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Paperwight (”Paperwight’s Fair Shot”), Who Will Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest? –

The Bush Administration handpicked know-nothing Party apparatchiks to fill every possible political appointment they could find, and turned them loose on the executive branch with ‘guidance’ from Karl Rove. I expect that guidance generally took the form of “expressions of concern” regarding certain “districts” or “issues”. Policy and personnel decisions were made in the fuzzy apparatchik cloud and then the shaft bolt lashed out of the cloud and struck someone in the civil service. No chain of command, no accountability, no procedure. Everyone just sort of knew what had to be done — they were all picked because they knew in advance what “had to be done” to serve the Party.

Marc Lynch, interviewed by Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Magazine –

At the same time, neither Al Qaeda as an organization nor bin Laden as an individual is commanding a great deal of respect or support. When you get these attacks in Algeria and Morocco, it repels people rather than attracting them. But the paradox is that even as Al Qaeda repels people with its actions, its core ideas are becoming more widely accepted, and that’s really troubling, and a real indictment of American public diplomacy. That’s also why the situation in Iraq is so devastating at the wider regional and global level. Killing people in Morocco and Algeria triggers a negative reaction, but fighting Americans in Iraq resonates with a much wider part of the Arab population.

Jonathan Schwarz (”Tiny Revolution”) in Mother Jones: “No Congress, No Peace” –

What, then, would a serious congressional strategy to block a war with Iran look like? Constitutional scholars and congressional staff agree there’s no one magic answer. The alarming truth is that 220 years after the adoption of the Constitution, there are few settled answers about what legal powers the executive branch possesses to start a war. But there are several steps Congress could take to make a war with Iran politically very difficult for the White House.

Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Monthly, Torture, Moral Vanity, and Freedom –

Even a prisoner in a small cell can stand and walk a little, can breathe on his own, has the capacity to tend to his own bodily functions, and to think or pray. Torture is designed to rob him of all these last shreds of liberty. It takes control of his body and soul and by the use of physical or psychological coercion, rids him of any real freedom at all. It puts him into the abyss of tyranny on a personal scale. And any man or woman who is given the license to torture and any man or woman who grants the right to torture is definitionally a tyrant over another person. There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strapped to shackles in a ceiling, or having his legs pulpified by repeated beating, or forced to eat pork and drink alcohol against religious strictures. Everything I have just described has been done by US forces under the command and direction of George W. Bush. They are all acts of absolute tyanny, conducted by people who at that moment are absolute tyrants.

Following up on the post below about DeWine’s “we’re in it for us” statement, it looks like we’re also apparently in Iraq for Al Qaeda, judging by this October 2005 message from Al Qaeda lieutenant “Atiyah” to Zarqawi:

The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness and firm rooting, and that it grows in terms of supporters, strength, clarity of justification, and visible proof each day. Indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest, with God’s permission.

The message was among the documents captured after Zarqawi was found and killed in June. The English translation was released in late September by the “Combating Terrorism Center” at West Point. Via Steve Benen and Marc Lynch (”Abu Aardvark”)*, who has a August 29 post that looks pretty spot-on in view of the Atiyah-Zarqawi message:

If the Americans left, al-Qaeda would likely soon follow because killing other Iraqis does them little good - it is fighting and killing Americans which sells videos and wins recruits. As Hezbollah’s experience demonstrates, resistance to a perceived occupation resonates in ways which a sectarian player in a civil war does not. While some of the most extreme jihadis may see killing Shia as an end unto itself, for bin Laden and al-Qaeda Central Iraq is a means to a wider end of mobilizing Arab and Muslim attitudes against America, against secular regimes, and towards Islamism. Without a major American presence, the insurgency would continue, but Iraq would lose its pride of place in the current jihadi universe. I’d go so far as to say that the homegrown Iraqi insurgency does indeed want the US out of Iraq, but al-Qaeda wants us in.

Stay the course?

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* A.k.a. associate professor of political science at Williams College and author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today.

EDIT, 10/4: “about…statement” and link to “post” added.
UPDATE, 10/5: Not surprisingly, Kevin Drum (a.k.a. “Washington Monthly”) got there before I did with Whose Interest? He adds the Suskind One Percent Solution kicker — the CIA concluding Bin Laden’s pre-election message was intended to help Bush win — to his post. Bush also thought that message helped him win, but didn’t appear to draw the additional conclusion.

More from Barton Gellman’s review of the new Ron Suskind book, “The One Percent Doctrine“:

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Now beat it. But wait — there’s more!

Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”

“All right, Crumpton. You’ve covered your ass, now.” Now beat it.

I’d prefer to think this is just run of the mill (for Bush/Cheney) extreme fecklessness and incompetence, rather than yet more high crimes and misdemeanors by our ruling duumvirate. But it seems important — for their sake! — to try to rule out darker explanations for why Bush didn’t care much about an imminent attack, and didn’t heed warnings the attacker would elude capture.*

Come November, there should be some investigations. Make them happen. Call your Democratic Congressman, or your Democratic challenger and let them know you want these matters — the August 6 memo, the Downing Street memo, NSA warrantless surveillance, Tora Bora, torture, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Katrina, and more — investigated, with a view to impeachment if warranted.

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* Reminds me of the recent Atlantic Monthly article about al-Zarqawi by Mary Ann Weaver:

During my time in Jordan, I asked a number of officials what they considered to be the most curious aspect of the relationship between the U.S. and al-Zarqawi, other than the fact that the Bush administration had inflated him.

One of them said, “The six times you could have killed Zarqawi, and you didn’t.”

In the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq last year, a poll by the University of Maryland’s Program in International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) showed that Americans overwhelmingly advanced two reasons they believed the war had been waged: Iraqi WMDs and Iraq’s possible links with Al Qaeda.*

It’s worth repeating before the election: both of these reasons were dead wrong. First, WMD — my own primary reason. From the Key Findings of the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (the Duelfer report):

Nuclear
Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years. [...]

Chemical
While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

Biological
In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.

(first emphasis in original)

Thus, neither WMD (including chemical or biological ones, which I considered sufficient) nor WMD programs (a fallback I insisted on) were present to any significant degree. The Duelfer report found plenty of intent to reconstitute WMD programs, but little-to-no ability to do so. True, containment was being undermined, but apparently not in ways serious enough to give Saddam what he wanted.

On to the purported Iraq/Al Qaeda links. If the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion — “no credible evidence” — seemed too partisan and biased for you, no less an authority than Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has permanently discredited the idea. According to a Defense Department press release,

Rumsfeld said he has not seen any strong evidence that direct ties existed, he stressed that he does not work in the intelligence field and that then-CIA Director George Tenet had presented solid evidence of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.**

As Rumsfeld observes, Iraqi officials were clearly not “Little Sisters of the Poor.” But mere contacts do not rise to the level of a casus belli when we should have been keeping our powder dry for stopping more serious threats — like North Korea, A.Q. Khan, or — remember them? — Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

It wasn’t just Bush
I was no better at reading the tea leaves. I was swayed from a conservative to a liberal evaluation of the available evidence — not in the partisan meanings of those words, but in their fundamental meanings: how to evaluate risk.

Sure, I wasn’t alone in my belief that there were WMD and/or WMD programs in Iraq. I thought the German BND intelligence agency, for example, was a reliable second opinion about Iraqi nuclear weapons development. But the BND, too, was probably just another victim of Chalabi “curveballs.” And there was never any clinching, definitive evidence — after all, how could there be? Others noticed; see most notably “RonK”’s summary “Operation Desert Snipe.”

I let my fears influence me towards a “better safe than sorry” view of Iraqi WMD. I still feel a recurring, low-level variety of those fears here in D.C. — I think you’re either crazy or lying if you claim you don’t think about the next 9/11-squared around here. (It was noticeable to me how it went away while I was in Germany, and returned by about the time I was wending my way through customs at Dulles Airport.)

But I did myself no favor on that score by supporting getting into the war as much as I did. Given the smug dunces in charge who apparently aren’t even aware there’s a problem, with huge weapons caches missing, with terror groups gaining recruits and experience, with the U.S. military tied down in a war that could have waited, and with even more serious threats gathering elsewhere, I’m worse off than I was before.

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* 60% said WMD were the main justification for the war, and 19% said Al Qaeda links were; the two reasons also combined for 66% of respondents’ next most important choices. The poll was taken May 14-18 among 1265 respondents, the margin of error was +/- 3% for questions posed to the entire sample.
** Rumsfeld subsequently tried to backpedal, saying that “linkages” were observed, but the notion that these were operational allies instead of “let’s do lunch sometime” contacts was clearly never one that Rumsfeld or his administration colleagues shared.

The New York Times reports “Bush Promotes His Plan for Missile Defense System“:

“I think those who oppose this ballistic missile system really don’t understand the threats of the 21st century,” he said. “They’re living in the past. We’re living in the future. We’re going to do what’s necessary to protect this country.”

Bush is on to something — if (1) the North Koreans get a missile that can hit the U.S., (2) they decide there’s some very compelling reason they actually want to hit the U.S., and (3) we had a missile defense system that, oh, I don’t know, ACTUALLY WORKS — in which case (4) the North Koreans unaccountably decided not to just load the bomb into a shipping container and float it into San Francisco Bay instead or (5) failed to just add two or three $1 Mylar balloons to the missile payload for a multi-million dollar ABM to choose from. Sure, that sounds like a good reason to spend $53 billion, $10 billion in FY 2005 alone.

There are so many better things to do with that kind of money for real security problems. Here’s one, suggested by Nick Kristof in a New York Times op-ed piece yesterday: increase funding for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which has deactivated thousands of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, and which could continue to buy or secure weapons-grade uranium and plutonium there.

Earlier this year, Bush actually proposed cutting back this program from $451 million to $409 million. That is, Bush was dickering about $42 million for something that actually works now, as opposed to spending $10 billion for something that may never work.

Why would those extra $42 million be well spent? In a prior article, Kristof wrote:

…Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, “We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs.”

…But the White House has insisted on tackling the most peripheral elements of the W.M.D. threat, like Iraq, while largely ignoring the central threat, nuclear proliferation. The upshot is that the risk that a nuclear explosion will devastate an American city is greater now than it was during the cold war, and it’s growing.

Via the ever-interesting Interfaith Nunnery, I was fascinated to read that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written a quite remarkable review of His Dark Materials, a play based on the book series by Philip Pullman.* The play is apparently quite the rage in London. If it’s half as good as the books, I can imagine why: reading them was a genuinely exciting, provocative, and fun reading experience for me, I can’t recommend them enough.

His Dark Materials is a fantasy trilogy** set in an alternate but in some respects recognizable world where a “Church” with otherwise unspecified theological leanings is cast as a ruthless, near-Orwellian ruler of England and Europe. From an early aside in the first book (The Golden Compass):

Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute. (chapter 2)

That’s by no means the only or even the most interesting aspect of Pullman’s world — my vote there would go to the daemons and the daemonless panserbjorne. But it’s an integral part of Pullman’s polemic about religion, which is skeptical to put it mildly, and hostile not to put too fine a point on it.

Williams’ review, though, is such a neat reply to Pullman that … I may re-read the series. From his conclusion:

A modern French Christian writer spoke about “purification by atheism” - meaning faith needed to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. I think Pullman and Wright [who adapted the books to the stage --ed.] do this very effectively for the believer. I hope too that for the non-believing spectator, the question may somehow be raised of what exactly the God is in whom they don’t believe.***

It was in the course of developing this response that Williams said something that really interested me:

But what kind of a church is it that lives in perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its God?

What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety - and so with violence. [...]

What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny. For Pullman, the Church evidently looks like this most of the time; it isn’t surprising that the only God in view is the Authority.

An especially threadbare, embattled, vicious one might look like Al Qaeda. Williams’ question reminded me of Paul Berman’s discussion, in Terror and Liberalism, of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual forefather of Al Qaeda. Berman describes Qutb’s reaction to the ‘catastrophe’ that the Islamic Caliphate — the rule on earth by the Prophet’s successors — had been ended by the secular Turkish state. Qutb believed that this portended the worst,

“a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim countries… It is an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed, and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions, and organizations.” (Berman, ch. 4)

Cobbling together Islamic and European reactionary thought, Qutb called for a “vanguard” of the faithful, charged with waging jihad against false Muslims and outside corruption alike. And, in time, the calling to desperately defend an almighty god twisted itself into a worship of death for its own sake. Qutb, on martyrdom and jihad:

“But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life…

There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.” (Berman, ch. 4)

A philosophy like this would be tailor-made for self-appointed prophets with a taste for blood and divinely based power. Enter, years later, Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and their authority via ever-greater acts of terror as jihad.

Christianity could of course be equally murderous when it considered itself threatened. Consider, for instance, the fate of the Cathars, a Christian sect in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Catharism was brutally repressed by Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian Crusade and the beginnings of the Inquisition. At Beziers alone, at least 20,000 were massacred, Cathars and Catholics alike. (When the fate of the non-Cathar inhabitants was protested, the attending papal legate famously said, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”)

These kinds of examples might serve as the nucleus of a counterpoint for Mr. Pullman: one may wish religion were about Faith and Morality, but in practice it often turns out to be about Authority instead — and Authority “on a mission from God” to boot.

Pullman’s books are about more than that: protecting childhood, the (desirability of an) afterlife, and what might be called the virtues of materialism are all themes. The trilogy’s title comes from Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Chaos Umpire sits,
And by decision more imbroiles the fray
By which he Reigns: next him high Arbiter
Chance governs all. Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage …****

Mr. Pullman and the Archbishop had a public discussion of His Dark Materials on Monday. I’m with Sister Andrea: that’s a discussion I’d have loved to attend.

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* As “Sister Andrea” writes, there are spoilers in the review — all but inevitable, given the reviewer — so handle with care.
** The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass
*** Judging by his speech of a week earlier, Williams means Olivier Clement, a French Eastern Orthodox theologian. The idea of “atheism as purification” can also be traced to Simone Weil (via Naked Writing). According to some, Weil’s beliefs and death echo those of the Cathars.
**** (Whoa, heavy! Couldn’t resist. — ed.) Via “His Dark Materials [an unofficial fansite]“

PS: I’d be remiss in not pointing out Michael Chabon’s review of “His Dark Materials” in the New York Review of Books, and Gary Farber’s interesting discussion of same. Gary also mentions the Archbishop’s review, and was also impressed with Williams. I also should say that for detailed, knowledgeable discussion of Sayyid Qutb, you should visit Bill Allison’s Ideofact blog.

UPDATE, 5/2: More, based on the transcript of the Pullman-Williams conversation.

Osama running out of bridge partners? The Washington Post reports that it wasn’t just Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who got nabbed in Rawalpindi. Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, alleged financial chief of Al Qaeda, was apparently caught napping as well. Hawsawi, a Saudi native (go figure), is said to have been the paymaster for the 9/11 terrorists. Some free advice: you guys should move around more … unless, of course, it isn’t safe, as Douglas Turnbull notes helpfully.

Sound familiar? That’s right! “Ready.gov” for Al Qaeda: Stay indoors … or move around! We just don’t know what to tell you! Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it?

Other “Gotcha” posts: 1, 2, 3. Trade them with your friends!

Lovely news from Rawalpindi: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed apprehended. (I can’t help mentioning: you’ve looked better, Khalid.) He’s considered the chief planner of the September 11 attacks. Mr. Mohammed will be seeing Mr. Atta in hell, but not before a lengthy layover in Guantanamo Bay.  Sayonara, s**thead.

U.S. Strike Kills Six in Al Qaeda (Washington Post):

A missile fired by a U.S. Predator drone over Yemen Sunday killed six suspected al Qaeda terrorists in a vehicle about 100 miles east of the nation’s capital, the first time the United States has used the unmanned weapon outside Afghanistan, sources familiar with the action said yesterday.

A senior administration official said Yemeni defense officials had identified one of the men killed as Abu Ali al-Harithi, a senior al Qaeda leader and one of the terrorist network’s top figures in Yemen. Al-Harithi is one of the suspected planners of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors in the Yemeni harbor of Aden, and has been linked to the Oct. 7 bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen.

There’s a great AP photo of some guy poking through the rubble. Great photos need great captions, leave yours as a comment if you like. “Asses to ashes”? The group was probably not on a coffee-and-doughnuts run. As ABC News reports:

Yemeni government sources have confirmed that traces of explosives and communications equipment were found in the car traveling in the oil-producing Marib province, about 100 miles east of the capital, San’a on Sunday.

…making me even less concerned about some Swedish foreign minister’s concerns (”summary execution”) than I already thought possible.

It’s a quibble, but we might have left this and the next two or three attacks “unexplained” for a while. On the other hand, this may slow down the operations these guys were planning, make their buddies rethink their travel plans, and allow more time to prevent terror attacks. In the meantime: are there any Predators flying over the “Empty Quarter“?

Great news that Binalshibh, a key 9/11 plotter, has been caught (Arrests in Karachi Raising Hopes in Hunt for Al Qaeda). Mixed feelings that the Al-Jazeera reporter who interviewed Binalshibh a week ago fears for his life as a suspected snitch (WPost, 9/15/2002, “Arab Journalist Fears Al Qaeda Retaliation”). Also a relief — for those of us who still care about relations with that country — that Germany has apparently passed on any effort to extradite Binalshibh to its own jurisdiction.