Department of Corrections Department - Michael Croft writes:

So, I read your blog. Your friend's logic may be fine, but her statement is false because her starting premises are wrong.

I dispute your friend's facts. Osama bin Laden has never admitted responsibility for any of the terrorist actions al-Queda has committed. Look at the record. His reaction has been to praise and justify those responsible. Had he admitted any of it, the Taliban would have had to openly support terrorism long before this.

Cynical Michael wonders what your friend thinks happened to a certain Egyptian airliner...

Nov 11, 2000: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/terror_001113.html
Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden denies links to the October attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 and maintains he has no ties to members of an Islamist group arrested in Kuwait for allegedly plotting to blow up U.S. targets in the Persian Gulf.

June 10, 1998:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/terrormain980610.html
When asked about the Riyadh bombing and other specific attacks, bin Laden refuses to answer directly. But he does praise the bombers: "We look at these young men as great heroes and martyrs who followed the steps of the prophet, peace be upon him. We called and they answered."

Michael is too polite to point out that I should have actually checked my Iranian friend's claims before posting them. In a follow-up message, he writes:

I think, btw, that your friend's desire to explain it all away is a human impulse, rather than anything tied to religion or race or culture. What person wouldn't want to find a reason that someone like them couldn't possibly have done something this awful?

related MP3: http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com./leestrawberry.mp3

The song is a (pointful) hoot.

Two Things - First, Joel Achenbach has an excellent piece in this morning's Washington Post. The key paragraph strikes me as this one:

There is an argument being made that this war is likely to drag on for a long time, that its objectives are difficult to achieve and subject to change, that American military actions could exacerbate Muslim rage against the West, that we're fighting in Afghanistan even though our larger problem has roots in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and that even the narrow objective of killing or capturing Osama bin Laden may be unachievable. What's disturbing is that this is the argument of the people who SUPPORT the war.

The whole essay is worth reading.

I said I had two things. The second is what I have to consider a bizarre misreading of Achenbach's essay on Instapundit.com. Apparently it's the word "quagmire" that sets Reynolds off, to the point where he feels compelled to lump Achenbach, a fine writer, in with the worst of the war's media critics. You make the call.

Instapundit: (What, I live in Knoxville, and Achenbach lives more or less within sight of the blasted Pentagon, and the purpose of the war isn't obvious to him?) It's the lame familiarity of the antiwar people.

Achenbach: Most Americans support this war, and, contrary to stereotype, are not seeking instant military gratification. We're patient. We're realistic. This isn't like Vietnam in part because we're not fighting primarily on behalf of someone else. This time it's personal -- we were attacked and have an obligation to do whatever we can to stop the terrorists.

I don't know how Glenn Reynolds squares "we were attacked and have an obligation to do whatever we can to stop the terrorists" with "It's the lame familiarity of the antiwar people." I don't think one can. And where was Reynolds two weeks ago when Krauthammer and Kristol were complaining about quagmires? If Reynolds is going to restrict his energies to promoting greater zeal among the menfolk, he risks attaining to the condition of ideal Confederate womanhood.

Well, There You Go - Had the utterly dispiriting experience of hearing from an Iranian friend of the family yesterday that, "It could have been the Jews," followed by a repetition of the "4,000 Jews were warned" canard. She also said that she was sure bin Laden was not behind the September massacres because he said he did not do it. She didn't say this out of any evident admiration for bin Laden. Nor was her logic on the narrow issue of the bin Laden denial completely off the wall. She said, "Every awful thing he has done before, he has not only admitted to but bragged about," so it would be breaking an established pattern for him to do something he denied.

Let us turn then to the latest interview with bin Laden in Dawn (Pakistan) as reported by msnbc.com:

“America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Iraq,” he reportedly said. “The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. The Islamic Shariat says Muslims should not live in the land of the infidel for long. The Sept. 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America’s icons of military and economic power.”

And there you have it. This isn't bin Laden coming right out and admitting culpability, but he does justify the attacks as muslim actions and discourses on the alleged purposes of the attacks with a certainty that only their author could claim.

Oh The Irony Department, Anthrax Division - In Jerry Pournelle's Monday "View" (November 5), he includes the following item:

And from Trent Telenko:

They picked up suspects in N.J. for the anthrax mailings.

They are being held on immigration charges.

And they are by no means "Mid-Western Right Wing White Guys."

The link:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/US_ANTHRAX.html

Times change! Go to that same link now and the lead story is headlined:

Terror Portrait
Bitter Loner Believed Behind Anthrax

Nov. 9 — FBI profilers say anthrax-laced letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, NBC News and The New York Post were likely mailed by the same person, an angry young man with a grudge.

Profilers have been wrong before - I think it was the Green River Killer whose age they underestimated by ten years, then lamely explained away the error by claiming that the ten years the guy had spent in prison didn't count. And the story does not include the Florida envelope in the bunch. It practically requires another level of complication on top of what some already find unacceptably coincidental. Instead of two unrelated terror campaigns (the September massacres and a domestic germ warfare campaign), try three (the September massacres and two independent domestic germ warfare campaigns). It's a stretch.

Pournelle is too wedded to Iraq-based explanations for Unqualified Offerings' taste, but he says something important:

I know that Iraq has lots of reasons to want us to believe this stuff did not come from Iraq. I presume the US has reasons not to want it to look as if security was so lax that some of this stuff got out into the world. And Russia has a heck of a lot of reason to not be suspected.

If there is NOT disinformation flowing about, that would be astonishing, given the motivations of everyone concerned.

Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan are not only convinced that "Iraq did it;" They've suggested that the government can already prove that Iraq did it and will do so at a time of its own choosing. All the stuff about possible domestic anthrax origins is, they think, disinformation.

Okay, if it is, then isn't the general principle that we should be very careful about believing what we're told about the war and its progress generally?

Annals of Ressentiment - Today our purpose is not to praise Pakistani columnist Farrukh Saleem but to bury him. (Figuratively.) Also to tie some recent Unqualified Offering themes - empire, the Pakistani press, drug prohibition - together into one big bundle of personal preoccupation. Wait! I mean, of overarching insight! In a September 7 column, "American Pretense of Virtue Breaks Down," Salim writes

The Grimmett Report (named after Richard F Grimmett, the author) titled "Conventional Arms transfers to Developing Nations, 1993-2000" is out, and the United States has, once again, been named as the biggest supplier of conventional weapons on the face of the planet. According to another report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) titled "The suppliers of major conventional weapons", aggregates for the years 1996-2000 show that the US exported some $50 billion worth of conventional weaponry to everyone and anyone who was willing to pay for it. Russia, the second largest supplier, was at a distant $15.69 billion. Russia was followed by France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Ukraine (320 T-UD tanks for $650 million to Pakistan), Italy, China (major buyer was Pakistan) and Belarus (the ranking for 1995-1999 wasn't much different).

Most of the rest of the article is a recitation of world trouble spots where the US supplies arms to one or more sides. I don't want to argue that it is always or even ever virtuous for the US to sell weapons to other countries, some at peace, some at war. But Saleem makes the classic mistake of gun controllers, drug warriors and leftists in general: demonize the supplier and the thing supplied; ignore the consumer and the desire to consume. Shut down the gun shows, interdict the drug shipments, shut off the supply and no one will get hurt. But just as there is a drug trade because lots of people want to use drugs, and there are gun shows because many people enjoy guns, there is an international arms trade because lots of international actors want big honking firepower. Yes, the US is the biggest single purveyor of military hardware. Saleem quotes an NGO report that calculates US arms exports from 1996-2000 at $50 billion, with Russia second at just under $16 billion.

First off, let's face it: if you want military hardware for whatever reason and you have the option of getting either US goods or Russian, you'd be nuts not to buy American. The relative merits of the, er, product lines have been repeatedly proven in use. But that's not the main point. Does Saleem imagine that if the US stopped selling arms, that all its former customers would pursue a path of peace and light? Saleem says US M16s were prominent in the recent slaughters in East Timor. But M16s didn't cause either the independence movement or the violent reaction against it. A Czech gun will kill you just as dead; what drives the phenomenon of arms sales is a buyer's desire to be ready to kill. In his own country, Saleem can find ready supplies of local knockoffs of the AK-47.

Saleem is not the only student of the history US intervention. The pattern I see repeated over and over is local actors who want warmaking means for local reasons. I do not ask the Saleems of the world to admire the US government or its military-industrial complex for taking advantage of the fact. I only ask him to stop scapegoating.

The Wild, The Innocent, and the, Frankly, Pretty Damned Tame - Rollcall.com's "Heard on the Hill" column today has a piece about Oklahoma Republican JC Watts's trip to Canada for a reunion with former CFL Ottawa Rough Rider teammates. A pleasant visit for all, apparently, but not without the following whiff of scandal!

But it was inevitable that some would start telling tales about the conservative leader's more wild days as the quarterback who took his team to the Grey Cup, the Canadian equivalent of the Super Bowl, in 1981.

Teammate Dean Dorsey noted that Watts had a love-hate relationship with the home fans and reminisced about the day his temper flared, a far cry from the Baptist minister who's now cool as a cucumber.

"J.C. had marched the ball from deep in our own end to the other team's 20," recalled Dorsey. "But then he threw a lousy pass and they got on him. So he comes to the huddle and says, 'You know, I feel like dropping my pants and mooning these people.' The players were all so stunned that he'd said that, they just sort of stood there, and we got a time-count penalty."

Whoah! Lamar Odom got nothing on Wild Child Watts!

Southwest Asian Time Capsule - What sorts of things were they talking about in Pakistan on September 9? This, among other things.

Update - I carelessly linked to Furrukh's index page, not the column itself. Here is the specific column on offer.

The Unending Search for Bad Role Models - LA Clippers star Lamar Odom has been suspended by the National Basketball Association for failing a marijuana test. Okay, it's probably absurd to use "LA Clippers" to modify "star," but not as absurd as the league-level drug-testing regimes in force in all the major sports.

If recreational drugs are as bad as the drug warriors claim, you hardly need to test for them - the "drugged out" athlete should play himself out of a job in short order. Every time it happened you'd have another object lesson that "Drugs are bad for you." I'm sure that some players have drug problems of a scope that they do play themselves out of a job. But pro athletes play themselves out of jobs for all kinds of reasons - work habits, coachability, age, injury, just not being as good as somebody else, being more expensive than management feels like paying. What's more, athletes who play themselves out of jobs often manage to play themselves back in later, perhaps better for the lessons learned. Pro sports are notorious for giving athletes enough drugs to let them play with injuries, and if you are in the business of, say, paying people to play offensive tackle, you already accept the principle that people should be able to engage in personal behaviors (like playing offensive tackle) that risk long-term health problems. Pro sports are also notoriously unsentimental about getting rid of players who are too old, too out of shape or too expensive.

The inconvenient fact for drug warriors is that some (many?) athletes can use recreational drugs and still perform at a high level. Like Michael Irvin, they can make the Pro Bowl. So the only sure way to find drug-using athletes is to go looking for them. Hence drug tests. Lamar Odom isn't sitting out games because his pot "habit" wrecked his game, he's sitting out games because he failed a urine test.

They tell us athletes are role models, and drug-using athletes "send the wrong message." Well okay. The leagues could pass rules against players using drugs publically. They could suspend athletes convicted for violating drug laws. (They could even bar those players permanently from the league, but let's be serious, there are tickets and jerseys that need selling.) But look: nobody knew or cared that Lamar Odom smoked pot until his test results hit the news. You can't be a "bad role model" if no one knows you do bad things. You're just a shmoe who discreetly smokes pot, one among millions in the US. The league drug testing regimes are actually bad role model creation programs.

So why do they do it? Pressure, group think, image. Probably most owners and league officials are hidebound enough to actually swallow the gummy bundle of hypocrisies that drive drug "policy" in this country. The "policy" is to use raw power to enforce lies as truth. They have to have drug testing for athletes because drug use doesn't necessarily harm athletes. They just jacked up the penalties for Ecstasy because the objective risks of Ecstasy are apparently not high (oops!) enough to deter young people on their own. (For us non-young people, "Ecstasy" is two points off the mortgage rate.) They unearth "bad role models" with tests. Since anyone can tell that, say, pot hasn't made Lamar Odom a bad basketball player - I mean, so bad he can't even play for the Clippers - talk radio woofers like Jim Rome fall back on what amounts to (Warning: Genuine Moral Equivalence (TM) coming!) Soviet Psychology Theory: Lamar Odom, or whoever, knew the risks of failing a drug test. So if he did drugs anyway, he must have a Real Problem! Sure. And Drew Bledsoe, currently nursing a lung his own ribs punctured in September, knew the risks of playing behind the New England Patriots offensive line and did it anyway. He must have a real problem too!

Athletes are young and full of juice and used to having their way with the world. You can't walk onto the field or the court for a game unless you're the personality type who knows the career-ending injury won't happen to you, the rep-destroying blooper will be made by someone else. And maybe some of them just get ticked off at the absurdity and injustice of the leagues' drug regimes, and figure they'll stick their thumb in The Man's eye. "We" have uses for such people. Once we load the sins of the tribe on them anyway.

Fake Moral Equivalence Rebuked! Christopher Hitchens does it in his latest Nation column. It begins, "If there is one expression that ought to be discarded from the current discourse right away, it is 'The Street.' " He then discourses on the hypocricy of trying to understand the fascist impulses of some unruly mobs but not others. When 200 louts marched on a mosque in the midwest next month, no one in the mainstream media counseled the importance of the feelings of the American "street." Rather, they averred that unruly, violent mobs are a bad thing. The principle holds outside the US too.

New TMQ - Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for Slate is for those of us who are either football fans with intellectual pretensions or intellectuals with football fan pretensions. This week's column is especially good. Easterbrook is sometimes funny and sometimes sophomorically funny, but he loves the game and actually knows what he's talking about:

Watch Jerome Bettis carefully—despite his rep, he jukes constantly to avoid contact while rarely lowering his shoulder. That's why he's still barreling after nine years.

The weekend airwaves are full of dolts who characterize Bettis' style as blunt instrument running because - well, because other dolts on the airwaves said it before. Easterbrook actually accepts the evidence of his eyes.

Even better, his analysis of Tennessee's signing of free agent bust-in-the-making Kevin Carter:

Carter may become an expensive discard. He signed for what looked like a $10 million bonus, and in theory a gentleman who just cashed a huge check cannot be cut for years because proration of the bonus would crash-land onto the salary cap. Carter's agent boasted that the deal made his client waiver-proof—funny that he was worried about this. But Carter actually got $3 million up front ($1.5 million per sack so far); the balance is a "split bonus," due next winter. Here's the math: If Tennessee pays the second bonus, Carter will count $2.4 million against the 2002 cap and much more against future caps. If he is released, the 2002 cap charge would be an all but identical $2.5 million. So from a cap standpoint, the man practically has a sign taped to his back that says WAIVE ME. If the Titans keep him, Carter will haunt the team's cap for years, whereas if they cut him, he'll be gone from the books in 2003.

Thus, Tennessee management carefully structured the Carter deal so this gentleman could be ditched. When you let a good player go and trade a No. 1 pick for a guy you're already worried about getting out from under, you are pointing the compass south.

Easterbrook is a big time policy journalist and author of one of the fattest books I ever saw. The attention paid to analyzing the details of Carter's contract with the Titans shows that Easterbrook really is a football geek. My own interest in the game is at an ebb right now - throughout adult life I've oscillated from intense concentration to complete uninterest. A few years ago I was known to watch preseason games with a notebook and pen handy - and no, I've never been stupid enough to bet on games. Now I watch just the Redskins and Steelers, and not obsessively either. But I never miss TMQ.

The Grand Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name - I haven't been a big fan of Scott McConnell's antiwar.com columns. But he has a good piece in The New York Press this week. First he addresses the problems with the "Iraq did it" theory, covering means, motive and opportunity deficiencies in three paragraphs:

Officials scrutinizing anthrax assert that Iraq is probably not the source. So the case for Iraqi complicity rests on the fact that Egyptian hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat/spy in Prague. That’s a thin reed to hang a new war on, especially one that would be opposed by every European and Arab country, leaving the United States and Israel isolated against much of the Muslim world. Can one imagine the Arab government whose intelligence service Al Qaeda terrorists have not met with? Indeed, there are more reports of CIA contacts with Al Qaeda than Iraqi ones.

Iraq lacks a plausible motive. Certainly Saddam’s thuggish regime has every reason to oppose the United States, to hate both the American president who drove it out of Kuwait and his son, George W. Bush. But why would it risk provoking an American attack now?

By every visible measure, Baghdad was easing its way from the straitjacket that has enshrouded it since 1991. UN weapons inspectors are gone. The sanctions, while still partially in place, have been loosened. During the past spring, Colin Powell and Great Britain were exploring ways to ease them further–at the urging of much of the Arab world. Saddam’s regime–canny enough to survive 10 years of isolation and hostility from the West–could not only see light at the end of the tunnel, it had practically reached the open air. Indeed, the anti-Iraq crowd’s motives for starting a war now are far more apparent than Saddam Hussein’s.

I have one "Wilderness of Mirrors" cavil with the above. The New Scientist did indeed report that tests on anthrax attack samples indicate that it was created with a characteristically US drying process. Okay, and for the first half of the 80s the Afghan resistance fought the Soviet Army with Kalashnikovs and other Soviet arms - because that's what we supplied them with, through Egypt, because it allowed the US to maintain the fiction that we had no idea what had gotten into those people, killing Soviet soldiers like that. IF you were Iraq and IF you wanted to inaugurate a campaign of covert germ warfare against the United States, you would love it if you could do it with US-nameplate germs.

But "Wilderness of Mirrors" can work the other way too. Not only is McConnell surely correct about the ubiquity of foreign, and apparently US, contacts with al-Qaeda operatives, consider this: IF you were either al-Qaeda or a state other than Iraq sponsoring the September massacre operation, you would very much like to throw suspicion off on someone else. You would love to have Mohammed Atta seen in the company of an Iraqi intelligence officer - you would dangle Atta before the Iraqis and let their own curiousity get themselves on the hook.

Like McConnell, I can't see what Iraq would think it had to gain by 9/11 or anthrax war. The risks attendant on being caught, or even suspected, are huge. The gain? I'm not sure there is much, from the Iraqi perspective. I'm not saying they're too nice to have done such an awful thing. Saddam and his folks are rat bastards. But as McConnell says, things were looking up for the Baath Party anyway. Now they're at real risk.

But what I wanted to get to is McConnell's longer term points. On Ginger Stampley's Mark I blog, which has sadly passed out of this space-time continuum, she asked, What US foreign policy would eliminate the possibility of scare-quote blowback. The short answer is that no foreign policy eliminates even the possibility of blowback. But there is an approach to international relations that drastically minimizes it. The word for this approach exists in establishment political discourse only as insult or caricature. It is never characterized fairly by the sorts of people who get regular column gigs for metropolitan newspapers. Like "conservatism," it comes in "neo" and straight flavors. The word we are looking for is "isolationism." The time we are looking for it is necessarily after the country has destroyed the organizations that attacked us.

Saudi Arabia, home to three-fourths of the hijackers, barely cooperates with American investigators. Ditto Egypt, recipient of $2 billion in annual aid...On the streets of Baghdad, people greet an American visitor warmly. Iran–where there has been no significant American presence for a generation–offers to rescue downed American pilots.

The conclusion is inescapable: the less we are there, the more we are liked, or at least the less motivation there is to kill us.

Wilderness of Mirrors - Here is what we, the public, can be pretty sure we know about the massacres of September 11. A couple dozen muslims, mostly arab, and those mostly Saudi and Egyptian, slaughtered unoffending air travelers as a way to slaughter unoffending office workers. The hijackers have links to Osama bin Laden who is either a ward or sponsor of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, and a man with lots and lots of connections to the upper crust of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Here is what we don't know: Just about everything else. (Here is what we know about the anthrax attacks: They came through the mail.)

Among the reasons we don't know more, one stands out: The perpetrators don't want us to know more. bin Laden himself denied any role initially, though his subsequent public statements amount to a tacit admission of guilt. The National Greatness types insist that Iraq must be behind the attacks because, because - well, they hate us! The Hashemite Restoration crowd (Unqualified Offerings is in the junior auxiliary) think that prominent Saudis are at the very least accessories after the fact. Paranoid ravings on this very website imply that bin Laden might be anything up to and including a secret operative of the Saudi government. And Mustafa "Blood Libel" Tlass maintains it must be the Israelis because everyone Mustafa Tlass knows is a dipshit and complicated stuff is beyond them.

Saudi Arabia dumped its intelligence chief in the month before the WTC massacres. Arabnews.com has been running an interview with the man over the last couple of days. Strikingly, there's no blatant anti-Jewish language in the interview. He's critical of Israel and US support of Israel, but what can we expect? He's not some Christian Coalition spokesman; he's a former high official of an Arab government. Of course he's critical of Israel. Doesn't make him right, it makes him Arab. I was inclined to read his reiteration of the official Saudi position, "Palestinian problem must be resolved in a just manner," as code - "just manner" = "Israel obliterated." But the next paragraph of the interview references those old favorites, UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which, unless the Saudis have done their own tortured legal exegesis, confirm Israel's right to exist.

But why is this guy being sent out to play good cop? In the wake of 9/11, the assumption (mine for sure, but also others, I think) was that Prince Turki al-Faisal had been pushed out for being too close to bin Laden. In that case, if you're the Saudi government and you're getting nervous about American reaction, you might think having Prince Turki sound almost...nice about things would seem reassuring.

But there's another possibility. What if Turki is saying these things because they're what he thinks? What if he had to resign from his position not because he was too chummy with al Qaeda but because he wasn't chummy enough?

Silver Linings - One thing the neocons have been proven right about is the depth and breadth of antisemitism in muslim and arab media and government circles. (Yeah yeah. Arabs are semites too. You know what the word means in this context.) This is depressing, and not just because it sucks when the neocons are right. So one takes one's good news where one finds it. In the official Saudi site, arabnews.com, they're having a poll. Here are the results:

"Who do you think is carrying out the Anthrax attacks?

Votes
A white supremist group in America 22% 899
Supporters of Osama bil Ladin 43% 1717
Right wing Israelis 24% 969
Other 8% 336

3921 votes total

Only one in four picked "Right wing Israelis," Arab media trends notwithstanding. I'm even inclined to a small glimmer of hope in the wording of the option: "Right wing Israelis" as opposed to the more official "Mossad" or more general "Israel."

Note: Unqualified Offerings did not take the survey, as "No fucking idea" was not on the list.

Pakistan Search Engine Watch - In my previous visits to The International News site, one thing I regretted was the lack of a search engine. I was sure there wasn't one. Today there is, in a pretty prominent place, so either it is new or I missed it before. First thing I put in, of course, was "anthrax." Oh ho! All that came up were "Sponsor's Links" to three general information sites. No links to news articles at all. Here was proof of what I had come to suspect from browsing the news in the last several days - Pakistan is keeping a tight lid on "Pakistani anthrax" stories in their own press. But then I decided to search for some other keywords - "Taliban"; "bin Laden"; "Kashmir"; "US aid" and so on. Pretty much nothing comes up in the search engine after October 1. So it's not surprising that the search engine finds no link to anthrax stories. (Note to our younger readers: people didn't used to think or talk about anthrax much.)

Now here's my question: How much of the reporting we're getting on this, to us, unfamiliar part of the world is distorted by reporters not doing simple baseline tests?