The 9/11 Generation versus the Baby Boomers

Dean Barnett writes in The Weekly Standard:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Now here is some of what Barnett says about the 9/11 generation. Specifically those who responded to the terror attacks by enlisting in the U.S. military:

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who--contrary to John Kerry's infamous "botched joke" ("Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq")--could have chosen to do anything with their lives. Having signed up, they have either gone to Iraq or look forward to doing so.

One National Guardsman, Sergeant Joseph Moseley, 28, went to Iraq only to have part of his leg leg muscle blown away - an injury, Barnett says, that will probably plague him forever:

Yet when asked about his time in Iraq, Moseley speaks with evident pride. He says the fact that he took the brunt of the IED's blow means he did his job. None of the men serving under him was seriously injured. When asked how he would feel about being characterized as a victim, Sergeant Moseley bristles. "I'm not a victim," he says. "It's insulting. That's what we signed up for. I knew what I was doing."

As Barnett continues:

Tom Cotton is another soldier who knew what he was doing. When 9/11 occurred, Cotton was in his third year at Harvard Law School. Like most Americans, he was "shocked, saddened, and angered." Like many on that day, he made a promise to serve his country.

And Cotton meant it. After fulfilling the commitments he had already made, including clerking for a federal judge and going to work for a large Washington law firm, Cotton enlisted in the Army. He jokes that doing so came with a healthy six-figure pay cut. . .

According to Barnett the above two accounts weren't unique either:

Regardless of their backgrounds, the soldiers I spoke with had a similar matter-of-fact style. Not only did all of them bristle at the notion of being labeled victims, they bristled at the idea of being labeled heroes. To a man, they were doing what they saw as their duty. Their self-assessments lacked the sense of superiority that politicians of a certain age who once served in the military often display. . .

In England last week, I talked to an officer in the Royal Navy who had just received his Ph.D. He was saying he thought the larger war would last 20-30 years; I've always thought a generation--mine in particular. Our highest calling: To defend our way of life and Western Civilization; fight for the freedom of others; protect our friends, family, and country; and give hope to a people long without it.

As Barnett concludes:

It is surely a measure of how far we've come as a society from the dark days of the 1960s that things like military service and duty and sacrifice are now celebrated. Just because Washington and Hollywood haven't noticed this generational shift doesn't mean it hasn't occurred. It has, and it's seismic.

For some reason this story made me recall one about a young North Korean that was published in the International Herald Tribune recently.

Perhaps I made this connection because I remember hearing about Baby Boomers who, while they railing against U.S. policies, were at the same time singing the praises of dictators like Kim il-sung, the father of this Leninist-Marxist, er, paradise.

Anyway, this young North Korean, Shin, actually lived in this utopia Baby Boomers were only imagining. He grew up in a prison camp:

"I got to visit my mother only once or twice a year," Shin said. "I never saw my whole family together. I don't think I saw my brother more than a few times."

There were up to 1,000 children but no textbooks in the school at Valley No. 2, the part of the camp where Shin lived. Pupils were taught to read and write, and to add and subtract, but little more. After school, children worked in the fields or mines. In most of North Korea, villages are decorated with Communist slogans and portraits of Kim Jong Il. Valley No. 2 had only one slogan carved into a wooden plaque: "Everyone obey the regulations!"

Inmates were fed the same meal three times a day: a bowl of steamed corn and a salty vegetable broth. They scavenged whatever else they could find: cucumbers and potatoes from the fields, frogs, mice, dragonflies and locusts. Shin said he once ate corn kernels he found in cow droppings. When a teacher found a girl had hidden wheat grains in her pocket, he beat her on the head with a stick. She died the next day.

As the Tribune continues:

Shin's life changed in 1996, when his mother and brother were accused of trying to escape. Guards interrogated him in an underground torture cell about a suspected family plot to flee the camp. They stripped and hung him by his arms and legs from the ceiling, and held him over hot charcoal.

After having to see his mother and brother shot right in front of him, Shin eventually managed to escape to South Korea.

But unfortunately, he didn't find paradise there either, as the Tribune reports:

Now in Seoul, [Shin] said he sometimes finds life "more burdensome than the hardest labor in the prison camp, where I only had to do what I was told." His limited vocabulary has caused him to fail twice the written driver's license test. And there is his struggle to reconcile with his dead mother.

"However I try, I can't forgive her," he said. "She and my brother severely hurt me and my father by trying to escape. Didn't she think what would happen to us?"

Shin said he sometimes wished he could return to the time before he learned about the greater world, "without knowing that we were in a prison camp, without knowing that there was a place called South Korea."

Well, apparently Iraqis aren't the only ones in the position of recalling life under a dictatorship as relatively paradise-like.

I mean isn't this what the Baby Boomers keep saying too? Isn't this the sentiment behind, say, Michael Moore's portrayal of Iraq under Saddam as a place where all the children flew kites, the women never had to cover, and all the pretty girls could date the president's sons without any interference from religious fanatics?

Should the U.S. give up on Musharraf?

Here's the New York Times' analysis of the situation:

...as a National Intelligence Estimate released last week makes clear, the Bush White House finds itself in a similar predicament. Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the wild west tribal areas of Pakistan. It is stronger than at any time in years, and it is actively plotting new attacks.

Putting aside for the moment that this NIE is a CIA work product and therefore may not be reliable (see post below), assume for a moment things are as it says they are in Pakistan. This poses the obvious question: is the General cum President Pervez Musharraf part of the problem or part of the solution?

Here is what The Times says:

[E]vents in Pakistan in recent weeks have at last presented the opportunity for a serious campaign against Islamic radicals in Pakistan, if it’s not already too late. The breakdown of a cease-fire between elders in the tribal lands of Pakistan and the government of President Pervez Musharraf, combined with the determination that General Musharraf showed earlier this month when he ordered an assault on the Red Mosque complex in Islamabad, may have finally given President Bush something his predecessor never had: a partner who may at long last be persuaded to go after an entrenched terrorist haven.

As the Times goes on to report, "Pakistan experts" seem to think that the upcoming presidential elections may be just the "impetus for action" Musharraf needs to muster up the courage to take control of these historically tribal lands. If he succeeds, this would be the first time these areas would fall under control of Islamabad.

But the challenges General Musharraf faces are not trivial, the Times goes on to suggest:

[Pakistan's army is] designed, trained and equipped to fight India in Kashmir and deter New Dehli with nuclear weapons. That requires a dramatically different kind of strategy from what is needed in the tribal areas, whose leaders do not consider themselves part of Pakistan.

As far as what the U.S.'s immediate options are - covert action, airstrikes, or a massive ground invasion - they all seem lousy. As the Times concludes:

Yet, when asked how the United States would respond if Al Qaeda were to plot a successful attack on the United States from the tribal areas, the answer from one intelligence officials was direct: “We’d go in and flatten it.”

Before you bother reading the latest NIE

Or any National Intelligence Estimate produced by the CIA, read this book for background on the agency that produces these reports.


Or, at least today's New York Times review. Here is how the review opens:

America’s foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence Agency. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister Chou En-lai asked about C.I.A. subversion. Kissinger told Chou that he “vastly overestimates the competence of the C.I.A.” Chou persisted that “whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of.” Kissinger acknowledged, “That is true, and it flatters them, but they don’t deserve it.”

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

Tim Weiner’s engrossing, comprehensive “Legacy of Ashes” is a litany of failure, from the C.I.A.’s early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet’s now infamous “slam dunk” line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A. train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days — a great reputation and a terrible record.”

And here is how the review closes:

Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the C.I.A.’s golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the C.I.A., most notably Thomas Powers in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying.

The Times reviewer, incidentally, was Evan Thomas, himself an author of a book on the CIA: "The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA."

Apparently the Very Best weren't good enough after all. But the myth was certainly entertaining - unless of course you were sent into one of those battlefronts the CIA was only pretending to understand.

Fatah militants in the West Bank announce ceasefire

The New York Times reports:

Scores of West Bank Palestinian militants taken off Israel’s wanted list as a gesture to President Mahmoud Abbas are handing in weapons and signing pledges to cease violence against Israel, saying they want to give Mr. Abbas a chance to consolidate his rule here. . .

“Everything must come to an end,” said Mahdi Maraka, an Aksa Brigades leader from Al Ein refugee camp here in Nablus, a traditional hotbed of Fatah militancy in the northern West Bank. “There are two tracks, the political and the military. Now is the time for the political stage.”

Nasr Kharaz, 31, an armed militant and spokesman for the Brigades in the West Bank, said, “The military wing of Fatah has stopped armed resistance at this stage.”

Let's hope this really does signal the beginning of a new era. As one Aksa fighter, Khalil Abayat, 45, summed up the general sentiment (including that of this armchair spectator to this conflict): “Enough. I’m exhausted. I just want to rest.”

"The REAL IRANIANS"

I'm IRANIAN, originally uploaded by HORIZON.

Be sure to check out the rest of Horizon's series of photos of "the REAL IRANIANS" - or as he writes, "the ones who LOVE OTHERS and HATE NOBODY."

What if it's not all about Greater Power after all?

Richard Bulliet channels what should be a major concern sweeping across the Middle East, not to mention the world. From Agence Global via the Pacific Free Press:

For over a century, the wise heads who populate every Middle Eastern teahouse, university podium, and diplomatic reception have agreed on one simple truth: foreign agents acting in the interest of imperialist powers -- today it’s the United States -- dictate every political event from Casablanca to Islamabad. Ayatollah Khomeini was an American puppet. So was Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden? A tool of the CIA, the same CIA that duped poor old Saddam into invading Kuwait. The Saud family are tools of the Bush family. Or vice versa. Needless to add, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were staged by Israelis, or perhaps by a rogue element within America’s military-industrial complex.

However nutty these conspiracy theories seem, they offer something that “the roadmap,” “democratization,” and “stand the Iraqis up so we can stand down” all lack: assurance that somehow, somewhere everything makes sense. That the rattles and grinding noises that sound like an imminent breakdown of the engine of politics are actually the normal vibrations of an invisible and omnipotent imperialist machine.

But trust in the all-controlling imperialist machine is fast running out. To the bewilderment of local pundits, suspicion is mounting that American actions in the region actually are as incompetent as they appear to be. Informants who once volunteered, with a wink and a nod, their deep “inside knowledge” of CIA activities and American strategic designs now anxiously ask: “What in the world is the Bush administration up to?” Maybe it's not a conspiracy. Maybe there is no master plan.

I wonder if the next big question on the regional agenda might not be and what if there's no master plan at all? What would happen if the birthplace of monotheism suddenly started challenging all of its basic assumptions?

If that seems, well, like a capital crime to you, pause for a moment and cogitate on the implications of the issues raised in the latest issue of the Middle East Quarterly: "Palestinians, Jebusites, and Evangelicals."

In this article, a master's in Christian studies, David Wenkel, investigates the Palestinians' claim that they have a historical claim to Jerusalem that trumps the Jews'.

I know that after I read this piece, all I could think was monotheism - and the region that gave birth to it - really are doomed if this is what it's all about in the end.

And what next? That we should all be sent back to where our DNA says we come from?

Hey, after you. Be sure to call when you get there.

Former member of British Hizb ut-Tahrir speaks

More on the presidential campaign in Pakistan

Just as I suspected, all this violence in Pakistan is, well, serving some people's political ends. As the Financial Times reports:

General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's US-backed military ruler, faced calls to resign yesterday after attacks by Islamist militants claimed at least 54 more lives, bringing the death toll since Saturday to 184.

Pakistan has been torn by extremist violence since Gen Musharraf ordered commandos to storm a mosque in Islamabad on July 10, a move that led to the death of at least 75 Islamists and promises of revenge from al-Qaeda and militant groups.

Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for the Pakistan People's party, said: "The military government has failed to contain militancy and should resign to pave the way for a democratically-elected government that has the consent of the people behind it."

As a leading Pakistani pundit opined:

"We are getting increasingly sucked in to the fallout from the Afghan war," said Ayaz Amir, a leading Pakistani political commentator. "The solution lies in restoring full civilian rule. Only then will we be able to unite Pakistanis for fighting for this cause."

In other words, this is presidential campaigning, Pakistani style.

If you think American presidential campaigns are nasty...

In Pakistan, they're downright bloody. From the South Asian news service, the ANI:

The opposition Pakistan Peoples Party has blamed former military ruler General Zia ul Haq's remnants for the Islamist attack that took at least 17 lives in Islamabad on Tuesday.

'The mastermind behind the blasts and suicide attacks wants to create an impression across the world that an Islamist movement runs in Pakistan,' former federal ministers Khursheed Shah, Yousuf Talpur and Professor N D Khan and former Senator Taj Haider said in a joint statement.

Almost three hundred people have been killed in the past several weeks. While Mssrs. Shah, Talpur, and Haider's theory is not the only one out there, the wave of killings does seem to have something to do with stakeholders in the upcoming presidential elections.

The head of the PPP, incidentally, is Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan who now lives in exile and is by all accounts keen to return - if she gets to run things.

Lebanon's senior Shiite cleric on civil war and Al Qaeda in Lebanon

And on whether Shiites have been creating chaos in the region lately. From The (Beirut) Daily Star:

Senior Shiite cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah said Thursday that a civil war is not likely to erupt in Lebanon. "Neither the United States nor other international forces want a civil war to happen in Lebanon because it will complicate things even more in the region," Fadlallah told As-Safir newspaper in an interview published Thursday.

Hmmm, I wonder why he remains conspicuously silent on whether the Lebanese are willing to go to war with themselves...Is this because even someone in his position can't predict what the militias will do? (Note that he has always resisted being called the spiritual leader of Hizbullah though the leadership of Hizbullah certainly looks to him for guidance.) Or is he just offering up the usual excuse - that all problems in the region can be attributed to meddlesome outsiders?

Anyway, as the Star report continued:

Asked whether the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization had any significant presence or influence in Lebanon, Fadlallah replied that they do. "However," he added, "they cannot be as harmful as they are in Afghanistan or Iraq for their area of operations is a lot more restrained."

...Fadllalah also defended Shiites in the Middle East. "They have not played a negative role in the Arab world despite the marginalization and oppression they are subject to ... and in Lebanon they are among the keenest sects to preserve security," Fadlallah said.

And some more words of encouragement from the cleric:

He said Shiites are open to cooperation with other sects to make Lebanon a "sovereign, free and independent, country."

Fadlallah said Hizbullah's arms were never used against the Lebanese, "and they will surrender their weapons as soon as we have a strong state capable of protecting its citizens."

"Shiites do no want Iran or Syria to rule over Lebanon ... they want to be equal with citizens from other sects, and any other description is not acceptable," he added.

Well, let's just hope someone other than me gets this important message.

Taliban: The world's most incompetent suicide bombers?

I'm sure you've heard the alarming statistics. As Brian Glyn Williams, an Islamic historian at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, writes in this month's Terrorism Monitor:

Suicide bombing statistics from Afghanistan alarmingly demonstrate that, if the current trend continues, 2007 will surpass last year in the number of overall attacks. While there were 47 bombings by mid-June 2006, there have been approximately 57 during the same period this year. . .

But as he goes on to say:

An analysis of the attacks carried out in the last two years reveals a curious fact. In 43% of the bombings conducted last year and in 26 of the 57 bombings traced in this study up to June 15, the only death caused by the bombing was that of the bomber himself. Astoundingly, approximately 90 suicide bombers in this two year period succeeded in killing only themselves. This number exceeds 100 when you factor in those who succeeded in killing only one person in addition to themselves. There was one period in the spring of 2006 (February 20 to June 21) when a stunning 26 of the 36 suicide bombers in Afghanistan (72%) only killed themselves. This puts the kill average for Afghan suicide bombers far below that of suicide bombers in other theaters of action in the area (Israel, Chechnya, Iraq and the Kurdish areas of Turkey).

Now why would this be? After discounting theories that this is because as Pashtuns, the Taliban fedayeen have some higher moral standard than your average suicide bomber, Willams reports:

Members of the Afghan police, government and National Directorate of Security (NDS) who were interviewed about this trend during the months of April and May 2007 offered a surprisingly unanimous explanation for the Taliban bombers' poor showing [2]. The cause for the Afghan suicide bombers' underwhelming performance, they claimed, lay in the ineptitude of the people the Taliban were recruiting as fedayeen (suicide) bombers. Afghan officials continually told stories of lower class people who had been seduced, bribed, tricked, manipulated or coerced into blowing themselves up as "weapons of God" or "Mullah Omar's missiles." Afghan NDS officials also spoke of apprehended bombers who were deranged, retarded, mentally unstable or on drugs.

Another factor that may explain the Taliban bombers incompetence is that they are notorious for recruiting children for these deadly missions.

In one case, a powerful tribal chieftain in Khost province who discovered that his son had been recruited by Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani for a "martyrdom operation" managed to get him back (after threatening to attack the Taliban with his tribe); unfortunately, this is an exception, as is the recent case of a captured 14 year-old suicide bomber who was personally pardoned by President Hamid Karzai, who announced, "Today we are facing a hard fact, that is a Muslim child was sent to madrassa to learn Islamic subjects, but the enemies of Afghanistan misled him toward suicide and prepared him to die and kill." ...

As disturbing as this video is, it pales in comparison to the discovery Afghan security officials recently made in eastern Afghanistan. In an incident that caused tears of fury among local villagers, a six year-old street urchin approached an Afghan security checkpoint and claimed that he had been cornered by the Taliban and fitted with a suicide bomber vest. They had told him to walk up to a U.S. patrol and press a button on the vest that would "spray flowers" (Daily Mail, June 26). Fortunately, the quick thinking boy instead asked for help, and the suicide bomb vest was subsequently removed.

And yet the unnamed CIA officials who contributed to the recent National Intelligence Estimate say the Taliban and it's partner in crime, Al Qaeda, are stronger than ever. Frankly, I don't buy it.

Scenes from Al Qaeda's alleged safe haven in Pakistan

Cute kids.

Uploaded on June 5, 2007 by (s@jj@d)~`~DiL~AwAiZ~`~

Nice pets.

Uploaded on September 16, 2006 by (s@jj@d)~`~DiL~AwAiZ~`~

Overall, not a bad spot, I have to say. Check out the photos in earlier posts too.

Is this where Bin Laden is hiding?

Doesn't look like it would be such a hardship assignment to check this area out.

On going towards Mahodand Lake Uploaded on 28 December 2005 by Heartkins

Not a bad place to take refuge

This is what part of the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, alleged to one of Al Qaeda's post-Tora Bora sanctuaries looks like.

Uploaded on December 26, 2005 by Heartkins

And now for my favorite story of the day....

Even better than yesterday's item about the 52-year-old five-times-married Briton becoming Bin Laden's 27-year-old son's second wife.

From the New York Times:

For more than a year, the leader of one the most notorious insurgent groups in Iraq was said to be a mysterious Iraqi called Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

As the titular head of the Islamic State in Iraq, Mr. Baghdadi issued incendiary pronouncements. Despite claims by an Iraqi Interior Ministry official in May that Mr. Baghdadi had been killed, he appeared to have persevered unscathed.

On Wednesday, the chief United States military spokesman here, Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, provided a new explanation for Mr. Baghdadi’s ability to escape attack: he never existed.

General Bergner told reporters that a senior Iraqi insurgent captured this month said that the elusive Mr. Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose declarations on audiotape were read by a man named Abu Abdullah al-Naima.

General Bergner said the ruse was devised by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Although the group is mostly Iraqi, much of its leadership is foreign, and Mr. Masri was reportedly trying to mask the outsiders’ dominant role.

As the Times report continues:

General Bergner said that Mr. Masri’s ploy was to invent Mr. Baghdadi, a figure whose very name was meant to establish an Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq, and then arrange for Mr. Masri to swear allegiance to him.

Adding to the deception, he said, the deputy leader in Osama bin Laden’s group Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, publicly supported Mr. Baghdadi in video and Internet statements.

The captured insurgent who was said to have alerted the Americans was identified as Khalid Abdul Fatah Daoud Mahmud al-Mashadani, who was said to have been detained by American forces in Mosul on July 4.

According to General Bergner, Mr. Mashadani is the most senior Iraqi operative in Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. According to some reports, he served in Saddam Hussein’s Special Republican Guard and later became an insurgent with the group Ansar Al Sunna. About two and a half years ago, Mr. Mashadani joined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, where he served as the Media Emir, or publicity director, the general said.

General Bergner said that Mr. Mashadani was also an intermediary between Mr. Masri in Iraq and Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, whom the Bush administration says are remotely supporting and guiding Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The Times, being the fair and balanced speaker of truth to power it is, suggests that the real deception here may well be the Bush administration's:

An important part of the American strategy against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has been to drive wedges between the group, other insurgent groups and the Sunni population, and General Bergner’s briefing continued that theme.

This is, of course, why the Times is now calling Al Qaeda in Iraq Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Does this mean, as James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal suggests, that we should also start referring to the Times as the New Amsterdam Times?

On the latest National Intelligence Estimate...

Since it says nothing new or intelligent as far as I'm concerned, I'm going to pass on the opportunity to comment about it here.

I do have one question: How much did this rehash cost?

There better be something in the still classified part that could justify this expense, but...I doubt it.

The problem in Pakistan is not the madrasahs

According to many experts.

As Robert Templer of the International Crisis Group told RFE/RL:

"It is the secular education that needs to be improved. If people in Pakistan are given a choice, they will send their children to the better-run schools -- no matter what their religious convictions are. Wealthy and well-educated Pakistanis do not go to madrasahs. They go to a whole host of other schools, but certainly not madrasahs. What is needed is a state system that provides opportunities for far more people than it currently does."

Of course that's not to deny, as Templer goes on to note:

"There are a small number of very extreme madrasahs like the Red Mosque that need to be closed down," Templer says. "These are institutes that are fostering sectarian violence. They've caused thousands of deaths in the past decades. They are training militants. They are preaching hatred. They are a source of dangerous publications, tape recordings, preachings. These need to be closed down. I don't think any modern state could tolerate essentially vigilante armies in its own territory operating in this way. And I don't think these madrasahs are 'reformable' as such. They need to be closed down."

But as as the RFE/RL continued:

"We can see how the madrasahs have responded to the [Red Mosque] crisis," [Rasul Baksh] Rais[, a newspaper columnist and political scientist] says. "The federation of religious institutions has cut the two madrasahs [at the Red Mosque complex] from their [accreditation] list. They cut them off the list and they did not give them any legitimacy or any recognition. We don't see any uprisings at any major madrasahs throughout the country.

Forget all the polls on Muslims who claim they want shariah

Because here is the bottom line. From the Financial Times:

Two Dubai institutions are teaming up to launch Waqf Trust Services, the first firm exclusively to offer Shariah-compliant trust services.

The Dubai International Financial Centre’s investment arm and Dubai Islamic Bank have joined forces to meet demand in the region for financial succession planning and other trust-related services that follow Islamic guidelines.

So how many Muslims are really willing to put their money where their mouths are even if this means that they might have to choose the Islamic over the profitable?

According to Standard & Poor's only about 20 per cent of investors in the Gulf and Muslim Asia would be willing to do this.

I suspect these numbers are high. If these figures were correct, why hasn't this type of vehicle been offered before?

Is this what all second-term presidents do at the end of their tenure?

Try to bring about Middle East peace? President Clinton did it. As the New York Times reports, President Bush seems to be headed that way too:

President Bush announced an initiative on Monday to shore up the Palestinian president and to begin building a Palestinian state, signaling that his administration will use its remaining months to make a major push for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mr. Bush called for a regional peace conference.... He exhorted Israel’s Arab neighbors to open talks with Israel and to show leadership by “ending the fiction that Israel does not exist” and “stopping the incitement of hatred in their official media.”

He also urged them to send cabinet-level visitors to Israel, a request directed implicitly at America’s closest Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, which has refused to do so...

He even took a rare jab at Israel, using the word “occupation” to refer to the Israeli presence in the West Bank.

As the Times points out, this is a "pivotal shift" in the Bush administration's previous policy:

For several years, the Bush administration has eschewed direct engagement in peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, and has refused to press Israel to dismantle settlements or to sit down at the table with Palestinian counterparts to discuss a future Palestinian state.

But now the United States is mired in Iraq and looking for a way to build good will among Arab allies that have pushed for America to re-engage in Middle East peace talks. Administration officials also are hoping to capitalize on growing anti-Hamas sentiment among leaders in Egypt and Jordan. Both of those countries have diplomatic relations with Israel; the big question remains whether Saudi Arabia, which does not, will embrace the administration’s approach

Maybe I'm wrong that this focus on Middle East peace is limited to second-term presidents. As the Times recalls:

The most notable previous Middle East peace conference was a regional meeting held in Madrid in 1991 under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union and the United States during the administration of the first President Bush.

Anyway, let's hope this second Bush administration's late-term peace processing doesn't just lead to more violence - the end result of previous administrations' efforts.

How did I miss this story?

Now usually celebrity gossip doesn't interest me (much). That said, this item reported by the London Times already a week ago sure was fascinating:

A British woman has married a son of Osama bin Laden after a holiday romance and is to apply for a visa so that he can visit Britain, The Times has learnt.

Jane Felix-Browne, a 51-year-old grandmother and parish councillor from Cheshire, has until now kept her marriage to Omar Ossama bin Laden, 27, secret from everyone apart from her immediate family and close friends. But she has now agreed to speak about her relationship with bin Laden’s fourth eldest son.

The couple reportedly met when the already five-times married Mrs Felix-Browne, was in Egypt seeking treatment for her multiple sclerosis. (Note that this is how desperate a patient in national health system must be.)

She says he fell in love with her at first sight, when he saw her riding a horse at the Great Pyramid. (And I thought the pyramids were to be disdained by Salafis, being the pre-Islamic monuments they are.)

This, incidentally, is her second marriage to a Saudi man. She married her first when she was 19.

As the Times report continues:

Omar bin Laden left Saudi Arabia as a child when his father was expelled for his extremist beliefs, his wife said. Living in exile in Sudan and then Afghanistan, he saw at first hand the creation of al-Qaeda and its techniques. Mrs Felix-Browne said: “I never had any problem with his past. Omar did not do anything wrong. He was a child when he was in Afghanistan.”

She said that her husband left Afghanistan before the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. However, some reports claim that he split from his father only after the attack on New York and an argument about tactics.

Mrs Felix-Browne insisted: “He last saw his father in 2000 when they were both in Afghanistan. He left his father because he did not feel it was right to fight or to be in an army. Omar was training to be a soldier and he was only 19.

“He told me he has had no contact with his father since the day he left him. He misses his father. Omar doesn’t know if it was his father who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I don’t think we will ever know.”

I wonder if that last remark means that Omar doesn't think his father was behind the attacks. Does that mean Omar thinks his father lies and tries to steal credit then?

Anyway, as the Times story continues:

Apart from their religion the couple appear to have little in common. She has three sons and five grandchildren and is a respected parish councillor in the village of Moulton. She has had various jobs, including restoring houses and aircraft, and is a keen rider and scuba diver.

He works as a scrap metal dealer in Jedda and is one of at least 17 children fathered by bin Laden. His father’s reputation means that he has been ostracised by the wealthy and powerful bin Laden family and is under surveillance by the security services in Saudi Arabia.

Mrs Felix-Browne, who now uses the Islamic name Zaina Mohamad, says that she speaks to her husband for several hours every day over the internet or by telephone. During their conversations she refers to him repeatedly as “Habibi”, the Arabic for “my love”. She said: “I find it very difficult to live without him and I know he does too. But really we have the most normal life possible."

Did she really just say their life was normal? Well, perhaps by the standards of someone who has been married five times before. As the Times continues:

She was aware before her marriage that her husband already had another wife and a two-year-old child. “I haven’t seen her but I have spoken to her for about an hour on the telephone,” she said. “She is fine about it.”

I have to say, I doubt this marriage is normal even by Saudi - or Bin Laden - standards. If you want to see pictures, you have to click the link to the Times story (above).