistanis staged an angry anti-American protest near the remote village of Damadola, about 120 miles northwest of Islamabad, where Friday’s attack took place. According to witnesses, the demonstrators shouted, “Death to America!” and “Death to Musharraf!” — referring to Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf — and the offices of at least one U.S.-backed aid organization were ransacked and set ablaze.

Jason Burke and Imtiaz Gul of the Observer write that relations between the U.S. and our GWOT “ally,” Pakistan, have been stretched to the breaking point.

Tensions between Washington and Islamabad have grown in recent weeks as American troops have stepped up operations against militants. Pakistan has already lodged a protest with the US military six days ago after a reported US airstrike killed eight people in the North Waziristan tribal region, an almost deserted area of mountains 300 miles south of Damadola. In Damadola itself, locals said they had never sheltered any al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders, let alone al-Zawahiri, an instantly recognisable 54-year-old Egyptian-born ex-doctor.

Even if the raid had taken out Ayman Zawahiri, one might still argue that the price of the capture was far too high. “This is war, and unfortunately war results in collateral deaths by mistaken targeting,” say the warbloggers. But let’s take a step back and ask a fundamental question.

Why are we at war? Aren’t we supposed to be fighting to end (or, at least, significantly discourage) terrorism? If our focus on eliminating people on a shopping list of bad guys results in making more bad guys, is this not a tad self-defeating? Like curing someone’s headache by cutting off his head? Are we not missing the big picture here?

Jane Hamsher has more on what we might call the inconsistency of righties on this issue, but let’s move on to the next story …

An editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times says we’d better pay attention to Afghanistan.

MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AFTER the invasion that overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan remains a dangerous place. A suicide attack 10 days ago — presumably targeting the U.S. ambassador, who was attending a nearby ceremony — killed 10 people. Days earlier, there was the beheading of a high school principal by suspected Taliban militants who broke into his home and forced his wife and eight children to watch.

The violence followed a year in which nearly 1,600 people were killed in insurgent attacks and suicide bombings. The latter are an especially troubling development because such attacks were previously rare in Afghanistan. Last year’s death toll included more than 80 American soldiers, making the year the bloodiest for U.S. forces there since the invasion.

Yet the U.S. plans to reduce the number of troops stationed in Afghaistan this spring. NATO will take up some of the slack, but one might ask why President Bush is so determined to “finish the job” in Iraq but not in Afghanistan.

But what’s this? Doug Smith and Borzou Daragahi write in the Los Angeles Times that Bush’s “Marshall Plan” for Iraq is fading.

After more than 2 1/2 years of sputtering reconstruction work, the United States’ “Marshall Plan” to rebuild this war-torn country is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet and no plans to extend its funding.

The $18.6 billion approved by Congress in 2003 will be spent by the end of this year, officials here say. Foreign governments have given only a fraction of the billions they pledged two years ago.

With the country still a shambles, U.S. officials are promoting a tough-love vision of reconstruction that puts the burden on the Iraqi people.

“The world is a competitive place,” Tom Delare, economics counselor at the U.S. Embassy, said this month during a news briefing. “You have to convince the investor that it is worth his while to put his money in your community.”

In other words, Halliburton et al. has decided there isn’t enough profit in Iraq reconstruction. The White House insists it remains committed to Iraqi reconstruction. They’re just not going to put any more money and effort into it.

Meanwhile, we’re on the way to a nuclear showdown in Iran.

Now, here’s the punch line: In response to their crumbling Middle East policy, some in the GOP have pulled out all the stops … to smear John Murtha.

Those that can, do. Those that can’t — smear.

Indigestion 2005

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I did a Technorati search, and it seems Jazz is right — as of now the Right Blogosphere is ignoring the unfortunate post-election turmoil in Iraq. After whining at us that we ignored the glorious election, now they’re ignoring the inglorious side-effects of an apparent religious Shiite victory.

Reuters reports renewed violence in Iraq, along with Sunni demands for a do-over election and a boycott of parliament.

On the other hand, some Sunnis are still negotiating for more seats in the new parliament. Not successfully, but they haven’t given up.

I remain skeptical that Iraq or any other non-democratic nation can be forcibly retrofitted with a workable democratic government by outside forces. The argument is that the U.S. turned Japan into a democratic country after World War II; therefore, it should work with Iraq as well. This argument ignores the fact that there are ENORMOUS cultural, sociological, historical, and political differences between post-WWII Japan and current day-Iraq. And (warning: I’m no expert) I understand that the government that emerged in Japan was not as wildly different from what the Japanese were accustomed to as Americans might believe. For centuries under the Shogunate the country was ruled through rigid hierarchy and bureaucratic control, and the emperor was little more than a figurehead. Some argue that’s sorta kinda the way General MacArthur left it in 1949. And Japan had been moving toward democracy on its own in the 1920s before economic and social upheaval shoved it toward militarism. For a time after World War I the nation had a two-party political system and was governed mostly by a prime minister, not the Emperor. Americans have a hazy notion that Japan’s pre-war government was something like a European monarchy and that elections were utterly alien to the Japanese, but this is not so.

So if we eliminate Japan as an example of a new Little Democracy That Could, are there other examples? I can’t think of any.

Also: More on why the “tough on terror” Right is really a pack of weeniebabies. It’s us liberals, not the lefties, who demonstrate real resolve against terrorists.

Losing the War on Terror

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Via Altercation, I see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have a new book called The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right. Simon and Benjamin were respectively Director and Senior Director of Counter-Terrorism on the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, and they had publicly warned of a massive terrorist strike against the United States before September 11. Their earlier book The Age of Sacred Terror is, IMO, a must-read.

Altercation has an excerpt from the new book:

A core part of the case that Bush and his advisers made was that Saddam might collude with terrorists because it would allow him to hurt the United States “without leaving fingerprints,” but it appears that a large part of the reason Iraq—like Iran and Libya—stopped targeting the United States was the belief that it could not carry out an attack without detection. (Iran, under its newly elected president, Muhammad Khatami, may have also changed its policy after the Khobar Towers attack because terrorism was not advancing its goals. The Iranian regime appears to have supported the attack because of a desire to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia, but the bombing’s only effect was to cause Washington to move the troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to a more secure location.) Since detection carries with it a strong likelihood of retaliation, as Iraq learned in 1993, when U.S. cruise missiles destroyed the country’s intelligence headquarters, the calculus did not make sense—it was just no longer worth the risk to attack America. That cruise missile strike was derided by conservative critics of the Clinton administration as a “pinprick,” but Saddam seemed to have gotten the message.

No rightie will admit to that in a million years, of course.

Beyond the matter of whether the Iraqi regime was likely to attempt a terrorist attack against the United States, the administration’s argument raised the further question of whether Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden were likely to collaborate. In fact, Iraq and al Qaeda were anything but natural allies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and have plunged Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such leaders as Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the military government in Algeria ,and the Saudi royal family. To contemporary jihadists, Saddam was another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith who refused to rule by Islamic law and who habitually murdered religious leaders in Iraq who might oppose his regime. Perhaps the best summation of the jihadist view of Saddam’s Iraq was given during the Persian Gulf War by Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical sheik now imprisoned in the United States. When he was asked what the punishment should be for those who supported the United States in the conflict, he answered, “Both those who are against and the ones who are with Iraq should be killed.”

Simon and Benjamin go on to say that the few contacts made between bin Laden’s and Hussein’s camps, which mostly occurred in the early 1990s, were part of a “Middle Eastern tradition of keeping tabs on all groups, friendly or not.” Further, it was the consensus of the intelligence community that neither Iraq nor Iran were having much to do with bin Laden.

In 1998, in an effort to ensure that the U.S. government was not becoming complacent in this judgment, Richard Clarke asked his staff to evaluate the available intelligence to see if these conclusions were justified. After reviewing a large amount of intelligence, they too endorsed the intelligence community’s verdict. After a lengthy investigation of its own, the 9/11 Commission arrived at the same understanding in 2004 and noted in its final report, “We have seen no evidence that [the contacts] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

I brought that up because we’re seeing so much crapola from the Right these days about how “even Bill Clinton” though Saddam Hussein was dangerous. Maybe he did, but Bill Clinton didn’t think Saddam Hussein posed much of a threat to the United States. And by 1998 the Clinton Administration had realized that al Qaeda and other radical Islamic jihadist groups were far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein was. But the righties never get around to mentioning that.

This is from a New York Times review of the same book:

Like the CIA officer Michael Scheuer, the author (under the pseudonym “Anonymous”) of the 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Benjamin and Simon regard the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a kind of Christmas present to Osama bin Laden: an unnecessary and ill-judged war of choice that has not only become a recruitment tool for jihads but that has also affirmed the story line that Qaeda leaders have been telling the Muslim world – that America is waging war against Islam and seeking to occupy oil-rich Muslim countries.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq toppled one of the Mideast’s secular dictatorships, the authors write, and produced a country in chaos, a country that could well become what Afghanistan was during the years of Soviet occupation: a magnet for jihads and would-be jihads from around the world.

Do tell.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book Against All Enemies that something like the Iraq War was bin Laden’s plan all along. At least a decade before 9/11, according to Clark, Osama was hanging out in the Sudan dreaming up an Iraq scenario–

The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren. After the success of the jihad, the Muslim region would become a radical Islamic state, a breeding ground for more terrorists, a part of the eventual network of Islamic states that would make up the great new Caliphate, or Muslim empire. [p. 136]

So, George, Dick, Condi, Rummy, Dougie, Wolfie, and the rest of the crew–Osama bin Laden sends a big thank you!

Simon and Benjamin acknowledge that it was widely believed that Saddam Hussein did have biochemical WMDs, although not nuclear weapons. But they say the critical question that should have been asked before the invasion was not did he have them, but would he use them?

…The answer to these questions is the same: no. Saddam is an execrable man and one of the most loathsome national leaders in a century in which there was plenty of competition. He had miscalculated badly on a number of occasions, most notably by invading Kuwait in August 1990. But he was not insane. He wanted to avoid obliteration. As far as the United States and its vital interests were concerned, he was deterred.

Now let’s repeat a snip from the last post, taken from yesterday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. The speakers are Michael Scheuer, Rand Beers, and Matthews.

MATTHEWS: Michael, just to think outside the box, would we be better off with Saddam Hussein still running tyrannically that country of Iraq, right next door to Jordan? Would Jordan be more secure in that environment?

SCHEUER: No doubt about it, sir.

MATTHEWS: No doubt?

SCHEUER: There‘d be … many fewer dead Americans,[*] and we would have many more resources available to annihilate al Qaeda, which is what we have to do. Without a doubt, in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.

MATTHEWS: How so?

SCHEUER: He was not going to permit Iraq to become a base, as it is today, for Sunni fundamentalists.

MATTHEWS: Why did he let them come in for that training, that chemical training, whatever the hell they did up north?

SCHEUER: They didn‘t control the area, so that was in the no-fly zone. They were in an area that was in Kurdistan.

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCHEUER: And they were Shia.

* Note: Scheuer stumbled on his words and said “more dead,” then he corrected himself. The transcript reads as if he said there would be more dead, which is not what he meant.

See what kind of information you can get when people who know something don’t get shouted over by rightie goons and Bushie shills? I’m listening to today’s Hardball now, as I keyboard. All this week Matthew has been doing a pretty good job of presenting the arguments against the war that we should have heard before the invasion. Before the invasion, Matthews’s guests tended to consist of an occasional liberal meekly asking why we had to invade right now–can’t we give the inspectors more time?–and a mess of righties screeching that everybody knows leaving Saddam Hussein was dangerous and every moment we delayed put America at terrible risk. Thanks, Tweety.

BTW, this rightie blogger linked to the dialogue and commented:

And what about this idea that Saddam Hussein was one of the best allies the U.S. had in the war against al Qaeda? This is leftist propaganda dished up to be adopted and amplified by others who believe that Bush went after the wrong guy. Poor Saddam was after all, a bad guy, but a bad guy who could have been made good with a few simple diplomatic meet-ups and pressure from the United Nations. HEH!

Righties tend to be literal. Obviously Scheuer was using “ally” in a metaphorical sense, as in “ladybugs are our best ally against aphids” or “rain is our best ally against drought.” He was not saying that Saddam Hussein would have been cooperative with the U.S., but that leaving him where he was worked to our advantage vis à vis al Qaeda for reasons throughly explained in the remainder of the dialogue. No “diplomatic meet-ups and pressure from the United Nations” were required, any more than with ladybugs.

Listen to Him Next Time

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Is the chaos in Iraq crossing over the border into Jordan? Before the Iraq invasion, King Abdullah of Jordan tried to warn the White House this might happen.

From the memory hole courtesy of His Majesty’s web site, an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan from August 2002, conducted by Glenn Kessler & Peter Slevin of The Washington Post.

Abdullah, speaking in an interview in his suite at the Four Seasons hotel, said an invasion of Iraq could splinter the country and spread across the Middle East. He commented as the Senate held its first hearings on the wisdom of a military campaign to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Abdullah said a reluctance by allies to confront the Bush administration over Iraq may have left U.S. policymakers falsely believing that there is little opposition to a war. Many also may have believed that the prospect of war was far in the distance, though Abdullah said “all of the sudden this thing is moving to the horizon much closer than we believed.”

“In all the years I have seen in the international community, everybody is saying this is a bad idea,” he said. “If it seems America says we want to hit Baghdad, that’s not what Jordanians think, or the British, the French, the Russians, the Chinese and everybody else.”

While Blair is frequently seen as a close partner of President Bush, Abdullah said, “Blair has tremendous concerns about how this would unravel.”

Abdullah dismissed the assertion of some U.S. officials that the rise of a democratic Iraq would lead to better prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. “In an ideal world, that could be a possibility,” he said. “Life being as it is, and so uncertain, very few people are convinced that that attitude would happen so easily. Our concern is exactly the opposite, that a miscalculation in Iraq would throw the whole area into turmoil.”

This wasn’t the first time King Abdullah had expressed misgivings about invading Iraq. A quickie google turned up a March 2002 CNN article in which the King told the Dick

that a U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq would be disastrous for the region and would undermine the broader coalition in the war on terrorism.

During a weekend meeting with an Iraqi official, King Abdullah said a U.S. military confrontation with Iraq would be a “catastrophe” for the region.

On the other hand, here are remarks by President Bush to King Abdullah from May 2004:

The fall of Saddam Hussein removed a source of instability and intimidation from the heart of the Middle East. All of Iraq’s neighbors, including Jordan, are safer now. And the emergence of a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq will contribute to Jordan’s security and prosperity.

Hmm, who turned out to be right? …

Note to lurking righties who always need everything explained to them multiple times: Nobody, including King Abdullah, is opposed to a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq. Nor does anyone deny that a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq would contribute to the security and prosperity of the Middle East. What King Abdullah said–and it appears he had a clue–is that a U.S. invasion of Iraq had little chance of resulting in a peaceful, prosperous, and free Iraq and a big chance of making the Middle East even more unstable than it already was.

Some background: Abu Musab Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s bombings in Jordan. This is from an article just posted on the Time magazine web site:

Zarqawi, born Ahmad Nazzal Fadil al Khalayilah (his nom de guerre is an adaptation of Zarqa, his industrial hometown in northern Jordan) has been engaged in a long-running struggle with Jordan’s King Abdullah II. Their duel began immediately after Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999, when he freed the Jordanian militant from prison in a general amnesty. Zarqawi, 39, had been jailed in the early 1990s on sedition charges after joining an Islamic fundamentalist group. He repaid Abdullah’s royal gesture by starting a relentless terrorism campaign against Jordanian monarchy. In turn, Abdullah has stood firm against Islamic extremism and sought to bring Zarqawi to justice, cooperating ever more closely with the Bush administration’s War on Terrorism.

In hindsight, we might say that King Abdullah made a mistake letting Zarqawi go. But not as big a mistake as the Bushies, who passed up at least three chances to terminate Zarqawi before the invasion of Iraq.

The Amman attacks fit a now-familiar pattern of terrorism that began after the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003: simultaneous blasts against Western targets hit housing and office compounds in Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004, hotels in Morocco in May 2003, and tourist resorts in Egypt in October 2004 and July 2005. In each case, the targets were in Arab countries led by pro-American governments.

But Zarqawi had his sights on Jordan long before the Iraq war. Jordanian officials accuse him of directing the so-called Millennium Plot to hit tourist sites, including the Radisson Hotel in Amman, on New Year’s Eve 1999. Last year, a Jordanian court sentenced Zarqawi to death for instigating the assassination of an American diplomat in 2002. In 2004, Jordanian officials said they foiled a chemical bomb attack directed by Zarqawi that could have killed up to 20,000 people; he is currently standing trial in absentia for the plot.

Here’s the most alarming part:

Wednesday’s attacks suggest that Abdullah’s worst fears about the Iraq war may be coming to pass. Though the King has been a staunch ally in the War on Terrorism, and provided key logistical support in the Iraq invasion, he strongly opposed the war on grounds that a conflict could further destabilize the Middle East.

The signs that the insurgency in Iraq was spilling on to Jordanian territory became apparent right after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, when Zarqawi’s men launched a massive bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad. Just over two months ago, Zarqawi claimed credit for shoulder-fired rocket attacks on U.S. warships in Jordan’s port of Aqaba. The shots missed their targets, killed two bystanders and served as a warning that more Zarqawi attacks may be on the way.

Worse from Jordan’s perspective, large numbers of young Jordanian men have gone to Iraq to join Zarqawi’s cause, raising the concern of another generation of young Zarqawis.

This is from yesterday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: … I want to bring in former CIA officer, Bob Baer, who joins us by phone. Mr. Baer, what do you make of this? We are looking at the earmarks of this in the early going here, three hotels hit simultaneously in the tourist areas of Amman, suicides apparently involved.

ROBERT BAER, FMR. CIA OFFICER: Well, Chris, I think to say first, that General Downing has hit the nail on the head, and I would like to even go farther in that what we are seeing is the chaos in Iraq slopping over the border into Jordan. Jordan has a long border with Iraq; weapons can come across very easily.

You have a majority population is Palestinian. They are very proinsurgency in Iraq. And you also have a strong Hamas and Islamic Jihad presence, which uses suicide bombings. In addition to Zarqawi, and until we can stabilize Iraq, I bet you we are going to be seeing more of this in the future.

MATTHEWS: How does that work? … Is it out of towners, the foreigners, or is it the Iraqis?

BAER: It‘s both. It‘s both support coming out of Saudi Arabia, from the fundamentalists, the Salafists. It is Sunni fundamentalists in general, who can foresee re-emergence of caliphate, which would include Syria, Lebanon, Anbar Province in Iraq, probably Baghdad and Jordan, and these people are after power.

They think that this is a domino, and you can bring down these capitals one after another, and they would especially like to go after King Abdullah. His mother is English. He is western educated. Jordan is a very sophisticated, westernized country.

MATTHEWS: Right.

BAER: And they want to bring it down. And that would be a huge feather in their cap, the fundamentalists.

If you continue reading the transcript, you run into some commentary I’ve seen elsewhere–that al Qaeda and the Iraq insurgency are not seeing eye to eye these days. Al Qaeda does not want a Shia-Sunni war, which is where the Iraq insurgency might be heading. This is a development that bears watching.

Close to the end of the transcript are remarks by Michael Scheuer and Rand Beers:

MATTHEWS: …Michael Scheuer served as chief of the CIA‘s bin Laden unit. He also wrote the book, Imperial Hubris, why the West is losing the war on terror.

Rand Beers served as a special assistant to President Bush on combating terrorism. He was also a member of the national security council during the Clinton administration.

Gentlemen, Michael and then Rand, what does this tell us about where we stand in the world, the war in Iraq, it‘s relevance to this, et cetera?

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FORMER COVERT CIA OFFICER: By invading Iraq, we‘ve basically signed the death warrant of Jordan and much of the Levant. bin Laden, it‘s another example, Chris, of no one reading what bin Laden said. bin Laden prizes contiguity about all things. An area where he can operate from safe haven into another country.

MATTHEWS: Now his save haven is war-torn Iraq?

SCHEUER: Exactly right, sir. We created his bastion to get to an area he‘s never been able to work against, which is the Levant, Israel, Egypt. He now has safe haven to operate from there.

MATTHEWS: He couldn‘t operate from his home country of Jordan. He couldn‘t attack Jordan from within?

SCHEUER: Well, al-Zarqawi could have. But for bin Laden, what we are seeing is al Qaeda move forces to Iraq to be able to move in against the Jordanians, against the Syrians, and eventually into Lebanon and into Israel.

MATTHEWS: What is the goal of the bombings tonight as you understand it? Why did people do it, who apparently committed suicide to do so, what drove them to that, what‘s their mission?

SCHEUER: Well, part of it was to destabilize Jordan. Part of it was to finish the job they failed to do in 2000. You remember, the Radisson was in the Millennium attack, was a target. And so it‘s meant to further the spread of the Jihad.

It‘s a very nice operation. There‘s going to be tremendous casualties there, and once again, the president and the secretary of defense will whistle past the graveyard saying this is, al Qaeda‘s back is broken, this is some kind of a new organization out there.

MATTHEWS: Is this meant, this attack on Jordan, meant to make life in Jordan so unstable that people say, we might as well try something new?

RAND BEERS, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL STAFFER: Well, it‘s certainly designed to do as much to destabilize the current government there as possible.

MATTHEWS: What does destabilize mean?

BEERS: What it means, is basically force the government to use its security forces to go after cells there, and in so doing, create a sense of repression.

MATTHEWS: It makes them feel like an occupying force.

BEERS: That‘s right.

MATTHEWS: And that‘s what the terrorists want to achieve, to make the Hashemite government, King Abdullah, seem like a Western power put on top of them.

BEERS: That‘s right. And taking the longstanding relationship with Jordan, with the United States, this makes them an extension of the United States in the eyes of al Qaeda, have been for some time. That‘s why Zarqawi started there. That‘s why he was involved in some attacks there. That‘s why he has had a cell structure there that preexisted what he did in Iraq.

MATTHEWS: Michael, just to think outside the box, would we be better off with Saddam Hussein still running tyrannically that country of Iraq, right next door to Jordan? Would Jordan be more secure in that environment?

SCHEUER: No doubt about it, sir.

MATTHEWS: No doubt?

SCHEUER: There‘d be … many fewer dead Americans, and we would have many more resources available to annihilate al Qaeda, which is what we have to do. Without a doubt, in the war against al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein was one of our best allies.

MATTHEWS: How so?

SCHEUER: He was not going to permit Iraq to become a base, as it is today, for Sunni fundamentalists.

MATTHEWS: Why did he let them come in for that training, that chemical training, whatever the hell they did up north?

SCHEUER: They didn‘t control the area, so that was in the no-fly zone. They were in an area that was in Kurdistan.

MATTHEWS: OK.

SCHEUER: And they were Shia.

MATTHEWS: Do you buy this argument that if had we not gone into Iraq, Jordan would be safer to live in right now?

BEERS: Oh, I think in near term, that‘s absolutely true. You can‘t dispute that.

MATTHEWS: And these fellows, who were just on trial who now—I shouldn‘t call them fellows, like they are pals of mine. These guys who are the terrorists are under down in Australia now, saying the reason they went to the plan, at least, to blow up areas and use their explosives, was they are anger about the war in Iraq. Do you believe that that‘s the true motive?

BEERS: I think that that was certainly a large part of it, and I would say, let‘s remember what people have said recently. The spokesman for al Qaeda, a guy named Gadahn, who is an American citizen, said that there would be attacks in Australia and at Los Angeles. If you go back and you think about the original Radisson plot, the original Radisson plot in the millennium was also what Rassam was doing coming into the United States when we caught him at the border.

MATTHEWS: From Canada.

BEERS: From Canada. He was going to LAX. So I have to say here, we had better pull up our socks and be looking very carefully within our own borders at this time.

MATTHEWS: You think this is a sign of something to come here …

BEERS: Well, we do know …

MATTHEWS: … what was happening Jordan tonight?

BEERS: Well, we do know that they come back to the scene of operations that they failed to complete. They have come back to the scene with the Radisson. That was partly …

MATTHEWS: They came back to the scene of the World Trade Center, 1993, back in 2001.

BEERS: Right. That‘s right. They did the Cole after the missed the Fitzgerald in Aden, so we know that there is this pattern of coming back for failed operations.

SCHEUER: I think what you‘re seeing too, Chris, is we haven‘t heard from bin Laden for a year. The last time we heard him, and he said that‘s the end of it, I am not warning you anymore. I think the next time we see Osama bin Laden is after there‘s an attack in the United States.

Juan Cole has more.