I've been trying to decide who to ping at NRO for suggestions on good books about the US involvement in Nicaragua. I'm looking for something that is a little broader than just a rehash of Iran-Contra. Your post today about Corner readers ("The Corner audience is the greatest audience in the world.") and the success of your recent post asking for suggestions on good books about Vietnam has narrowed my selection to......you! Since you worked for President Reagan, I thought that might be able to offer some suggestions and if not you might just ping "...the greatest audience in the world." I hope that I'm not being too presumptuous.

Yes, we all know the problems that can come from absurdly soft judges, but, at the same time, whether it’s California’s ‘Three Strikes’, the Rockefeller drug laws, or any of the many other instances of mandatory sentences that litter the statute book, there is all too real danger that their inflexibility comes at the expense of justice. Check out the case of Jamie Olis, a former Dynegy executive. He has just been sentenced to 24 years for his part in an accounting fraud that prosecutors maintained led to $500 million in stock losses, a number that is, in fact, impossible to prove. Under Federal rules, he’ll have to actually serve at least twenty years. Now, financial crime can be devastating, and can ruin the lives of the fleeced, the swindled, and the robbed. It needs to be taken seriously. Found guilty, Mr. Olis deserved to go to jail. And for quite a while. But for 20 years, to be served, incidentally, in a prison system where inmates’ safety cannot be guaranteed? That doesn’t seem right. The sentencing judge appeared to feel the same way. Read the story and see what you think.

Of course, it’s almost impossible to decide what is a ‘fair’ penalty. It will vary from crime to crime, from victim to victim, from defendant to defendant. That’s why we have judges, that’s why we have judicial discretion but, if we are to reduce that discretion by legislating much narrower – and stricter - sentencing guidelines, here’s my test. If one of your close relatives (a close relative who you actually liked), or one of your friends, was to commit the crime for which that sentence was being fixed, a crime for which you accepted he should be punished, would you think that the preordained sentence, a sentence remember, that will be imposed with little regard to the actual circumstances of the case, was just?

I certainly don’t know all the facts, but I doubt if what happened to Mr. Olis satisfies that test.

The European Social Forum is, as its name would suggest, a self-important gathering that assembles from time to time to hawk socialism, stupidity and self-righteousness (if that is not to repeat myself). The observant Scott Burgess (he’s the source of the boar story too) has discovered that a European Creative Forum has now been formed to join in the fun. This quote from their website tells you all that you could want to know.

"The newly-formed European Creative Forum (ECF) joins the call to all artists, musicians, performers, DJ's, dancers, designers, writers, film-makers, writers, poets, actors, architects, rappers, jugglers, journalists, media activists, culture jammers, critics, promoters, organisations, charities, campaigns, collectives, networks and individuals who share the objective of creating and participating in the next European Social Forum in London in the Autumn."

And if you need more than that, check out the ECF graphic that Burgess has found. It says it all really.

Burgess also claims to be distressed that “jugglers” are included, but mimes are not. As Scott appears to be a good fellow, I’ll just assume he’s joking. Mimes are, of course, the spawn of Satan, the Dr Peppers of the entertainment world, creatures too loathsome even for the European Social Forum.

For over a century, a statue of a wild boar stood in the center of England’s oldest public park. It was damaged during the Second World War. Finally, it has been restored. The old boar was going to be put back where it belonged. Not any more. These plans have, apparently, now been "abandoned for fear of offending Muslims, whose religion considers pigs to be 'unclean'."

And if you want another tiny example of the West’s supine response to Islamic fanaticism – that’s it.

The idea that ‘religious workers’ should have some sort of immigration priority is one that has a long tradition in many Western societies. The rationale? The benefits that such people generally bring to the community. In an age, however, where an extreme form of Islam is potentially no less pestilential than, say, National Socialism or Communism, the idea that the arrival of such pious folk is automatically a good thing needs re-examining. And that is just what the Danes are doing.

The Guardian is reporting that “New rules will require any person coming to Denmark on a religious visa to show that they are a "worthy" candidate, are educated, financially self-supporting and connected with one of 200 recognised religious communities.”

Good.

Here, via the bloggers at The Agitator , is a selection of the flags of the world, graded aesthetically. Betsy Ross wouldn’t be happy with these findings, and there are many other misjudgments (for instance, what’s so wrong with “colonial nonsense”) but it’s good to see Somalia (shame about the country) and the Faroe Islands (shame they are not a country) getting the credit they deserve. Other discoveries – Botswana and Slovakia.

Read it for the insults. Did Libya: “even try?” The machete on Angola’s flag is “nicely depicted, but not a wise idea,” Rwanda’s flag (“a big R on an overused tricolour”) is “spectacularly unoriginal”, while Mozambique’s effort (“automatic weapons on a flag are especially bad”) “appears to have been designed by a committee all of whom had stupid ideas for pictures of extra things to put on the flag”

Enjoy.

A reader asks a good question:

"Has Kerry ever proposed any of the measures he's proposing now in the course of his 18-years in the senate? If not, why not, if it's such a good idea?"

I don't know the answer -- yet.

You can technically still be square and watch Rich on Charlie Rose.

Yes, I'm trying to up our google hits.

Here's an email I just got:

Cottle's plan sounds like a decent idea, but unfortunately it wouldn't work for several reasons.

1:creation of a special adult section of the internet that smut peddlers would have to register to be on. Do you consider Yahoo! an adult site? If not, then you would be wrong. For quite some time (and possibly still) Yahoo! was one of the biggest hosts of child-porn on the internet. Yahoo! groups stored terrabytes of images of illegal content that was loosely regulated by Yahoo! and much of which still exists today. Yahoo! restructured their groups so you could not search their adult groups database, but the groups still exist and are accessible to anyone who visits one of the web's most popular websites. Would Yahoo! register for this new domain, or at least put much of the content hosted on their site on that domain? How about Geocities, MSN, Lycos, etc, all of which host adult content in their groups or forums. Highly unlikely.

2: The online zoning would make it easier for parents to filter adult content. This reminds me of the gun control argument that making guns illegal makes it harder for criminals to get guns. It may be true, but if smut peddlers want to target kids to get them hooked early, they are going to find a way. Much in the same way that if criminals want to find a gun illegally, they will find a way.

Possible solutions: Ever wonder how kids find their way to these sites? Why do pop-ups with naked women keep flashing on my PC? Why do I get e-mails asking if I want to see terrible terribly things? If Congress wanted to address this problem they should first address the issue of spyware/adware and Spam. Unwanted solicitation is probably a leading reason for kids finding their way to adult sites. Kids unknowingly install a free screensaver and the next thing they know they are looking at naked people and receiving hundreds of unsolicited adult e-mails every day. Make it illegal to silently install software from the web that doesn't require the customer's interaction. When you install a free screensaver, or most any free application for that matter, you're probably installing Spyware/Adware with it. This software installs silently without any interaction from the end-user, and runs silently in the background on most PCs. The spyware/adware sends usage statistics to spam e-mails who then mail out tons of Spam to that user, and spyware will also create pop-ups with links to adult sites that are very difficult to prevent and remove. If users know that they are installing this software, they are much more likely to answer "no" if prompted "do you want to install this?". However, most of these apps install themselves while the downloaded program (screensaver, freeware, etc..) installs. Make this illegal, and punish those who break this law, and you'd see a reduction in the amount of Spyware/Adware/Spam almost immediately. By reducing spyware/adware/spam you're reducing the means by which kids accidentally find their way to these sites.

I saw a big billboard in downtown NYC today (that's where I am right now) for "Walking Tall," the new movie with The Rock. It just struck me as so weird that the star of the movie is called "The Rock." I actually like him and think he's a pretty good action star. I just think it's weird. Other than musicians I can't think of a time when there's been a star who goes by such a manufactured name. I'm sure there's a branch of futurist-libertarian types who look forward to the day when there are no last names at all and we all create our personas. You know, your accountant could be known as The Cruncher. The guy at Kinko's could be Der Doppelganger. Alec Baldwin could be Bag-of-Rocks. Whatever. I just think it's kind of fun to think about.

From the AP (Link Via Drudge):

WASHINGTON - Top Republicans in Congress sought Friday to declassify two-year-old testimony by former White House aide Richard Clarke, suggesting he may have lied this week when he faulted President Bush (news - web sites)'s handling of the war on terror.

"Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said in a speech on the Senate floor.

The Tennessee Republican said he hopes Clarke's testimony in July 2002 before the House and Senate intelligence committees can be declassified. Then, he said, it can be compared with the account the former aide provided in his nationally televised appearance Wednesday before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said he supports the move. "We need to lean forward in making as much information available to the public as possible, without compromising the national security interests of the nation," he said in a statement. Hastert said the initial request had been made by Rep. Porter Goss, the Florida Republican who heads the House intelligence committee.

The developments marked the latest turn in a Republican counterattack against Clarke, who has leveled his criticism against Bush in a new book as well as in interviews and his sworn testimony before the commission.

Ex-CIA Dir. James Woolsey, on Clarke (Via Hotline):

Ex-CIA Dir. James Woolsey, on Clarke: "He's a man who, once he gets locked into a view, doesn't listen anymore. He is an able man, in some ways. But in this case, he got locked into the view early on that there was nothing ever, no contacts of any kind between al Qaeda and governments such as Iraq. And so I think he ignored some of the clear evidence that George Tenet spread out before the Senate in 2002 about Iraqi training of al Qaeda in poisons, gases and explosives" ("On the Record," FNC, 3/24).

My syndicated column has a different email address when it gets sent out to the world. It's amazing how different the readerships are. Here are two fun emails just because it's late Friday. The first is from my column on C-Span :

Jonah,

With your typical fallacious reasoning, you try to use the outstanding creation of Brian Lamb as proof, somehow, that the media giants are not greedy corporations. You might as well tell us that if you are mugged on the way from making a withdrawal from an ATM, you will consider the mugger to be blameless if he/she gives you one of your dollars. One, obviously, has nothing to do with another. C-Span is a very good thing, a family favorite, but no responsible person would even think of using it to suggest that this absolves media corporations from blame for their misconduct and proves their inherent virtue. Brian Lamb deserves a Congressional Gold Medal, but the media corporations get more than they deserve in their tax deductions alone.. I give you a Bronx Cheer for mental loitering with the intent to mope.. You, I suppose, are awaiting the Newsprint Manufacturers' Association Award for "maximum consumption of newsprint without logic discussion?"

I suppose you have ben forced by circumstances to take take a break from your primary defense of the irrational and indefensible politicians of the your "Corporate Hippie Self Love Movement," exemplified by a radical right on the verge of becoming leftists -again without giving proper credit, this time Mussolini, who created the concept you so admire? I take it that this is because the truth about this Administration's sorry record is now coming to light? Authoritarian politicians and politics of the right and of the left, National Socialist German Worker's Party, "Neo-Con," Bolshevik, Maoist or al-Quaida, all possess the same essential characteristics, varying only in trivial detail. They do not meet the high standards of American Conservatism and represent an abandonment of the qualities which has made America great.

Thank for providing us with some of the oddest examples of "spin." Sometimes your comedic presentations are almost brilliant. Have you ever considered an appearance on Saturday Nigh Live? You really ought to think about a new career.

LOL

I think you are blinded by your countries hostility to Fidel Castro. It is so predictable. Your so called freedom loving country will not let you visit Cuba to see for yourself the running of this country that "dares" to reject capitalism. Who is the "evil dictator" ? Bush, Castro or Carter ? Yours [Name withheld] UK Citizen with freedom to visit Cuba (unlike you)

Let's set aside for a moment the fact that all this stuff is just very confusing even to those of us who have attempted to study it. I'll try to pick through all this. This is another don't use my name (whatever the going acronym is for that) e-mail.

Interacting with the deferral is the following: U.S. tax law taxes the global income of multinationals, but also allows a credit of foreign income taxes against the U.S. corporate income tax. So for U.S. affiliates in places where the corporate tax rate is higher than in the United States (like much of Europe) the effective tax rate they pay is the foreign tax rate, and the foreign government gets it all. An accountant may know this better than me, but I don't think repealing deferral changes the firm's tax burden or the firms' behavior. Seemingly repealing deferral would have more impact on the propensity of U.S. firms to invest in low-tax countries.

Now here is the problem - for a lot of firms, pre-existing foreign direct investment (FDI) is part of doing business. About 2/3 of U.S. FDI is directed at serving host-country markets, not in selling back to the U.S. So there's a big incentive to keep those investments regardless of taxes. But repealing deferral hits the main way in which FDI is financed. You can either transfer funds from the U.S. parent to the affiliate, have the affiliate borrow in local or world capital markets, or reinvest the profits of the affiliate. The biggest chunk of U.S. *outbound* FDI is these reinvested profits, in other words letting all your old foreign affiliates mostly self-finance through retained earnings.

So if you've got to have the affiliate there, and it becomes really inconvenient from a tax standpoint to finance its capital expansion through retained earnings, then your typical corporate treasurer would switch to one of the other two methods. Either have the head office borrow on U.S. markets, or have the overseas affiliate borrow on U.S., local, or world markets. Now if it matters at all, then this would tend to push interest rates up and crowd out Americans wanting mortgages, college tuition loans, or whatever. If it doesn't matter a lot, then the Treasury wouldn't really raise a lot of funds by doing it.

Another workaround that firms would likely use is that they have 2 different streams of sending money back to the United States. One is by repatriating profits, which this plan is designed to encourage more of. (Of course, U.S. firms repatriating too much profits is the sort of thing that anti-globalists complain about a lot, but never mind..) The other is by having the affiliates pay the parents license and royalty fees for technology generated by the parents' R&D. So if I really need the affiliate to be self-financing, I'd have them pay less license and royalty fees instead to make up for the new tax incentives to repatriate profits. Would this have an effect on corporate R&D, on productivity, on American dynamism in general? Or would it just disappear in the general fungibility of funds? This is the point at which I stop pretending to understand it very well....

Over the past six months, Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer has: raided drugstores near Rush's home; seized his medical records without going through the required process enacted by the Florida legislature to protect medical privacy; leaked false information to the media that he was about to plead guilty to a felony; threatened to make his medical records public unless he pled guilty to a felony he didn't commit; released to the media confidential letters regarding Rush's situation that he received from my office; and falsely claimed that the Florida Bar and attorney general's office approved of the release.

Normally, people with drug dependencies who acknowledge their problems and seek treatment are lauded for their courage, not prosecuted. So am I wrong to wonder if something is out of whack when the Palm Beach County State Attorney pulls out all the stops in an effort to nail Rush, while giving immunity to the traffickers who supposedly kept him supplied with painkillers, and who, as a result of a deal with the prosecutor, were able to make a six-figure killing selling their "story" to a tabloid?

I'll have some thoughts tomorrow. From a reader:

Today I was in the company of a number if Indian programmers at one of those obligatory outings to celebrate the completion of a project milestone. They solicited my opinions on Bush and the Iraq engagement. Almost all were adamantly opposed to both. One of them said “You don’t know what problems your country is causing the rest of the world.” After listing many countries that are by our side and have no problems with our actions, I suggested to them that this is just a simple matter of bringing murderers to justice, so what is the problem with that? Another answered “We don’t have the ability to protect ourselves. We can’t just go into another country and root our terrorists.” This is the first time I have heard this line of reasoning. It sounded to me like they feel forced to be nice to murderers so the won’t be targeted by them. They are afraid we stirred up a hornets nest and are cowering in wait of the sting. Am I wrong?

Taken aback, I had trouble responding to them. In the final analysis, I’m thinking we pay a certain price for justice sometimes, and these folks I played laser tag and bowled with all afternoon have no heart to pay that toll. All were in agreement that the world needs to come together to fight terror, but they object to our invading Iraq. I have to admit, ours has been a lethal and powerful response to terror that other countries might have trouble manufacturing. But, where is their fortitude? Seems a little world-wide fortitude in lieu of advanced weaponry and surveillance techniques could go a long way. Your thoughts?

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY DENOUNCES GIBSON FILM AS PRO-CHRISTIAN

(London)-In his homily yesterday during a memorial service for Palestinian suicide bombers, the Right Reverend Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, denounced Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" as being "overtly pro-Christian."

"This film is going to have a devastating effect on Anglicanism worldwide," said Reverend Williams. "Impressionable persons may be unduly influenced and actually begin attending church. And it would be a great tragedy if the Church had to divert its precious resources away from protesting against capitalism and democracy and use them instead for religious purposes"....

Jay’s list is an impressive one – the Backhaus recording is justly famous.

You can hear a snatch here (play Disc 1 Track 6)

But for this repertoire, I’ll stand by the lesser known Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich. Here’s a place where you can hear a snatch of him (play Disc 1 Track 12)

Hope this helps & enjoy it. A dedicated Corner reader

I notice Mr. Nordlinger gave you a list rather than a ranking. If you want one-stop Brahms shopping (the intermezzo you mentioned plus many of his other great shorter pieces, esp. Op 119 Nos. 1 and 3), try this CD from Radu Lupu:

Try Radu Lupu, Stephen Bishop Kovacevich, Julius Katchen, Wilhelm Kempff, Artur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter if you can find it, Emmanuel Ax, Ivo Pogorelich, in roughly that order. In other words, just about anyone but Cliburn. Some of Cliburn's concerto records were very impressive, but his solo interpretations I've found quite bland. Gould could be very insightful, but some of his interpretations are just wild and the sound can be quite dry, and the dreadful vocalising along with himself is unspeakable.

Actually, Peter, you would be quite surprised at the work that Brahms did later in his life. He abandoned the large forms of the sonata, concerto, etc. and mainly wrote small character pieces, such as the Intermezzos. As someone who has played that piece, I would vouch for Kempff, Gieseking (also plays a good Ravel concerto) and Rubinstein, but I am not a big Hess fan. If you look through op. 116 - 119 you will find more high quality pieces like that. (op.117 no. 1, op. 118 no. 5 etc.). Keep defending free trade for me.

Piano Performance major at Arizona State

Canada's troops to reclaim Arctic Five-year plan to 'put footprints in the snow' and assert northern sovereignty Adrian Humphreys National Post Thursday, March 25, 2004 Canada is launching an extensive five-year plan to march soldiers through all of its uninhabited Arctic territory in the largest bid yet to exert sovereignty over its northern domain, an area drawing increasing international attention and conflicting territorial claims. A renewed northern mobilization by the army, navy and air force -- including new space-based technology -- marks a significant increase in Canadian Forces resources earmarked for the region at a time when military funding is stretched extremely thin.

Mark - I don't disagree, I just wish that it were otherwise. I think you'd agree that the facts of the accusation are more important than the motives of the accuser. If I publicly accuse you of murder, the fact I'm doing it because you stole my Tonka truck when I five is much less important then question of whether or not you're actually guilty. Hanna Arendt once claimed that it was the communists who introduced the tactic of attacking motives in order to dispute inconvenient facts. They'd call their opponents bigoted fascists as if that changed the fact that they were on Moscow's payroll. Whether that's true or not, it seems to me that going after motives rather than facts is a tendency of the left we usually don't like.

As Rich noted earlier, I think Clarke could have written a thoughtful, serious and critical book about Bush. I wouldn't necessarily agree with all of it, but this war on terro is a monumental and monumentally complicated undertaking. It would strain our faith in bith the fallibility of man and government to believe that Bush did everything perfectly. But Clarke's criticism is so outlandish, so not constructive, and so contradictory to the facts as we know them that Clarke's motives have to become an issue. Again, as Rich (and I) have noted -- and as you would no doubt agree -- that briefing Clarke gave is flatly incompatible with the tone, tenor and content of his book. If that weren't the case, I'd say his motives don't matter.

From a reader:

Good Evening Sir. I just read your article in the Union Leader about the testimony of Mr Clarke today. I have to shake my head. I will not insult your intelligence like so many of my friends and neighbors do when i dare to question the current administration, however i will turn the tables on you, and do like you have done to Mr Clarke. What are your motives sir? What makes you write an article like this? How many people have to come forward? How many lies have to be debunked? How much will you overlook? How many ominous and unseemly connections will have to be brushed aside? Answer that and i will then place my faith in your journalistic integrity? Sincerely, A Father of four children who does not want to see their blood spilled in foreign lands for a lie.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I respectfully disagree that it is wrong to force children to recite the Pledge. I recognize this is not what is at stake in this case, but even if I was I would not have a problem with it. The public has an interest in promoting love of country and patriotism. As Walter Berns so eloquently wrote a few years back, patriots are made, not born. Do we think that people will naturally have the kind of devotion to country that will require sacrifice necessary for any regime to survive? Devoid of any public support, do we expect that a decent patriotism can survive? Do we now say that pride in country, what one might call a public pride, must be a purely private matter? This is a silly argument. This is taking individualism and the public/private distinction to the point where the public is no longer able the defend itself.

I should clarify that I would want my kids to be forced to say the Pledge at whatever school they go to. But I can't deny that making it obligatory strengthen's the atheit's case. Moreover, I do think parents should be the final authority on such things.

From a reader:

Jonah:

Great posts in the corner about the Pledge. Just to offer moral support, I
wanted to let you know that I am (a) an atheist and (b) definitely opposed
to altering the Pledge of Allegiance - and for precisely the reason you
state: it's more trouble than it's worth. Not changing it hurts nothing.
Changing it just rips the national fabric a few more threads.

During the '96 Olympics, some nut job was carrying a huge cross around
Centennial Park and yelling about how much Jesus loved everyone. Clearly,
Nedow is at least as crazy as that guy.

Keep up the great work.

Look: I am not oblivious to the argument that in a vacuum there is something to the atheists' case. As I've argued before, the 9th circuit's decision wasn't loony given the precedents of the last thirty years. Again, my basic objection is pragmatic and small-c conservative. It's not worth changing. Active, politicized atheists in this country -- and many sympathetic liberals -- have bought into a bogus narrative. They seem to believe that religion is the source of American history's great evils. That's an argument for another day, but suffice it to say that for every bad thing done in religion's name in American history it's just as easy to find many good things (like, um, the Reverend Martin Luther King's civil rights movement).

But while that part of the narrative is simply inaccurate another part of the narrative is flatly illogical. They seem to believe that the role of religion in American life is increasing and that is the source of the problems today. This is nonsense. Never mind that the "under God" line was inserted half a century ago and could never get in there today were it not already there. But our political leaders invoked religion and used religion as a guide for our law so, so, sooo much more in the past than they do today. The idea that the Founders would be horrified by the "under God" passage is laughable. President George Washington declared national days of prayer and fasting. States had their own established Churches. Lincoln got jiggy with the God references. Our civic arhcitecture is drenched in allusions and mentions of God and the Bible. Look at our money for Pete's sake.

The problem with this narrative is not that it is false, though that's bad enough. The problem is that once you believe it you are never satisfied until every last part-per-billion of Godness is purged from public life. That is not a great position for the atheists to take because it demands a couner-reaction that will be far worse than the "harm" caused by the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

It reminds me of Jesse Jackson's insistence years ago that the most pressing civil rights issue in America was DC statehood. Well, if that's the most pressing civil rights issue in America, then the civil rights problem has been solved! It's like saying the most pressing public health problem is the continued headaches of glue sniffers. If atheists truly see this as their biggest problem then most Americans will see atheists as kooks and zealots. For their own sake, atheists should drop it.

From a reader:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

Your argument for leaving the pledge alone is that removing the words now
would do more harm than good. Who is harmed by removing 'under God'? 90% of the American people may oppose altering the pledge, but are they actually harmed by the words being removed? If so, how? Certainly, the removal of 'under God' does not make the pledge contradict anyone's religious beliefs. At most, it removes an affirmation of their religious beliefs - but to say
that is harmful is as absurd as saying the pledge's current omission of the
phrase 'under God, washed of sin by the sacrifice of Christ' is harmful to Christians as it doesn't affirm those beliefs either.

The appeal to tradition works if there is no particular reason for the
change. Tradition is a perfectly valid argument against exchanging the
meanings of the words 'down' and 'up'. However, it is quite clear that the
pledge as is manifestly harms atheists. They are forced to swear a pledge
containing words which contradict their beliefs. In light of this, your
appeal to tradition simply does not apply.

ME: I think this is just flat wrong. First of all, if tradition can be overturned because of a "particular reason" then tradition can always be overturned because there will always be "particular reasons" for overturning it. There needs to be a "good reason" for overturning tradition (indeed, isn't that the whole logic behind stare decisis?). This reader sugggests that that good reason is the "manifest harm" done to atheists. Wrong again. The pledge does not harm atheists, it offends atheists -- a much lower standard. And, again, if offense alone can overturn tradition then tradition has no power whatsoever.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I still have a quote from you saved on my computer regarding Newdow that you posted to The Corner on July 2, 2002. To my mind, it's still as appropriate today as the day you wrote it:

"I hope everybody has read the New York Times profile of Pledge of Allegiance plaintiff Mike Newdow. They say that hard cases make for bad law. Well, nutcases make for worse law. This guy -- who I am sure has a very high IQ -- is precisely the sort of person I think of when I use the phrase "pugnaciously stupid." It's the aggressive nature of his idiocy, the in-your-faceness of his Jackassery, that so offends me. Like Peter Singer, he has that uncanny ability to articulate so eloquently ideas so dumb most of us don't know how to respond to them. My contempt is boundless."

Yep, that pretty much covers it.

Ben

Sir, One thing I haven't heard in the media is this: If what Clarke is saying is true, then the liberals, by all logic, are upset that Bush didn't overturn the existing Clinton doctrine early enough. It is generally accepted that incoming administrations universally carry forth existing national policies until they come up with their own. When the Bush tax cuts went through, even the biased main stream media said that now it was Bush's economy, not Clinton's. Well, it seems to me that until such a time that Team Bush could create a different terrorism policy, the existing Clinton policy was in effect. So, the Clintonistas are saying that Bush didn't change the existing Clinton Doctrine (Essentially doing nothing) fast enough. Am I off base? Your thoughts?

From a reader:

The response to your knee-jerk 'get the *&^% out' diatribe is the same as always to such idiocy: maybe the guy actually LOVES HIS COUNTRY, as you conservatives tell us we all should, and wants to change things for the better here. I'm an atheist myself (one who supports the Iraq war, before you pigeonhole me), and I think the Pledge is creepy in general, and the God bit just annoying. The beauty of our country is that it evokes great loyalty precisely because it doesn't demand it. The Pledge is a pointless and anti-American exercise. The fact is, the intention of the fundies is to try to force their God on the rest of us (and why shouldn't they? wouldn't you, if you felt you had access to the ultimate truth?) and we have to fight it where we can. How exactly would it be a 'slap in the face' to take God out of the thing? Was it a slap in the face to religious folks for the many years it existed with no reference to God?

ME: Obviously, I disagree with a lot of this. But let me just address one point. This reader (a professor) wants to know how it would be a slap in the face to Americans to get rid of the under God portion since it was only added half a century ago. Well, because it obviously would be. Close to 90% of Americans want to keep the pledge in there. Taking it out because of the demands of a tiny minority would once again reinforce the widespread (and correct) feeling that a tiny group of secular social engineers have once again redrawn the country according to their own unpopular views. This reader and others like him fail to understand that to most Americans Mr. Newdow is just as much of a fundamentalist (or "fundie") as members of the religious right.

The most persuasive argument -- among many -- for why the phrase under God should stay there, in my view, is not because it's an establishment of religion or because we are a "Christian nation" but because removing it would do more damage than leaving it. Indeed, if the phrase under God had never been added, I would be against adding it today. But the fact is it's there today and it's one of the few places left where fundamentalists like Newdow haven't scrubbed religion from the Public Square like so much graffiti. And I am a Burkean on this. As Delta House President Robert Hoover might have said had he been serving as Solictor General, "But sir, the phrase 'under God' has a long tradition of existence both to its members and the community at large."

I'm not now nor have I ever been an "America: Love it or leave it guy." And while I'm not going to run through all of the platitudes about how America should welcome everybody, that doesn't mean I don't generally agree with those platitudes. Nonetheless, there's a difference between saying that we should welcome or even accomodate everybody and saying that we should rewrite the social charter so it's pleasing to whoever complains the most.

Michael A. Newdow is, I believe, a very smart crank. Although Linda Greehouse would have us believe he's something of a demigod. Regardless, Newdow's assault on the Pledge of Allegiance depends on the criticism that any public recognition of God is unacceptably tyrranical. Here's an exchange, recounted by Greenhouse, between Justice Souter and Newdow from yesterday hearing:

Justice Souter's question for Dr. Newdow was whether, even assuming that schoolchildren were being asked "as a technical matter" to make a personal religious affirmation, the recitation had become in practice "so tepid, so diluted, so far, let's say, from a compulsory prayer that in fact it should be, in effect, beneath the constitutional radar." Was it the case, Justice Souter asked, that by "the way we live and think and work in schools and in civic society in which the pledge is made, that whatever is distinctively religious as an affirmation is simply lost?"

Dr. Newdow replied: "That is a view that you may choose to take and the majority of Americans may choose to take. But it's not the view I take, and when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, it's like I'm getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you know, `this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.' "

"I, I, I." You get the sense this all about Newdow? Remember this isn't even a case about what the pledge does to him, it's supposed to be about what the pledge does to his daughter.

I'm sorry but this country may have been established to protect individual rights, but it wasn't founded to cater to the feelings of every individual. Newdow is unconcerned by the fact that if he got his way he'd be slapping, literally, hundreds of millions of Americans in the face. He thinks that's fair because of his ego and because his capacity for abstraction affords him the ability to shove his head up his own butt and mistake the darkness for a temple of reason.

If he feels so strongly about the oppressiveness of the pledge, he can do what billions of others living under tyranny have done: Move. He can crabwalk himself, head firmly implanted in his temple of reason, to France or New Zealand or any other place else where he can live in freedom.

From a reader:

Jonah; To deter suspicions that he is partisan, today Clarke swore under oath that he would NOT accept any job in any Kerry administration - should there be one. To deter criticisms that he acting out of personal greed (by manufacturing a false controversy to sell his book), let's challenge Clarke to donate all proceeds from his book to the 9/11 families.

From a reader:

A reader says: "Russell Kirk praised him [T.S. Eliot] in his "Enemies of the Permanent Things" for his search for normative ethics and also called Eliot "the greatest man of letter of this century". Russell Kirk must not be aware that T. S. Eliot is responsible for "Cats" - a singular reason to deny him the title.

From a reader:

The confidentiality claim belongs to the White House, not Clarke. I say that as a 20-year veteran journalist in television and print, including many years as a television anchor, producer, and reporter for four different television stations in three states, and as an editor, columnist, and reporter for two newspapers. Clarke's background comments were on background at the request of the administration, not Clarke personally. The White House has every right to waive the claim, FOX has every right to ask them to waive the claiml, and FOX has every moral and ethical justification to run with the story once the claim is waived. Case closed. Mike Reeder

A note of gratitude from a reader:

Dear Jonah,

Despite the other Cornerites moaning about yet another meme about "The Best
Conservative Something-or-other", I want to thank you for asking for good
conservative fiction. At my college, the usual tripe that the English
department feeds us is of the postmodernist bent and it has had the effect
of turning my off of fiction for some time(I also wanted to spend my reading
time shoring up my conservative roots i.e Kirk, Buckley, subscribing to
National Review, etc.) Now, this troublesome meme has given me some leads to
sniff out some cool, hopefully non-postmodern books. Oh, and I recommend
T.S. Eliot to other conservative readers, with the overall approval of
Russell Kirk. Kirk praised him in his "Enemies of the Permanent Things" for
his search for normative ethics and also called Eliot "the greatest man of
letter of this century". If you have any more recommendations from other
readers, please send them along. Thank you for your time and keep up the
good work!

This reader focuses on precisely the reason I distinguished between the moral and ethical issues involved:

Jonah, I don't give a you know what about backgrounds being confidential. A man is trying to discredit a presidential administration during an election year, and implicate it as being guilty by omission in the deaths of 3000 American citizens (not to mention get rich in the process by pushing his book the same week he appears in what is supposed to be a nonpolitical public proceeding.) If he said anything to anyone that casts doubt on the credibility of his public statements, then I believe journalists have an ethical obligation to bring it to the public's attention. Otherwise, the press can sit on their hands and watch the public being misled about its government. That would be beyond shameful. The focus should remain on the credibility of the accuser, not the party that reports the accuser's contradictions.

In Kerrey's angry diatribe against Fox News he made it sound as if Fox was betraying an agreement with Richard Clarke. If that's the case, then Fox has made a mistake. While morally I see nothing wrong with it, ethically journalists are bound to such arrangements. However that doesn't seem to be the case. Here is what the preamble to the Clarke backgrounder transcript says:

The following transcript documents a background briefing in early August 2002 by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke to a handful of reporters, including Fox News' Jim Angle. In the conversation, cleared by the White House on Wednesday for distribution... [Emphasis mine.].

In other words the agreement to keep Clarke's comments "on background" applied to the White House, not to Clarke. Kerrey makes it sound like this was grossly unfair and unbalanced to Clarke, but it was the White House that had the expectation of confidentiality and so if they choose to waive it that's their right. Indeed, Clarke's own comments confirm that Clarke himself didn't feel like he was speaking for himself but for the White House. So the release of the content of that briefing didn't betray Clarke at all. But maybe I'm reading this wrong.

Did you know that only one "religion" can write-off the costs of indoctrinating its children from their taxes? Did you know that the IRS has a special deal with the Church of Scientology denied to all other religions? I think this is an amazing story, from the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES, March 21 - A trial is to begin here on Wednesday morning to determine whether a Jewish couple can deduct the cost of religious education for their five children, a tax benefit they say the federal government has granted to members of just one religion, the Church of Scientology.

The potential ramifications are huge, for a ruling in favor of the couple could affect the millions of Americans who send their children to religious schools of all types. At stake is whether people of all religions can deduct the cost of religious education as a charitable gift, as Scientologists are allowed to do under an officially secret 1993 agreement with the Internal Revenue Service.

That agreement came despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling denying tax deductions for money paid in fees set by the Church of Scientology for its "auditing" and "training" services. The Supreme Court decision said the money did not qualify for the charitable gift deduction because it involved a fixed price and was akin to a fee for a service.

The couple, Michael and Marla Sklar of Los Angeles, originally took the I.R.S. to court after being denied $2,080 in 1993 deductions for religious education for their children. They lost that case, in which Mr. Sklar, a tax accountant, represented himself at trial. The couple appealed, and three judges on the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against them two years ago. But one judge also took the unusual step of suggesting further litigation that would better define the issues.

The judges in the original Sklar case said "it appears to be true" that Scientology - founded by L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer, in the 1950's - received preferential tax treatment in violation of the First Amendment.

"Why is Scientology training different from all other religious training?" Judge Barry D. Silverman wrote in his opinion, adding that the question would not be answered just then because the court was not faced with the question of whether "members of the Church of Scientology have become the I.R.S.'s chosen people." Judge Silverman then recommended litigation to address whether the government is improperly favoring one religion.

"If the I.R.S. does in fact give preferential treatment to members of the Church of Scientology - allowing them a special right to claim deductions that are contrary to law and disallowed to everybody else - then the proper course of action is a lawsuit to put a stop to that policy," Judge Silverman wrote.

Read the whole thing.

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you're saying is that there was no — one, there was no plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of '98 were made in the spring months just after the administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That's right.

RICHARD CLARKE: Actually, I've got about seven points, let me just go through them quickly. Um, the first point, I think the overall point is, there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.

Second point is that the Clinton administration had a strategy in place, effectively dating from 1998. And there were a number of issues on the table since 1998. And they remained on the table when that administration went out of office — issues like aiding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, changing our Pakistan policy -- uh, changing our policy toward Uzbekistan. And in January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we've now made public to some extent.

And the point is, while this big review was going on, there were still in effect, the lethal findings were still in effect. The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda.

The sixth point, the newly-appointed deputies — and you had to remember, the deputies didn't get into office until late March, early April. The deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details, uh, of these new decisions that they were endorsing, and sending out to the principals.

Over the course of the summer — last point — they developed implementation details, the principals met at the end of the summer, approved them in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold, changing the policy on Pakistan, changing the policy on Uzbekistan, changing the policy on the Northern Alliance assistance.

And then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course [of] five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al Qaeda. That is in fact the timeline.

From a reader:

mr. goldberg,

you may have already heard or thought of this. whenever i hear about hamas vowing revenge for the killing of one of their leaders, and the concerns over more radicals joining the fight, i can't help but think of an exchange from buffy the vampire slayer.

buffy has just embarrassed a vampire in a fight:

Buffy: Wow, that was really funny-looking! Could you do it again?
Vampire: I'll kill you for that.
Buffy: For that? What were you trying to kill me for before?

then again, perhaps you haven't. my thoughts seem to be more simple than most.

cordially,
[Name withheld]

Does anybody remember the nasty insinuations shortly after 9/11 about how Bush "ran away" from Washington for fear of attacks on the White House? The Salon wing of the punditocracy, for example, insisted that, in Joe Conason's words, "The Bush administration told an outrageous lie that the president was a target of terrorists." In classic Conason style, he turned his outrage to 11 on every knob.

Whatever anyone thinks of this president or his political legitimacy, there are few issues more fundamental in a constitutional democracy than the physical security of the head of state, especially when the nation is under attack. The tale of the supposed targeting of the president, the White House and Air Force One by terrorists is among the most serious fabrications ever promulgated by federal officials....

....The question isn't whether Bush ought to have flown back to Washington immediately. He may well have had ample reason not to. The question is whether the officials in charge of national security and their spokespeople have been candid about one of their most crucial responsibilities. If the president cares at all about honor and integrity, he will demand that his aides either reveal the truth or tender their resignations.

Well, it turns out that Richard Clarke is claiming all of the credit for the decision to keep the President out of Washington that day. He's actually claiming he ordered the President away. But now that Clarke is a new Dashboard Saint of the Church of Bush-Is-Always-Wrong, nobody seems to care about that. In Joe Conason's lengthy interview, the only reference to the charges which Conason once considered fundamental to our democracy, is this question:

In the first chapter of your book, which I must say is gripping, you give your account of your actions on 9/11, when great authority was turned over to you [by Cheney and Rice]. Is there an issue of disloyalty or ingratitude there? To be honest, it seemed to me that you saved their asses that day.

Clarke answers:

Well, that's for other people to say. As regards my loyalty to President Bush, I was a career civil servant. I wasn't loyal to any particular political machine. When the president makes a big mistake -- like he has in the way that he has fought the war on terrorism by going into Iraq -- I think personal loyalty or party loyalty has got to be put aside.

Apparently, that's all the candor Conason needs now.

Jonah, I can't put my finger on it but the whole strategy question surrounding the killing of Yassin seems odd (never mind the "you win by winning" argument which would draw laughs even in a bong induced high). Aren't those considerations subordinate to the simpler question of the penalty for the crime? I can't imagine the Justice Dept contemplating the relative strength of his replacements, whether the organization will be stronger, before they try to capture and prosecute a John Gotti type.

From one of several readers:

The flag in the video is the Japanese Naval Ensign flown on warships. It was originally in service from 1898-1945, and re-adopted in 1954 for the Maritime Self Defense Force. This link , has more info.

One recurrent theme – and one that I hadn’t previously addressed – was deterrence. A number of writers made the argument that, by killing Yassin, the Israelis had sent a message to the Hamas leadership that none of them were safe from retribution. Ever. That’s true, and it’s a very good point. Nevertheless, in and of itself, it does not ‘justify’ the decision to kill Yassin at this time, and in the way that happened. Hamas has plenty of leaders, killers all, who fully deserve to be a lesson in deterrence. Why choose the one whose assassination will inflame the situation the most, not only for Israel, but also for the US (for example, a number of people e-mailed to say that Yassin’s death had caused yet more trouble in Iraq)?

Just so there’s no ambiguity, when I write that deterrence does not ‘justify’ Yassin’s killing, I am not arguing about morality. Yassin was an evil man. He was a murderer. He deserved his fate. But that is not the point at issue. What we are discussing here is whether this move made sense strategically. And that’s an entirely different question.

Well, I’ve received more e-mails on this topic than on any subject on which I have ever written. As so often with Corner readers, they were (almost) all polite, even when they disagreed strongly with what I had to say (most did), and, even if they didn’t change my mind (they didn’t), I learnt a good deal. What’s more, it was difficult to disagree too much with this contribution to the debate:

" Can anyone explain what, exactly, was achieved by his killing?"

”He's dead, Jim.”

A minute too soon. This is the first post on Wednesday!

(If correct) about yesterday's post on the Japanese Navy's recruitment video. From a reader:

Hilarious clip. But did anyone notice that the Japanese flag in the video is the Imperial flag of the WWII era (the red beams radiating outward from the rising sun)?

The current Japanese flag, which dates from the postwar era is just a big red dot on a white background.

I mean, isn't that analogous to a current commercial for the German navy using a flag from the Third Reich with a swastika on it?

Maybe they're not as peace-loving and passive as those prancing midshipmen would have us believe...

Spain paid the price for supporting the war in Iraq. I suppose Germany's president was targeted for assasination for not opposing it enough. From Reuters:

BERLIN (Reuters) - German President Johannes Rau has cancelled a planned visit to Djibouti after German security services warned him of an assassination plot, his office says.

The statement said the security services had received information that an Islamist group planned to kill him during a visit to the Horn of Africa state to meet German troops stationed there.

The decision to cancel the visit comes amid heightened security fears following the recent train bombings in Madrid by a group suspected to be linked to al Qaeda.

"In the judgement of the services responsible, there was a considerable and concrete personal risk to the President," the president's office said.

So we if abandon the historical analogies, and return to the awful Yassin, what do we get? If we assume (and I think that is the assumption) that in recent years he had little "operational" significance, all that has happened is that a living "spiritual leader" has become a dead "spiritual leader." I suspect that his capacity to inspire evil is undiminished, and may have even increased. I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, where's the victory? Last time I checked, 'Ayatollah' Khomeini was still causing trouble, and that bastard has been dead for fifteen years.

Jonah, take another look at what the editorialist is saying:

"Did Mr Sharon and his advisers consider how the spectacle of helicopter gunships rocketing an old man in a wheelchair outside his mosque would appear to the world? Did they intend to turn this merchant of death into a victim - the Palestinian equivalent of Leon Klinghoffer? "

The editorial writer is, of course, not comparing Yassin (a "merchant of death") with Leon Klinghoffer, and, unless the Telegraph has changed its entire worldview he would be appalled, and astonished, that you thought so. I am. What he is saying, and saying quite clearly, is that the particular circumstances of Yassin's death will allow him to be portrayed, however unfairly, as a Klinghoffer. He and, it should go without saying, I, obviously think that such a comparison is ridiculous - and offensive. The fact that people have now been given the opportunity to make it and, effectively, to thereby try and turn a monster into a "martyr" is further evidence that Sharon may well have made a major mistake. And that, not Yassin's death, is the tragedy.

While we're at it, let's take a look at another section of the same editorial:

"Yassin's life had been dedicated to the self-immolation of his people. The vile cult of the suicide bomber, though alien to Islamic tradition, has acquired a spurious legitimacy in the Muslim world, and especially among Palestinians - mainly thanks to clerical demagogues such as Yassin."

Yes, well put, indeed.

Andrew - I'm sorry, but I can see the argument that the US government needs to distance itself from the Yassin assasination. In fact, I think there's considerable merit to that case. But if you think it's "well put" or a good idea to compare Yassin to Leon Klinghoffer I think you're way, way, off base. I would very much like to know how that comparison is well put. Klinghoffer was nothing more than an old Jewish man on a cruise. Sheik Yassin was the mastermind of vicious mass-murder. Is there something -- anything -- beyond the apparatus of a wheel chair that makes you think that the two men are similar? If Osama Bin Laden is in a wheelchair when we bomb him, would he be like Leon Klinghoffer too when we kill him? If Stalin was in a wheelchair, does that make him an innocent victim? What strange alchemy does a wheel chair work on a man's soul to absolve him of his crimes?

It's one thing to acknowledge the ass-backwards morality and logic that plagues much of the Middle East and deal with it as a reality, it's another thing to say that the US government should ape that logic. That strikes me as indefensible.

I'm sorry to do this, but the comparison of Sheik Yassin to Jesus just begs for a wider audience. Maybe it's because I just sent off my syndicated column on how the foreign policy debate has been taken over by the culture war and Americans just see the same facts from wildly different perspectives. Anyway, from a reader:

Dear Jonah,

I could just say that you are full of sh*t, but maybe I ought to explain why. To suggest (no, to claim) that if we can create a democracy in Iraq that will eliminate the reason people in that region support terrorism against us is completely absurd. Did not the Irish in democratic America support the IRA terrorists? Do not the Jews in democratic America (not to mention a lot of non-Jews) support the thuggish tactics of Ariel Sharon (I mean, assassinating the leader of Hamas - that is almost like killing Jesus Christ.) Those people will hate us and rejoice anew when we are attacked by terrorists whether they have a democratic form of government or not. And they will have their hands out for our aid at the same time. I fear that Ann Coulter and her knee-jerk reaction after 9/11 was closer to the truth. It's hearts and minds all over again. It won't work, and a lot of blood and money will go down the Middle East rat hole before the rest of America wakes up to what is going on.

Not that we shouldn't defend ourselves, and not that we shouldn't strike elsewhere if the need should arise (say, in North Korea or Iran, not to mention Pakistan). But trying to make people like us by democratizing them - forget it. The time for such action came and went, if it ever truly existed, in the post-WWI period. We cannot eliminate the legacy we have created, we just have to learn to make the best of it, like we did during the Cold War. I grew up with the threat of a nuclear holocaust, and my kids will grow up with the threat of terrorism, it is that simple. Hopefully, in the long run, those who now hate us will see that they are wrong. I know you would say that what Bush is doing now will hasten that day. But as I said, well, I guess saying it once was enough.

I'll go one further and posit that Clarke is a Rove/Bush plant. After all, Clarke is, in effect, getting all the Democrats to cry "you should've done more to stop al-queda, even though you weren't 100% sure they would attack the U.S.

How can they then turn around and say "you should not have done more to stop Saddam, since you weren't 100% sure he'd help to attack the U.S."?!

It's another ready-made commercial showing Kerry as a flip-flopper.

Following up on your overseas source, there is more to the theory...

The American public is being shown Albright countered by Powell, Cohen countered by Rumsfeld. etc etc. Now, if you believe that this is a war, which I do. who would you rather have?

-"The secret to Bolton's record is that, in a foreign policy team divided roughly between ideologues with no managerial skills and managerial types with no ideas, Bolton is that rare commodity: an operator and an ideologue."

-"During his 8:15 a.m. meetings with the assistant secretaries of state who report to him, for instance, the bureau chiefs stand the entire time, an indignity that has become part of Foggy Bottom mythology."

-"At one point last year, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Beth Jones went so far as to organize a mini-revolt against Bolton, penning a memo to Colin Powell, co-signed by the assistant secretaries from every regional bureau, which complained that Bolton's campaign for bilateral agreements exempting Americans from prosecution by the ICC had been a failure and should be abandoned. In response to the memo, Powell called a meeting between Bolton and the assistant secretaries. Both sides argued their case, and Powell ended up granting Bolton permission to proceed. In the months since Jones tried to abort Bolton's campaign, he has signed agreements with 81 countries."

-"As one mystified career State Department employee puts it, 'At first we thought that Powell and Armitage would control Bolton. We kept waiting, and now Bolton seems to be controlling them.'"

-"Indeed, while Bolton claims not to 'do carrots,' in both the Libyan and North Korean cases his 'muscular approach,' far from prompting a hardening of their positions, helped achieve the opposite result: Pyongyang's agreement to the long-held U.S. demand that it negotiate with America and her allies across the same table and Tripoli's decision to abandon its WMD programs."

-"'There's absolutely no question that Bolton's strategy of pressuring the iaea led its members to finally get serious about Iran's weapons programs,' says Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at National Defense University."

Here's one: "Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the spiritual and political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas. At the turn of the millennium this organisation gained infamy as one of the most savage organisations in the Middle East, responsible for a wave of suicide bombings that led to the death of countless civilians. "Confined to a wheelchair and speaking in small squeaks, Yassin had the demeanour of a fragile, pious sage. Yet he was possessed with an unswerving ruthlessness. His fanaticism inspired sacrificial devotion among men willing to kill civilians in the cause of the destruction of Israel. "

And here's another: "In truth, neither Arafat nor Yassin had Mandela's special greatness. But of the two, it was Yassin, the founder-leader of the militant Islamist organisation Hamas, who came closer. The reason was not to be found in his beliefs - which, in their narrow, obscurantist, religious frame, were far removed from the South African's lofty humanism and compassion - but in the facts of his career, and the part that certain, very personal, qualities - of selflessness, simplicity, conviction and a true sense of service - played in bringing it to fruition."

Via blogger Scott Burgess.

From an editorial in today's Daily Telegraph:

"Whatever Yassin's death was meant to achieve, its symbolism is disastrous for Israel. Did Mr Sharon and his advisers consider how the spectacle of helicopter gunships rocketing an old man in a wheelchair outside his mosque would appear to the world? Did they intend to turn this merchant of death into a victim - the Palestinian equivalent of Leon Klinghoffer? Despite intensive efforts to improve Israel's image abroad, and despite sympathy for victims of suicide bombings (most recently in Ashdod), the Jewish state now looks more isolated than ever. Like Napoleon's decision to execute the Duc d'Enghien, which transformed his image from that of a liberator into that of a tyrant, Sharon's decision to execute Yassin is worse than a crime: it is a blunder."

That's well put. The US needs to be saying the same.

From a reader:

I think you've probably nailed it pretty close. Both sides in most political debates are generally extremely quick to attribute the worst possible motives to their opponents when, all too often, it's more likely a combination of wounded egos and failing to really listen to what someone is saying....

Regarding Clarke, most charitably, as you say, because of his frustration over past dismissals by the Clinton administration of his proposals, he misinterpreted President Bush's understandable concern to be absolutely sure that Iraq hadn't been behind the WTC disaster. The thing that puts the lie to Clarke's interpretation, more than anything, is that fact that in short order Bush ordered the bombing of al Qai'da camps in Afghanistan — not Iraq!

Here's a fun one from a reader:

Yo, Einstein:

I realize you aren't very bright and I will give you a break because you have a family to support now, but Hitler did not declare war on us and Yassin did NOT issue fatwas.

Why don't you go kick an old man in a wheelchair. That should make you feel better.

It must be tough having a job where you have to make excuses for Bush and Sharon all the time.

If only to head-off the email from readers: 1: Of course Hitler declared war on us (December 11, 1941). 2. It's true that Yassin wasn't an "official" islamic cleric and hence he didn't issue "real" fatwas (and was sort of a bogus "spiritual leader). However, his statements were treated as fatwas by his followers and were regularly referred to as "fatwas" in the press. Oh, and, 3: I was making a joke.

"If the Israelis do indeed pull out of Gaza, who is now to take control of the territory? The Palestinian police loyal to Mr Arafat have lost all prestige compared with the militants of Hamas. The recipe seems to be for chaos, not an orderly withdrawal. It will not be lost on the Arab world that the killing of Yassin took place after King Abdullah of Jordan came to meet Mr Sharon at his farm in the Negev. This was a sort of reward for Mr Sharon's proclaimed desire to leave Gaza. Who now among the leaders of the Arab world will dare to shake Mr Sharon's hand? Much diplomatic effort behind the scenes has gone on to persuade the world that Mr Sharon is serious in his disengagement plan. Apart from vacating Gaza, it will also involve abandoning some two dozen settlements on the West Bank, in return for being allowed to annexe the larger settlements to Israel. The outside world is even more confused than before. If this is a serious proposal, it is hard to see how the disengagement has been brought forward by yesterday's events. The alternative is that it was never serious, but a bone thrown to world opinion. Perhaps it is simply a twin-track approach, but that suggests less than full commitment to Mr Sharon's goal of full disengagement from the Palestinians."

Read the whole thing.

Here are a bunch of the shorter emails on conservative fiction. In no particular order. I don't necessarily agree with all of them either.

Patrick O'Brian, V.S. Naipaul, Willa Cather, Tom Wolfe, W.F.B. Karen Clancy

----

Jonah,

Anything by Robert A. Heinlein would be good within the Science Fiction category. The book “Starship Troopers” is conservative, no matter how badly Paul Verhoeven mangled the movie.
---

Knowles' A Separate Peace is an awesome piece of young men's conservative fiction and even has an ancient NR praise on its paperback cover

----

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

Surely someone will point out your own Mr. Buckley's fine Blackford Oakes novels, The Story of Henry Tod being the best.
----

Jonah,

IMHO, the best "conservative" short fiction was written by Flannery O'Connor, especially from the perspective of the traditionalist's response to the modern world and mind. Fortunately and unfortunately, all of her work is contained in one volume "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor", and I suggest "The Enduring Chill" as the place to start for a good conservative yarn. As you may know, her stories are decidedly but not overtly Catholic, but in an Old Testament sort of way.

----

Jonah,

I am particularly fond of Catherine Marshall's epic novels Christy and Julie. This is especially in the light of her non-fiction works and things that she believed about modern social and religious issues. (definitely right leaning)

Christy and Julie both have as their central characters young women who have high ideals, but when a bucket of cold reality is thrown on those ideals, they learn that ideals aren't enough - you have to stand on solid (God's in her books) principles even when it makes you unpoopular, learn that handouts aren't enough to help people, and to make decisions based in truth, tempered with compassion, not emotionalism.

----

Anything by H. Beam Piper, early Heinlein, Inferno by Lary Niven, Oath
of Fealty by Niven & Pournelle, Clifford Simak

---
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet.

A survivor of HItler's war kvetches about intellectuals, the sexual revolution, moral relativism, radical riffraff, urban crime, and other social pathologies of America in the sixties.

---
Add Kipling and Twain to the list.

---
Patrick O’Brian (Master and Commander, etc.) O’Brian has many similarities to Jane Austen, another great conservative writer. SF author Jack Vance is a superb conservative/libertarian writer. Just as you don’t have to like sea stories to like O’Brian’s writing, you don’t have to like other SF to appreciate Vance.

Chesterton – Manalive; The Ball and the Cross

Waugh – Brideshead Revisited

Not a classic - yet: H.W. Crocker – The Old Limey
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Jonah,
Not an Ayn Rand fan? Her novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are very significant works regarding individual freedom, though I admit I would disagree with her on the whole athesim bit. Also, YAF has a good list of reading on their website, mostly nonfiction but some novels.

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Jonah,
Not that it has much to do with modern politics (or modern anything for that matter), Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield is a phenomenal book. In case you're not familiar, it's a novel about the battle of Thermopylae, Spartans v. Persians, West v. East, courage, sacrifice, etc. It became standard reading among all my friends as soon as one of us had read it.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Isn't the most charitable explanation for all sides something like this:

Clarke banged his head against the wall about al Qaeda for years in the Clinton administration. He made significant headway in convincing his superiors of the threat if not necessarily the proper response to it. When the Bush team took over, Clarke stayed on but he was tainted by precisely that failure on the part of the Clintons to respond to terrorism. In the Bush White House he was not only a holdover who'd been demoted, but a one-note-Johnny. His one note might have been a good one, but he was unwilling to rethink foreign policy priorities the way the new guys wanted. When he was told to take a fresh look at Iraq, he bristled. He'd been working on this for years after all and his predictions of an al Qaeda attack had just come true, demonstrating in gory detail his failure to make his case successfully. Meanwhile, Bush -- during a huge foreign policy crisis -- didn't need the attitude from Clarke and he may have misinterpreted Clarke's reluctance also. So the Commander-in-Chief gave his instructions in a very forcefull way which Clarke misinterpreted as intimidation.

Now, just because this is the most charitable explanation doesn't mean it's the most likely. Frankly, if Clarke truly believed that Bush was looking for manufactured evidence of Iraq's complicity he should have resigned in a very public way. Indeed, if he thought the Clinton administration's failure to strike al Qaeda was as ill-advised as he's indicated in the past, he should have resigned in the 1990s.

Here's what the man writes in the New York Review of Books: "Perhaps it is easier for Gibson than for some others to feel associated with his film victim, since his own movie characters have often been pulverized, brutalized, mangled by evil men and sinister organizations. If, in this case, he is the man being persecuted, who are his persecutors? The movie's critics are. They are the real Christ-killers. Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor of National Review, said of the film that those 'who choose to mock it' are 'Christophobes.'"

If Wills had read one paragraph further into my article, he would have come across this passage: "[Christians] should be careful to avoid the temptation to make of this movie more than it is. . . . Mel Gibson's Passion is not Christ's Passion. You can mock the first without mocking the second, although you can also of course mock both." My point was that some but not all critics of the movie would be people who hate, fear, or otherwise dislike Christianity. That hardly seems controvertible. Even if I'm wrong, the point I was making was not the one Wills attributes to me.

Finally, Gallagher says that there is no reason to switch amendments because support for the FMA is “growing fast.” Maybe it’s growing in the polls. But it is not growing much among senators. Given the speed with which legal developments are taking place, the strategy for enacting the FMA has to be either to persuade/scare enough existing congressmen to enact it in 2004, or to flip enough seats in the upcoming elections on the issue that it can pass in 2005.

The former strategy will require at least 20 Senate Democrats to sign on. That’s two-fifths of the Senate Democratic caucus. Anyone care to come up with a list of 20 Senate Democrats who can in theory be gotten? Or to put it another way: The 34 most liberal senators can stop any amendment they want to stop.

On either strategy, it makes sense to find ways to deprive the opposition of its favorite talking points. The opponents manifestly do not wish to spend most of their time defending the judicial redefinition of marriage without a public vote. They are much happier talking about states’ rights and the like. Why not take away that option?

Alleged problem two: “On its face, the Hatch language appears to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman for the purposes of federal law.” Here Gallagher has found a possible ambiguity in Hatch’s wording, one that could perhaps be fixed by changing “in each state” to “for each state” in the first sentence. But this is a fairly niggling criticism, considering that the text of her own preferred amendment just changed in the Senate yesterday. It’s not a criticism that gets to the heart of the question.

Alleged problem three: “It won’t protect defense-of-marriage laws from being overturned by a Supreme Court already signaling its interest in affirming same-sex marriage as a civil right.” Since Gallagher does not expand on this point, I’m not sure why we are supposed to believe it. As far as I can tell, she’s wrong. State defense of marriage laws typically have two components: They define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and they deny recognition to same-sex marriages contracted elsewhere. Under the Hatch language, the Supreme Court has to defer to the state legislatures on the definition of marriage (sentence one) and cannot use any provision of the Constitution to compel a change in that definition (sentence two). Nor can the Supreme Court use the Constitution to compel recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages, since that would require that benefits be granted in violation of sentence two.

Alleged problem four: “Leaving the matter to the states amounts to conceding that marriage is not a key social institution.” I don’t see this at all. Gallagher knows perfectly well that the failure to include a definition of marriage in the Constitution up until now was not a matter of Americans’ not understanding that marriage is a key social institution. It is necessary to include it now, on her account, because the institution faces a particular threat. But what is the nature of that threat? The reason advocates of an FMA have always given for why a constitutional amendment is necessary is that it is the only way to stop state and federal courts from redefining marriage. If an amendment other than the FMA can accomplish that goal, and indeed accomplish it better because it can actually be enacted, what’s the argument for asking an amendment to do more? The Hatch language does not concede that marriage is not important; it recognizes that the action to be concerned about blocking is the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage (or civil unions).

Hatch’s amendment reads as follows: “Marriage and its benefits in each state shall be defined by the legislature or the people thereof. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to require that marriage or its benefits be extended to any union other than that of a man and a woman.” According to Gallagher, “There are many problems with this language.” Alleged problem one: “Courts that have discovered a right to same-sex marriage in general commitments to due process or equal protection are no doubt capable of discovering that ‘the people’ have a right to same-sex marriage.” The suggestion here would appear to be that a state court, for example, could say that “the people” of the state had, in some fashion or other, approved of same-sex marriage when they had not. It could, in a flight of fancy, decide that “the people” who lived together in same-sex unions had defined marriage.

Now any case for a constitutional amendment on marriage has to begin with a suspicion of judges, or at least some important subsets of them. But this suspicion cannot become paranoia. If you are willing to assume that judges can do anything they want with any constitutional text, then there is no point to passing any amendment. Willful judges will be able to read Gallagher’s preferred FMA in abstraction from its clear intent, too.

That's asking a lot. In practice, it's unreasonable to expect this of a professional civil servant unless it is clear that there's an unbreakable mandate for the mission. There is only one way to demonstrate that: to remove the people who have failed in the past. Of late, we have begun to hear calls for the resignation of George Tenet, and certainly someone should be held accountable for the colossal intelligence failure that made life easy for the September 11th mass murderers. But it is important that President Bush not single out one or two individuals, and then pretend that a couple of new people can turn the whole thing around. He (or Ridge, on the president's authority) should ask for the resignations of the whole lot of them, from the (Clinton-appointed) FAA chief to the heads of the various counterterrorist units and the counterintelligence top guys as well. If Louis Freeh were still at FBI, he should go along with the others (hell, he should have gone once the Hanssen treason was discovered).

Yes, it's bloody, and yes, it runs counter to some of the early themes of compassionate conservatism. Some will urge the president to let these people redeem themselves, a process in which he strongly believes, having experienced it personally. But that is a doctrine for normal times, and he does not have the time to determine who can be redeemed, and who will simply fail again. This is time for the old motto, "kill them all, let God sort 'em out."

New times require new people with new standards. The situation requires it. The American people, who have responded magnificently to this horror, richly deserve it. The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give Tom Ridge a chance to succeed, and us to prevail.

Two salient facts left out by different reporters working for the LA Times, one leaving out the fact that George W. Bush was a fighter pilot, and the other leaving out the fact that John Kerry is lying or, at best, failing to recall a meeting he attended that featured discussion of a plan to assassinate American politicians. If you're looking for a pattern, both omissions help Kerry.

Media bias on display, courtesy the LA Times.

Q. Both Menendez brothers got married in prison, and I read that accused murderer Scott Peterson is inundated with love letters and proposals. Why do these guys appeal to women? —Dave Sears, Bloomington, Ind.

A. “For certain very upright, conservative women, convicts appeal to their forbidden sexual fantasies,” says Michael Crocker, a psychotherapist who specializes in sexual disorders. “We call such women ‘love avoidants,’ because their fantasy of an inaccessible man is more appealing than the reality of an actual relationship with an available partner.” In layman’s terms: Some women just don’t like to have their man around the house.

Frontline: In January 2001, you wrote a memo where you basically stated there are more attacks coming, [that] Al Qaeda cells are here. What was that memo? What was the reason for it looking back at it now? How right did you get it?

I think the intelligence community, the FBI, were unanimous, certainly throughout the year 2000 into 2001, that there was in fact a very widespread Al Qaeda network around the world in probably between 50-60 countries -- that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan; that we didn't really know who those people were. We didn't have names for very many of them, and we didn't know where they were; but since bin Laden kept saying the United States was the target, the United States was the enemy, that we had to expect an increasing rate of sophistication of attacks by this large Al Qaeda network against the United States. …

Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?

The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat -- we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved....

But didn't you push for military action after the Cole?

Yes, that's one of the exceptions.

How important is that exception?

I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated Al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier. …

Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?

Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole "Come to Afghanistan where you'll be safe and you'll be trained," well, that wouldn't have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That's the one thing that we recommended that didn't happen -- the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened. …

A lot of people looked at Sept. 11, and said "Massive intelligence failure. Haven't seen an intelligence failure like this since Pearl Harbor." What's your opinion on that allegation?

I think it's a cheap shot. I think when people say, no matter what event it is, they say, "Oh, it was an intelligence failure," they frequently don't know what the intelligence community said prior to the event. In June 2001, the intelligence community issued a warning that a major Al Qaeda terrorist attack would take place in the next many weeks. They said they were unable to find out exactly where it might take place. They said they thought it might take place in Saudi Arabia.

We asked, "Could it take place in the United States?" They said, "We can't rule that out." So in my office in the White House complex, the CIA sat and briefed the domestic U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, Immigration, Federal Aviation, Coast Guard, and Customs. The FBI was there as well, agreeing with the CIA, and told them that we were entering a period when there was a very high probability of a major terrorist attack. Now I don't think that's an intelligence failure. It may be a failure of other parts of the government, but I don't think that was an intelligence failure.

Regarding my previous post on this topic, 2 emails:

1) "Interesting--just curious, does George Will e.g. think that persons who lose jobs to domestic competition are less entitled to help than persons who lose them to foreign trade?

"Haven't studied these issues but 'instinct' says: people who lose a job to foreign competition and to domestic competition, where the competition is extra-regional in source, have more weight policy-wise than those persons whose loss of job is a result of intra-regional compeition. The key thing is to avoid disruption of local communities, family life as much as possible via migration to other parts of the country."

My response: Assuming that federal-government action can serve the long-term interests of communities in the way my correspondent suggests, wouldn't the issue be the extent of job losses in a community rather than the location of the competition? Whole industries can just decline, not because there are more efficient producers of the good in question in some other region or country but because there is less demand for it, there is a substitute good, etc.

2) "The reason (or at least a reason) a person displaced by foreign competition is more entitled to federal aid then one injured by domestic competition is that we owe our countrymen more than we owe foreigners. We all exist under equal laws and have equal rights. However, foreigners have no entitlement to our markets, as our countrymen do by natural justice and the dormant commerce clause of the Constitution. The benefits of foreign trade are a net benefit but they do not benefit all Americans equally. In order to continue political support and moral support for free trade (especially with unfree states) some help for displaced workers of that policy can be considered, where it would simply be robbing Peter to pay Paul to do it domestically."

My response: I don't think this argument works. Whether we owe more to our countrymen than to foreigners is irrelevant here; my question was not, after all, whether we should compensate foreign worker for losing American market share as much as we compensate American workers. I don't see how anyone has any "entitlement" to having their product sold in America in the quantities and at the prices they want, wherever they're from. Intra-national trade can be said, just as international trade, to benefit Americans unequally. It may be, as correspondent 2 says, that protection for workers displaced by foreign competition--assuming you can identify who they are--makes sense as a way of buying political support for free trade. But the moral justification still eludes me.

Almost all I know is what I saw on "60 Minutes" last night. I need to do more homework. But it seems to me that Clarke cannot simply be dismissed as a jerk with an agenda (as I am perfectly comfortable doing with Joe Wilson). That said, that doesn't mean we have to buy everything Clarke says without skepticism. The first point, which I think "60 Minutes" did a masterful job of blurring is that Clarke's criticism is twofold, with part 1 being very different than part 2.

His critique of pre-9/11 Bush says that Bush and his crew weren't particularly interested in Clarke's opinions. Clarke takes this as an outrage, and it may well be that it was stupid on the Bushie's part to ignore him (that's certainly turned out to be true politically). But it's sounds like Clarke was an embittered holdover from the Clinton administration who was kept on out of an admirable desire for continuity. Clarke basically confirmed this when he admitted that he was upset about his demotion from Cabinet level status. He just said -- through clenched teeth -- that he wasn't angry enough to quit right away. I guess he wanted to bide his time for a book.

He also complains that the Administration was "too" concerned about Iraq when it took over. Well, A) this isn't news and B) this is debatable given what Clinton himself had said publicly about Iraq's WMD programs. Obviously, in retrospect, the Bush administration did not concentrate on al Qaeda enough as Clarke suggests. And -- if true -- the allegation that the Bushies ignored the pre-9/11 chatter to the extent Clarke claims is a serious one.

But, it strikes me as a shocking example of blame-dodging for the guy who ran Bill Clinton's anti-terrorism agency to be making these charges. After all, if there's one guy more completely culpable for the growth of al Qaeda over the last decade you'd think it would be Clarke. Of course, his defense might be that Clinton didn't listen to him enough (Where's my copy of Legacy). But that's not Clarke's charge. Rather, he charges -- according to "60 Minutes'" telling that all of the serious mistakes on this front were made by Bush & Co.

Clarke's critique of post 9/11 Bush is quite vague beyond Clarke's opposition to the Iraq war. Again, this can be a serious argument, but it's nothing new and beyond his stature, he offers nothing new to it. The substance of his major critiques beyond that were that Bush and Rumsfeld were too eager to hit Iraq, not Afghanistan. Maybe so, but Bush quite quickly ended up following precisely the course Clarke had reccomended, i.e. hitting Afghanistan. Clarke tries to make it sound like Bush was willing to falsely blame Iraq for 9/11, but this charge is flimsy in Clarke's own telling (Clarke got that sense, but never heard those words) and the more charitable interpretations are the more plausible -- i.e. Bush & Co. thought it was Iraq but were persuaded by the facts that Afghanistan had to be the first target. A-ha, says Clarke, but the Bushies were willing and eager to have Iraq be the second target. True enough. But here again we are back in to a fairly conventional anti-war argument. That Clarke made it from the inside of the White House at least demonstrates that those who claimed the White House suffered from group-think were wrong.

Here's the story Clarke may be helping the Commission Dems fly: Even though the Cole bombing happened on Clinton's watch (Oct 2000), it was really too late in his term to have reasonably expected him to do anything about it; therefore the failure to retaliate against bin Laden (and, as the story goes, to neutralize him so that 9/11 could have been prevented) is Bush's fault. I think Clarke will be there to say this, and to tell the Commission -- as [he'll be telling the world on CBS Sunday night]-- that he was Cassandra screaming for something to be done about bin Laden prior to 9/11 but he couldn't get the Bush people to listen.



The story is total BS. First, even if there had not been an unprecedented delay in resolving the 2000 presidential election, the Cole attack happened almost a month before the ELECTION, not a month before THE END OF CLINTON's TERM; he was going to be president for nearly 3 more months, and if Gore had won it would have essentially been a continuation of the same administration. If a military response was called for, it was incumbent on Clinton to respond . . . immediately. If, as happened, Bush had emerged as the winner, it would have been entirely appropriate for Clinton to coordinate what he was doing with Bush and his transition team (just as Bush 41 coordinated what he was doing in Somalia before Clinton assumed the office in 1993); but that is not an excuse for not responding. Clinton didn't do anything -- and not because he was deferring to a new admin, but because he NEVER wanted to do anything if it meant meaningful military action, and because he was too busy pardoning Mark Rich and the Weather Underground to be bothered with bin Laden.

By the time the Bush got in, it was 3 mos after the Cole, and it took another 1 to 8 mos to get the major players of his admin confirmed and in place. Further, it makes no sense to look at the Cole attack in isolation -- it was part of a pattern of attacks by a growing entity; that situation did not call for a specific retaliation for Cole but for an entire rethinking about al Qaeda. Regardless of what Clarke says, that precisely is what was done: a new counterterrorism policy was developed -- shifting from containment to eradication of al Qaeda and its sanctuaries -- and drafts were circulated at the cabinet level in June and the first week of September 2001 (the latter is virtually the same as the directive GWB signed after the 9/11 attacks). Of course 9/11 happened despite all this, but that hardly means intense rethinking and planning was not underway beforehand -- rethinking and planning that had lots to do with the spectacularly swift and decisive military campaigns post-9/11. And Clarke is certifiably insane if he thinks Bush could have garnered public support or put together a coalition BEFORE the 9/11 attacks. To do what we did required key help from countries (like Pakistan) who would not have given us that help absent the 9/11 attacks. (Think about this: We've seen the various objections to the military operation against Iraq -- and that was AFTER 9/11 and involved a country in open defiance of UN resolutions satisfaction of which were the condition for ending the first Gulf War; what do you figure the Dems, the NYT, CBS, etc. have said if Bush had decided to invade Afghanistan BEFORE 9/11?)

Richard Clarke was a fairly low level functionary in the Reagan and Bush 41 admins before rising in the Clinton admin to a virtual cabinet level post of national counter-terrorism coordinator, a job that really no longer exists because strategy of the current admin is to eradicate al Qaeda, not merely to contain it with extraditions and prosecutions -- which means it is now in the hands of the NSC & DOD, where it should have been all along. When Bush II came in, among the first things he directed was an entire rethinking of the anemic Clinton anti-terror strategy (at the actual cabinet and NSC level -- meaning Veep, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and their deputies), which demoted Clarke. BUT, rather than firing Clarke the prez kept him on with the understanding that he should continue doing his important work while the new strategy was being developed and implemented (which took some time both b/c of the nature of the task and the happenstance that the controversy over the election meant that a lot of important admin staffing was not completed until well into summer 2001).

Clark is bitter at his fall from the perch, and that is now coming home to roost. He has written a book that is about to be released and will be absolutely devastating because it gives the media exactly what they want: someone they can portray as an "insider" who will explicitly say (a) that the Bush admin did not take terrorism seriously in the run-up to 9/11; (b) that he told Bush right after 9/11 (I believe he says it happened on 9/12) that there was no connection b/w al Qaeda and Iraq -- and therefore could be no connection b/w Saddam and 9/11 -- at which point Bush, angrily, told him to check again and next time come back w/ the right answer (i.e., essentially to make up a connection whether it was there or not); (c) that the Afghanistan operation was not the raging success it appeared to be; and (d) that the decision to take the war on terror to Iraq, aside from being based on a false premise that Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, badly compromised the actual war on terror by diverting essential resources. Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes will be doing a segment on it…and Clarke is already making the rounds (he was the no. 2 story -- after the anniversary of the Iraq invasion -- on CBS evening news Friday night).

He’s baaack…to be played by a new actor, but a Tory MP sounds a warning note:

"As for Christopher Eccleston, it's great casting because he's a very talented actor. I just hope he remembers he's not playing a socialist time peasant, but an aristocratic Time Lord, and that he demonstrates that he can smile as well as scowl. The whole point about Doctor Who is its very light humour. Without it, the show would be just a bunch of upended rubbish bins talking in silly voices and waving egg whisks."