Dubai: "Restores one's faith in the Arabs' potential"

Thus wrote Middle East scholar Martin Kramer almost a year ago. I've been trying to pull my thoughts together about my own recent visit to Dubai but since it's impossible to compete with Martin Kramer when it comes to describing anything about the Middle East, I hope he won't mind if I quote him at length here:

Dubai is over the top, daringly cosmopolitan, and all about business and pleasure. Across the Arab Middle East, economically productive minorities have been driven out. The Emiratis of Dubai, by contrast, have turned themselves into a minority in their own country, bringing in foreigners of every kind to build up and partake in the boom. Anyone who can do anything better (and cheaper) is welcomed in Dubai. They've perfected the Arab version of the American ethos, short on democracy but long on opportunity.

The Arab world has always had privileged nodes through which it has transacted fast-track business with the world. In the colonial period, Alexandria in Egypt served as the great gateway, relying crucially on foreign minorities. Nasser put an end to that. In the immediate post-colonial period, Beirut in Lebanon emerged on top, building upon its long tradition of open exchange with East and West. Extreme brands of nationalism destroyed that. In our time, Dubai is the great entrepôt. It exemplifies that larger shift of power away from the decaying, ideology-ravaged Arab Mediterranean and toward the worldly crust of the Arabian Gulf.

Kramer then goes on to describe his visit to one of Dubai's many shopping malls:

One afternoon in Dubai, I had a bit of spare time on my hands, so I went out to the brand new Ibn Battuta Mall, named after the 14th-century Muslim traveler who journeyed from his birthplace in Morocco across North Africa and Asia to China. The mall is set up as a series of arcades, themed around the various highlights on Ibn Battuta's route: Andalusia, Tunisia, Egypt, Persia, India, and China.

The place gives new meaning to the familiar phrase "shopping mecca." The Persian arcade is a giant dome, itself a work of art on a considerable level, no doubt meant to be admired by the many Iranians who come through Dubai. Smack in the middle of it, as this photo shows, is a Starbucks.Orientalist kitsch? Definitely. But Arabs have built it. Such cross-cultural play is possible only where people are comfortable with amalgams. To see the incredible mix of people strolling this mall, happily shopping for designer labels and making their choice at the 21-cinema "megaplex," restores one's faith in the Arabs' potential for embracing a global future. It's no doubt fragile, this odd experiment in our own style of consumerism, on a stretch of hot sand a world away from us. That's all the more reason not to turn Dubai into a whipping boy for our disappointment with the rest of the Arab world.

I hope he won't mind if I post this picture here as well - to give you some idea of his eminence in the region.

"Why bother with military tribunals for terrorists?"

"Just hold them in contempt of court. They'll languish there for years," quipped Bernie Kleinman, attorney for Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber and nephew of the 9/11 mastermind, KSM, in a response to an article that appeared in today's New York Times - yes, a cover story - on one of his former clients.

Kleinman's former client, Martin Armstrong, an investment manager accused of securities fraud has spent the past seven years in jail because he says he does not have some documents that were requested by the courts.

Soon the number of years Mr. Armstrong will have spent in jail on civil contempt charges will exceed the maximum sentence he would have obtained had he been convicted of all 24 counts of securities fraud with which he was originally charged. (Prosecutors agreed to drop all but one of the charges in exchange for his guilty plea on one count.)

This is a joke, right?

Asia-Pacific News is reporting that a leading Malaysian cleric, one Abu Hassan al-Hafiz, is recommending that women wear chastity belts to defend themselves against sexual predators.

"The best way to avert sex perpetrators is to wear protection," Abu Hassan reportedly told his followers at the mosque where he preaches. "My intention is not to offend women but to safeguard them from sex maniacs. Besides, husbands could also feel more secure, if you know what I mean."

Hassan apparently tried to assure his followers that this wasn't some medieval practice he was trying to resurrect by saying Malaysian women had only begun wearing them in the 1960s.

Is it now too hot in Iraq for Moktada al-Sadr?

According to the New York Time's sources, Sadr is in Iran. Now did he flee because things are getting too hot in Iraq? Or was this just a routine visit?

This being the Middle East, there is always a third possiblity: That this is just a publicity stunt cooked up by the Americans, as one of his aides said in an interview on Al Arabiya.

“This is an American lie that aims to get information about the whereabouts of Sadr in any way possible,” Abdul Razzaq al-Nadawi, identified as one of the cleric's top aides, was reported as saying. “Through this they can accomplish two things: the first is that either Sadr shows up on TV and announces that he is here, and in this case they can make sure that he is in Najaf, Iraq. If he doesn’t show up they will also have achieved something, by depicting Sadr as a coward who fled to Iran fearing for his life.”

In any case, now that the borders with Iran and Syria are supposedly closed, let's hope this means we won't see him back in Iraq any time soon.

Studying Islam in Academe: An exercise in self-censorship?

In today's New York Sun, Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, talks about the pervasive self-censorship that exists today when it comes to the study of Islam.

Remember "Orientalism," that landmark book by the late Columbia University professor Edward Said?

The 1978 work put the fear of God into any Western scholar who dared to discuss Islam, Muslims, or Arabs in anything less than superlatives — and it has succeeded beyond Said's wildest dreams.

In a prescient new book, "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents," author Robert Irwin notes that "because of the possible offense to Muslim susceptibilities, Western scholars who specialize in the early history of Islam have to be extremely careful what they say, and some of them have developed
subtle forms of double-speak when discussing contentious matters."

Ibrahim goes on to point out that such self-censorship has also become the norm in the media, publishing, and film business.

But read his entire article.

Weren't these attacks supposed to have been about Iraq?

The Washington Post reports that about a week before the 9/11 attacks, members of the Turkish cell who carried out the Istanbul bombings in November 2003 - the four nearly-simultaneous truck and car bomb explosions that killed 58 people and wounded 750 that targeted Jewish and British interests - met with bin Laden and obtained Al Qaeda's support and blessing for the attacks.

The organization wanted to "take action against American and Israeli targets and break their dominance over Islamic countries," a suspect in the bombings told Turkish authorities. As the Post points out, this implies the attacks were being set in motion long before the U.S. even thought about sending troops into Iraq.

Like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's franchisee in Iraq, at least for most of his "substantial collaboration" with Al Qaeda (to use a 9/11 Commission phrase), the Turkish cell was not required to pledge their fealty to bin Laden in exchange for the financial, spiritual, and logistical support, and explosives training they received in Al Qaeda's terrorist training camps then still operating in Afghanistan.

As one of the cell members told the Turkish investigators, "We are different from al-Qaeda in terms of structure, but our views and our actions are in harmony."

We'll be following the news of this trial, about to commence in Istanbul.

Is it always wrong to dance on graves and rejoice in other people's misery?

Not if this news is true - that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri is wounded and his top aide, Abu Abdullah al-Majamiai is dead, as CNN is reporting.

Unfortunately, you must delay festivities until the U.S. military can corroborate this news.

"Good energy" for a change

And these energy dollars are not making their way to radical Islam.

So why not "Shift" your source of energy?

(Be sure to watch the videos, especially you Hollywood talent agents out there.)

That Al Qaeda - winning hearts and minds in Algeria

Or is it just killing them???

The New York Times reports the Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb has claimed responsiblity for near-simultaneous explosions of seven bombs yesterday in the Algerian capital of Algier. The attacks left six dead and more than a dozen wounded.

As the Times reports, this was the worst terror attack in months by "North Africa's most active terror group." This Qaeda outfit was previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat - or more commonly by its French acronym, the GSPC.

Recall that in September, as the Washington Post reported, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's assistant, released a video on the Internet heralding the "great news" that Al Qaeda had joined forces with this group. "Our brothers," he said, "will be a thorn in the necks of the American and French crusaders and their allies, and a dagger in the hearts of the French traitors and apostates."

Since 2003, as the Post reported at the time, the GSPC the had "emerged as an umbrella for radical Islamic factions in neighboring countries, sponsoring training camps in the Sahara and supplying streams of fighters to wars in Iraq and Chechnya, according to counterterrorism officials and analysts in Europe and North Africa."

Recall that the jihad in Algeria has resulted in an estimated 200,000 deaths since its onset in 1991. The GSPC was ironically founded as a splinter group, a breakaway branch of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, which was famous for its massive slaughtering of any Algerian who didn't subscribe to their harsh reading of Islam or who refused to take up arms against the government.

The GIA's methods of elimination were brutal even by jihadist standards. A favorite practice was to enter a village and slit the throats of anyone deemed to be apostate - i.e., anyone who didn't enthusiastically embrace their views. Even bin Laden was reportedly appalled by the group's capacity for gratuitous violence against fellow Muslims.

Because of its roots in the GIA, the GSPC was not apparently entirely trusted by Al Qaeda. But the distrust began to melt away after the group started to court Bin Laden. For example, on the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Post reports, a leader of the GSPC posted a statement on the Internet saying: "We strongly and fully support Osama bin Laden's jihad against the heretic America." There were other such adoring statements until finally Al Qaeda succumbed to the GSPC's overtures and consented to a merger with the group in September.

As Algerian terrorism expert Liess Boukraa told the Post at the time of the "great news," "The leadership of al-Qaeda doesn't have a secure base left anywhere else in the world, so al-Qaeda needs the GSPC at the logistical level. The GSPC needs al-Qaeda at the ideological level."

Or as another Algerian terrorism expert, Mounir Boudjema, assessed the situation: "In terms of strategy, they have lost. The population doesn't want to have them anymore. The people in the villages refuse to give them blankets or water or food. The whole logistical network is falling apart."

I wonder if this latest attack will make them any more popular with their base in Algeria.

In a study released in March by the Saudi National Security Assessment Project on the foreign fighters in Iraq, it was found that some 22 percent were Algerian.

When news of these findings came out, I and my coauthor of Jihad and International Security (Palgrave, 2007) assumed that this was because the Algerian jihadists had worn out their welcome at home because of what was perceived as their senseless slaughtering of innocents.

As if what's now happening in Algeria isn't bad enough, the Post further reports that an Algerian underground in Europe is recruiting large numbers of Tunisians, Moroccans, Syrians and other extremists, according to Xavier Raufer, a French terrorism specialist. A cell linked to the GSPC was arrested in Casablanca in March on charges they were planning to attack a church and a subway system in Italy.

In defense of "inappropriate" challenges to the CIA

In today's Washington Post, Douglas Feith gets the opportunity to defend his pre-war questioning of the CIA's pronouncements on Iraq:

The CIA has a hard job. Some of its work has been good; some has been famously and disastrously bad, as everyone familiar with the Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction fiasco knows. Intelligence is inherently sketchy and speculative -- and historically often wrong. It is improved when policy officials freely probe and challenge it.

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.) Pentagon officials did not buy that theory, and in 2002 they gave a briefing that reflected their skepticism. Their aim was not to enthrone a different theory, but to urge the CIA not to exclude any relevant information from what it provided to policymakers. Only four top-level government officials received the briefing: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and (together) Stephen Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

A 2004 Senate intelligence committee report praised the quality of the Pentagon's Iraq-al-Qaeda work -- the critical briefing and the related Pentagon-CIA dialogue. The policy officials "played by [intelligence community] rules" and asked questions that "actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's products," it said. Levin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller both endorsed that judgment.

It was nice of the Post to give Feith this opportunity to defend himself as only days earlier, the Post had misreported the findings of a Pentagon investigation, and in doing so had skewered Feith. In a Page One story entitled "Official's Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted," Post reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith had assessed the findings this way:

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.

Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process." An unclassified summary of the full document is scheduled for release today in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs. In that summary, a copy of which was obtained from another source by The Washington Post, the inspector general concluded that Feith's assessment in 2002 that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a "mature symbiotic relationship" was not fully supported by available intelligence but was nonetheless used by policymakers. At the time of Feith's reporting, the CIA had concluded only that there was an "evolving" association, "based on sources of varying reliability."

But as the Post itself later acknowledged, this assessment of the Pentagon report was almost entirely wrong:

Correction to This Article

A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration" were also from Levin's report. The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith's office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general's report did not draw.The two reports employ similar language to characterize the activities of Feith's office: Levin's report refers to an "alternative intelligence assessment process" developed in that office, while the inspector general's report states that the office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The inspector general's report further states that Feith's briefing to the White House in 2002 "undercuts the Intelligence Community" and "did draw conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence."

Interestingly a Powerline reader received this email from Jeff Smith, one of the Post's reporters on the story.

I agree with you that this was an egregious error. I also had nothing to do with it. All I did was obtain a copy of the unclassified summary of the IG report and write a precisely correct account, which I turned over to the other reporters. I'm not happy my name was put on that story by the editors, and I was astonished by the mistake. I blew the whistle on it internally. So don't attribute the mistake to me.

Cheers,
Jeff Smith

A coming Arab-Israeli war?

Only this time they might be allied in a military strike against Iran.

Or so reports Swoop, described by the Washington Post as a "well sourced foreign policy website."

On February 9, Swoop reported that a report out of Tel Aviv claims that the Israeli political and military leadership has concluded that "Bush is finished and the US is headed for a neo-isolationist phase." Because of this belief, Swoop says Israel is "increasingly open to unilateral action against Iran."

Swoop goes on to report that "area experts have learned that the Israelis have received assurances from Saudi emissary Prince Bandar bin-Sultan that, should they go ahead, they will enjoy tacit support from the Gulf Cooperation Council states and may even be able to use airfields in Qatar for emergencies."

If you don't have time to read all the books out about Iraq

Don't miss this digest by Michael Rubin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

First of all, Michael Rubin has some idea of what's been going on in Iraq. He's spent more than 22 months in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003 and nine of those months as a governance advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

As Rubin points out, some authors have used "their Iraq narrative to promote other agendas," while others 'have substituted theory for fact or tried to propel their experience into the center of the Iraq policy debate." And then there are the books that will have a lasting impact.

According to Rubin, these are some of the best books:

In the Company of Soldiers by Rich Atkinson
No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle of Fallujah by Bing West
Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson
On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom by Col. Gregory
Fontenot (Ret.), Lt. Col. E.J. Degen, and Lt. Col. David Tohn
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor
In the Red Zone: A Journey into the Soul of Iraq by Steven Vincent
Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid
The Foreigners' Gift by Fouad Ajami
Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos (with William Patrick)
Reclaiming a Plundered Past by Magnus Bernhardsson
Memories of State by Eric Davis

And these, he says, are some of the worst:

Sleeping with Custer and the 7th Cavalry by Walter C. Rodger
Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception by Danny Schechter
Losing Iraq by David Phillips
The Assassins' Gate by George Packer
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End by Peter W. Galbraith
Squandered Victory by Larry Diamond

But read Rubin's whole analysis as there's much, much more there.

Female Genital Mutilation

Really, guys, how bad would it be to outlaw this?

The Baltimore Sun gives some well-deserved op-ed space to a German NGO which has spent at least a decade trying to focus world attention on the practice of female genital mutialion, or rather cutting, if you prefer - the practice meant to perserve a woman's sexual honor (purity) before marriage. Even Ken Livingstone, the famous multiculturalist mayor of London condemns the practice.

WADI, which has had a presence in Iraq for over ten years, published a study in 2005 which suggested that FGM is well, normal in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Sixty percent of the 1,554 girls and women they interviewed over age ten said they had undergone the procedure themselves.

Previously, most scholars believed that the practice was more or less confined to Africa (in Egypt some 90 percent of women are thought to have had this done).

Thus the WADI report that this was happening in Iraqi Kurdistan was surprising. I mean, Iraqi Kurds have been the biggest opponents of sharia, as the Christian Science Monitor observed in 2005 when news of this study first came out.

Iraqi Kurdish women told WADI staff members that any girl who did not have this procedure done would essentially be considered unmarriageable. Some thought the reason behind the practice was because women who didn't get circumcised were promiscuous or the food they cooked was unclean. Others thought the rationale had a religious component.

This is because, as one Kurdish cleric told the Monitor, most Kurds are Muslim and subscribe to the Shafii legal tradition in Islam which mandates that both men and women be circumcised. This is opposed to say the Hanbali tradition, the tradition in Saudi Arabia, which says that only men need be circumcised.

While this may be Kurdish legal tradition, a WADI staffer did tell the Monitor that in his experience, most Kurdish imams were pretty easy to convince that the practice should be abandoned.

The real die-hards the Monitor went on to report, were the older women. They apparently just can't be convinced that men would really stay with uncircumcised women over the long-haul.

(Were they also suggesting that this may be the reason for our high divorce rate here in the West?)

Anyway, the good news is that after some initial embarrassment and denial, Iraqi Kurdish politicos of all stripes seem to be finally swallowing their pride and are at least willing to discuss the problem.

As Thomas Von Der Osten-Sacken and Thomas Uwer write in the Sun, "perhaps the most important factor enabling an NGO to uncover the problem of FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan was the existence of civil society structures and popular demand for individual rights."

I think what they mean to say here is that if liberal seculary democracy survives in Iraq, female genital mutilation won't.

And now we end on a tragi-comic note. When WADI presented these findings in Vienna (i.e., in front of the UN and other human rights' organizations) this spring, some Iraqi groups suggested that WADI was only airing these ugly secrets because, yes, you guessed it, WADI is an Israeli agent.

Those Zionists, even behind the plot to eliminate female genital mutilation.

You can see a longer discussion of this issue in the latest issue of the Middle East Quarterly, "Is female genitual mutilation an Islamic problem?"

This should kill intelligent debate

Group think must rule.

While a Pentagon investigation headed by Inspector General Thomas F. Gimbel found that there was nothing illegal about the Pentagon's independent analysis of the nation's prewar intelligence, it deemed such independent study as "inappropriate" according to the New York Times report on the conclusions of the investigation which were only released to Congress on Thursday.

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon found the conclusion baffling:

Describing the [Pentagon's prewar] work as a “fresh, critical look” at intelligence agency conclusions about Al Qaeda and Iraq, the Pentagon rebuttal said, “It is somewhat difficult to understand how activities that admittedly were lawful and authorized (in this case by either the secretary of defense or the deputy secretary of defense) could nevertheless be characterized as ‘inappropriate.’ ”

No kidding. The underlying message here is that skeptics should just drink the kool-aid and then keep their mouths shut.

Formal dissent within the US intelligence community?

The New York Sun's Eli Lake reports that four out of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies have issued a formal dissent to the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq.

Lake says these dissenting agencies are objecting to the report's conclusion that Al Qaeda is only playing a small role in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

The dissenting agencies are reportedly the Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the military intelligence bureaus of the Army and Marines. They oppose the conclusions of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and others, according to Lake.

While Lake's sources may very well be right, I myself can't see what the dissenters are allegedly talking about, at least not in the summary of the NIE that has been de-classified.

This de-classified version mentions al Qaeda (actually al-Qa'ida as they prefer to spell it) in two separate paragraphs. First:

Extremists—most notably the Sunni jihadist group al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI) and Shia
oppositionist Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) — continue to act as very effective accelerators
for what has become a self-sustaining inter-sectarian struggle between Shia and
Sunnis.

And second:

The Intelligence Community judges that the term “civil war” does not adequately
capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia
violence, al-Qa’ida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread
criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term “civil war” accurately
describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-
sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian
mobilization, and population displacements.

But in any case, Lake says that these formal dissenters contend that Al Qaeda is not just a "very effective accelerator" of the insurgency, as the majority holds, but rather the new authority to whom the Sunnis, including the Baathists, the former regime elements, have conceded authority.

Specifically, this would make the head of the Sunni insurgency Abu Ayoub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he was, uh, promoted to Paradise by U.S. forces last June.

Lake seems to believe that in its assessment, the CIA is trying to make the case that, as he puts it, "Iraq is not a central front in the war on Al Qaeda," in order to undermine the President's war strategy.

The dissenting views, he says, are all fairly similar to those of Marine Colonel Peter Devlin, head of Marine intelligence in the Anbar province, the seat of the Sunni insurgency, as expressed in a classified assessment that was revealed by the Washington Post in September.

Where am I?

Somebody suggested I should include a map for those whose geography is a little weak.

Right now I'm in Dubai. And it's totally fascinating for all sorts of reasons. Among them, 97 percent of the population is foreign.

Is jihad in Kashmir the result of being mystified?

Kashmiri shawls

Let's hope that this new book by Indian political scientist Navnita Chadha Behera (no relation that I know of), Demystifying Kashmir will straighten out everyone's thinking about Kashmir and finally bring about an end to the jihad, I mean inter-state conflict - or whatever it is that has caused so many deaths and such economic devastation for so many decades.

While I don't necessarily agree that Chadha "breaks new ground," as the Brookings Institute catalog puts it, because she frames "the conflict as a political battle of statemaking between India and Pakistan rather than as a rigid and ideological Hindu-Muslim conflict," I do think she's right to remind everyone of the "rich, complex, and multi-faceted" nature of Kashmir and the fact that this Himalayan state was the beloved homeland of many different ethnic groups and religious faiths before all the ethnic cleansing began.

Now whether recalling these historical details will really convince the warring parties to come together and call a truce, well, I'm in the agnostic camp on this one. That said, I do think this is one of those instances where maybe some persistent faith could work some magic.

I remember the first time I saw Notre Dame in Paris. "Do you believe in God," I asked my traveling companion, who prefers to remain anonymous.

"Does it matter?" he responded. "Look at what faith built."

On that note....But before we leave the subject of Kashmir, I'm happy to report that in spite of the jihad or whatever it is that is going on up there, Kashmiri shawl designs only get more and more fabulous.

As my anonymous traveling companion put it when I showed him my latest purchases, "Uh-oh, Italy has to be getting worried."

More Kashmiri shawls

And by the way, these were the cheap ones and these photographs do them absolutely no justice.

Fly the falcon-friendly skies of Etihad Airways

But "snub-nosed" dogs not welcome.

We are on our way from Mumbai to Abu Dhabi and because our flight was delayed, I was surfing the website of Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates national airlines, when I came across this information:

Can I travel with my pet on Etihad Airways?

...The following pets are accepted for travel, subject to the shipment meeting all necessary requirements.

• Birds
• Cats
• Dogs (excluding any snub-nosed types)
• Falcons (allowed inside the aircraft cabin on Etihad flights)

No "Snub-nosed types [of dogs]" allowed? What's the story behind that prohibition?

Still, glad to know I could travel with a falcon - and in the cabin.

CIA appoints "James" to run Baghdad station

Ken Silverstein at Harpers.org, the website of Harper's Magazine, has an interesting profile of the person referred to as "James" who the CIA has supposedly named to head its Baghdad station. Silverstein implies he knows who James really is but cannot reveal this information for legal reasons. So long as he stops short of naming him, Silverstein feels comfortable revealing a great deal about this James person - and about the Agency itself.

Particularly interesting about Silverstein's account were the reasons his sources in the intelligence community believe that James is a poor candidate for this position.

These sources - most identified as government officials - object to James not because he supposedly "triggered" the jihad in Algeria in the 1990s, as Silverstein suggests, or because he was head of Alec Station, the CIA unit focused on bin Laden that failed to predict 9/11. Neither did James disqualify himself, according to Silverstein's sources, when as head of the Kabul station, he let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, or because he again failed to find him in Pakistan when he then went to run the station in Islamabad, after bin Laden supposedly left Afghanistan.

No, the real problem with James, Silverstein's sources suggest, is that he was a key advocate of the CIA's interrogation policies, specifically those designed to quickly extract information from high-value intelligence sources (namely al Qaeda leaders) before their fellow travelers realized they had been nabbed. “These guys believed that the memos written by [Albert] Gonzalez and lawyers at the CTC gave them the legal authority to do what they wanted,” Silverstein's source, identified as "a former official," reportedly told him. “But in my view that was just stuff we were writing to ourselves."

In other words, James's greatest failing, according to his critics in the intelligence community, is that he is no bureaucrat, that is, he is not someone who is content with generating memos, well, for the sake of generating memos. Not surprisingly they also say he is a "terrible manager" because he "creates a lot of tension" in the workplace. Perhaps because he expected his subordinates to produce results?

What these sources really seem to be revealing here is, if this is the mentality that he has had to work with, maybe James isn't to blame after all for not being able to find bin Laden in all these years and different places.

The face of poverty in India

And one of the hundreds of millions of reasons why it never seems as hideous as it probably should.



Imagine what this girl will look like if she ever gets enough money to really express her sense of style.

[Reporting now from Mumbai, India.]