John Pomfret makes the connection:

I've never really been able to take China nationalism that seriously. It's like some of the comments on my blog. There's no shortage of passion but it's also curiously skin deep. It's often a foil for anti-government feelings, employed by Chinese who are actually fed up with Communist Party rule but aren't allowed to say it. Finally, it often masks deeper divisions in Chinese society. Whenever I read a Chinese blogger urging an anti-foreign boycott or some other type of joint action, I'm reminded of the telling saying that Chinese have about themselves. "A Chinese alone equals the power of a dragon, but three Chinese, nothing but an insect."

A British teacher in Sudan was convicted of "insulting Islam because her class of 7-year-olds named a teddy bear Muhammad," according to the New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman. He has more information on the Sudanese reaction, which is a bit varied:

Hundreds of demonstrators in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, poured into the streets on Friday demanding the execution of a British teacher who was convicted of insulting Islam because her class of 7-year-olds named a teddy bear Muhammad....

Despite the display of outrage, witnesses said that many of the protesters were government employees ordered to demonstrate, and that aside from a large gathering outside the presidential palace, most of Khartoum was quiet. Imams across the city brought up the case in sermons after Friday Prayer, but few of them urged violence.

“This woman gave an idol the name of Muhammad, which is not acceptable,” said Ahmed Muhammad, the imam at a mosque in Khartoum 2, an upscale section of town. But, he added, the proper response was more nuanced: “We have to first respect ourselves, and then others will respect us.”

Teachers at Unity High have stood by their colleague, noting that the first complaint came only last week despite the fact that parents had been aware of the class bear's name since September.

During an eight-hour court proceeding on Thursday, it emerged that a school secretary had been the first to raise the alarm. Teachers have alleged that Gibbons was the victim of a staffer trying to discredit the school rather than an offended parent....

The case is an embarrassment for the Sudanese government, whose policies in Darfur have helped make it an international pariah. But the government is hamstrung by extremist elements, who will capitalize on any perception that Khartoum is bowing to British pressure, said Professor Elteyb Hag Ateya, director of Khartoum University's peace research institute.

"There is a sort of "who is the best Muslim?" competition to this whole thing which makes it difficult for the government to be seen to back down," he said.

UPDATE: Lydia Polgreen has a front-pager today iin the New York Times about yet another country that has incorporated sharia into its justice system -- Nigeria. The outcome, however, is at variance with initial expectations:

When Muslim-dominated states like Kano adopted Islamic law after the fall of military rule in 1999, radical clerics from the Arabian peninsula arrived in droves to preach a draconian brand of fundamentalism, and newly empowered religious judges handed down tough punishments like amputation for theft. Kano became a center of anti-American sentiment in one of the most reliably pro-American countries in Africa.

But since then, much of the furor has died down, and the practice of Islamic law, or Shariah, which had gone on for centuries in the private sphere before becoming enshrined in public law, has settled into a distinctively Nigerian compromise between the dictates of faith and the chaotic realities of modern life in an impoverished, developing nation.

The New York Times' Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin have the story that will occupy the blogosphere for today -- Baghdad is safer:

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.

By one revealing measure of security — whether people who fled their home have returned — the gains are still limited. About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent Society survey.

Well, there are some other changes... ike in the rest of Iraq. The Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher has a story on this:

Ammar al-Hakim is presiding over an Iraqi Shiite building boom. His austere Shaheed al-Mihrab Foundation has raised 400 mosques in Iraq since 2003. It's building the largest seminary here in the holy city of Najaf and opening a chain of schools. And it now has 95 offices throughout the country.

What's more, Mr. Hakim's foundation is winning over adherents to his party – the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) – through all-expenses-paid mass marriages along with cash payments and gifts for the newlyweds, free education and stipends at his new schools, and an array of other charitable projects such as caring for orphans and displaced families.

All of this is being done to promote ISCI's core vision: a federation of nine provinces where conservative Shiite Islam would reign.

While opponents say that such a federation among central and southern provinces would only hasten the breakup of Iraq and create a ministate where Iran would hold great sway, Hakim and his party are making great gains.

For them, the plan would bolster security for Shiites and benefit the stability of the country as a whole. And, most significant, they are winning much support ahead of a national referendum on the issue by April 2008, as proscribed by the Constitution.

As long as the U.S. remains in Iraq, its alliance with ISCI will help entrench the party in the country’s governing, security and intelligence institutions, in Baghdad as well as most southern governorates. Its only true challenger remains the Mahdi army, which despite its ruffian credentials and bloody role in sectarian reprisals enjoys broad support among Shiite masses. Their rivalry now takes the form of a class struggle between the Shiite merchant elite of Baghdad and the holy cities, represented by ISCI (as well, religiously, by Sistani), and the Shiite urban underclass.

This struggle, more than the sectarian conflict or confrontation between Anbari sheikhs and al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters, is likely to shape the country’s future. The most plausible scenario is a protracted struggle for power between these two movements, marked perhaps by temporary alliances, such as is presently in force.

The U.S. has fully backed ISCI in this rivalry. This is a risky gambit. Unleashing ISCI/Badr against the Sadrists is a dangerous policy that will further deepen intra-Shiite divisions; it also is a short-sighted one, given the Sadrists’ stronger mass base.

UPDATE: Anne Applebaum makes an important point:

[The] optimism is totally unwarranted. Not because things aren't improving in Iraq—it seems they are, at least for the moment—but because the collateral damage inflicted by the war on America's relationships with the rest of the world is a lot deeper and broader than most Americans have yet realized. It isn't just that the Iraq war invigorated the anti-Americanism that has always been latent pretty much everywhere. Far worse is the fact that—however it all comes out in the end, however successful Iraqi democracy becomes a decade from now—our conduct of the war in Iraq has disillusioned our natural friends and supporters and thrown a lasting shadow over our military and political competence. However it all comes out, the price we've paid is too high.

Maria Burns Ortiz has a story at ESPN.com that indicates Hugo Chavez's nationalization policies are starting to foreign direct investment -- in baseball:

With that kind of talent emerging from Venezuela in recent seasons, one would assume that big league clubs would be flocking to the South American nation in search of the next superstar. However, the cultural and political scene in Venezuela is undergoing rapid and radical transformation, and instead of flocking to the country, teams are fleeing over concerns about safety and political uncertainty. They aren't leaving in droves just yet, but the stream has been steady enough to raise a red flag about the future....

The number of clubs pulling their player development operations out of Venezuela has been a concern for Major League Baseball. Nineteen teams have participated in the Venezuelan Summer League in the past, but only 11 did so this year.

The Padres, for example, had planned on leaving Venezuela following this season after they built a multimillion-dollar facility in the Dominican, but the current situation accelerated the move. The team moved all its player development operations out of Venezuela following the 2005 campaign, two years earlier than originally anticipated.

"We just figured we might as well do it [then] to avoid some of the hassle of having to deal with some of the legislation that [President Hugo] Chávez passes down there in hiring coaches, worrying about severance pay and just getting in and out of the country," says Juan Lara, San Diego's Latin American operations coordinator.

San Diego is not alone. Baltimore ceased operating its academy following the 2006 season. The Red Sox -- one of the teams the Padres shared an academy with -- left when San Diego did in 2005. Cleveland pulled out in 2004.

until I heard about the Robert Mugabe National School of Intelligence!!

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe has launched an intelligence academy named after him, saying it would produce officers able to counter growing threats from Western powers, state media reported on Friday.

Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, is fighting isolation from the West, which accuses him of human rights abuses and rigging elections and economic mismanagement....

"With the current unjustified demonization of Zimbabwe by Western powers, the role of intelligence in shaping foreign, security and economic policies become even more critical," the Herald newspaper quoted the president as saying at the launch of the Robert Mugabe National School of Intelligence near Harare....

The intelligence academy is also expected to train members of the army, police and operatives from other southern African countries.

Mugabe said Britain and the United States continued to try to destabilize Zimbabwe by working with "non-state actors" aimed at unseating his government.

"The important role of defending our country cannot be left to mediocre officers incapable of comprehending and analytically evaluating the operational environment to ensure that the sovereignty of our state is not only preserved, but enhanced," Mugabe said.

Hat tip: Blake Hounshell.

The Financial Times' Steve Negus offers some good news from Iraq. No, really:

The Iraqi government reported on Monday that civilian casualties dropped by more than 50 per cent in September, a month in which US casualties also declined to their lowest level in 14 months.

All estimates of civilian casualties are contentious, due to the difficulty of obtaining complete data from conflict zones scattered across the country as well as the danger that statistics will be politically manipulated.

But September’s drop is one of the most dramatic since the Iraqi government began releasing figures, and is in rough accordance with other data suggesting levels of violence may be dropping.

The apparent decline also comes in spite of September’s partial overlap with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which usually sees an increase in attacks by Sunni Arab militants. A tally provided by Iraq’s health, interior and defence ministries quoted by news agencies noted 884 civilians killed in September, down from 1,773 in August, 1,653 in July and 1,227 in June.

The independent Iraq Body Count, which tallies press reports of civilian deaths, recorded higher numbers but showed a similar trajectory – 1,280 killed in September, 2,575 in August, 2,600 in July, and 2,092 in June.

US casualties also declined. Icasualties.org, a website which keeps a tally of US deaths, reported 63 fatalities in September, compared with 84 in August and 126 in May. September’s total is the lowest since July 2006.

A common objection to any kind of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is that it's a gift to Iran. Iran is actively meddling in Iraq's politics as we speak. Should U.S. forces go over the horizon, the prospect of a powerful Iran and a subordinate Iraq stokes fears of a Shiite superstate in the region.

Is this how things will actually play out? Consider what is heppening now in Basra. The Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher reports on how Iraq's second-largest city is doing in the wake of the British exit from the city earlier this month. To get a sense of how fractious the place is, here's Dagher's guide to the key players in the region:

Sadrists and Mahdi Army: The movement of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is a formidable force in Basra. The Mahdi Army is estimated to number 17,000 in the province. Security officials say that some of the Basra militia are infiltrated by Iran and beholden to Tehran. It opposes a super-Shiite region, but supports the ouster of the Fadhila governor.

The Council: The Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, previously known by its acronym SCIRI, embraces four other affiliate parties in Basra:

The Badr Organization – Once the council’s Iranian-trained paramilitary arm, known as the Badr Brigade.

The Shaheed Al-Mihrab Organization – A nationwide movement headed by Ammar al-Hakim, the son of the Council’s chief.

The Sayed Al-Shuhada Movement (Master of Martyrs Movement).

The Hizbullah Movement in Iraq (no relation to Lebanese Hizbullah) and another small Iraqi party called Hizbullah al-Iraq (see below).

All five parties were previously based in Iran and have strong ties to Tehran. The Council and its affiliates hold 21 of the 40 seats in the provincial council. Badr still controls several police units, including customs.

The Pentacle House: The Council and its four party affiliates make up the Bayet al-Khumasi, or the Pentacle House. The goal: to create a nine-province Shiite group called the “South of Baghdad region.” Billboards in Basra tout the project as a “Shiite Renaissance.”

The Islamic Fadhila (Virtue) Party: Fadhila is a national party founded by Basra natives. Its spiritual leader is Najaf-based cleric Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yacoubi, who broke ranks with Moqtada al-Sadr in 2003.

The movement continues to espouse Sadrist ideas but has increasingly fashioned itself as a Shiite Arab Islamist party opposed to Iranian meddling in Iraq. It opposes the pro-Iranian Council and its affiliates over a number of issues, including the supersouthern region.

Fadhila holds 12 seats in the Basra provincial council, including the governorship and one of the two deputy governor slots in Basra. Fadhila dominates the 15,000-strong oil protection force.

Thaar Allah (God’s Revenge) Party: A small party based in Basra and headed by Yousif al-Mussawi. He is suspected by many city residents of being an Iranian agent. The party derives much of its funding from wealthy merchants who rely on it for protection. It has allied itself with the Council and its Pentacle House in the fight to oust the Fadhila governor. Mr. Mussawi blames the governor for the death of three members of his family during a raid on his party headquarters in 2006.

Hizbullah al-Iraq: A small party headed by tribal chief Abdul-Karim al-Mahamadawi, based in neighboring Maysan Province. The Prince of the Marshes, as Mr. Mahamadawi is known, has a large, armed tribal following and presence in Basra. He has tense relations with the Council and its affiliates.

Mahmoud al-Hassani al-Sarkhi: The cleric broke ranks with the Sadrists and is believed to be in the holy city of Karbala with the bulk of his militia. But he still has a following in Basra. His posters adorn many streets. The controversial cleric has challenged the authority of the marjiya, the Shiite religious authority dominated by the Najaf-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

2) Iran does not appear to be playing a unifying role. The Monitor story suggests that this is because it lacks the capacity to do so:

Although Iran is closest to the council and its affiliate parties like Badr and Sayed al-Shuhada, it's also backing many other Shiite groups in southern Iraq including those that are openly using violence to oppose British and coalition troops, according to Ali Ansari, an Iran specialist at London's Chatham House.

"The Iranians are backing as many horses as they can," he says. "But there is a limit to their influence, given how fractious Shiites are in Iraq."

The Basra story is still developing, of course. Still, one wonders whether Tehran will be any more adept at nation-building in Iraq than the United States.

The Financial Times' Amy Kazmin and Andrew Ward report that Myanmar's regime is so bad that they've actually managed to make Budshist monks angry. Apparently, you wouldn't like them when they're angry:

Burma’s military regime fulminated on Friday against ’external anti-government groups’ which it claimed were trying to foment a mass uprising in Burma, and warned that it remains determined to crush open displays of dissent....

The regime’s outburst came amid persistent high tensions in the town of Pokkoku, a centre of Buddhist learning, where angry Buddhist monks have clashed with government authorities and pro-regime supporters in recent days....

Burma’s ruling generals are on edge after a rare wave of small but persistent protests against a sudden sharp increase in the price of rationed fuel, which has exacerbated the hardships of the impoverished population.

Initially, the regime relied mainly on its civilian militias – with frightening names like Swan-aah Shin, or “Masters of Force” – to help police and other security forces to haul off demonstrators, and snuff out protests and marches almost as soon as they began.

But tensions have intensified since Wednesday night when soldiers in Pokkoku fired warning shots over the heads of hundreds of protesting monks, who complained of being manhandled, and tied to electricity poles.

On Thursday, monks infuriated at the harsh treatment held a dozen government officials captive in a tense standoff, and burned four official cars, before freeing the group unharmed a few hours later. However, later monks and town residents destroyed an electronics shop and a home that belong to members of the regime’s Union Solidarity and Development Organisation, reflecting the strength of public anger towards any one seen as linked to the regime.

More than 100 people have been arrested by the regime in an attempt to quell the protests.

Starting in September, Hugo Chavez is going to be shifting Venezuela's clocks forward by a half-hour (to ensure "a more fair distribution of the sunrise" according to Reuters).

An hour I can understand -- but a half-hour?

How long is it going to be before Chavez delivers this kind of speech?

Simon Romero reports in the New York Times about Hugo Chávez's proposed constitutional changes:

President Hugo Chávez will unveil a project to change the Constitution on Wednesday that is expected to allow him to be re-elected indefinitely, a move that would enhance his authority to accelerate a socialist-inspired transformation of Venezuelan society.

The removal of term limits for Mr. Chávez, which is at the heart of the proposal, is expected to be accompanied by measures circumscribing the authority of elected governors and mayors, who would be prevented from staying in power indefinitely, according to versions of the project leaked in recent weeks.

Willian Lara, the communications minister, said Mr. Chávez would announce the project before the National Assembly, where all 167 lawmakers support the president. Supporters of Mr. Chávez, who was re-elected last year with some 60 percent of the vote, also control the Supreme Court, the entire federal bureaucracy, public oil and infrastructure companies and every state government but two.

The aim of the overhaul is “to guarantee to the people the largest amount of happiness possible,” Mr. Lara said at a news conference on Tuesday.

And, of course, Chávez's apparent fondness for democratic centralism.

One of the standard mantras uttered by Middle East experts is that if the Bush administration had approached Hamas differently when they came to power in 2006, that group could have eventually cut a deal with Israel.

This may very well be true, but every once in a while I run into a story like this one in the New York Times that makes me wonder just how much wishful thinking is embedded in that sentiment:

Hamas television, which was criticized for a Mickey Mouse-like character named Farfur who spouted anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish nostrums at children, has replaced the mouse with a bee named Nahoul, who says he is Farfur’s cousin.

Farfur was beaten to death by an Israeli who wanted his land on the previous episode of the children’s show “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.”

Nahoul, the bee, says: “I want to continue on the path of Farfur, the path of ‘Islam is the solution.’ The path of heroism, the path of martyrdom, the path of jihad warriors.”

In the name of Farfur, the bee says, “we shall take revenge on the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets, the murderers of innocent children, until Al Aksa will be liberated from their filth.”

Michael Wines' describes Zimbabwe's comical efforts to fight inflation in the New York Times:

Zimbabwe’s week-old campaign to quell its rampant inflation by forcing merchants to lower prices is edging the nation close to chaos, some economists and merchants say.

As the police and a pro-government youth militia swept into shops and factories, threatening arrest and worse unless prices were rolled back, staple foods vanished from store shelves and some merchants reported huge losses. News reports said that some shopkeepers who had refused to lower prices had been beaten by the youth militia, known as the Green Bombers for the color of their fatigues.

In interviews, merchants said that crowds of people were following the police and militia from shop to shop to buy goods at the government-ordered prices.

“People are losing millions and millions and millions of dollars,” said one merchant in Bulawayo, referring to the Zimbabwean currency, which is becoming worthless given the nation’s inflation, the world’s highest. “Everyone is now running out of stock, and not being able to replace it.”

Because the government has threatened to seize any business that does not sell goods at the advertised price, the merchant said he was keeping his shop open, but with virtually nothing on the shelves.

Economists said that the price rollbacks were unsustainable and that shops and manufacturers would soon shut down and lay off workers rather than produce goods at a loss.

“You can’t buy eggs or bread or things of that sort,” said John Robertson, an economic consultant in Harare, the capital. “Suppliers can’t supply them at a price that allows retailers to make a profit.”

“It’s pretty chaotic,” he added. “But I think the impact will be worse if it stays in place.”

Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was last reported to be 4,500 percent in May, a figure the government has yet to confirm. Mr. Robertson and others say that the true rate now is probably about 10,000 percent, but official statistics apparently are no longer being released.

He and others said they feared that the economic collapse would quickly lead to social unrest if Zimbabwe’s already shrunken work force were hit by huge layoffs and foods like cornmeal, cooking oil and sugar became unavailable.

Henry Farrell answers this question over at Crooked Timber.

The depressing part comes with Nikolas Sarkozy's success at "moving market competition from the list of the EU’s main goals." Henry is undoubtedly less concerned about this than I am, but even he concludes:

I suspect that the main beneficiaries of these changes will be powerful semi-monopolies and national champions with good political connections, which can by no means necessarily be expected to act in the public interest.

In Der Spiegel, Marco Evers writes about the President of Gambia, ruled one 41-year-old Yahya Jammeh. He's quite the Renaissance man:

Jammeh -- a military officer who staged a successful putsch in 1994 -- is not just the president. He's also a healer on a divine mission. In January of this year, he summoned a number of his acolytes together with foreign diplomats and revealed to them that he had made an extraordinary discovery. He announced that, in addition to asthma, he was now capable of healing Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) -- the epidemic that ravages sub-Saharan Africa like no other region of the world. More than 15 million Africans have already died of AIDS, and a further 25 million are infected with the HIV virus which causes the disease.

On Thursdays -- Jammeh's healing powers are only available to him on that day of the week he says -- the president frequently allows Gambian television to film him as he defeats AIDS: Patients lie flat on their backs as the president whirls around them and mumbles verses from the Koran. He slaps green sludge onto their skin, sprinkles liquid from an old Evian bottle over them and gives them a brown broth to drink. A quick banana snack completes the therapy.

That's it. Thanks to the power of the Koran and seven secret herbs this treatment, repeated over the course of several weeks, leads to the patient being cured of the lethal virus "with absolute certainty," as Jammeh says. But two requirements need to be met for it all to work. First: His patients have to renounce alcohol, tea, coffee and sex for the duration of their treatment -- as well as theft. And second: Whoever is taking anti-viral medication has to stop doing so immediately, according to Jammeh.

Even more disturbing is that the Gambian minister of health supports his president -- despite being a trained gynecologist educated in Ukraine and Ireland. The country's other institutions, including the parliament, are doing the same. And on the streets of the Gambia, demonstrations can sometimes be seen -- not against Jammeh, but in support of him.

[South Africa's] former vice president, Jacob Zuma, has had unprotected sex with a woman who was HIV positive at the time. There was hardly any risk of infection, Zuma said publicly, since he showered immediately after having sex. It's astonishing that Zuma isn't more knowledgeable about the spread of HIV; he was, after all, previously the director of a national AIDS organization.

And the South African minister of health, a med-school graduate, advises those infected not to take anti-viral medication in favor of a mixture of garlic, lemon, potatoes and red beet. That's better, she says, because the side effects are less severe. "Dr. Red Beet," as she is mockingly called, also sympathizes with German miracle healer Matthias Rath, who sells vitamin drinks in South Africa as an alleged alternative to established HIV medication.

Speaking seriously, though, this "cure" for AIDS highlights the misinformation that surrounds the disease in many countries. In Africa, many aren't aware that condoms protect against HIV infection. Even if they are told, they also face anti-condom messages: Condoms are a conspiracy by whites to lower African birthrates; condoms are tainted with HIV to decrease the African population. On top of it all, traditional healers, tribal leaders, and the Catholic Church warn against using condoms. What is one to believe?

The Financial Times' Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Gareth Smyth report that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if left to his own devices, will succeed in running the Iranian economy into the ground:

Some 60 economists this week wrote to Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad criticising his government for putting “short-term welfare above long-term sustainable development”.

Almost half way through his first four-year term, the letter underlines the acute dilemmas faced by the president in delivering short-term welfare promises as he manoeuvres to bolster political support.

The government’s indecision over two major issues – the price of petrol and bank lending rates – is a particular source of confusion.

More than three weeks after the lapse of the original date for petrol rationing – designed to curb a $5bn (€3.75bn, Ł2.5bn) bill for importing 35m of the 75m litres Iran consumes daily – the government is still groping its way around any decision it fears might be unpopular. Officials have this week made differing statements over when and how rationing – which was to begin tomorrow – will start....

Private bankers wrote to the economy minister last week demanding a freeze on loan rates to “make survival of private banks possible”.

But even with inflation officially at 13.6 per cent last year, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is battling with the central bank over his insistence on a 12 per cent lending rate, down from the current 14 per cent in state-owned and 17 per cent in private banks. The Guardian Council, a constitution watchdog, is due to rule this week on a compromise.

“What the government describes as economic policies do not match any professionally-known theories, but are rather populist political policies,” said Mohammad Tabibian, former deputy head of the Management and Planning Organisation, a cross-governmental co-ordination body....

Many observers doubt official figures of 14 per cent inflation and 12 per cent unemployment. One economist told the FT that inflation was above 20 per cent, while unemployment was 25 per cent among university graduates.

The smart money would have to be Zimbabwe, but don't underestimate the economic incompetence of either Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

UPDATE: Congatulations to Venezuela and Zimbabwe for making this list.

According to CNN International, Hugo Chávez has declared war on yet another facet of Venezuelan life:

Venezuela's most-watched television station -- and outlet for the political opposition -- went off the air after the government refused to renew its broadcast license.

Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), which has been broadcasting for 53 years, was replaced by a state-run station -- TVes -- on Monday. The new station's logo began running immediately after RCTV went off the air.

Leading up to the deadline, police on Sunday used water cannons and what appeared to be tear gas to break up thousands of demonstrators protesting the government's decision to close the country's most-watched television station.

The protest began in front of National Telecommunications Commission headquarters after members of the National Guard seized broadcast equipment, including antennas, the result of a Supreme Court order on Friday....

Inside the studios of Radio Caracas Television, employees cried and chanted "Freedom!" on camera, AP reported.

"We are living an injustice," presenter Eyla Adrian said, according to AP. "I wish that tonight would never come."

President Hugo Chavez announced in January that the government would not renew the broadcast license for the station, long an outlet for opposition parties.

Chavez has accused the station of supporting the failed 2002 coup against him and violating broadcast laws.

He called the station's soap operas "pure poison" that promote capitalism, according to AP.

RCTV, which has been broadcasting for 53 years, is slated to be off the air at midnight. It will be replaced by a state-run station.

"To refuse to grant a new license for the most popular and oldest television channel in the country because the government disagrees with the editorial or political views of this channel, which are obviously critical to Chavez, is a case of censorship," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

"We have arrived at totalitarianism," said Marcel Granier, president of Empresas 1BC, which owns RCTV. (emphasis added)

In the Guardian, Ben Whitford goes to town on Chávez 's decision:

Chávez and his officials unilaterally branded the network coup-mongers and pornographers - the latter apparently a reference to the trashy but popular telenovelas that are standard fare on all the region's networks. No investigations, meetings or hearings were held to assess the station's failings; no evidence was presented, and the network was given no right of reply.

It wasn't until this March, three months after announcing its decision to revoke the station's license, that the government deigned to release a "White Book" giving an official account of the station's transgressions. More polemic than policy paper, the book only serves to underscore the arbitrary and politicized nature of the government's decision; RCTV is accused of a raft of minor sins, from sensationalizing its coverage of a recent murder to showing alcohol consumption during its coverage of a baseball game. RCTV had never previously received more than a warning for these violations; other stations guilty of the same or worse errors have been allowed to retain their licenses.

It's hard to see RCTV's closure - which was opposed by 70% of the Venezuelan people - as anything more than an act of political retaliation for the network's continuing, and increasingly isolated, resistance to the Chávez administration. While it's true that the country's media remains largely in private hands, most of the other opposition channels have allowed themselves to be cowed by Chávez's threats, and have substantially cut back their news and editorial coverage. Of the stations with national reach, only RCTV had remained an outspoken critic of the government; on Sunday night that voice, too, fell silent. (Claims that RCTV could stay on the air by switching to cable or satellite are disingenuous; even if the network survives, it will reach only a tiny fraction of its current audience.)

In pulling the plug on RCTV, Chávez appointed himself judge, jury and executioner; and in doing so, struck a dangerous blow against Venezuela's proud traditions of democracy and free speech. Worryingly, he did so as part of a wider campaign to stifle dissenting voices and independent views. Since coming to power, Chávez has pushed through a barrage of regulations designed to breed a compliant and uncritical media sector; organizations now face swingeing fines and license suspensions if they fail to meet vague and arbitrary "social responsibility" criteria, while draconian defamation regulations and "insult laws" make it illegal to show disrespect for government officials and institutions....

A few minutes after RCTV flickered off the air, a new network took its place: Venezuelan Social Television. The new public channel, run by Chávez appointees, will provide news and entertainment that is more palatable to Chávez's government; it will join a growing portfolio of state-owned channels that one government station chief says is part of Chávez's wider plan for "communication and information hegemony". The failure of the likes of Tariq Ali and Colin Burgon to recognize this as a blow to Venezuela's tradition of free speech shouldn't surprise anyone; Chávez is a past master at playing the international left to his own ends. The truth, though, is that this is one occasion when people on both the left and the right, as supporters of liberal democracy, should be prepared to cry foul.

If you're a developing country that reflexively opposes the United States, you have to work exceptionally hard -- I'm talking years of effort here -- to do anything that provokes the ire of Noam Chomsky. I mean, this is a guy who had few qualms about the Cambodian genocide because the Khmer Rouge was anti-American. Clearly, the bar of awfulness is pretty high to get ol' Noam's attention.

Amazingly, Mahmoud Ahmdainejad's Iran has pulled this off. Robin Wright explains in the Washington Post:

Momentum is building behind an academic boycott of Iran to pressure the government to release imprisoned American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who was jailed in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison May 8 after more than four months under house arrest....

MIT professor Noam Chomsky also issued a statement today calling Esfandiari's detention "deplorable" and warning that the action by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security was "a gift" to American policymakers trying to organize support for military action against Iran.

"Now is a time for diplomacy, negotiations and relaxation of tensions, in accordance with the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans and Iranians, as recent polls reveal," he said. "The intolerable treatment of this highly respected scholar and human rights activist severely undermines the efforts of those who are seeking peace, justice and freedom in the region and the world."

In his popular blog, University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole announced today that he has canceled plans to attend a conference this summer in Iran because of Tehran's imprisonment of Esfandiari.

"Everyone should be outraged about this story," he said. "Her arrest should be an issue for everyone who believes in human rights, in academic freedom, and in women's rights."

Cole added, "I don't see how normal intellectual life can go on when a scholar at the Wilson Center can't safely visit Iran." He also suggested that academics and others mobilize to protest in front of Iranian diplomatic missions around the world.

UPDATE: Wright's follow-up report is not good:

American scholar Haleh Esfandiari has been charged with trying to topple the Iranian regime, Iran's state-controlled television reported today.

Iran's Intelligence Ministry accused Esfandiari, director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of trying to foment a soft revolution by setting up a network "against the sovereignty" of Iran. Esfandiari was imprisoned May 8 after more than four months under virtual house arrest.

"This is an American-designed model with an attractive appearance that seeks the soft-toppling of the country," state TV reported, according to the Associated Press....

In a statement published by Iran's ISNA news agency, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security charged that Esfandiari had received money from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

"The long-term and final goal of such centers is to try to enable this network . . . to confront the ruling powers. This model designed by the Americans . . . is following the 'soft revolution' in the country," the statement said....

Esfandiari, a 67-year-old grandmother who is a dual U.S. and Iranian national, was originally in Iran to take care of her 93-year-old mother when her passport was taken in a robbery as she was en route to the airport Dec. 30. When she went in to get a replacement, she was put under interrogation for six weeks.

On Thursday the Wall Street Journal's Jose De Cordoba had a front-pager describing how Hugo Chávez's agricultural reforms are going:

Now Mr. Chavez is taking his revolution to the Venezuelan countryside. "We must end latifundios," he said in a televised speech in March, referring to large agrarian estates. "The people order it, and we will do it, whatever the cost." Then he announced the seizure of a land area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Since coming to power, The Chávez government has handed over 8.8 million acres, an area bigger than Maryland, for use by the poor. While much of this was state-owned land that was either idle or leased to ranchers, some 4.5 million acres were "recovered" from private owners, Mr. Chávez said recently. In some cases, the government compensated them. In most others... it has simply turned a blind eye to land invasions.

The government bills land reform as a way to make Venezuela self-sufficient infood. But so far, the effect has been to undercut production of beef, sugar and other foods, as productive land is handed over to city dwellers with no knowledge of farming. Established farmers and ranchers, fearing their land may be seized next, are cutting investment in their operations to a minimum.

The chaos in the countryside has contributed to shortages in basic items like milk and meat, a paradox in a country enjoying an economic boom traceable to high oil prices. Also spurring the shortages are price controls on certain foods that keep them prices below the cost of production. Meanwhile, 19%-plus inflation--as oil revenue floods the economy--spurs panic buying: purchasing price-controlled and other goods the shopper might not immediately need for fear of having higher prices in the future or not finding the items at all.

"You get up at dawn to hunt for a breast of chicken all over town. Housewives are in a foul mood." says Lucylde Gonzalez, a Caracas homemaker, who says she hasn't seen an egg in a week."

Over at Duck of Minerva, Peter Howard explains why Hugo Chavez's plan to diversify oil exports away from the United States will not work. This bit from a linked Washington Post story was particularly interesting:

During most of Chávez's eight years in office, more than 60 percent of the country's total crude exports have gone to the United States, up from 50 percent throughout much of the 1990s, according to Ramón Espinasa, a former chief economist at PDVSA who is now a consultant in Washington. The trend is due to growing U.S. demand, Venezuela's rising consumption and what oil analysts say is the state's inability to diversify its base of clients to include big consumers.

But in an ideologically drawn battle, one marked by constant verbal slings, Chávez has promised to veer sales away from the United States.

He often says that PDVSA is considering selling Citgo, its refining and retail arm in the United States, which processes and sells the extra-heavy brand of crude mined in Venezuela. His government has also increased sales to China, with 300,000 barrels a day now headed there, Rafael Ramirez, the energy minister and PDVSA's president, said in an interview this month....

So a country less capable of producing oil, analysts say, is more tied to the United States, where refineries wholly or partly owned by PDVSA refine Venezuela's molasses-like oil. The installations exist nowhere else, which makes some analysts skeptical that Venezuela is exporting as much to China as it claims.

Nicholas Sarkozy will be the next French President. The Economist spells out what this means:

By sheer drive and political cunning, Mr Sarkozy managed to build up an electoral machine, through the party that Mr Chirac originally founded, and reinvent himself—30 years after entering electoral politics—as a force for change.

The question now is how far Mr Sarkozy will be able to implement some of the controversial reformist elements of his programme. In his election-night speech, he declared that "the French people have chosen change.” Among the first reforms that he intends to bring about are labour-market measures: he plans to secure minimum service on public transport during strikes; to break the big five unions' stranglehold on union representation; to change the unemployment-benefit rules to penalise those who refuse two job offers; and to introduce a single job contract with progressive rights.

Unlike President Chirac, who in 1995 also tried to bring about reform but had been elected on an uncontroversial promise to "heal the social fracture", Mr Sarkozy arrives in office with a clear mandate to change. Not only was his score high, but turn-out—at about 85%—was too. Mr Sarkozy knows that he has to move fast to capitalise on that. On minimum service for trains and buses, for instance, he says that he will let the unions and bosses' organisations try to negotiate a deal until the end of the summer; after that, in the absence of agreement, he will legislate. There will doubtless be resistance, and strikes and street protests are widely predicted. Indeed, on election night there were already clashes between riot police and anti-Sarkozy protesters.

In the months leading up to today’s presidential voting in France, there was a lot of talk about breaking with the past. Don’t bet it will happen.

The French are notoriously resistant to change, and any new president would be hard-pressed to deliver any dramatic departure from the way people here live and work and get along with each other (or don’t)....

Mr. Sarkozy promised pension reforms and limits on unions’ ability to strike. Already, the most critical union federations are warning him to expect people in the streets if he tries to push through either change.

“Radical change in an authoritarian manner will lead to a situation of blockage,” said Michel Grignard, national secretary of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor. French unions are strong in part because the right to strike is written into the Constitution.

And then there is the French love of their vacations.

Parliament usually is away from mid-July to October, but Mr. Sarkozy has suggested he would call a special session to push through legislation while most of the French are vacationing — and when it would be hard for unions to mobilize them.

The unions warned against it. “Whoever is elected president, if he or she thinks there are things that must be decided very fast, in a flash, and pass them in July, watch out,” said Mr. Mailly of the Force Ouvričre federation. “There’ll eventually be a boomerang effect.”

My guess is that Sarkozy will adopt more anti-American rhetoric -- regardless of U.S. foreign policy -- right around the time his first major domestic reform effort shuts down the streets of Paris.

Last week Michael H. Cognato blogged at Passport about the fact that smart sanctions seemed to be having an effect in Zimbabwe:

[The International Crisis Group] found that targeted sanctions have played an important role in undermining Mugabe's support:

Targeted EU and U.S. sanctions on senior regime figures are working. ZANU-PF leaders cite their personal financial situations as motivation for wanting Mugabe out. “We have businesses which we worked hard over years to set up which are collapsing. It is about time we change course”, said a senior politburo member.

The possible implications stretch far beyond Zimbabwe. Targeted sanctions, which limit the activity of specific regime members, rather than the entire country, are a relatively recent innovation. The hope has been that they would better pressure a target government while sparing its citizens needless suffering. Officials in Sudan, Iran, and North Korea are currently on the receiving end of these appeals to their unenlightened self-interest. The news out of Zimbabwe is reason to hope they might be similarly persuaded.

Top opposition leaders were assaulted and tortured by police who broke up a prayer meeting planned to protest government policies, colleagues of the activists said Monday.

One protester was shot dead by police in Sunday's unrest in the outskirts of the capital and scores of others were arrested. Journalists trying to cover the events also were arrested.

In a statement, organizers of the prayer meeting, an alliance of opposition, civic, church leaders and student and anti-government groups, said lawyers who visited the detainees Monday reported the main opposition party leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, fainted three times after being beaten by police.

The alliance, called the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, said another opposition leader, Lovemore Madhuku, was taken to the main Harare hospital early Monday after collapsing from police assaults.

At least four other opposition and civic leaders were beaten and tortured in custody, the campaign said.

``The police thoroughly assaulted leaders of the Save Zimbabwe Campaign while in custody,'' the group said.

The alliance said lawyers were still trying to establish the whereabouts of all those picked up by police, saying some were denied food or legal advice.

No comment was immediately available from police on Monday.

[Former member of parliament Roy] Bennett, speaking in Johannesburg after consulting with other opposition figures by phone, said Sunday's gathering was the beginning of mass protests against Mugabe's government under a newly formed Save Zimbabwe Coalition.

"This is what everybody's been building up to," said Bennett, who fled Zimbabwe a year ago. "It's the beginning of the end."....

Tafadzwa Mugabe, from the group Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, said from Harare that attorneys were denied access to Tsvangirai and the others who were arrested. Judges at the High Court of Harare declined to hear the case Sunday night but scheduled a hearing for Monday morning.

Mugabe, who is not related to the Zimbabwean president, said there had never been such a broad crackdown on opposition figures there. "In terms of magnitude and profile, I'd safely say it's unprecedented," he said.

Zimbabwe has been in economic decline for seven years. It has inflation of more than 1,700 percent, unemployment exceeding 80 percent and chronic shortages of such basics as gasoline, bread and cooking oil. Mugabe, who has been Zimbabwe's ruler since the end of white-supremacist rule in 1980, has become increasingly authoritarian, sharply limiting political freedoms....

The International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organization based in Brussels, reported last week that the crisis in Zimbabwe was nearing its conclusion because of deepening splits in Mugabe's ruling party, but warned that spontaneous violence could erupt.

The opposition has been severely split as well. There are now two rival factions of the Movement for Democratic Change, the group Tsvangirai helped found. The leader of the other faction, Arthur Mutambara, also was arrested Sunday, as was Lovemore Madhuku, head of the National Constitutional Assembly, which also opposes Mugabe's rule.

So there's another, gloomier possibility: smart sanctions are insufficient, and the state's ability to repress will not be tamed anytime soon.

Developing....

The Financial Times' Gareth Smyth reports that Iran is starting to tighten its belt in anticipatio of serious economic sanctions. Of course, one person's "belt-tightening" is another person's "pitiful reduction of massively inefficient subsidy.":

Iran’s parliament this week set May 22 as the day when the country’s 15m motorists lose access to unlimited cheap fuel.

Pump prices, frozen for three years at 80 tomans (or 9 cents) a litre, have boosted consumption far beyond the capacity of Iran’s oil refineries and meant that 40 per cent of petrol has had to be imported.

With Iran facing further UN sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, politicians have opted to dampen demand by a combination of rationing and higher prices.

Parliament decided on Wednesday to limit annual petrol subsidies to $2.5bn, and Iranian news wires have reported the new rationed price will be 100 tomans (11 cents) a litre, with extra fuel sold at a higher price.

Deputies left the government to decide by April 20 on ration quantity, the price of un-rationed petrol, and the method of rationing, likely to be the use of ‘smart cards’.

The price of petrol has been regarded as politically sensitive, especially as many Iranians run cars as unofficial taxis to supplement low incomes or survive unemployment.

Basic commodities – like bread, electricity, gas and medicines – are subsidised by the government, and with Iran sitting on the world’s second highest oil reserves, many Iranians see cheap petrol as a birth-right.

Mahmoud Abtahi, a deputy, warned a 25 per cent increase would bring a “severe shock because petrol is the life blood of the economy” and urged parliament to support low-income groups.

Spencer Ackerman explains:

While Iraqi suicide bombers target civilians and soft targets in order to sow destabilization and provoke/respond to sectarian violence, nearly all Taliban suicide bombings -- and in Afghanistan, resistance to the presence of foreign forces and the Karzai government is overwhelmingly Taliban -- are focused on Afghan or U.S./NATO security forces. The two researchers assess that unlike the Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaeda or Shiite militias, the Taliban has to cleave the population away from the Karzai government, but in the process must "avoid losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by needlessly killing civilians."

The trouble is that it works. Members of the International Security Assistance Force have in some cases balked at taking up operations in suicide-bomb-heavy territory. Worse still, Williams and Young find that freaked-out ISAF forces have responded by upping their tolerance for collateral damage. Little is more provocative in Afghanistan than civilian deaths at foreign hands; in that sense, the Taliban gambit does show some success.

Simon Romero report in the New York Times about what happens when you combine price controls and the Dutch disease in Hugo Chavez-land:

Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods like beef, chicken and milk, President Hugo Chávez has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country’s expanding price controls.

Food producers and economists say the measures announced late Thursday night, which include removing three zeroes from the denomination of Venezuela’s currency, are likely to backfire and generate even more acute shortages and higher prices for consumers. Inflation climbed to an annual rate of 18.4 percent a year in January, the highest in Latin America and far above the official target of 10 to 12 percent.

Mr. Chávez, whose leftist populism remains highly popular among Venezuela’s poor and working classes, seemed unfazed by criticism of his policies. Appearing live on national television, he called for the creation of “committees of social control,” essentially groups of his political supporters whose purpose would be to report on farmers, ranchers, supermarket owners and street vendors who circumvent the state’s effort to control food prices.

“It is surreal that we’ve arrived at a point where we are in danger of squandering a major oil boom,” said José Guerra, a former chief of economic research at Venezuela’s central bank, who left Mr. Chavez’s government in 2004. “If the government insists on sticking to policies that are clearly failing, we may be headed down the road of Zimbabwe.”....

In an indicator of concern with Mr. Chávez’s economic policies, which included nationalizing companies in the telephone and electricity industries, foreign direct investment was negative in the first nine months of 2006. The last year Venezuela had a net investment outflow was in 1986.

Shortages of basic foods have been sporadic since the government strengthened price controls in 2003 after a debilitating strike by oil workers. But in recent weeks, the scarcity of items like meat and chicken have led to a panicked reaction by federal authorities as they try to understand how such shortages could develop in a seemingly flourishing economy.

Entering a supermarket here is a bizarre experience. Shelves are fully stocked with Scotch whiskey, Argentine wines and imported cheeses like brie and Camembert, but basic staples like black beans and desirable cuts of beef like sirloin are often absent. Customers, even those in the government’s own Mercal chain of subsidized grocery stores, are left with choices like pork neck bones, rabbit and unusual cuts of lamb.

With shoppers limited to just two large packages of sugar, a black market in sugar has developed among street vendors in parts of Caracas. “This country is going to turn into Cuba, or Chávez will have to give in,” said Cándida de Gómez, 54, a shopper at a private supermarket in Los Palos Grandes, a district in the capital....

Fears that more private companies could be nationalized have put further pressure on the currency as rich Venezuelans try to take money out of the country. Concern over capital flight has made the government jittery, with vague threats issued to newspapers that publish unofficial currency rates (officially the bolívar is quoted at about 2,150 to the dollar)....

But recent expropriations of farms and ranches, part of Mr. Chávez’s effort to empower state-financed cooperatives, have also weighed on domestic food production as the new managers retool operations. So has the flood of petrodollars into the economy, easing food imports and making some domestic producers uncompetitive, an affliction common to oil economies.

“There seems to be a basic misunderstanding in Chávez’s government of what is driving scarcity and inflation,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a former chief economist at Venezuela’s National Assembly who teaches at Wesleyan University.

“There are competent people in the government who know that Chávez needs to lower spending if he wants to defeat these problems,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “But there are few people in positions of power who are willing to risk telling him what he needs to hear.”

Developing....

UPDATE: Chavez is now on a goodwill tour in the Caribbean trying to buy more international support. According to the AP, "The crowd, however, did not respond with applause to the Venezuelan leader's vitriolic statements."

When the International Herald-Tribune characterizes an economic program as "far-left," it's time to click over and see what all the fuss is about:

Ségolčne Royal, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, unveiled a long- awaited platform on Sunday, veering sharply to the left on economic policy while also stressing discipline and "traditional values."

Ten weeks before the election, Royal is hoping to reverse a slide in popularity that has seen her lose ground to her main challenger, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

In a two-hour speech to about 10,000 supporters north of Paris, she laid out a 100-proposal platform, pledging to raise pensions, to increase the minimum wage to €1,500, or about $2,000, a month and to guarantee a job or further training for every youth within six months of graduating from university.

She also said that randomly selected citizens' juries would watch over government policy and that juvenile delinquents could be placed in educational camps run by the military.

As if to preempt her opponents on the right, she stressed throughout her speech that her ideas had been nourished in 6,000 debates with citizens throughout France, a method she has called "participative democracy."....

A substantial part of her speech was dedicated to social and economic issues, on which Royal took a hard-left line.

"The unfettered rein of financial profit is intolerable for the general interest," she said. "You told me simple truths. You told me you wanted fewer income inequalities. You told me you wanted to tax capital more than labor. We will do that reform."

Royal said she would tax companies in relation to what share of their profits is reinvested in equipment and jobs, and what portion is paid to shareholders. She also promised to abolish a flexible work contract for small companies and hold a national conference in June on how to increase salaries.

Indeed, she seemed to have something to offer to most groups in society without saying how much the combined measures would cost: Under her presidency, she said, young women would get free contraception, all young people would get access to a €10,000 interest- free loan and the handicapped would see their benefits rise.

I have enough of a soft spot for the old Athenian council of 500 to hope that the citizen jury idea could actually work. Beyond that, if Royal wins and actually tries to implement this, it will be the fiscal equivalent of Francois Mitterand's "Keynesianism in One Country" -- with the same results of massive capital flight, recession, and policy retrenchment.

UPDATE: Over at U.S. News and World Report,James Pethokoukis blogs about another prominent politician who's big into taxing profits.

The Temporary Turkmenbashi of the Blogosphere commands all who revere him to look in the direction of Belarus. When we last left things, Russia was putting the screws on the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

According to Lukashenko's interview with Reuters, the screws really hurt -- but he has a plan:

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, stung by big rises in Russian energy prices, vowed on Tuesday to recover $5 billion in losses by making Moscow pay for vital transit traffic and military cooperation.

But despite disappointment over Moscow's price rises and its foreign policy, Lukashenko said close ties with Russia remained the cornerstone of his isolated administration's policy.

The two former Soviet neighbors have long enjoyed warm relations and were negotiating a union with a common currency.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin's sudden doubling of gas prices and cut in oil subsidies at the end of last year threatened a vital prop for the Belarussian economy and prompted Minsk to strike back.

"Now that the Russian president has mentioned a transition to market relations ... we will in return ask Russia to pay in hard currency for services that Russia used to benefit from free of charge," Lukashenko told Reuters in a rare interview at the presidential offices.

The president was speaking the day after Belarus announced big rises in the amounts it charges Russia for the transit of oil across its territory to supply markets in western Europe..

It's worth keeping this fact in mind when reading about Belarus' recently announced intentions to build its first nuclear reactors.

The hard-working staff here at danieldrezner.com has demanded that your humble blogger be declared the Turkmenbashi of the Blogosphere by universal assent. I hereby accept that mandate for the day -- which makes it about as legitimate as the last guy to accept this title.

In honor of the old Turkmenbashi, I hereby decree to spend the day posting about the remaining totalitarian dictatorships in the world.

OK, so let's see....Zimbabwe? Yep, got that one. Hey, let's check up on Turkmenistan itself!

Of course, they're hold a presidential election, so they might fall from totalitarian status. However, if this report from Peter Finn of the Washington Post Foreign Service is any indication, it's a presidential election that warms the cockles of the Turkmenbashi's heart:

Six presidential candidates are barnstorming the country and holding public meetings to talk about improving education, reforming health care, ensuring adequate pensions and boosting agriculture.

It could be Iowa -- if it weren't Turkmenistan.

Acting President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, 49, will almost certainly win when the Central Asian country's citizens go to the polls Feb. 11. His opponents, a deputy minister and four regional officials, are willing foils, according to analysts and exiled politicians.

Murad Karyev, the supposedly neutral chairman of the Central Election Commission, has already said Berdymukhammedov is the best man for the job....

The exiled opposition has been prevented from returning to take part in the election. A coalition of exile organizations chose Khudaiberdy Orazov, a former vice premier and head of the Central Bank, to run as their candidate, but he is sitting out the campaign abroad.

"They are trying to create an image of real elections, but of course these are not elections. It's some sort of clownery," said Orazov, who lives in Sweden. "I believe we are entering the second stage of dictatorship."

Agents from Turkmenistan's internal security service, the MNB, are shadowing five of the candidates to ensure they don't stray from their scripts and say things contrary to policies laid out by the leading candidate, according to the Eurasian Transition Group, a nongovernmental organization in Germany that is one of the few with a presence in Turkmenistan.

"The other five candidates have to attend security council meetings, where they receive their orders," said Michael Laubsch, executive director of the German group. "Everything is concentrated on Berdymukhammedov, and the MNB have total control over the other candidates."

In the New York Times, Michael Wines chronicles the slow collapse of the state in Zimbabwe:

For close to seven years, Zimbabwe’s economy and quality of life have been in slow, uninterrupted decline. They are still declining this year, people there say, with one notable difference: the pace is no longer so slow.

Indeed, Zimbabwe’s economic descent has picked up so much speed that President Robert G. Mugabe, the nation’s leader for 27 years, is starting to lose support from parts of his own party.

In recent weeks, the national power authority has warned of a collapse of electrical service. A breakdown in water treatment has set off a new outbreak of cholera in the capital, Harare. All public services were cut off in Marondera, a regional capital of 50,000 in eastern Zimbabwe, after the city ran out of money to fix broken equipment. In Chitungwiza, just south of Harare, electricity is supplied only four days a week.

The government awarded all civil servants a 300 percent raise two weeks ago. But the increase is only a fraction of the inflation rate, so the nation’s 110,000 teachers are staging a work slowdown for more money. Measured by the black-market value of Zimbabwe’s ragtag currency, even their new salaries total less than 60 American dollars a month.

Doctors and nurses have been on strike for five weeks, seeking a pay increase of nearly 9,000 percent, and health care is all but nonexistent. Harare’s police chief warned in a recently leaked memo that if rank-and-file officers did not get a substantial raise, they might riot....

Mr. Mugabe’s fortunes appear to have dimmed as well. In December, the ruling party that has traditionally bowed to his will, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, balked at supporting a constitutional amendment that would have extended his term of office by two years, to 2010. The rebuff exposed a fissure in the party, known as ZANU-PF, between Mr. Mugabe’s hard-line backers and others who fear he has brought their nation to the brink of collapse.

The trigger of this crisis — hyperinflation — reached an annual rate of 1,281 percent this month, and has been near or over 1,000 percent since last April. Hyperinflation has bankrupted the government, left 8 in 10 citizens destitute and decimated the country’s factories and farms.

The central bank’s latest response to these problems, announced this week, was to declare inflation illegal. From March 1 to June 30, anyone who raises prices or wages will be arrested and punished. Only a “firm social contract” to end corruption and restructure the economy will bring an end to the crisis, said the reserve bank governor, Gideon Gono. (emphasis added)

1) Wines also reports the following: "Foreign journalists remain barred from the country under threat of imprisonment, and harassment of Zimbabwean journalists has sharply increased." OK then, Michael Wines, how did you pull this off then? That was just a big ol' raspberry to the Washington Post's Africa correspondent, wasn't it?!

2) One wonders whether South Africa has any kind of cintingency plan for what happens when the Mugabe government collapses.

Anthony Boadle writes a story for Reuters suggesting that Cuba under Raul Castro is somewhat different than Cuba under Fidel:

Six months after Cuba's sick leader Fidel Castro handed over power provisionally to his brother Raul, signs of an opening in public debate are emerging in the communist-run country.

Articles have appeared in the government-controlled media since October uncovering theft in state enterprises and other previously unmentionable deficiencies in Cuba's economy....

In unusual public statements, Cuban intellectuals have denounced the resurfacing of censors who were responsible for blacklisting writers and homosexuals 30 years ago.

The state conceded it made a mistake and allowed 400 writers and artists to hold an unprecedented meeting on Tuesday to discuss the Stalinist-style cultural purges of the 1970s....

The acting president has taken credit for stirring some of the debate, saying he has prodded the uncritical Cuban media to play a greater role in identifying economic shortcomings.

Raul surprised Cubans by encouraging greater discussion on government policies and more transparent state management. He said the country was tired of excuses and criticized delays in paying private farmers who provide 60 percent of its produce.

"Raul has made a point of abandoning Fidel's practice of scapegoating others. Instead, he is admitting that the revolution's problems are serious and home grown," said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst and author of "After Fidel."

"The good thing about Raul is that he listens," said a Cuban economist who asked not to be named.

Raul has commissioned studies from think tanks on how to raise food production and stimulate the economy without ruling out private ownership of small business, he said....

"Each day there are more intellectuals speaking up, and that is new in Cuba," said dissident Espinosa Chepe.

But he said economic reforms wanted by most Cubans --the average monthly wage is $17-- are too slow in coming and Cuba may face turmoil without a leader of Fidel Castro's stature to contain it.

"Cuba is stable for the moment, but there is a lot of discontent on the streets," he said.

Mind you, Raul Castro might actually be going for perestroika rather than abertura. But I'm not holding my breath.

Developing.....

If there were a contest for wackiest dictator in the world, many Vegas oddsmakers would have made Kim Jong Il the putative frontrunner. In truth, however, until today the hands-down winner would have been Turkmenistan president Saparmurat Niyazov:

He renamed the town of Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian Sea, Türkmenbaşy after himself, in addition to renaming several schools, airports and even a meteorite after himself and his immediate family. He even named the months, and days of the week after himself and his family. Niyazov's face appears on Manat banknotes and large portraits of the president hang all over the country, especially on major public buildings and avenues. Statues of himself and his mother are scattered all over Turkmenistan, including one in the middle of the Karakum Desert as well as a gold-plated statue atop Ashgabat's largest building, the Neutrality Arch, that rotates so it will always face into the sun and shine light onto the capital city. Niyazov commissioned a massive palace in Aşgabat commemorating his rule. He was given the hero of Turkmenistan award five times. "I'm personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets - but it's what the people want," Niyazov said.

He renamed the month of January after himself and April after his mother and banned ballet, gold teeth and recorded music. A planet of the Taurus constellation, a crater on the Moon and a mountain peak were other things named after him....

Like the khans who once ruled this long-nomadic land, Niyazov ran Turkmenistan from an office draped with carpets that made it look like a nomad's tent. When foreign leaders met him he often presented them with a horse.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the president of Turkmenistan, has died leaving the gas rich Central Asian republic he had ruled for over twenty years impoverished, internationally isolated and with no obvious successor.

Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi, or Ruler of the Turkmens, died of cardiac arrest in the early hours of Thursday morning, according to a statement broadcast by Turkmenistan state television.

“The people of Turkmenistan will continue to pursue the political course of Saparmurat Turkmenbashi at this difficult moment”, the statement said.

Niyazov, who was appointed president for life by Turkmenistan’s Majlis, or parliament, in 1999, was 66 years old. He admitted earlier this year that he suffered from heart disease, but no successor was named.

Niyazov was a hardline dictator who established a bizarre personality cult in Turkmenistan, a largely desert republic bordering Afghanistan, Iran and Uzbekistan. The opposition has been brutally crushed and there is no independent media.

Western diplomats have expressed concern that frequent government purges ordered by Niyazov have denuded Turkmenistan’s administration of officials capable of ruling the republic or its industries.

Whether this translates into a few interesting weeks for global energy markets remains to be seen.

Crooked Timber's Maria Farrell went on a study tour organised by the 21st Century Trust and the John Smith Memorial Trust to see what's going on in Ukraine nearly two years after the Orange Revolution. The group decided to create their own blog to record their thoughts on the trip.

If you're interested in the country, go check it out.

The New York Times' Steven Lee Myers looks at a question that I've wondered about from time to time -- what do the people of Kazakhstan think about Borat? The answer appears to be surprisingly liberal:

There is no Running of the Jews here. No one greets you with the expression “Jagshemash,” which is either nonsense, garbled Polish or mangled Czech; it’s hard to say. The country’s national drink is not made from horse urine, though fermented horse milk, or kumys, is considered a delicacy. (It tastes like effervescent yogurt.)

There is almost nothing, in short, remotely truthful in the satiric depiction of Kazakhstan popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian who plays a bumbling, boorish, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic Kazakh television reporter named Borat Sagdiyev.

And yet Borat — Mr. Cohen, that is — has managed to infuriate and confound the country’s officials. Their attempts to respond, to set the record straight, have resulted only in more attention here, where Borat’s antics, shown on British and American television and on the Internet, now make the rounds like samizdat from the long-gone days when the country was part of the Soviet Union....

“There is an unwritten rule that the president’s personality is never criticized,” said Baryz Bayen, a correspondent and editor for TV 31, a privately owned channel in Almaty.

Last fall Mr. Bayen prepared a six-minute feature on the controversy over Mr. Cohen’s MTV performance that included clips of the skit depicting Mr. Nazarbayev, borrowed from Russia’s NTV channel. Mr. Bayen cited a history of political satire dating to Moličre and recalled an old refrain from Soviet times: “I have never read Solzhenitsyn, but I condemn him absolutely.”

“I do not feel any false patriotism,” said Mr. Bayen, who, like all ethnic Kazakhs, bears no resemblance to Borat whatsoever. “I saw portions of his show, and I can say it is funny.”

TV 31’s executive producer, Yevgeny Grundberg, said he hoped to send a correspondent to interview Mr. Cohen in character, reversing the roles in Borat’s acts, where his mock interviews have duped some subjects. So far, though, Mr. Cohen has not responded to his offer. He said Mr. Cohen’s satire was hyperbolic at best and wildly off the mark at worst but nonetheless served as an antidote to the articles and broadcasts that appear in official state media, where Kazakhstan is forever harmonious and prosperous.

“Most people take it normally,” he said, noting that those who have seen Borat remain a minority with access to the Internet or satellite television, where “Da Ali G Show” appears on Russian MTV, which is on cable television here. “The nation has changed enough for that.”

[Borat does not poke fun at Islam, whereas Mohammed cartoons do. You're comparing apples and oranges!!--ed. Maybe... except that nationalism can provoke just as much passion as religion, so I think the similarities are more important than the differences.]

Oh, and you can see the trailer for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan by clicking here. As for Borat's reaction to the Kazakh government's denunciations, click here.

I have discovered, through long and intensive soul-searching, that I would be a lousy pundit for a Sunday morning talk show. The reason is that my reaction to 99% of the topics discussed on such shows boils down to, "This too shall pass."

In other words, claims that individual leaders or individual political performances make a difference leave me, for the most part, unimpressed.

Which brings me to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Multiple sources have Ahmadinejad performing brilliantly while in NYC. Consider the New York Times' David Sanger:

Over the objections of the administration and Jewish groups that boycotted the event, Mr. Ahmadinejad, the man who has become the defiant face of Iran, squared off with the nation’s foreign policy establishment, parrying questions for an hour and three-quarters with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations, then ending the evening by asking whether they were simply shills for the Bush administration.

Never raising his voice and thanking each questioner with a tone that oozed polite hostility, he spent 40 minutes questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened — “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,” he said after hearing an account of an 81-year-old member, the insurance mogul Maurice R. Greenberg, who saw the Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell — and he refused to even consider Washington’s proposal for Russia to provide Iran with nuclear reactor fuel, and take it back once it is used.

Then there's Andrew Sullivan:

Watching the CNN interview with Mahmoud Ahamedinejad and reading about his meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations reinforces my sense of foreboding about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There's no point in denying that his trip to the U.S. has been a big media and p.r. coup for him. And there is a chilling slickness to him that is as disturbing as it is obviously formidable. The way he deflected questions always back toward the U.S., the way he skilfully used every awkward moment to pivot to the themes his domestic and international audience want to hear, the very image of the informal, mild-mannered, quiet-spoken, constantly smiling serenity: all these represent a very, very capable politician. There is a complete self-assurance to him that suggests he can neither be trusted as a diplomatic partner nor under-estimated as a global foe.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sparred with a high-levelgroup from the Council on Foreign Relations for ninety minutes Wednesday on virtually every contentious issue between the United States and Iran.

There were no obvious changes in the responses given by Ahmadinejad, who has been granting interviews to major news organizations over the past week ahead of his trip to the opening session of the UN General Assembly. But the Iranian leader engaged in a protracted punch and counterpunch with the panel.

“I’m not sure we learned anything new,” said Richard N. Haass, the CFR president, in comments afterwards.

Looking at Gwertzman's account, I did not see that. Instead, I see Ahmadinejad getting pilloried by Matin Indyk, Brent Scowcroft, and Kenneth Roth -- not exactly a homogenous bunch. Which might explain Ahmadinejad's truculence at the end:

As the meeting drew to a close, the Iranian leader observed, “In the beginning of the session you said you are independent, and I accepted that. But everything you said seems to come from the government perspective.” Haass responded that there had been no advance coordination among the Council participants and that “the aim was to expose you to views of a broad range of Americans. It would be wrong for you to leave this meeting thinking that you heard unrepresentative views.”

Ahmadinejad too will pass.

UPDATE: OK, I'll give Ahmadinejad credit for sartorially converting Matthew Yglesias.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A valid question running through the comments boils down to, "what if Ahmadinejad gets nuclear weapons?" I agree that this does not fall under the "this too shall pass" category -- however, we need to be clear about terms here. My (limited) understanding of the Iranian power structure suggests that on the nuclear question, Ahmadinejad is a) not the most important decision-maker; and b) holds the minority position of rejecting all compromise. So even if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, I do not think this means Ahmadinejad is going to have his finger on the button.

Besides, I suspect Ahmadinejad has his own domestic troubles.

It's strictly a coincidence that third-wave democratic governments in Hungary and Thailand are having a spot of trouble today. There does seem to be a loose commonality in the underlying sources of the instability, however.

Why the attempted coup in Thailand? The BBC has a good backgrounder:

Thailand's latest political crisis traces its roots back to January when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra sold his family's stake in the telecoms firm Shin Corp.
The move angered many, mainly urban Thais, who complained the family avoided paying tax and had passed control of an important national asset to Singaporean investors.

It led to mass protests and calls for the resignation of the prime minister, who was already under pressure over his handling of a Muslim insurgency in the south and his extensive control over the media.

In a bid to tackle the crisis, and to show he still had widespread public support despite regular massive street protests in Bangkok, Mr Thaksin dissolved parliament in February and called a snap election for April.

Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party won 57% of the vote in the April election, but millions of Thais cast protest votes and the opposition refused to take part.

After weeks of limbo, Thailand's highly-revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej called the situation a "mess" and ordered the courts to sort it out.

The election result was ruled invalid by the Constitutional Court and a new date was set for later this year.

As for Hungary, here's the Associated Press explanation:

Protesters clashed with police and stormed the headquarters of Hungarian state television early Tuesday in an explosion of anger over a leaked recording of the prime minister admitting his government had "lied morning, evening and night" about the economy.

Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said the overnight riots were "the longest and darkest night" for the country since the end of communism in 1989. About 150 people were injured, including 102 police officers, one of whom suffered serious head injuries, officials said....

The outpouring of rage may be linked to austerity measures Gyurcsany's Socialist-led coalition has implemented in order to rein in a state budget deficit expected to surpass 10 percent of gross domestic product this year — the largest in the European Union.

The government has raised taxes and announced plans to lay off scores of state employees, and introduce direct fees in the health sector and tuition for most university students.

Until the scandal suddenly broke this weekend, the 45-year-old Gyurcsany had been the Socialist Party's golden boy — a youthful, charismatic leader promising to lead his nation to the prosperity as a full EU member.

His coalition with the Alliance of Free Democrats in April became the first Hungarian government to win re-election since the return to democracy in 1990.

The violence came after a mainly peaceful protest outside parliament attended by several thousand people began late Sunday, when a recording made in May was leaked to local media in which Gyurcsany admitted to repeatedly having lied to the country about the true state of the Hungarian economy to win April's elections.

A mark against democracy? Well, yes, but only until one considers Winston Churchill's thoughts on the matter.

James C. McKinley reports in the New York Times that after an interesting period of protest, Mexico is now returning to normal:

Supporters of a leftist candidate who narrowly lost the presidential election this summer were tearing down five miles of tents on Thursday that have blockaded this capital’s central avenues for six weeks.

“It’s an emotional situation,” Juan Gutiérrez Calva, 45, a street vendor, said as he packed up his tent. “I’m calm. I’m not sad or happy. It was always clear that we were not going to advance much toward a real democracy in this country.”

The move signaled a shift by their leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, who says he was robbed of an election victory.

Having lost a legal battle for a full recount, and facing a steady defection of supporters, Mr. López Obrador is now striving to find a way to remain a political force over the coming six years, while Felipe Calderón, a conservative, serves as president.

Now even Mr. López Obrador’s aides acknowledge that he is losing some support among middle-class liberals and influential leftist politicians and intellectuals, as Mexicans seem prepared to move on from the election dispute, even if Mr. López Obrador is not.

The founder of his party, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, for instance, published a letter on Thursday accusing Mr. López Obrador and his inner circle of being intolerant of dissent.

“It worries me profoundly, the intolerance and demonization, the dogmatic attitude that prevails around Andrés Manuel for those of us who do not accept unconditionally his proposals and who question his points of view and decisions,” he wrote.

And Carlos Fuentes, the giant of Mexican letters, also assailed Mr. López Obrador this week for continuing to insist there was widespread fraud in the election, while he never challenged the elections of his party’s members to the Legislature.

“There could have been fraud in the Chamber of Deputies, there could have been fraud in the Senate, but there wasn’t,” he said. “There was only fraud for the presidency of the republic. How strange, no? I don’t believe it.”

There have been other signs of weakening support. Mr. López Obrador’s party voted down a slate of his closest allies for leadership positions in Congress, choosing the leaders of other factions. Two prominent governors from his party have also recognized Mr. Calderón’s victory.

The questioning extends to the voters. Several said in interviews that the prolonged blockade of the city’s central avenues and main square, as well as Mr. López Obrador’s refusal to concede defeat, only confirmed the accusations of his political enemies that he was autocratic and had little regard for courts or the law.

Last month I posted the following caveat to my blogging about the Lebanon conflict:

[I]it is possible that Hezbollah has suffered far greater losses than we know. There is an asymmetry in the reporting of the conflict -- reporters clearly have much greater access to the Israeli military than Hezbollah. While it's in both sides' interest to keep published reports of their losses to a minimum, it's institutionally tougher for Israel to do this.

As a result, the Israeli losses are known -- the Hezbollah losses are not completely known.

I still don't know the answer. According to Greg Djerejian, Hezbollah has acted so swiftly to reconstruct and rebuild the affected portions of Lebanon that, "Hizbollah's vast independent network undermines the state and encourages criticism of the cash-strapped central government."

On the other hand, according to Michael Totten, Hezbollah is acting in a quite chastened manner in South Lebanon:

[T]he most recent development in Hezbollah’s post-war saga is frankly humiliating.

Hizbullah has dismantled 14 outposts on the Israel-Lebanon border near the Shaba Farms, Lebanese security sources said Monday.

Reportedly, the group evacuated the posts using trucks to carry artillery, other weapons and military equipment, while bulldozers blocked access to tunnels and bunkers.

Witnesses said that the vehicles laden with weapons and other military equipment were headed northward.

A French news agency reported that the Lebanese army had deployed troops along the border with Syria and that its soldiers had blocked routes used by weapons smugglers.

UPDATE: Below is an extract from an e-mail relayed to me by someone within the "defense establishment" -- make of it what you will:

1. All serious military analysts in the US, Iran and Israel understand that Hezbollah suffered an enormous defeat on the battlefield.

2. However, Hezbollah’s military branch developed a technique to nullify the tactic that the IDF normally uses in cross-border raids. Specifically, the IDF often conducts raids by quickly sending in a platoon backed up by a few tanks/mobile armor units. By arming their fighters with anti-tank weapons, Hezbollah nullified the tank advantage. By using tunnels, they were able to surprise the IDF infantry and evade reprisal.

3. In response, IDF changed tactics. Specifically, they activated massive reserves and then flooded the areas with troops. This nullifies the Hezbollah technique because the IDF could cut retreat routes, block routes to other tunnels, and can quickly kill the people who pop out of tunnels. In short, after you take a cheap shot at the IDF and you try to run, you will encounter more IDF.

4. In the last days, when the IDF called its reserves, Hezbollah lost much ground and was powerless to stop most IDF actions.

5. Also, the strategy of distributing rockets throughout the population is very effective for publicity. Though the rockets themselves cause relatively little damage and have little effective military use, they are easy to use, hard to stop and are sensational (in the sense that they bring attention).

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s strategy to reverse the results in Mexico's presidential election is starting to confuse me. Consider this Financial Times story by Adam Thomson:

Ever since Mr López Obrador, leftwing candidate in the election for president on July 2, lost by a razor-thin 244,000 votes to Felipe Calderón of the ruling centre-right National Action party, he has been “fighting to save democracy”....

In a rare interview, Mr López Obrador told the Financial Times at the weekend that not only would his struggle continue but that it would also become more radical and incorporate new acts of “civil resistance” to press his case.

All this has come as little surprise to his critics, who brand the silver-haired 52-year-old simply as an unreformed leftist campaigner with an authoritarian streak and scant regard for legal process.

They would probably be unsurprised, too, to learn what Mr López Obrador is reading: Sources on the History of the Mexican Revolution, a large leather-bound book with gold leaf on the spine. “You have to know history to know what to do in circumstances . . .”, he says before tailing off into silence.

Mr López Obrador has been reading about José Vasconcelos, a prominent revolutionary figure who later put down his loss in the 1929 presidential election to fraud and called on supporters to begin an armed struggle. And like that of Vasconcelos, Mr López Obrador is aware that the story of his own struggle might be retold for future generations.

“Never in this country’s history has an opposition movement managed to bring together so many people,” he says. “This is a historic moment because the next few days will define the future of democracy in Mexico, the role of the institutions and respect for the constitution.”....

As a political strategy, however, most analysts believe the call for peaceful civil resistance is a big mistake. The resulting traffic chaos from the blockade of Reforma has annoyed many residents in the capital, which is by far Mr López Obrador’s biggest support base. An increasingly radical strategy may also alienate members of his own party, which did well at the legislative level. Before long, they argue, instead of becoming a new Vasconcelos, he may find himself a lonely – and insignificant – character.

Mr López Obrador admits that “there has been a drain of support” since he began his civil resistance campaign. He also accepts that less than half the population supports him in his struggle. In the capital, for example, he believes he now has the backing of 38 per cent of citizens.

But he insists that he had no option but to challenge the authorities. “You can’t stop them unless you take these kinds of steps. The way to fight fraud and to overcome the news blackout is what we are doing now,” he says. “If we hadn’t taken Reforma [the occupied avenue], we would not exist.” (emphases added)

If Lopez Obrador knows that his "permanent protest" campaign is causing him to lose support, and there is no indication that the protests to date are affecting the legal part of the electoral process, how is this Mexican standoff going to end?

Taylor Owen at Oxblog relays a first-person account from Erin Baines about negotiations to end a conflict in Uganda. You know a situation must be pretty dire when the Sudanese government is the mediator in a dispute.

Go check it out.

The BBC reports that there will not be a full recount in Mexico's recent presidential election:

Mexico's electoral body has rejected a request by left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador for a full recount of votes from July's disputed election.
Instead, the electoral tribunal's seven judges ordered a partial recount.

Mr Lopez Obrador's supporters have repeatedly said a ballot-by-ballot recount is the only way to restore faith in Mexico's electoral system.

The 2 July vote gave victory to the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, by less than 1%.

The electoral tribunal ordered the recount of votes at 11,839 of the country's almost 130,500 polling stations.

Mr Obrador has challenged the election result, saying the vote was rigged.

He has said he will not accept a partial recount, raising fears of prolonged public unrest.

In Mexico's central plaza, thousands of protesters watched the court session on a huge screen, chanting "Vote by vote!" and drowning out the judges' statements. Representatives of Lopez Obrador walked out of the session in protest.

Tens of thousands of Lopez Obrador's supporters have camped out in the capital's center for a week, disrupting business and traffic to press their case that their candidate was cheated of victory in the July 2 election and to demand that all the votes be recounted....

Lopez Obrador contends he won the election and argues that a full, ballot-by-ballot recount is the only way to restore faith in Mexico's electoral system.

Calderon has expressed confidence the election was clean and fair, and European Union observers said they found no problems in the vote counting.

The protest camps in Mexico City's cultural and financial heart, the elegant Reforma Avenue and the Zocalo plaza, have snarled traffic for nearly a week.

The blockade looks more like a fair than a protest. City workers and party members have erected enormous circus-like tents the length of the avenue. There are stages where musicians entertain the protesters, and a photo exhibit of Mr. López Obrador’s life. A volleyball net had been set up, as well as a mini soccer field.

But the protest has cost Mr. López Obrador many allies, among them the leftist writer Carlos Monsivais, who believe that causing traffic jams throughout a city that voted overwhelmingly for him is going too far.

Business owners in the city center have also complained they are being hurt and have demanded the city government dislodge the protesters, to no avail. Hotel owners say their occupancy rate has dropped 50 percent this week. Restaurateurs and retailers are also hurting. The blockade is causing losses of $22 million a day, estimates the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce.

When the war started in Lebanon, I said the situaion was fluid.

Not any more.

Neil MacFarquhar has a front-pager in the New York Times suggesting that the Arab Middle East has come to a consensus about the war in Lebanon -- and it's not a consensus the United States would like:

At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.

Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.

The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.

An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.

Even Al Qaeda, run by violent Sunni Muslim extremists normally hostile to all Shiites, has gotten into the act, with its deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, releasing a taped message saying that through its fighting in Iraq, his organization was also trying to liberate Palestine.

To be fair, I suspect if the IDF had managed to cause Hezbollah to disintegrate within the week of conflict, this wouldn't have happened -- and I think that was what the IDF expected to happen. However, I'm shocked, shocked to report that pre-war intelligence might have been flawed.

Now, Israel faces the worst of both worlds -- they've discovered that Hezbollah is a more potent, disciplined, and technologically savvy threat than they previously thought. At the same time, public opinion in Lebanon, the region and across the world has shifted against Jerusalem, making it next to impossible for them to adopt the military measures necessary to eradicate the threat [What measures are those?--ed. I'm not even sure -- I just now they would involve action on a greater scale than what the IDF is currently doing.]

UPDATE: There is one whopping caveat to the above that I forgot to mention -- it is possible that Hezbollah has suffered far greater losses than we know. There is an asymmetry in the reporting of the conflict -- reporters clearly have much greater access to the Israeli military than Hezbollah. While it's in both sides' interest to keep published reports of their losses to a minimum, it's institutionally tougher for Israel to do this.

As a result, the Israeli losses are known -- the Hezbollah losses are not completely known. [If Hezbollah crumbles in the next week, will this be your "quagmire" post?--ed. Pretty much, yes -- but I still don't think they will fall apart.]

In their summer 2006 issue, Foreign Affairs featured a roundtable on "What to Do In Iraq?" with contributions by Larry Diamond, James Dobbins, Chaim Kaufmann, Leslie Gelb and Stephen Biddle.

This month, foreignaffairs.org invited four prominent online commentators -- Christopher Hitchens, Kevin Drum, Marc Lynch, and Fred Kaplan -- to a web-only discussion of the articles and Iraq in general. Biddle and Diamond respond in kind.

Go check it out.

Back in Boston, but very jet-lagged.

I see that the Middle East did not get more peaceful while I was on a jet plane. Stratfor provides a useful analysis on what Israel and Hezbollah are thinking in the current conflict. I don't know if the analysis is correct, but it does have the advantage of matching my cogitation on the matter:

The Israeli strategy appears to be designed to do two things. First, the Israelis are trying to prevent any supplies from entering Lebanon, including reinforcements. That is why they are attacking all coastal maritime facilities. Second, they are degrading the roads in Lebanon. That will keep reinforcements from reaching Hezbollah fighters engaged in the south. As important, it will prevent the withdrawal and redeployment of heavy equipment deployed by Hezbollah in the south, particularly their rockets, missiles and launchers. The Israelis are preparing the battlefield to prevent a Hezbollah retreat or maneuver.

Hezbollah's strategy has been imposed on it. It seems committed to standing and fighting. The rate of fire they are maintaining into Israel is clearly based on an expectation that Israel will be attacking. The rocketry guarantees the Israelis will attack. Hezbollah has been reported to have anti-tank and anti-air weapons. The Israelis will use airmobile tactics to surround and isolate Hezbollah concentrations, but in the end, they will have to go in, engage and defeat Hezbollah tactically. Hezbollah obviously knows this, but there is no sign of disintegration on its part. At the very least, Hezbollah is projecting an appetite for combat. Sources in Beirut, who have been reliable to this point, say Hezbollah has weapons that have not yet been seen, such as anti-aircraft missiles, and that these will be used shortly. Whatever the truth of this, Hezbollah does not seem to think its situation is hopeless.

The uncertain question is Syria. No matter how effectively Israel seals the Lebanese coast, so long as the Syrian frontier is open, Hezbollah might get supplies from there, and might be able to retreat there. So far, there has been only one reported airstrike on a Syrian target. Both Israel and Syria were quick to deny this.

What is interesting is that it was the Syrians who insisted very publicly that no such attack took place. The Syrians are clearly trying to avoid a situation in which they are locked into a confrontation with Israel. Israel might well think this is the time to have it out with Syria as well, but Syria is trying very hard not to give Israel casus belli. In addition, Syria is facilitating the movement of Westerners out of Lebanon, allowing them free transit. They are trying to signal that they are being cooperative and nonaggressive.

The problem is this: While Syria does not want to get hit and will not make overt moves, so long as the Syrians cannot guarantee supplies will not reach Hezbollah or that Hezbollah won't be given sanctuary in Syria, Israel cannot complete its mission of shattering Hezbollah and withdrawing. They could be drawn into an Iraq-like situation that they absolutely don't want. Israel is torn. On the one hand, it wants to crush Hezbollah, and that requires total isolation. On the other hand, it does not want the Syrian regime to fall. What comes after would be much worse from Israel's point of view.

This is the inherent problem built into Israel's strategy, and what gives Hezbollah some hope. If Israel does not attack Syria, Hezbollah could well survive Israel's attack by moving across the border. No matter how many roads are destroyed, Israel won't be able to prevent major Hezbollah formations moving across the border. If they do attack Syria and crush al Assad's government, Hezbollah could come out of this stronger than ever.

Judging from the airstrikes in the past 24 hours, it would appear Israel is trying to solve the problem tactically, by degrading Lebanese transport facilities. That could increase the effectiveness of the strategy, but in the end cannot be sufficient. We continue to think Israel will choose not to attack Syria directly and therefore, while the invasion will buy time, it will not solve the problem. Hezbollah certainly expects to be badly hurt, but it does not seem to expect to be completely annihilated. We are guessing, but our guess is that they are reading Israel's views on Syria and are betting that, in the long run, they will come out stronger. Of course, Israel knows this and therefore may have a different plan for Syria. At any rate, this is the great unknown in this campaign.

You know a crisis is still in a fluid state when major U.S. newspapers take opposing positions on in their new analysis of the situation.

For example -- how have the Israeli attacks affected Hezbollah's political position in Lebanon?

The New York Times' Michael Slackman thinks Hezbollah is the big winner:

A few short months ago, representatives of every Lebanese faction gathered in central Beirut and discussed many of the issues that divide them - including how and when to disarm the Hezbollah militia.

While Hezbollah and its supporters vowed never to give up their weapons, the recent events have served only to support their position: anyone calling for disarming Hezbollah now risks being called a traitor.

"It is strange that one man representing a faction of the Shia, Hassan Nasrallah, is holding the whole Lebanese population hostage," said Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst....

In Lebanon, [Hezbollah leader Hasan] Nasrallah tried to make clear during his own press conference on Wednesday that Hezbollah was only acting to free Lebanese prisoners and to liberate a disputed piece of land called Shabba Farms. Hezbollah has always maintained that its mandate is to fight for Lebanon - not to pursue anyone else's agenda, not even the Palestinians. No one doubts that the recent events served Hezbollah's interests, at least in the short term.

The radical Shiite movement Hezbollah and its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, hold an effective veto in Lebanese politics, and the group's military prowess has heartened its supporters at home and abroad in the Arab world. But that same force of arms has begun to endanger Hezbollah's long-term standing in a country where critics accuse it of dragging Lebanon into an unwinnable conflict the government neither chose nor wants to fight.

"To a certain Arab audience and Arab elite, Nasrallah is a champion, but the price is high," said Walid Jumblatt, a member of parliament and leader of Lebanon's Druze community. "We are paying a high price."....

Since the fighting with Israel started Wednesday, calls for Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons have gathered urgency. The violence began when Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border incursion, followed by an Israeli attack on roads, bridges, power stations and airports.

Lebanese critics as well as allies of Hezbollah insist that the Israeli response was disproportionate. But at the same time, in meetings Thursday, Lebanese officials began to lay the groundwork for an extension of government control to southern Lebanon. Hezbollah largely controls southern Lebanon, where it has built up a network of schools, hospitals and charities.

"To declare war and to make military action must be a decision made by the state and not by a party," said Nabil de Freige, a parliament member. He belongs to the bloc headed by Saad Hariri, whose father, Rafiq, a former prime minister and wealthy businessman, was assassinated in 2005, setting off a sequence of events that forced the Syrian withdrawal. "It's a very simple equation: You have to be a state."

After a cabinet meeting Thursday, the government said it had a right and duty to extend its control over all Lebanese territory. Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat said the statement marked a step toward the government reasserting itself.

Other government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, went further, calling it a first move in possibly sending the Lebanese army to the border, a U.N.-endorsed proposal that Hezbollah has rejected. The officials described the meeting as stormy and contentious but said both sides -- Hezbollah and its government critics -- were especially wary of public divisions at a time of crisis.

"It is becoming very clear that the state alone must bear responsibility for the country's foreign policy," said Samir Franjieh, a parliament member who is close to the Hariri bloc. "But our problem now is that Israel is taking things so far that if there is no help from the international community, the situation could get out of hand."

Going by news stories -- the London bombings, the French riots, the Danish cartoons -- 2005 was not a terribly good year for Muslim immigrants living in Europe.

So it's interesting to see that according to the Pew Global Attitudes project, the situation might not be as bleak as previously thought:

Muslims in Europe worry about their future, but their concern is more economic than religious or cultural. And while there are some signs of tension between Europe's majority populations and its Muslim minorities, Muslims there do not generally believe that most Europeans are hostile toward people of their faith. Still, over a third of Muslims in France and one-in-four in Spain say they have had a bad experience as a result of their religion or ethnicity.

However, there is little evidence of a widespread backlash against Muslim immigrants among the general publics in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain. Majorities continue to express concerns about rising Islamic identity and extremism, but those worries have not intensified in most of the countries surveyed over the past 12 months; a turbulent period that included the London subway bombings, the French riots, and the Danish cartoon controversy....

Most notably, France shows no signs of a backlash in response to last year's riots. In fact, a counter trend seems to have emerged with slightly more French people saying that immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is a good thing than did so a year ago. The French public is also more inclined this year to say that Muslims living in France want to adopt French customs - a view held by an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France. Nor do German and British publics express any increase in negative views of immigrants - although, unlike the French, they are not more positive toward immigrants this year. Meanwhile, the Spanish public's view toward immigrants has grown slightly more negative over the last year.

The poll finds that Muslims themselves are generally positive about conditions in their host nation. In fact, they are more positive than the general publics in all four European countries about the way things are going in their countries. However, many Muslims, especially in Britain, worry about the future of Muslims in their country.

Religion is central to the identity of European Muslims. With the exception of Muslims in France, they tend to identify themselves primarily as Muslim rather than as British, Spanish, or German. In France, Muslims are split almost evenly on this question. The level of Muslim identification in Britain, Spain, and Germany is similar to that in Pakistan, Nigeria, and Jordan, and even higher than levels in Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia. By contrast the general populations in Western Europe are far more secular in outlook. Roughly six-in-ten in Spain, Germany, and Britain identify primarily with their country rather than their religion, as do more than eight-in-ten in France.

Americans, however, split about evenly on this question: 42% say they first think of themselves as Christians versus 48% who think of themselves primarily as Americans - a divide close to that found among French Muslims.

The leaked memo from the Baghdad embassy to Condoleezza Rice on the situation for Iraqis in Baghdad makes for very sobering reading.

Read it and comment away. The first thought that came to mind for me: please, please tell me that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has sources of intel on the situation there beyond the locals working at the embassy.

I hope Dick Cheney is right when he says that 10 years from now people will look back at 2005 and say, "That's when we began to get a handle on the long-term future of Iraq." Memos like the one linked above, however, make Cheney's assertion look pretty out-of-touch.

Accoding to both U.S. and Iraqi officials, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in an airstrike today.

Question to readers: what effect, if any, will this have on the security situation in Iraq?

UPDATE: I do like this AP headline: "Around the world, al-Zarqawi death praised"

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian has some instant analysis that is worh reading.

I've occasionally riffed about how Al Qaeda acts like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Kansas City Royals of world politics. However, this was predicated on the assumption that Al Qaeda had lost their base in Afghanistan and failed to acquire a new one.

Which brings me to Somalia, and the takeover of Mogadishu by an entity called the Union of Islamic Courts. There are some very disturbing parallels between what's happening in Mogadishu, Somalia right now and what happened in Afghanistan when the Taliban took over Kabul. Consider this BBC report:

The Islamic Courts say they want to promote Islamic law rather than clan allegiance, which has divided Somalis over the past 15 years.

However, all but one of the 11 courts is associated with just one clan - the Hawiye, who dominate the capital....

The Union's public face is its chairman Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate who sought to assure Somalis and the international community this week that the Islamic Courts were no threat and only wanted order.

But the Union does contain radical elements.

Two of the 11 courts are seen as militant; one is led by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, on an American list of terrorism suspects because he used to head al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, which was linked to al-Qaeda.

Mr Aweys says al-Itihaad no longer exists and also denies accusations from some western diplomats and observers that there are training grounds for Islamic fighters in Somalia.

He is, however, strongly critical of the United States and its "war on terror"....

During the years of warfare and anarchy, many Somalis have increasingly turned to their faith for some sort of stability.

One visible sign is that before the civil war began in the 1980s, very few women wore headscarves in Mogadishu.

Now, almost every woman wears a headscarf and an increasing number are wearing veils covering their faces, with just narrow slits for the eyes.

Even those Mogadishu residents who are wary of Islamic extremism may welcome a single group being in control of the capital for the first time in 15 years, saying there will at least be some authority.

And many will prefer Islamic preachers to the warlords who have fought over and in many cases systematically looted the city since 1991.

James Gordon Meek has a roundup of U.S. intelligence views in the New York Daily News:

"Now you've got a safe haven for al-Qaida," said a defense intelligence official monitoring the country that was used as a base to stage attacks on two U.S. embassies and an Israeli resort in East Africa. "It's definitely a concern."

However, current and former U.S. officials told the New York Daily News that Osama bin Laden's terror network isn't firmly established in Somalia, though the country hasn't had a central government in 15 years.

U.S. Special Forces teams have found no signs of a firm al-Qaida presence, such as terror training camps, sources said.

"Probably our worst fears have not materialized," said recently retired CIA counterterrorism official Paul Pillar.

But Pillar said events in Mogadishu this week are "somewhat similar" to how the Taliban ended infighting by Afghan warlords in the 1990s, brought peace to a war weary country and gave sanctuary to bin Laden's training camps. Pillar said the CIA is likely telling its operatives to "collect, collect, collect" intelligence urgently.

"Having a place to stage attacks in that area is going to be attractive" to al-Qaida, warned former National Counterterrorism Center chief John Brennan.

Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, has a long essay in the Washington Post today on just what Saudi textbooks are saying after they promised to excise some of the more intolerant rhetoric post-9/11:

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government's statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the "monotheists") and unbelievers (the "polytheists" and "infidels").

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

Freedom House knows this because Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi dissident who runs the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs , gave us a dozen of the current, purportedly cleaned-up Saudi Ministry of Education religion textbooks. The copies he obtained were not provided by the government, but by teachers, administrators and families with children in Saudi schools, who slipped them out one by one.

Some of our sources are Shiites and Sunnis from non-Wahhabi traditions -- people condemned as "polytheistic" or "deviant" or "bad" in these texts -- others are simply frustrated that these books do so little to prepare young students for the modern world.

We then had the texts translated separately by two independent, fluent Arabic speakers.

FIRST GRADE

" Every religion other than Islam is false."

"Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________."

FIFTH GRADE

"Whoever obeys the Prophet and accepts the oneness of God cannot maintain a loyal friendship with those who oppose God and His Prophet, even if they are his closest relatives."

"It is forbidden for a Muslim to be a loyal friend to someone who does not believe in God and His Prophet, or someone who fights the religion of Islam."

"A Muslim, even if he lives far away, is your brother in religion. Someone who opposes God, even if he is your brother by family tie, is your enemy in religion."

EIGHTH GRADE

"As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus."

TWELFTH GRADE

"Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God."

1) How much cherry-picking is going on with the quotations?

2) If one were to go to religious schools in other countries, including the United States, how much rhetoric would one find that would smack of this kind of chauvinism?

I had the good fortune to attend the first-ever Brussels Forum last weekend. It turns out that at least one invitee was not so lucky, according to this e-mail from the Forum's conveners:

One of our invited guests to the Brussels Forum, Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, never made it to the event as he was detained by the Iranian authorities on the way to the airport to fly to Brussels. Dr. Jahanbegloo is a well-known Iranian intellectual and human rights advocate who currently heads the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran. Over the weekend we decided not to make his arrest public in the hope that he would shortly be released by the authorities. This has since proven not to be the case.

Ramin Jahanbegloo is a Sorbonne-educated expert on German philosophy. He has also been a post-doc in Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University and a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Dr. Jahanbegloo is a valued member of our intellectual community and a symbol of the universality of democratic and human rights. He is a frequent contributor to the many debates about human rights and democratic freedom in both Europe and the Middle East. Among his many books are Conversations with Isaiah Berlin and (as editor) Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity. At the time of his arrest, he was working on a study of Ghandi and peaceful resistance. He holds a Canadian as well as an Iranian passport.

“The arbitrary arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo shows the perilous state of academic freedom and free speech in Iran today,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “This prominent scholar should be celebrated for his academic achievements, not interrogated in one of Iran’s most infamous prisons.”

The authorities detained Jahanbegloo at Tehran Airport on or around Thursday, April 27. Officials refused to acknowledge his detention until Wednesday, May 3, when Tehran’s deputy prosecutor general, Mahmoud Salarkia, confirmed Jahanbegloo’s detention in an interview with the Iranian Students News Agency.

Also on Wednesday, the Fars News Agency quoted the chief of prisons in Tehran Province, Sohrab Soleimani, as saying that Jahanbegloo is being held in Tehran’s Evin prison. Neither official gave any reason for Jahanbegloo’s arrest. An unnamed Judiciary official told the daily Etemad-e Melli that charges against Jahanbegloo “will be announced after the interrogations.”

“Iran’s Judiciary is notorious for coercing confessions by means of torture and ill-treatment,” Stork said. “We hold the Iranian government entirely responsible for Jahanbegloo’s well-being.”

Needless to say, the Iranian blogosphere has been abuzz about the arrest, the first of a prominent intellectual since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election. This post by Shahram Kholdi provides the a sense of the Farsi blogosphere:

[T]hrough this post, I inform the readers of Free Thoughts on Iran that Dr. Jahanbegloo's arrest is a cause of concern and his release should become the goal of all who are concerned with the promotion of civil society, open public space for free political debate, and last but not least a space safe enough to conduct such debates in a non-violent manner. Dr. Jahanbegloo has taught, lived, and acted in a non-violent manner, and those who would like to rally for his release should remember one fact: He did all this without Media-Mongering and without recourse to Sensationalism.

Here, I join all those who are already active to do something to secure the immediate release of Dr. Jahanbegloo, and invite those who have not joined the rest of us yet, to join us. Also, I would like to ask all those who are willing to join the cause and care for Dr. Jahanbegloo not just as a scholar, intellectual, teacher, and a friend, but as a person who deserves due process, just representation, and freedom from arbitrary confinement, to join the cause in a non-sensationalist manner.

I am uncertain what useful non-governmental actions can be done with regard to Jahanbegloo's case -- but e-mailing Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations might be a useful starting point. They even have a "human rights" category in their subject menu.

Foreign Policy magazine has started up a blog with the catchy name of Passport. Perusing the posts, I think it will have to go up on the blogroll.

Among other posts, Davide Berretta informs us about Abu Zarqawi's apparent demotion within the ranks of Al Qaeda:

Remember the letter in which Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's sidekick, chided chief insurgent in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for killing too many civilians? Apparently, that was only a warning: word is that Zarqawi was stripped from his political duties two weeks ago, apparently due to the dispute over civilian killings.

Continuing the Tampa Bay Devil Rays metaphor, I look forward to Zawahiri issuing a press release confirming that Zarqawi will be staying on as a consultant, and that the demotion is not really an organizational shake-up.

Christine Spolar takes a look in the Chicago Tribune at what's happened in Lebanon since Syrian troops left the country. Spolar takes a pesimistic view of politicians dithering while the people suffer -- but after reading the article, I didn't see a lot of heft to that claim.

The interesting part of the story was about how Hezbollah is coping with normal politics:

The pressure is on the Lebanese political class to recapture the promise of a lost spring. Leaders from all parties in parliament are in round-table talks, the first national dialogue in decades, in hopes of translating last year's street protests for "freedom, sovereignty, independence" into some kind of progress.

After bitter delays, they are debating whether President Emile Lahoud, a former commander of the Lebanese armed forces allied with Syria, should be forced from office. They are also questioning for the first time whether the militant group Hezbollah needs its decades-old armed wing.

The discussions are difficult but necessary, according to those involved in the talks and observers keen to see results.

"We never even sat with some of these people before," said Galeb Abou Zeinab, a Hezbollah strategist. "Just sitting and talking is positive . . . and opens people up to a natural give-and-take."....

The United States and France are sponsors of a UN Security Council resolution that calls for the disarming of Lebanese militia, including Hezbollah. But Hezbollah says it needs to maintain its fighters to guard against possible Israeli incursions.

When others argue that weapons are unnecessary since Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah leaders point to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as evidence of Israeli ambition, and they see no reason that Israel would not return to the south if Hezbollah forces disappeared.

Such words appeal to many Arabs in Lebanon, who view Israel as an enemy, and the estimated 350,000 Palestinians who live in refugee camps in Lebanon.

Like other Islamist parties in the Middle East, Hezbollah made inroads in recent elections, claiming 14 seats in the 128-member parliament. Party members are heading ministries for the first time.

But Hezbollah's strength in these internal talks also is due to its history. It has been one of the few political forces in Lebanon to connect with people over the issue of land and sovereignty. When Israeli troops left, Hezbollah leaders were quick to claim credit.

"Everyone will be looking to maneuver," political scientist Makdisi said about the historic dialogue. "Hezbollah may know that at some point they will give up the arms--but the question is: How do you use them as a bargaining chip?"

Another month in France, another excuse for mass protests. This month, the justification has been a law proposed by French prime minister Dominique de Villepin that would make it easier for employers to fire younger workers. The thinking is that this would encourage firms will hire more workers. Needless to say, the French unions disagreed.

The Financial Times' Martin Arnold reports that de Villepin is ready to cave:

Dominique de Villepin will hold talks with trade unions “with no strings attached” on Friday over his unpopular employment law, a move widely interpreted as a climbdown by the embattled French premier....

The meeting could happen on Friday. But the offer for it came only after a long and reportedly heated meeting with President Jacques Chirac, fuelling rumours that the prime minister was ordered to back down.

The new law, which allows companies to fire people aged under 26 in the first two years of their contract without reason, has sparked widespread protests by students and workers which erupted into violence in central Paris yesterday....

Unions want the law withdrawn. François Chérčque, leader of the moderate CFDT union, said: “If the prime minister does not respond positively to our demand to withdraw the first job contract, we will end the conversation.”

Critics suspect Mr de Villepin has fallen into the same trap as his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, ousted after leading France to military defeat at Waterloo.

Analysts, opposition Socialists and members of his own centre-right UMP party said he had tried to push reform too far, too fast, in pursuit of his personal ambitions.

“President Chirac has told him to back down as he was leading the country to the wall,” said Dominique Moisi, a senior adviser at France’s Institute for International Relations. “He tried to convince himself he could be France’s Margaret Thatcher, but forgot he was only the number two.”

Jacques Chirac, French president, defended his walkout on Thursday night from the EU summit – after a French industrialist began addressing leaders of the bloc in English – saying he had been “profoundly shocked to see a Frenchman express himself in English at the (EU) Council table”.

Mr Chirac and two senior French ministers walked out in protest at the decision of Ernest-Antoine Seilličre, head of the Unice employers organisation, to make a plea for economic reform in what he called “the language of business”.

Mr Chirac’s boycott reflected the tensions surrounding the two-day economic summit, which comes against a backdrop of French street protests over labour market reform and claims that Paris is engaged in protectionism of its energy market. The French president was not in the room to hear Mr Seilličre urging leaders to “resist national protectionism in order to avoid a negative domino effect”.

He returned after Mr Seilličre had finished speaking.

Belarus had a presidential "election" over the weekend, which current president Aleksandr Lukashenko won handily.. I use quotations because the OSCE reported:

The Belarusian presidential election on 19 March failed to meet OSCE commitments for democratic elections, despite the fact that voters were offered the potential for a genuine choice between four candidates.

Arbitrary use of state power and widespread detentions showed a disregard for the basic rights of freedom of assembly, association and expression, and raise doubts regarding the authorities' willingness to tolerate political competition.

There have been some protests in Minsk because of the outcome, but as I've written before, I'm not expecting a Orange revolution in Belarus anytime soon. This Times of London report by Jeremy Page doesn't make me feel any more sanguine:

President Lukashenko of Belarus declared yesterday that he had thwarted a Western plot to overthrow him, pouring scorn on the thousands who protested against his election victory.

About 5,000 opposition supporters protested again last night, setting up a dozen tents in central Minsk, after Western observers said that Sunday’s presidential poll had failed to meet international standards.

The US, which has branded Mr Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator”, denounced his victory and backed opposition calls for a new election. The EU said that it would impose more visa bans on Belarussian officials.

But President Putin of Russia quickly congratulated Mr Lukashenko, highlighting the Kremlin’s determination to prevent another revolution in a former Soviet state. “The results of the election testify to the fact that the voters trust in your course,” he said.

Mr Lukashenko brushed aside his critics at a two-hour celebratory news conference. “The revolution that was so much talked about, and so much prepared for, failed. It couldn’t be otherwise,” he began, prompting applause from the 600 audience members — mostly state officials.

He derided the 10,000 people who demonstrated on Oktyabrskaya Square on Sunday night despite driving snow and a threat from the KGB chief that they could face the death penalty. “You saw the people who went on to the square. They were good-for-nothings.” He even suggested that God had intervened by sending a blizzard at the height of the protest. It was a vintage performance by the former collective farm manager who has resurrected Soviet-style economic and political controls since he was elected in 1994.

He sat alone beneath a giant plastic model of the Soviet-era national emblem, which he revived after taking power. A map of Europe showed Belarus to be about the size of France.

In one particularly stage-managed exchange, Sergei Gaydukevich, a candidate in the election who was widely regarded as a stooge, stood up to congratulate Mr Lukashenko. The President responded that he had voted for Mr Gaydukevich. “I have a tradition that I don’t vote for myself,” he said.

A Serbian woman asked if she could kiss Mr Lukashenko, on behalf of all Serbian women, for travelling to Belgrade while it was being bombed by Nato. When a French journalist asked about his threat to “break the neck” of anyone organising protests, he responded: “Is your neck broken?”

Shown on national television, the conference was sure to appeal to his supporters in the countryside and the elderly. However, it only reinforced his image among younger Belarussians and most Westerners as a deluded megalomaniac.

Michael Slackman writes in the New York Times that both Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are catching some flak for their handling of the nuclear negotiations:

Some people in powerful positions have begun to insist that the confrontational tactics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been backfiring, making it harder instead of easier for Iran to develop a nuclear program.

This week, the United Nations Security Council is meeting to take up the Iranian nuclear program. That referral and, perhaps more important, Iran's inability so far to win Russia's unequivocal support for its plans have empowered critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad, according to political analysts with close ties to the government.

One senior Iranian official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the delicate nature of the issue, said: "I tell you, if what they were doing was working, we would say, 'Good.' " But, he added: "For 27 years after the revolution, America wanted to get Iran to the Security Council and America failed. In less than six months, Ahmadinejad did that."

One month ago, the same official had said with a laugh that those who thought the hard-line approach was a bad choice were staying silent because it appeared to be succeeding.....

Average Iranians do not seem uniformly confident at the prospect of being hit with United Nations sanctions.

From the streets of Tehran to the ski slopes outside the city, some people have begun to joke about the catch phrase of the government — flippantly saying, "Nuclear energy is our irrefutable right."

Reformers, whose political clout as a movement vanished after the last election, have also begun to speak out. And people with close ties to the government said high-ranking clerics had begun to give criticism of Iran's position to Ayatollah Khamenei, which the political elite sees as a seismic jolt.

That said, Slackman has a source who explains why Iran has found itself in the pickle it's in -- like Saddam Hussein before them, the Iranians counted on the Russians way too much:

[O]ne political scientist who speaks regularly with members of the Foreign Ministry said that Iran had hinged much of its strategy on winning Russia's support. The political scientist asked not to be identified so as not to compromise his relationship with people in the government.

The political scientist said some negotiators believed that by being hostile to the West they would be able to entice Moscow into making Tehran its stronghold in the Middle East. "They thought the turn east was the way forward," the person said. "That was a belief and a vision."

The person added, "They thought, 99 percent, Russia would seize the opportunity and back the Iranian leaders."

1) Never get involved in a land war in Asia;

2) All French diplomacy is predicated on maximizing the self-importance of France;

3) Never trust the Russians to be a dependable ally.

In the New York Times, Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor get their hands on a classified United States military report on what Saddam was thinking before and during the Second Gulf War. And it turns out that Saddam was petrified of insurgencies more than the U.S. Army:

As American warplanes streaked overhead two weeks after the invasion began, Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani drove to Baghdad for a crucial meeting with Iraqi leaders. He pleaded for reinforcements to stiffen the capital's defenses and permission to blow up the Euphrates River bridge south of the city to block the American advance.

But Saddam Hussein and his small circle of aides had their own ideas of how to fight the war. Convinced that the main danger to his government came from within, Mr. Hussein had sought to keep Iraq's bridges intact so he could rush troops south if the Shiites got out of line.

General Hamdani got little in the way of additional soldiers, and the grudging permission to blow up the bridge came too late. The Iraqis damaged only one of the two spans, and American soldiers soon began to stream across.

The episode was just one of many incidents, described in a classified United States military report, other documents and in interviews, that demonstrate how Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without.

Judging from his private statements, the single most important element in Saddam's strategic calculus was his faith that France and Russia would prevent an invasion by the United States. According to Aziz, Saddam's confidence was firmly rooted in his belief in the nexus between the economic interests of France and Russia and his own strategic goals: "France and Russia each secured millions of dollars worth of trade and service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraqi. In addition, the French wanted sanctions lifted to safeguard their trade and service contracts in Iraq. Moreover, they wanted to prove their importance in the world as members of the Security Council -- that they could use their veto to show they still had power."

Ibrahim Ahmad Abd al-Sattar, the Iraqi army and armed forces chief of staff, claimed that Saddam believed that even if his international supporters failed him and the United States did launch a ground invasion, Washington would rapidly bow to international pressure to halt the war. According to his personal interpreter, Saddam also thought his "superior" forces would put up "a heroic resistance and . . . inflict such enormous losses on the Americans that they would stop their advance." Saddam remained convinced that, in his own words, "Iraq will not, in any way, be like Afghanistan. We will not let the war become a picnic for the American or the British soldiers. No way!"

The European Commission has lost a lot of big battles over the past few years -- the growth and stability pact and the constitutional referendum, to name two. One could easily debate the virtues of either proposal, but the key political science fact is that the Commission was unable to get its way.

Tobias Buck reports in the Financial Times that the next big test is coming -- preventing a beggar-thy-neighbor policy on mergers and acquisitions:

Just over four months ago, Charlie McCreevy raised eyebrows when he warned of a “strong wind of protectionism” blowing through the European Union.

Today, that wind has turned into a storm that is threatening to tear apart some of the principles on which the Union is founded.

Within the past few weeks, the EU internal market commissioner has seen governments in Madrid, Paris, Warsaw and Luxembourg hardening their opposition to foreign takeovers.

Stung by France’s move to fend off a possible bid from Italy’s biggest energy group, the government in Rome this week also ratcheted up its protectionist rhetoric.

More trouble could be in store. On Tuesday the Commission began examining French justification for its decision to protect 11 sectors from foreign takovers.

Even though Commission officials stress that some countries may be violating the spirit rather than the letter of the law, the hostility to foreign takeovers is raising serious doubts over whether the 25 EU members are committed to the idea of a borderless, open and competitive market.

Mr McCreevy said on Tuesday: “Some...hanker after protectionist barriers not only on the Union’s external borders but internally as well. Such an attitude strikes at the very heart of the freedoms enshrined in the treaties and I will never accept it.”

The architects of the internal market have watched recent developments with growing dismay. While protectionism has never really been defeated, attacks on the free market have become more numerous and aggressive, they say.

Karel van Miert, who served as a European commissioner for transport and competition between 1989 and 1999, told the Financial Times on Tuesday : “The vehemence we have seen recently in the Mittal case, in Spain and in Poland is indeed something new and rather worrying.”

[S]ome point to a more sinister reason for the rise in hostility towards foreign suitors. “One factor is clearly the current economic malaise gripping Europe. In times when the macroeconomic conditions are less favourable, protection is always on the rise,” said Jean-Pierre Casey, research fellow and financial policy expert at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies.

High levels of unemployment in western Europe have hampered efforts to open the European services market to more cross-border competition. The centrepiece of those efforts – the services directive – now looks certain to take effect only in a heavily diluted version. Much of the hostility towards the services directive has fed on fears that workers in countries such as Germany and France would be swept aside by an influx of cheap service providers from the new EU member states in eastern Europe.

EU enlargement may also have fuelled protectionist sentiment. The EU of today is, after all, a less cosy and less homogenous place than it used to be. But perhaps the most worrying reason for recent developments is that protectionist measures in one country appear to trigger protectionist responses in other EU member states....

“There is a risk that over time this dynamic triggers a series of tit-for-tat reactions,” said Mr Casey. “That is precisely how the great depression started: one country after the other erected barriers and finally free trade just ground to a halt.”

Comment away on the ever-worsening violence in Iraq, triggered by the bombing of the Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, in the city of Samarra. Dan Simon has a disturbing synopsis in the Christian Science Monitor.

It would be a cruel irony if a bombing that didn't actually kill anyone turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

Steven Lee Myers reports in the New York Times about how a Russian province deals with cartoons that offend the sensibilities of Valdimir Putin's United Russia party:

In a controversy with echoes of the Islamic anger over Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the authorities in a central Russian city today ordered the closing of a newspaper that published a cartoon showing Muhammad along with Jesus, Moses and Buddha.

The cartoon, published on Feb. 9 in the official city newspaper in Volgograd, prompted some criticism and a federal criminal investigation but no public outrage. That may be, in large part, because it depicted the figures respectfully, renouncing violence, though Islamic teachings forbid any depiction of Muhammad.

"Well, we did not teach them that," Moses says in a caption as the four watch a television set showing two groups confronting each other with banners and clubs and hurling stones. The cartoon appeared on Page 5, accompanying an article on an agreement signed by regional political parties and organizations to combat nationalism, xenophobia and religious conflicts.

Volgograd's first deputy mayor, Andrei O. Doronin, announced the closing of the newspaper, Gorodskiye Vesti, or City News, "in order not to inflame ethnic hostilities," according to the official Russian Information Agency. He gave the newspaper a month to liquidate its assets, leaving the fate of its staff unclear....

Most of the criticism against the cartoon in Volgograd came not from Muslim or other religious leaders, but rather from the local branch of United Russia, the pro-Putin political party that dominates governments across the country. Those complaints prompted Russia's deputy prosecutor general, Nikolai I. Shepel, to announce an inquiry on Wednesday.

Officials in Volgograd initially defended the newspaper, but another deputy mayor, Konstantin E. Kalachyov, said the decision to close the newspaper was an effort to contain a scandal that was "fanned up artificially" in the wake of the fury over the Danish cartoons.

"You can say that the journalists were taught a lesson in political correctness," he said in a telephone interview.

Since a city enterprise owns the newspaper, the mayor's office was essentially shutting its own business, though Mr. Kalachyov said he hoped the newspaper's staff could continue to work at a new city-owned paper that would replace Gorodskiye Vesti.

As Bob Uecker would put it, this New York Review of Books essay by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley on Hamas is juuuuust a bit slanted in its assessment of the Palestinian situation.

That doesn't mean it's devoid of value, however. Their take on Hamas after victory seems pretty much on point to me:

Out-and-out victory was not what Hamas had expected or, for that matter, what it had wished for. It had come to see itself as a watchdog on the sidelines, sitting in the legislature without controlling it, shaping the government's policies without being held accountable for them, taking credit for its successes and escaping blame for any setbacks. Its triumph presents it with challenges of a different, more urgent, and less familiar sort. Hamas suddenly finds itself on the front line, with decisions to make and relations to manage with the world, international donors, Israel, Fatah, and, indeed, its own varied constituents. The Islamists may have secretly expected to sweep the elections but, if so, that secret remains well kept. Referring to Iraq, President Bush once spoke of America's catastrophic success. Judging from the Islamists' initial, startled reactions to their triumph, this may well be theirs....

Hamas's leaders were counting on an honorable defeat, and they looked forward to the prospect of making the most of it. Coming in a close second, their options would have been wide open. They could have joined the government, or stayed out. Either way, they would have remained in the safety of the fringes, keeping a watchful eye on domestic issues, seeking to demonstrate that Hamas's presence, including the services it provides, could improve daily life, reduce corruption, and deal with lawlessness. Hamas would have concentrated on its long-term goal of Islamicizing Palestinian society, doing so doggedly, though in increments. It would have kept to its conditional truce, reserving the right to respond to Israeli attacks on Palestinian population centers and against its own leaders....

How swiftly victory can spoil the best-laid plans. Hamas's leaders had hoped to hide behind Fatah and the PA; they are now on the front lines. The burden that was supposed to be on others is now squarely on them. In the days just after the election, Hamas suddenly sounded more modest, restrained, and dependent on third parties. This was not a matter of choice. It had to reassure Fatah members and Fatah security forces that were knocked off balance by their loss, as well as donors hesitant to bankroll a Hamas-led PA, and Arab neighbors apprehensive about having an Islamist stronghold at their doorstep, doubly so about witnessing an Islamist success at the polls. The calm and quiet that Israel once requested has become a necessity for Hamas: if it is to consolidate and maintain its popularity, it will have to live up to the promise of reform and good governance. Renewed violence would lead to swift, devastating, and unrestrained Israeli attacks, thwarting any chance for the Islamists to have a successful domestic policy. Paradoxically, Hamas's electoral sweep has curbed its freedom of action far more than defeat would have....

Abbas's gamble was that integrating Hamas into Palestinian politics would moderate its behavior. To a degree, it already has. During the past eleven months, Hamas has demonstrated its willingness and ability to honor a cessation of violence, and Israeli officials regularly credit its discipline for the sharp drop in attacks. Elected in record numbers to municipal positions during 2005, local Hamas officials have maintained practical coordination with Israel wherever necessary. Throughout the campaign, the Islamic movement dropped repeated hints of possible flexibility. Its leaders did not rule out changing their charter ("It's not the Koran," they whispered), negotiating with Israel, or accepting a long-term truce based on Israel's withdrawal to the 1967 lines. Since the elections, the pattern has continued. Hamas has indicated that it is prepared to extend its truce, integrate its forces into a Palestinian army, and accept some past arrangements between Israel and the PA. There are serious caveats to all these positions and the ideological aggiornamento still will have to wait. But if it is a trend one is looking for, it is there.

David Rennie has a story in the Daily Telegraph suggesting that a very small cluster of Finnish islands could cause some headaches for the European Union:

In the decade since they voted to join the European Union the islanders of the Ĺland archipelago in the Baltic Sea have been outvoted and overruled by Brussels, time and again.

Now Ĺland, a unique, autonomous region of Finland, is about to teach Brussels a lesson in democracy it may never forget.

Thanks to a quirk of early 20th-century history, Ĺland's 26,000 people are essentially sovereign co-rulers of their home nation of Finland. As such, they can veto any international treaty that Finland wants to enter, including EU treaties.

And the islanders are threatening to do just that when the European Commission attempts to revive the moribund EU constitution later this year.

But last week the archipelago's head of EU affairs, Britt Lundberg, travelled to Brussels - a day-long trek - to deliver a warning that dismally low public opinion on Europe could mean Alanders prevent Finland from ratifying the constitution.

The islanders' revolt has been brewing for some time. First, this community of Swedish-speaking Finns lost the right to fish at sea with traditional nets.

Then Ĺlanders saw their beloved spring duck hunting virtually abolished. To the Ĺlanders' final outrage, local laws on consuming "snus" or Swedish chewing tobacco, are about to be quashed by the European Court of Justice....

Brussels is trapped in a "Catch 22" situation of the EU's own making. Snus, a form of chewing tobacco, has been outlawed by EU fiat in every nation except Sweden, which secured a -special opt-out as a condition of its joining the EU, and in every region - except Ĺland.

The Commission recently took Finland to court to quash Ĺland's snus law. But Finland has no power to change that law. Finland does not control laws covering health in Ĺland; Ĺland does.

Ĺland is not allowed to defend its law before the justices in Luxembourg because the court recognises only nations. So the court is set to convict and fine Aland, without allowing the island's government to plead its case....

The head of the Ĺland government, Roger Norlund, admitted that he did not even like snus. To him, the row is philosophical. "Ĺland finds small-scale solutions to its problems. But the EU model is one of large-scale solutions, and harmonisation."

Tomas Grunér, a navigator on the big boats, uses snus "24 hours a day". "It keeps me relaxed," he said. "I thought the EU was a good idea, but now I think it sucks."

Rennie might be exaggerating Ĺland's influence just a wee bit. It's true that the Finnish Customs Service confirms the special tax and regulatory status of the island. However, if you go to the Ĺland Islands' official home page, you discover the following:

Foreign affairs is not transferred to Ĺland under the Autonomy Act, but remains under the control of the Finnish Government. Even so, Ĺland has a degree of influence on international treaties that contain provisions relating to areas where Ĺland is the competent authority. The Autonomy Act states that an international treaty of this kind entered into by Finland requires the consent of the Parliament of Ĺland to become valid also in Ĺland.

Thus, when Finland became a member of the European Union in 1995, Ĺland’s accession was dependent on the consent of the Parliament. After the population had expressed its opinion in two separate referendums and it had been decided that Ĺland’s relationship to the EU would be regulated in a special protocol, the Parliament of Ĺland expressed its consent. The protocol, which is part of Finland’s treaty of accession, states that Ĺland shall be regarded as a third territory with respect to indirect taxation. It also contains certain special provisions relating to the purchase of real property and the right to conduct a business in Ĺland, and confirms Ĺland’s special status under international law. (emphasis added)

Click here if you want to know the historical reasons for Ĺland's special status. For some irrational reason, I do find it amusing that a small jurisdiction of 26,200 people could decide to stymie the mighty, mighty European Commission.

I'm at a conference all day today, which means I conveniently do not have the time to post deep thoughts on Hamas' electoral victory in Palestine. So I'll let me readers comment instead. Go to it!!

But click here and here if you want an inkling of what I think. And click here for Esther Pan's concise summary of the situaion at cfr.org.

UPDATE: Michael Herzog has a very pessimistic take at Foreign Affairs:

Optimists argue that Hamas' participation in mainstream Palestinian politics will spur the group to moderate its radical goals and terrorist tactics. But history shows that political participation co-opts militants only under very specific conditions -- and almost none of those exist in the Palestinian Authority today.

Ten days ago I blogged about Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff's quixotic campaign for parliament seat in Canada, as a member of the Liberal Party..

Well, the elections were yesterday, and the Liberals didn't do so well, according to the Chicago Tribune:

Canadian voters, saying they were fed up with financial scandals and ready for a change, ended the 12-year run of the ruling Liberal Party on Monday, ousting Prime Minister Paul Martin in favor of a Conservative Party likely to steer a path closer to the United States.

Nearly complete returns in the national election gave a strong victory to Conservative leader Stephen Harper, 46, an economist and political strategist from western Canada who jokes about being dull.

He shrugged off Martin's accusations that he is too cozy with U.S. conservatives for liberal-leaning Canada--the same accusations that crippled his candidacy in 2004.

Liberal Michael Ignatieff, touted as a potential future party leader, passed his first political test Monday, shaking off a campaign marred by accusations of opportunism and ethnic slurs to win a west Toronto riding.

The 58-year-old political neophyte and Harvard academic kept Etobicoke-Lakeshore in the Liberal fold, defeating Conservative John Capobianco and NDP candidate Liam McHugh-Russell.

The Ignatieff win took on a new significance after Liberal Leader Paul Martin said early Tuesday he would soon step down.

"Now he's got to stick around and live up to the expectations that he might be the leader-in-waiting,'' said David Docherty, a political science professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.

So there was an airstrike in Pakistan over the weekend that was intended to kill Al Qaeda #2 Ayman Al-Zawahiri -- but the strike missed the target. This caused thousands of Pakistanis to protest the airstrike the next day. The Pakistani press has also been up in arms.

With goodwill earned in-country from the earthquake relief, it seems as though a single airstrike could vitiate the shift in public opinion. The Council on Foreign Relations has a web page declaring, "MISSILE STRIKE PUTS U.S. ON DEFENSIVE."

Which leads us to this tidbit of information from ABC News:

ABC News has learned that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda's master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week's U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan.

Midhat Mursi, 52, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, was identified by Pakistani authorities as one of four known major al Qaeda leaders present at an apparent terror summit in the village of Damadola early last Friday morning....

"He wants to cause mayhem, major death, and he puts his expertise on the line. So the fact that we took him out is significant," said former FBI agent Jack Cloonan, an ABC News consultant, who was the senior agent on the FBI's al Qaeda squad. "He's the man who trained the shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, as well as hundreds of others."

Pakistani officials also said that Khalid Habib, the al Qaeda operations chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi, a senior operations commander for al Qaeda, were killed in the Damadola attack. Authorities tell ABC News that the terror summit was called to funnel new money into attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

"Pakistani intelligence says this was a very important planning session involving the very top levels of al Qaeda as they get ready for a new spring offensive," explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry and now an ABC News consultant.

Question for readers -- assuming this information is accurate and becomes common knowledge in Pakistan, will it blunt the downturn in public opinion?

[What do you care? The bad guys are dead!!--ed. Yeah, but I want the whole megillah.]

Let's see what's been going on with regard to Iran for the past day or so, in order from tragedy to farce:

1) The BBC reports that Britain, France and Germanyt will request an extraordinary session of the IAEA in order to refer Iran to the UN Security Council.

2) In an interview with Newsweek's Christpher Dickey, IAEA head Mohammed El Baradei -- who was quite the skeptic when it came to whether Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons -- makes it clear that he's pissed at the Iranians:

DICKEY: You've said you're running out of patience with Iran. What does that mean?
ELBARADEI: For the last three years we have been doing intensive verification in Iran, and even after three years I am not yet in a position to make a judgment on the peaceful nature of the [nuclear] program. We still need to assure ourselves through access to documents, individuals [and] locations that we have seen all that we ought to see and that there is nothing fishy, if you like, about the program.

At one site called Lavizan, facilities were bulldozed by Iran before you could look at them, and you weren't allowed to run tests in the area.
We clearly need to take environmental samplings from some of the equipment that used to be in Lavizan. We need to interview some of the people who have been engaged in Lavizan. We have [also] gotten some information about some modification of their missiles that could have some relationship to the nuclear program. So, we need to clarify all these things. It is very specific. They know what we want to do, and they just have to go and do it. I'm making it very clear right now that I cannot extend the deadline, which is ... March 6.

With all due respect, the Iranians don't seem to care what you think.
Well, they might not seem to care. But if I say that I am not able to confirm the peaceful nature of that program after three years of intensive work, well, that's a conclusion that's going to reverberate, I think, around the world....

What if the Iranians are just buying time for their bomb building?
That's why I said we are coming to the litmus test in the next few weeks. Diplomacy is not just talking. Diplomacy has to be backed by pressure and, in extreme cases, by force. We have rules. We have to do everything possible to uphold the rules through conviction. If not, then you impose them. Of course, this has to be the last resort, but sometimes you have to do it.

You're angry.
No, I'm not angry, but I'd like to make sure the process will not be abused. There's a difference. I still would like to be able to avoid escalation, but at the same time I do not want the agency to be cheated; I do not want the process to be abused. I think that is clear. I have a responsibility, and I would like to fulfill it with as good a conscience as I can.

This would be more persuasive if ElBaradei didn't make this point every month or so.

3) Iran has expelled CNN from working in Iran because of a slight mistranslation problem, according to the AP's Nasser Karimi:

Iran said Monday it is barring CNN from working in Iran "until further notice" due to its mistranslation of comments made by the president in a recent news conference about the country's nuclear research.

In a speech Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended Iran's right to continue nuclear research. State media have complained since the speech that CNN used the translation "nuclear weapons" instead of "nuclear technology."

The ban by the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry was read in a statement on state-run television.

"Due to mistranslation of the words of Ahmadinejad during his press conference, activities of the American CNN in Tehran are banned until further notice," the statement said.

CNN acknowledged that it had screwed up -- but this does strike me as overkill.

4) Finally, in a separate story, the AP's Karimi reports that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to make his contribution to genocide studies:

Iran announced plans yesterday for a conference to examine evidence for the Holocaust, a new step in hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's campaign against Israel -- one that could deepen Tehran's international isolation.

Ahmadinejad already has called the Nazis' World War II slaughter of European Jews a ''myth" and has said the Jewish state should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States....

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi did not disclose where or when the Holocaust conference would be held, and he would not say who would attend or what had prompted Tehran to sponsor it.

Ahmadinejad, who took office in August, caused an international outcry in October by calling Israel a ''disgraceful blot" that should be ''wiped off the map."

You just know this will be one of those invitation-only kind of conferences where only the cream of the Holocaust-deniers will be asked to attend.

It appears that Ariel Sharon has suffered from a massive, debilitating stroke -- Omri Ceren has the tick-tock on the latest medical news.

The AP reports that a full recovery is highly unlikely.

Looking a few steps ahead, this will leave Shimon Peres as the leader of Kadima -- which compels me to repeat what I blogged a few weeks ago:

I have only one thing to say about Shimon Peres' decision to leave the Labor party and join Ariel Sharon's brand-spanking new Kadima Party -- it can only mean Kadima is doomed to implode.

Why do I say this? Because the one constant in Israeli politics is that Shimon Peres might be the single-worst politician in the brief history of the Israeli state. By this I don't mean Peres is a bad policymaker or leader -- I mean the man couldn't win an election to save his life....

[U]nless the focus is completely on Ariel Sharon, Kadima will have a very short half-life.

Every once in a while a natural disaster has a significant impact on international relations. We've seen in the past year how U.S. humanitarian assistance can improve America's public image in the affected countries. The 1999 earthquake that affected Greece and Turkey -- and the outpouring of cross-border assistance -- led to a thaw between those two enduring rivals.

Of course, not every natural disaster has such an effect. The Bam earthquake in Iran, for example, led to no diplomatic thaw -- neither did the French heat wave of 2003 nor hurricane Katrina in 2005.

This leads to an interesting question for a dissertation -- under what circumstances will a truly exogenous shock lead to a lessening of international or internal conflicts?

The December 2004 tsunami presents an interesting comparative case study. In Indonesia, Nick Meo reports for the Australian on the budding peace in Aceh:

The head of the feared Indonesian military in Aceh was doing what was almost unthinkable only a year ago: telling its people that the war - one of Asia's longest and, until last year's tsunami, most intractable - was over.

There was a bigger surprise for the departing 3500 soldiers on Thursday. Irwandi Yusuf, leader of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), who 12 months ago was one of their deadliest enemies, was there to shake hands with the hard men in fatigues before their ships slipped away from the jungle-covered hills of Aceh, probably forever.

The event was stage-managed but nobody could doubt the sincerity, part of an extraordinarily successful peace process that has confounded the pessimists and inspired a people who suffered more than any other in the tsunami.

One year on from the tsunami that devastated large parts of Sri Lanka, killing more than 30,000 there, the South Asian island’s people are facing another looming disaster: the revival of a brutal civil war that has killed around 65,000 since it began 22 years ago. A fragile ceasefire, brokered by the government of Norway three years ago, is close to breaking-point after a string of recent attacks by the Tamil Tiger rebels, who are fighting for an independent homeland in the north and east of the island.

On Thursday December 29th the head of the ceasefire-monitoring team, Hagrup Haukland, gave a warning that, if the spate of violence were not halted, “war may not be far away.” In the most serious of the recent attacks, 12 Sri Lankan soldiers were killed in a landmine attack in the Jaffna peninsula on Tuesday and, four days before that, 13 sailors were killed with mines and rocket-propelled grenades in a rebel attack in the north-west of the island. On Sunday, a parliamentarian linked to the Tigers was assassinated at a Christmas mass in Batticaloa.

Looking at both cases, John Quiggin proposes a different dissertation topic:

It would be a salutory effort to look over the wars, revolutions and civil strife of the last sixty years and see how many of the participants got an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. Given the massively negative-sum nature of war, I suspect the answer is “Few, if any”.

When I was living in Ukraine in the early nineties, Russia was trying to exploit Ukraine's dependence on Russian energy to extract economic and political concessions from that country -- minor things like control over key industrial groupings and the Black Sea Fleet. Russia and the government gas provider, Gazprom, would periodically threaten to shut off supplies.

While it sounds like Russia had all the leverage, there was one problem -- Russia exported much of its gas to Southern and Eastern Europe through the gas pipeline that ran through Ukraine -- and Russia could do very little to prevent Ukraine from siphoning off these supplies... except bluster a bit.

A decade later, of course, all of this seems like ancient history. Oh, wait....

Now, back then, all of the involved parties would muddle through -- Ukraine would proffer some token concessions without making its economy more energy-efficient, Gazprom would punt on raising prices in the near abroad, and the crisis would be deferred for a year.

Let's see what develops this year.

UPDATE: Well, that was fast:

A heavily-criticised Russia on Monday promised to restore full gas supplies to Europe after Germany warned that its dispute with Ukraine over deliveries could hurt its long-term credibility as an energy supplier.

With winter demand already high, gas supplies through Ukrainian pipelines to Europe started to fall off dramatically as a result of the Russian blockade, prompting Western fears about insecurity in the energy sector.

Russia, which took over the G8 chairmanship for the first time this month and has sought to promote itself as a reliable energy source, cut its neighbor's gas supplies on Sunday after Ukraine rejected Moscow's demand for a fourfold price rise.

As criticism mounted, the state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom said it would restore full gas supplies through the pipeline to Europe by Tuesday evening, and that it had piped across an extra 95 million cubic meters of gas.

But it made clear it held Ukraine responsible for the problem.

"With the aim of preventing a possible energy crisis caused by Ukraine illegally taking gas, Gazprom has taken the decision to deliver additional gas into the gas transport system of Ukraine," the company said in a statement.

"We stress that the additional delivery of gas is not designed for Ukrainian consumers but is meant for transit through the territory of Ukraine for delivery to consumers outside the borders of Ukraine."

I would be remiss in not mentioning that Bolivia just elected a former coca farmer turned socialist politician as president. Among his many campaign pledges are to decriminalize coca production and to renationalize the commanding heights of the national economy.

Comment away on the implications of this power transition in Andean region. Noah Millman offers various reasons for why this should concern the United States.

[Hey a few years ago you were pretty sanguine about the rejection of the neoliberal model in Latin America. How about now?--ed.] Well, the spread of Chavez-like politicans throughout Latin America would be intrinsically bad. At the same time, this Associated Press report suggests just how difficult it will be to foster regional solidarity by pursuing a policy of economic nationalism:

The winner of Bolivia's presidential elections has repeated his vow to nationalize oil and gas and said he will void at least some contracts held by foreign companies "looting" the poor Andean nation's natural resources.

Indian coca farmer Evo Morales said he will not confiscate refineries or infrastructure owned by multinational corporations. Instead, his government would renegotiate contracts so that the companies are partners, but not owners, in developing Bolivia's resources, he said....

On Monday, Morales said Brazilian oil company Petrobras must turn two refineries it owns in Bolivia back to Bolivian control.

Morales announced that he had asked Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to return the refineries, which Petrobras purchased in the last decade. Petrobras bought the two refineries from Bolivia's state-owned oil company in 1999 for roughly $100 million....

The top investors in Bolivia are Petroleo Brasileiro SA, known as Petrobras, Spain's Repsol YPF, France's Total SA, British Gas and BP PLC . Foreign energy firms have invested $3.5 billion in Bolivia since 1996. But after the passage of the new hydrocarbons law in May, and amid increasing calls for an outright nationalization of the energy industry in Bolivia, they this year have mostly frozen any new investments. (emphases added)

Even if Hugo Chavez lends a hand, I don't think this strategy is going to inspire a lot of solidarity elsewhere in the continent.

Poor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president just can't escape his press stereotype. Marc Wolfensberger has the latest story for Bloomberg:

The West has "fabricated a myth under the name 'Massacre of the Jews,' and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,'' Iran's leader told thousands of supporters in the south-eastern Sistan-Baluchestan province, state television showed in a live broadcast.

"If you say and insist it's true that you killed 6 million Jews in crematoria during World War II, then why should the Palestinians pay for that?'' Ahmadinejad asked. "Our proposal is that you give a piece of your land in Europe, the U.S., Canada or Alaska. If you do that, the Iranian people will no longer protest against you.''

This is the strongest anti-Israeli public comment by Ahmadinejad since he took office in August. The Iranian president drew international condemnation on Oct. 26 after saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map.'' On Dec. 8, he prompted another outcry when he said Europe should host Israel on its soil. Some 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis until Germany's defeat in the 1939-1945 war.

The President of Iran has not ratcheted up his anti-Israeli rhetoric -- his views on Israel have remain unchanged since he took office.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the gift that keeps on giving as far as I'm concerned. According to Reuters's Paul Hughes, Ahmadinejad put his foot in his mouth in Saudi Arabia today:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday expressed doubt the Holocaust took place and suggested the Jewish state of Israel be moved to Europe.

His comments, reported by Iran's official IRNA news agency from a news conference he gave in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, follow his call in October for Israel to be "wiped off the map", which sparked widespread international outrage....

Ahmadinejad was quoted by IRNA as saying: "Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail."

"Although we don't accept this claim, if we suppose it is true, our question for the Europeans is: is the killing of innocent Jewish people by Hitler the reason for their support to the occupiers of Jerusalem?" he said.

"If the Europeans are honest they should give some of their provinces in Europe -- like in Germany, Austria or other countries -- to the Zionists and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it."

UPDATE: The AP's Ali Akbar Dareni has a long story nicely detailing the variors international and domestic actors who have had it up to here with Ahmadinejad. The list includes the U.S., Europe, Russia, Saudia Arabia, the IAEA, Iranian moderates, and "[e]ven some of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conservative allies." This quote, however, is really priceless: "Saudis fumed Friday that Iran's hard-line president marred a summit dedicated to showing Islam's moderate face by calling for Israel to be moved to Europe."

Developing....

Time's Michael Ware has a long profile of the Iraqi insurgency and U.S. strategies to cope with it. The single most depressing sentence: "After 31 months of fighting in Iraq, the U.S. still can't say for sure whom it is up against."

The basic thrust of the article is that the U.S. believes that a fair amount of the insurgency consists of "Sunni rejectionists," an odd word choice given that they are nevertheless interested in participating:

The vast majority of those groups fall into a category the military dubiously refers to as Sunni "rejectionists." Mostly Baathists, nationalists and Iraqi Islamists, they oppose the occupation and any Baghdad government dominated by Iraqis sheltered from Saddam by foreign-intelligence agencies, such as Iran's or the U.S.'s. But they don't oppose democracy in Iraq. Many voted in the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and have plans to participate in the Dec. 15 election. Few see a contradiction between voting and continuing to battle U.S. forces. "I voted in the referendum, and I'm still fighting, and everybody in my organization did the same," says Abu Marwan, the Army of Mohammed commander. "This is two-track war--bullets and the ballot. They are not mutually exclusive."

Evidence of shifts within the insurgency in some ways presents the U.S. with its best opportunity since the occupation began to counter parts of the Sunni resistance. Adopting the long-standing attitudes of secular Baathists, some Sunni leaders tell TIME they have lost patience with al-Zarqawi and would consider cutting a political deal with the U.S. to isolate the jihadis. "If the Americans evidenced good intent and a timetable [there's that word again--DD] for withdrawal we feel is genuine, we will stand up against al-Zarqawi," says Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars. "We already stood up against him on the Shi'ite issue, and if he doesn't follow us, it will be a bad path for him." Baathist insurgent leader Abu Yousif, who has met with U.S. intelligence officers, says, "The insurgency is looking for a political outlet--once we have that, we could control al-Qaeda."

Assume the withdrawal goes well. in any electoral democracy, the Sunnis will lose because they are vastly outnumbered by the Shia and the Kurds. Now assume the withdrawal goes poorly -- the insurgents will face a Shia majority pefectly willing to use extralegal means to ensure that they control the levers of power. Either way, the insurgents are better off right now than they will be when the Americans leave.

The one possibility of a U.S. withdrawal contributing to the Sunnis laying down their arms is if there's some kind of grand bargain behind the scenes in which the Shiite parties basically pledge to keep their militias from engaging in any kind of a pogrom -- but if I was Sunni, I'd take my chances playing cat-and-mouse with the U.S. military instead. Indeed, my strategy would be not to engage with U.S. forces at all, but do as much damage to Shia-predominant military units as possible.

[What about the possibility that Iraqis are now in the mood to vote for secular, non-sectarian parties?--ed. Again, great for the Sunnis, if true -- but the disturbing thing about both the Time piece and the Christian Science Monitor story linked above is that neither of them have any hard data -- just assertions by the reporter. Also remember that the supposed beneficiary of this secular trend -- former PM Iyad Allawi -- just got pelted with shoes in Najaf.]

I've been remiss in not blogging about Israel, because I do so love the roiling comments section such posts generate. However, I have only one thing to say about Shimon Peres' decision to leave the Labor party and join Ariel Sharon's brand-spanking new Kadima Party -- it can only mean Kadima is doomed to implode.

Why do I say this? Because the one constant in Israeli politics is that Shimon Peres might be the single-worst politician in the brief history of the Israeli state. By this I don't mean Peres is a bad policymaker or leader -- I mean the man couldn't win an election to save his life. This is a guy who couldn't beat Mr. anti-charisma, Yitzhak Shamir. He couldn't beat Bibi Netanyahu after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot.

If Peres keeps his mouth shut and goes into a bunker until the election is over, maybe Kadima has a chance. But unless the focus is completely on Ariel Sharon, Kadima will have a very short half-life.

UPDATE: Omri Ceren has an Israeli politics blogg, Mere Rhetoric, that is worth checking out. He's more optimstic about Peres than I am.

Since he took office earlier this year, the militance of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad has alienated many of his natural supporters in Iran.

If you think his prior statements have made some question his sanity, however, wait until people read this Financial Times story by Gareth Smyth and Najmeh Bozorgmehr:

A leading website in Iran has published a transcript and video recording of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad claiming to have felt “a light” while addressing world leaders at the United Nations in New York in September. Baztab.com – a website linked to Mohsen Rezaei, former commander of the Revolutionary Guards – said the recording was made in a meeting between the president and Ayatollah Abdollah Javadi-Amoli, one of Iran’s leading Shia Muslim clerics.

According to the transcript, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad said someone present at the UN, possibly from his entourage, subsequently told him: “When you began with the words ‘In the name of God’… I saw a light coming, surrounding you and protecting you to the end [of the speech].” Mr Ahmadi-Nejad said he sensed a similar presence.

“I felt it myself, too, that suddenly the atmosphere changed and for 27-28 minutes the leaders could not blink,” the transcript continues. “I am not exaggerating…because I was looking. All the leaders were puzzled, as if a hand held them and made them sit. They had their eyes and ears open for the message from the Islamic Republic.”

Among the things to be thankful for this year -- my family does not live in Harbin, China. David Fickling explains in the Guardian:

Panic was today spreading in Harbin, with officials preparing to cut off water supplies as heavily polluted river water flowed towards the Chinese city.

Residents were storing water supplies in bathtubs and buckets ahead of the expected three-day drought. Supermarkets reported panic buying of water, milk and soft drinks, while Harbin's airport and railway station were jammed with people fleeing the area.

The provincial government was also trucking in water from neighbouring areas, testing little-used local wells and demanding 1,400 tonnes of activated charcoal to purify the water intake after the pollution had passed through the city.

Harbin's authorities warned residents not to even approach the Songhua river because of the risk of pollutants escaping into the atmosphere when the polluted water hits the city around 5am tomorrow. The 50 mile-long stretch of pollution is not expected to flow out of the city until Saturday....

The city, in China's icy north-eastern Heilongjiang province, has a population of 3.8 million and draws most of its water from the Songhua. The river has been contaminated with more than 30 times the usual levels of benzene after an explosion at a chemical plant on its banks.

The blast, in the neighbouring Jilin province, happened on November 13, killing five people and causing 10,000 to be evacuated from the area, officials said.

Benzene, a component of petrol, is highly flammable and toxic. Short-term exposure to the chemical in drinking water can cause long-term damage to the nervous system, while long-term exposure can result in cancer and leukaemia.

UNAIDS released a good news/bad news kind of report yesterday about the state of the AIDS epidemic. These paragraphs from their press release capture the nature of the problem:

Despite decreases in the rate of infection in certain countries, the overall number of people living with HIV has continued to increase in all regions of the world except the Caribbean. There were an additional five million new infections in 2005. The number of people living with HIV globally has reached its highest level with an estimated 40.3 million people, up from an estimated 37.5 million in 2003. More than three million people died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2005; of these, more than 500000 were children.

According to the report, the steepest increases in HIV infections have occurred in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (25% increase to 1.6 million) and East Asia. But sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the most affected globally with 64% of new infections occurring here (over three million people).

"We are encouraged by the gains that have been made in some countries and by the fact that sustained HIV prevention programmes have played a key part in bringing down infections. But the reality is that the AIDS epidemic continues to outstrip global and national efforts to contain it," said UNAIDS Executive Director Dr Peter Piot. "It is clear that a rapid increase in the scale and scope of HIV prevention programmes is urgently needed. We must move from small projects with short-term horizons to long-term, comprehensive strategies," he added.

The report recognizes that access to HIV treatment has improved markedly over the past two years. More than one million people in low-and middle-income countries are now living longer and better lives because they are on antiretroviral treatment and an estimated 250 000 to 350 000 deaths were averted this year because of expanded access to HIV treatment....

Levels of knowledge of safe sex and HIV remain low in many countries - even in countries with high and growing prevalence. In 24 sub-Saharan countries (including Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda), two-thirds or more of young women (aged 15-24 years) lacked comprehensive knowledge of HIV transmission. According to a major survey carried out in the Philippines in 2003, more than 90% of respondents still believed that HIV could be transmitted by sharing a meal with an HIV-positive person.

For five years now, Abbott has worked with Tanzania's government to alleviate the impact of AIDS. The experience has taught the company that the biggest obstacles are less obvious, and less readily overcome, than getting drugs to the villages.

Hospital laboratories are archaic. Treatment wards are overrun with patients. There is little capacity to treat AIDS-related illnesses such as tuberculosis and malaria.

Tanzania cannot adequately care for the orphans of AIDS victims. A social stigma against AIDS victims persists, which deters people from getting tested and treated for the disease.

"People who simplify this into just drop-shipping gobs of drugs into remote areas of Africa, they're nuts," said Miles White, Abbott's chief executive, during a trip to Tanzania last month to review the progress of Abbott's work. "It's a lot more complicated than that."....

Dealing effectively in Africa also means avoiding pitfalls that have hit other donors.

The United Nations-supported Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria early this year cut off support for five programs in Uganda, citing widespread mismanagement. In Kenya, skepticism over the government's ability to deliver drugs has led church-backed organizations to form a private distribution company.

Merck & Co. teamed with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation five years ago to launch a groundbreaking $100 million program to aid Botswana, where 37 percent of the adult male population has AIDS. But the donors have found it difficult to distribute money, in part because of bottlenecks and logistical difficulties.

Ellen Knickmeyer has a front-pager in the Washington Post about U.S. and Iraqi efforts to reconstitute the Iraqi army's junior officer corps with former officers from Saddam Hussein's army. Kinckmeyer's report suggests that this process is going pretty smoothly by Iraqi standards -- but it leads to some very bizarre scenes:

Clad in the olive-green uniform of old, his heart rising to the sound of the lilting march to which he once went to war for President Saddam Hussein, Sgt. Bashar Fathi, a veteran of Iraq's once-elite Republican Guard, watched Iraqi tanks trundle across a parade ground recently -- just as they once swept across the sands of Kuwait.

"This ceremony -- this same music -- it makes us remember the old army," marveled Fathi, standing on the top tier of a reviewing stand south of Baghdad. Next to him was Capt. Khudhair Alwan, whose contact with U.S. forces began by trying to kill them as they invaded the southern city of Basra in 2003....

[There was] a ceremony Thursday officially delivering 77 Hungarian-donated Soviet-era T-72 tanks to the Iraqi army, giving the force its most formidable armor so far. Loudspeakers played music that would be familiar to members of Hussein's army -- including "We Are Walking to War," the anthem to which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men went to battle against Iran in the 1980s.

The low-slung, refurbished T-72s, with gunners saluting from the hatches, rolled past the reviewing stand without breakdown or excessive smoke. The music, the martial pageantry and the tanks -- the same model as the tanks Hussein used to roll out to war against his neighbors and his peoples -- had men in the stands speaking nostalgically.

One of the standard lines of criticism about Council on Foreign Relations task forces/reports/working groups is that the desire to product nonpartisan output can water down CFR foreign policy analysis and recommendations. There might, just might, be a grain of truth to that charge every now and then.

So it's pretty damn telling that Jack Kemp and John Edwards, the co-chairs of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward Russia, sent a letter to President Bush that was pretty damn explicit in terms of concern about Russia's new law regulating NGOs. Here's how it opens:

Dear Mr. President:

Last spring the Council on Foreign Relations asked the two of us to serve as co-chairs of an independent task force on U.S. policy toward Russia. The group has met several times over the past six months and is preparing a report to be issued early next year. As sometimes happens in the course of such a broad review, an individual issue emerges that is so timely -- and about which task force members feel so strongly -- that the co-chairs decide to make early contact with policymakers to express their views. We are writing you now on just such a question -- a disturbing new challenge to the ability of Russian non-governmental organizations to cooperate with, and draw support from counterparts in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this issue urgently needs discussion when you meet with President Putin this week.

As you may know, members of President Putin's party and other factions of the State Duma introduced legislation last week that would, among other things, keep foreign NGO's from maintaining "representative offices" or branches in Russia and deny foreign funds to Russian organizations that engage in (undefined) "political" activities. Virtually the entire non-profit sector -- from human-rights monitors to policy think-tanks, even public-health alliances -- is likely to be affected.

The impact of this measure, if it became law, should be obvious: it would roll back pluralism in Russia and curtail contact between our societies. It would mark a complete breach of the commitment to strengthen such contact that President Putin made when you and he met in Bratislava on February 24, 2005. And it raises an almost unthinkable prospect -- that the president of Russia might serve as chairman of the G-8 at the same time that laws come into force in his country to choke off contacts with global society.

Following up on this post from earlier in the week about the rioters acting within the political traditions of France, we have Mark Landler's, "A Very French Message From the Disaffected" in today's New York Times:

More than 7,000 vehicles have been set ablaze since the civil unrest began in the suburbs of Paris on Oct. 27. The daily damage report posted by the French police is a car owner's nightmare: 502 burned on Friday night, 463 the previous night, 482 the night before that, and so on.

No other country in Europe immolates cars with the gusto and single-minded efficiency of France. Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country.

"Burning cars is rather typically French," said Michel Wieviorka, a French sociologist who has studied the phenomenon. "The last two weeks have been unusual, but it is more common than people realize."

Comment away on the latest suicide bombing attacks in Jordan.

Earlier in the week I had referenced Marc Lynch's overvations about prior Zarqawi-inspired attacks in northern Africa. I tend to agree with his preliminary read of this attack as well:

[C]alling it an "al-Qaeda attack" is misleading - you have to look at it, I'd say, as a Zarqawi operation aimed both at his Iraqi strategy and at his escalating intra-Islamist strategy. The timing and nature of this attack suggest that it may have more to do with Iraq and with Zarqawi's two-level games than with bin Laden's grand plan....

The nature of the attack - especially the sheer evil brutality of attacking a wedding celebration - once again throws dirt in the face of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who (assuming the authenticity of that letter) urged Zarqawi to stop doing things which would alienate Arab public opinion. That the traditional Jordanian opposition - including the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated professional associations - led an angry protest against Zarqawi speaks volumes. Jordanian public opinion (certainly the organized political opposition) has been more generally supportive of the insurgency than in most other places... to hear them shouting "death to Zarqawi" shows how thoroughly his methods alienate even potential supporters.

Here's an MSNBC story on the post-bombing protests:

Hundreds of angry Jordanians rallied Thursday outside one of three U.S.-based hotels attacked by suicide bombers, shouting, “Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!” — a reference to the leader of Al-Qaida in Iraq, the terrorist group tied to the blasts that killed at least 56 people.

The protest was organized by Jordan’s 14 professional and trade unions — made up of both hard-line Islamic groups and leftist political organizations — traditionally vocal critics of Abdullah’s moderate and pro-Western policies.

A lot has been written about the ongoing riots in France, but the best things I've seen have come from Megan McArdle and Daniel Davies.

From Miss Jane Galt:

Is it because Arabs/Muslims are a roiling repository of violent, seething hatred, ever threatening to bubble over onto unsuspecting victims in their path? Because the French are so damn mean?

Let me suggest another possibility: Muslim youth are rioting in France because breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun.

But Davies wins the prize here, pointing out the one way in which this is all so... French:

These young men have got a political grievance, and they're expressing it by setting fire to things and smashing them up. What could be more stereotypically, characteristically French than that? Presumably they're setting fire to cars because they don't have any sheep and the nearest McDonalds is miles away. "French society is threatened by anarchy and lawlessness". I mean really. Everyone would do well to remember that this is France we're talking about, not Sweden or perhaps Canada.

Indeed. The only difference between these riots and prior action like this by, say, Air France employees is that by this point in the game the French government would have already capitulated.

Marc "Abu Aardvark" Lynch reports that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's latest tactics in Iraq haven't gone down well in the Maghreb states:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has taken another step to alienate mainstream Arab public opinion: kidnapping and threatening to execute two Moroccan embassy workers. Just as the murder of an Egyptian diplomat infuriated Egyptian opinion, and the murder of Algerian diplomats enraged Algerian opinion, the threats to kill the two Moroccans have set off a national protest....

Zarqawi's strategy aims at driving representatives of Arab states out of Iraq to prevent any Arab intervention on behalf of the struggling Iraqi government. The cost is the alienation of mainstream Arabs - tactical gain for strategic loss, or at least so it appears on the surface.

Read the whole thing -- the idea that Zarqawi is playing a tw-level game is an interesting one.

In the Financial Times, Amy Kazmin reports that the military junta controlling Burma has found a brand-new way of ensuring its diplomatic isolation:

Burma’s military rulers have begun the relocation of civil servants and central government ministries to an isolated compound near Pyinmana, hundreds of miles north of Rangoon.

In a statement to diplomats on Monday, Kyaw Thu, deputy foreign minister, said the regime had decided to move the entire government to remote Pyinmana to help with the “formidable tasks of building a modern and developed nation throughout the whole country and, in particular, the border areas”.

The Burmese regime selected Pyinmana, halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay and surrounded by mountains and dense forests, as a “command and control centre based at a strategic location central in the transportation and communication networks of the entire country”.

Foreign diplomats and international aid workers said the move suggested the military junta was retreating into a physical bunker....

While construction of the complex has long been an open secret, few believed the move would take place.

Government officials, many of them civilians, were reportedly devastated on Friday when relocation orders were unexpectedly issued to 10 ministries, including foreign affairs, home, commerce, health, transport, and communications.

The first convoys of trucks with office equipment and personnel moved out of the capital at the weekend.

Rangoon residents said civil servants were warned they would be charged with treason if they sought to avoid the move by resigning from their poorly paid jobs.

In its statement, the foreign ministry advised diplomats: “If you need to communicate on urgent matters, you can send a fax to Pyinmana.”

OK, so the French appear to be experiencing some domestic disquiet in recent days. The Guardian has some details:

French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.'

The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, was involved in a series of crisis meetings today following the clashes between police and immigrant groups in at least 10 poor suburbs, during which youths torched car dealerships, public buses and a school....

The violence has once more trained a spotlight on the poverty and lawlessness of France's rundown big-city suburbs and raises questions about an immigration policy that has, in effect, created sink ghettos for mainly African minorities who suffer from discrimination in housing, education and jobs.

In the north-eastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, gangs of youths set fire to a Renault car dealership and incinerated at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium....

Today, France's government was in crisis mode with Mr de Villepin calling a string of emergency meetings with government officials throughout the day.

One was a working lunch with the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been accused of inflaming the crisis with his tough talk and police tactics. Mr Sarkozy has called troublemakers "scum" and vowed to "clean out" troubled suburbs, language that some say further alienated their residents.

The unrest was triggered by last Thursday's accidental death in Clichy-sous-Bois, five miles from Aulnay, of two African teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding in a power substation from what they believed, apparently wrongly, was police pursuit....

The minister of social cohesion, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the government had to react "firmly" but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to deal with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.

"We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough," he told France-2 television.

[Wait a second -- there's a ministry of social cohesion in France?--ed. Well, sort of.]

Comment away -- but I am curious about the accuracy of the press analysis on the riots. After the reportage on Katrina, my radar is up about any exaggeration of chaos and mayhem.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad had some lovely words for Israel yesterday, according to the FT's Gareth Smyth:

Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, Iran’s fundamentalist president, on Wednesday declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and warned Arab countries against developing economic ties with Israel in response to its withdrawal from Gaza.

His remarks, delivered at a conference in Tehran entitled “A World without Zionism”, led to diplomatic protests by the UK, France and Spain, while Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy prime minister, said Iran should be expelled from the United Nations.

In Washington, spokesmen for the Bush administration said the statement underscored US concern over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

The most depressing sentence in the story? "US analysts noted that the president’s remarks were not a departure from hardline Iranian rhetoric and did not represent new policy." Well that's a relief.

Whenever political leaders start talking crazy talk, some political scientist like me usually comes out of the woodwork to explain the underlying rationality of such a move. After reading this Financial Times piece by Smyth and Najmeh Bozorgmehr, however, I'm beginning to wonder about Ahmadi-Nejad's competence:

Complaints about rising chicken prices during the holy month of Ramadan mark the first widespread disquiet about president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, just two months after he became Iran's president.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, last week acknowledged public concerns in Friday prayers, saying it was "unfair to drag the government to the table of expectations after only two or three months". Private business was wary of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's rhetoric even as he won June's landslide election victory, but is now approaching a crisis of confidence. "Name me one sector that is working," says a government official.

The Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) has dropped 20 per cent since the election, with the Tehran price index (Tepix) closing on Monday at 10,014, perilously close to the psychological 10,000 mark level. Yesterday the exchange was closed for a public holiday.

A sense of malaise in the economy has resulted both from Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's statist rhetoric and from tension with Europe and the US over Iran's atomic programme. Hossein Abdeh-Tabrizi, secretary-general of the TSE, has linked falling share prices to the nuclear issue. Business circles welcomed the new government's economic team and applauded parliament's plan to reduce subsidies on the sale of imported petrol, but Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has himself spread confusion over the government's direction. The president reacted to falling share prices by calling on public bodies, which own about 80 per cent of shares, to control the decline. At the same time, the commerce ministry banned cement exports to help meet domestic demand, hitting the cement companies which comprise about 30 per cent of the bourse. "The government seems to jettison long-term policies [favouring the market] for short-term reasons and so it's not clear where it's heading," says an economy analyst.

Iran's private businesses are also worried about possible UN Security Council sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme. Questioned last Thursday by reporters, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad refused to deny that Tehran is blocking letters of credit for companies from South Korea, the UK, Argentina and the Czech Republic, countries that last month voted for a resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency finding Tehran in "non-compliance" with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. "Economic relations have to be balanced with political relations," says Mr Ahmadi-Nejad.

South Korean direct and indirect exports to Iran and its investment - mainly in the oil and auto sectors - were about $3bn in 2004. "When you compare this with Korea's $55bn trade surplus with the US, it's hard to see what Iran thinks it can achieve from such pressure on Korea," says the analyst.

I can't see the rationale either. Maybe these kind of sanctions weaken Ahmadi-Nejad's domestic political opponents, but in a country like Iran there are better ways of weakening one's political opponents. Even in a world of $60 oil and the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, this kind of political behavior is not heakthy.

So is Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad crazy like a fox -- or just crazy? Discuss.

Comment away on the implications of the Iraqi vote on its constitution.

Condi Rice is apparently pleased:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that initial assessments indicate Iraqis had probably approved a controversial constitution, although the turnout alone showed the fragile new political process has taken hold despite a deadly insurgency.

"There's a belief that it has probably passed," Rice told reporters traveling with her, based on people in Iraq who are seeing preliminary vote tallies. At least 63 percent of Iraqis voted Saturday, she said, an increase of about 1 million voters over the first democratic election in January for a transitional government. Much of that increase, she said, comes from the higher participation of Iraq's minority Sunni Muslims.

The violence also was lower and produced fewer lethal attacks than in January's vote, she noted.

The constitution requires a simple majority to be approved, unless two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq's 18 provinces voted against it. Then the constitution would not pass and Iraqi leaders would be forced to draft a new document to be submitted to voters.

News services from Baghdad reported Sunday that early returns suggested large numbers of voters rejected the constitution in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. But according to initial results, Sunni voters may not have been able to reach the two-thirds threshold in Diyala province east of Baghdad or in Nineveh province in the north, where Sunnis also have large representation.

Disputes over the constitution have been intense and threatened to deepen the religious and ethnic divide right up to the Saturday vote. But Rice said the turnout sends a strong signal to insurgents that the political process is "alive and well."

"What [the referendum] will certainly help to do is to broaden the base of the political process," she said, and diminish the influence of those supporting violence.

"Ultimately, insurgencies have to be defeated politically. You defeat them by sapping them of their political support, and increasingly Iraqis are throwing their support behind the political process, not behind the violence," she said on the last stop of her week-long tour of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Europe.

There's a lot riding on that last paragraph.

Neil MacFarquhar has an excellent front-pager in today's New York Times looking at the conundrums of Morocco's recent liberalization:

Morocco has moved further along the reform road than any of its Arab neighbors. Its press is vibrant and outspoken. A family law no longer treats women as chattel. Civic organizations can be formed with relative ease, and scores of them work on everything from improving prison conditions to lowering the country's abysmal illiteracy rate.

Yet the entire system of law rests not on a framework of checks and balances, but on the whim of the king. Morocco's Constitution declares the king both sacred and the "prince of the faithful."

Other Arab constitutions do not declare the ruler holy, but an official reverence cocoons virtually every president or monarch in the region. Anyone who challenges the ruler does so at his own peril.

It is a fact that raises a central question here and across the Middle East: What is needed to turn states of despotic whim into genuine nations of law?

Read the whole thing.

How do you try a dictator for crimes committed while in office? The question is not an easy one to answer. The best treatment I've seen of this problem, ironically, is fictional: Julian Barnes' The Porcupine.

This question will rear its head again when Saddam is put on trial in three weeks. Gary Bass -- author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals -- has a non-Times-Select op-ed in the NYT expressing concerns about how the Iraqi government is handling the matter:

The Iraqi war crimes tribunal's first case against Mr. Hussein, which opens Oct. 19, charges him with the 1982 massacre of at least 143 men and boys from the village of Dujail. This was meant to be a test case of manageable scope and strong evidence. Unfortunately, Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, says that once the court has reached a guilty verdict in the Dujail case, the near-certain sentence of death "should be implemented without further delay."

But if Mr. Hussein is executed for the Dujail killings, he will never be called to account for the larger atrocities on which he was arraigned in July 2004: killing political rivals, crushing the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, invading Kuwait in 1990, and waging the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, including gassing Kurdish villagers at Halabja.

If this sounds trivial, Bass is correct to point out that the treatment of Saddam's past affects Iraq's political future:

[T]he Iraqi tribunal would do well not to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows. A hasty execution would shortchange Mr. Hussein's victims and diminish the benefits of justice. Baathists would be all the more likely to complain about a show trial. Kurds would rightly feel that they were denied their day in court for the Anfal campaign. Shiites in the south would also be deprived of a reckoning.

A thorough series of war crimes trials would not only give the victims more satisfaction but also yield a documentary and testimonial record of the regime's crimes. After Nuremberg, the American chief prosecutor estimated that he had assembled a paper trail of more than five million pages. A comparably intensive Iraqi process would help drive home to former Baathists and some Arab nationalists what was done in their names. The alternative is on display in Turkey, where the collapse of a war crimes tribunal after World War I paved the way for today's widespread Turkish nationalist denial of the Armenian genocide.

Read the whole thing.

Well, no, not exactly. But the AP's Nicole Winfield does have some new information on the conclave that eleated Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI:

A cardinal has broken his vow of secrecy and released his diary describing the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI, revealing in a rare account that a cardinal from Argentina was the main challenger and almost blocked Benedict's election.

Excerpts of the anonymous diary, published Friday, show the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, led in each of the four ballots cast in the Sistine Chapel during the April 18-19 conclave. But Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit, was in second place the whole time.

Most accounts of the conclave have said that the retired Milan archbishop, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, was the main challenger to Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI after his election, and that a Third World pope was never realistically in the running.

While Bergoglio never threatened Ratzinger's lead--and made clear he didn't want the job, according to the diary published in the respected Italian foreign affairs magazine Limes--his runner-up status could signal the next conclave might elect a pope from Latin America, home to half the world's 1 billion Roman Catholics.

The diary of the anonymous cardinal also shows that Ratzinger didn't garner a huge margin--he had 84 of the 115 votes in the final ballot, seven more than the required two-thirds majority....

offers other colorful insights of what went on behind the scenes during the two days the 115 cardinals were sequestered in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican's Santa Marta hotel.

Because the hotel prohibits smoking, Portuguese Cardinal Jose da Cruz would sneak outside for an after-dinner cigar, the diary says. And Cardinal Walter Kasper shunned the mini-buses that shuttled cardinals to the Sistine Chapel, preferring to walk by the Vatican gardens instead.

Wow, that last paragraph had some spicy info, let me tell you.

This is one of those stories where the news is not in the content but in the fact that someone made it public. [What about the prospect of a Latin American pope?--ed. Possible, but prior second-place finishers are far from guaranteed to be viable candidates in the next round of voting. That said, I'm sure Andrew Sullivan or Stephen Bainbridge could parse out further meaning.]

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey is saddened at this news, believing that, "[this] comes as a sad commentary that even the princes of the church cannot be trusted with secrets any longer, except those which specifically benefit themselves."

Hmmm... as someone who occasionally studies closed-off regimes, I can't say I agree.

Last Thursday was Costa Rica's independence day. According to Jacqueline Paisley, the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education put some constraints on how the day should be celebrated:

The Ministerio de Educación Público promised to suspend for up to 30 days any marcher who wore a miniskirt, defined as anything with the hem above the knees. The streets were full of miniskirts Thursday all over the country, in part because such skirts were part of the uniforms schools have purchased....

Each year the ministry decrees against miniskirts, and each year tons of female marchers wear them.

Both the exit polls and the early returns suggest that Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi has won a handy victory in parliamentry elections -- reversing a decade-long decline in the fortunes of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and paving the way for privatization of the postal savings system, which has been a corrupt albatross on the Japanese economy.

From a U.S. perspective, this is a huge win. A staunch U.S. ally has been re-elected, and if Koizumi's proposed reforms are implemented, then Japanese growth could finally escape its 15-year doldrums. Since Japan is a natural market for U.S. exports, a growing Japanese economy would be a very good thing.

Some reporters will credit Koizumi's charismatic leadership as the key to victory.

I choose to credit the lipstick ninjas.

Egypt's first multi-candidate presidential elections were held today, and much of the press coverage echoes this London Times account by Richard Beesron: "the experiment in democracy risked being seriously compromised by intimidation, electoral abuse and widespread voter apathy."

Dan Murphy's account in the Christian Science Monitor includes corruption among the sins of this elecvtion:

The bus is rolling through the narrow dirt roads of Dar El-Salam, a down-at-heel Cairo neighborhood, and men and women are running to catch it, afraid they'll miss voting in Egypt's first presidential election.

The man with well-oiled hair cramming them into the rusty machine - festooned with portraits of President Hosni Mubarak - isn't collecting fare. Instead, he's gathering ID cards to be checked against voter rolls. Those will be returned, with 20 Egyptian pounds ($3.20), after his riders cast their votes - for the incumbent.

Sounds rather depressing. However, Steven Cook writes on Foreign Policy's web site that in the long term, Hosni Mubarak may get more reform than he originally planned:

[J]ust because the election was a sham, doesn’t mean that it was meaningless. The constitutional amendments that were instituted to make the election possible may just open the door for real democracy in Egypt....

Influential elements of Egyptian society are already mobilizing to push Mubarak’s changes further than he anticipated. Approximately 3,000 members of Egypt’s Judges Club, for instance, are insisting that they be given full authority to supervise the presidential elections to ensure polling is conducted freely and fairly. One astute Egyptian observer puts it this way: “Egyptian judges now know the power of making collective, public demands, buoyed by the admiration and support of pro-democracy forces and the glare of the international and domestic media.” Other groups are following suit, including journalists, human rights activists, Islamists, and even Egypt’s sclerotic opposition parties. All are signaling to Mubarak and his regime that business as usual is no longer acceptable. Mubarak’s appointed successor, whoever it is, will likely not be able to waltz through the 2011 elections by believing merely that his patronage network will be enough to trump these reform-minded forces.

While immediately unsatisfying, Mubarak’s constitutional amendments could make a significant impact on Egyptian politics in the middle to long term. Sure, the changes seem like yet another gambit to reinforce Egypt’s existing political order under the guise of reform. But they nevertheless have the potential—in combination with continued internal and external pressure for change—to provide the basis for significant moves toward real democracy. The status quo in Egypt is slowly slipping away. And by 2011, Egypt may have a president who is neither a military officer nor a civilian with the last name Mubarak.

Developing....

UPDATE: The AP's Maggie Michael reports that Egypt's regime might be feeling some blowback earlier than he had anticipated:

More than 3,000 people marched through downtown Cairo at midafternoon -- by far the largest crowd ever drawn by the opposition group Kifaya, or "Enough" in Arabic. Police watched from a distance, despite government vows that protests would not be allowed.

Peter Finn reports in the Washington Post that twenty years after the disaster at Chernobyl, the health effects have been much less than prior estimates would have suggested:

The long-term health and environmental impacts of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, while severe, were far less catastrophic than feared, according to a major new report by eight U.N. agencies.

The governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the three countries most affected by radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, should strive to end the "paralyzing fatalism" of tens of thousands of their citizens who wrongly believe they are still at risk of an early death, according to the study released Monday.

The 600-page report found that as of the middle of this year, the accident had caused fewer than 50 deaths directly attributable to radiation, most of them among emergency workers who died in the first months after the accident. In the wake of the world's largest nuclear disaster, there were numerous predictions of mass fatalities from radiation.

The report said that nine children had died of thyroid cancer, but that the survival rate among the 4,000 children in the region who had developed thyroid cancer has been 99 percent. An expected spike in fertility problems and birth defects also failed to materialize, the study found....

Officials said that the continued intense medical monitoring of tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus is no longer a smart use of limited resources and is, in fact, contributing to mental health problems among many residents nearly 20 years later. In Belarus and Ukraine, 5 percent to 7 percent of government spending is consumed by benefits and programs for Chernobyl victims. And in the three countries, as many as 7 million people are receiving Chernobyl-related social benefits.

"The monitoring of people with incredibly low doses uses huge amounts of resources and does more psychological harm than good," said Fred Mettler, a professor of radiology at the University of New Mexico who chaired one of three health groups in the study, titled "Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts."

Here's a link to the World Health Organization's press release on the report -- compare and contrast with this media assessment from a decade ago.

Environmentalists will likely not appreciate the irony of Finn's closing paragraphs:

The abandonment of large tracts of land, combined with a ban on hunting, has led to a dramatic increase in wild animals and birds, including wolves, elk, wild boars, white-tailed eagles, owls, cranes and black storks.

"Without a permanent residency of humans for 20 years, the ecosystems around the Chernobyl site are now flourishing," the report said. "It looks like the nature park it has become."

In the Washington Post, Anthony Faiola reports that Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi is pulling out all the stops in the run-up to parliamentary elections in Japan:

Armed to the teeth with blood-red lipstick and a killer smile, Yuriko Koike stormed the streets in a working-class neighborhood here with rapid-fire handshakes and a brigade of young campaign aides wearing hot-pink T-shirts and waving rose-colored flags. One of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's hit squad of female "assassins," the former anchorwoman vowed to take no prisoners in Japan's nationwide elections a week from Sunday.

"This is a ground battle for reform!" Koike, 53, shouted through a bullhorn to her giddy audience. "Let's change Japan!"

Koike joined a star-studded cast of female candidates sent out on the campaign trail this week by Koizumi, who has vowed to resign if his fractured Liberal Democratic Party fails to win control of Japan's lower house on Sept. 11. The women -- now ubiquitously referred to in the national media as Koizumi's assassins -- also include Satsuki Katayama, a model-turned-bureaucrat, and Makiko Fujino, Japanese television's version of Martha Stewart. Their mission: to take out the prime minister's political enemies in the old boys' network that long held sway over the LDP.

The women embody Koizumi's strategy of putting a new face on the stodgy, conservative party that has ruled Japan for most of the post-World War II era. In a country where only a small percentage of elected officials are female and women are still expected to pour tea for male co-workers and defer to their husbands, Koizumi's "new LDP" is fielding a record 26 women in the upcoming race, more than double last year's number.

More important, Koizumi, 63, chose Koike and eight other well-known, successful women to run in key races. They are opposing the powerful hard-liners whom Koizumi effectively purged from the party after they voted against his bill to privatize Japan's massive postal service, the centerpiece of his plan to reform the world's second-largest economy. Rejection of that bill in August led Koizumi to angrily dissolve the lower house and put his job on the line by calling new elections in which he has vowed "to change or destroy" the LDP....

Koizumi's popularity is soaring ahead of the vote -- particularly among such nontraditional LDP voting groups as younger people and urbanites.

"There's no way around it," said Yasunori Sone, a professor of political science at Keio University in Tokyo. "Koizumi is a political genius. His creation of the assassin candidates has captured the public's imagination."

Indeed, Koizumi's daring approach has surprised a nation used to consensus politics, titillating the press and jolting many Japanese out of their state of political apathy. Public opinion polls indicate heightened interest in the elections.

Three weeks ago today Dafnia Linzer had a Washington Post front-pager on an National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran wasn't nearly as close to developing nuclar weapons as previously thought.

Three weeks later, Linzer pours even colder water on Iran's WMD progress:

Traces of bomb-grade uranium found two years ago in Iran came from contaminated Pakistani equipment and are not evidence of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, a group of U.S. government experts and other international scientists has determined.

"The biggest smoking gun that everyone was waving is now eliminated with these conclusions," said a senior official who discussed the still-confidential findings on the condition of anonymity.

Scientists from the United States, France, Japan, Britain and Russia met in secret during the past nine months to pore over data collected by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to U.S. and foreign officials. Recently, the group, whose existence had not been previously reported, definitively matched samples of the highly enriched uranium -- a key ingredient for a nuclear weapon -- with centrifuge equipment turned over by the government of Pakistan.

Iran has long contended that the uranium traces were the result of contaminated equipment bought years ago from Pakistan. But the Bush administration had pointed to the material as evidence that Iran was making bomb-grade ingredients.

The conclusions will be shared with IAEA board members in a report due out the first week in September, according to U.S. and European officials who agreed to discuss details of the investigation on the condition of anonymity. The report "will say the contamination issue is resolved," a Western diplomat said.

U.S. officials have privately acknowledged for months that they were losing confidence that the uranium traces would turn out to be evidence of a nuclear weapons program. A recent U.S. intelligence estimate found that Iran is further away from making bomb-grade uranium than previously thought, according to U.S. officials.

The IAEA findings come as European efforts to negotiate with Iran on the future of its nuclear program have faltered, and could complicate a renewed push by the Bush administration to increase international pressure on Tehran.

Link via David Adesnik, who asks, "The question, then, would seem to be the same one as we now ask about Iraq: Why would a government with nothing to hide constantly lie to international inspectors?"

Following up on my post a few months ago on whether China's economic liberalization will lead to democratization, the Economist asks similar questions about the trajectory of Hu Jintao's government -- and comes up with the same muddled answer:

Mr Hu's (in fact, fairly consistent) conservatism has been evident in his belief that the Communist Party, riddled with corruption and other abuses of power, is quite capable of cleaning up its own act without the need for any checks or balances. This year, for instance, he has ordered millions of party officials to take part in many hours of mind-numbing ideological training designed to tighten party discipline (known as the “education campaign to preserve the advanced nature of Communist Party members”)....

Publicly, Mr Hu's comments have been moderate in tone. But he has been tougher at closed-door gatherings, such as during a meeting of the party's Central Committee last September. The plenum was of crucial symbolic importance for Mr Hu. It appointed him as the supreme commander of China's armed forces, thus completing his takeover of the country's three top positions, following his appointment as party leader in November 2002 and president in March 2003. The contents of Mr Hu's maiden speech have not been published in full. In the still secret portion, Mr Hu reportedly railed against “Western hostile forces” and “bourgeois liberalisation”. It was a worrying throwback to the paranoid language that suffused official rhetoric in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989....

Yet for all Mr Hu's rhetoric, he has yet to strike out at perceived wayward tendencies with anything like the vigour shown by Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping or even Jiang Zemin, whose crackdown on Falun Gong, a spiritual movement, in 1999 sent many thousands to labour camps. The complaints of Beijing's intellectuals are offset by other signals that China's economic reforms are continuing, even if government enthusiasm for the kind of mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises that occurred in the late 1990s and early this decade may have abated. In February the government issued new guidelines for private investment in areas hitherto the preserve of the state. This month it issued a draft of China's first law on property rights, aimed at protecting individuals and companies from arbitrary appropriations by the state. Many say the new law is inadequate, but it is still something of a concession to a growing middle class.

Even in the realm of privatisation, the government continues to experiment. In May, a new attempt was launched at off-loading state-owned shares in the 1,400 companies listed in China's stockmarkets. The government has indicated that the reform plan will not mean selling off its controlling stake in “key enterprises”. But it will relinquish at least some of its firms.

Given the increasingly conspicuous inequalities emerging in China as a result of the country's embrace of capitalism, it suits Mr Hu to appear to pour cold water on the idea of laisser-faire economics, blamed for a growing gap between rich and poor, between regions and between urban and rural areas. In the past couple of years there has been an upsurge in the number of protests triggered by these disparities, as well as by rampant corruption. Mr Hu is trying to strengthen the party's legitimacy by stressing its sympathy for the disadvantaged.

Mr Hu's catchphrase is “balanced development”. This will be a central theme in a new five-year economic plan (a still cherished relic of the central-planning era) due to be discussed by the Central Committee in October and ratified by the legislature next March. It will be Mr Hu's first opportunity to put his stamp on a long-term economic strategy. But rapid growth will remain his first priority. Mr Hu has shown no sign of retreat from the core belief of party leaders since the early 1990s: that growth is essential to social stability and thus the party's survival. If redistributing wealth were to jeopardise that, even the conservative Mr Hu would back off.

Whenever people start talking about the interrelationships between regime type, the rule of law, economic development, and political corruption, the outlier is always Singapore.

Think that economic development inexorably leads to freedom of the press? Hello, meet Singapore.

Think that authoritarianism automatically leads to corruption? Have you met Singapore?

Think that no government can plug its country into the Internet while still retaining a vast web of censorship? Yes, yes, that is Singapore over there in the corner giving you the raspberry.

[So what do political scientists say whenever the Singapore is brought up as the counterexample to the general rule?--ed.] There are a few options available:

OPTION #1: "Oh, you say a small city-state violates my covering law? I say 'feh.' All statistical relationships will have outliers. The general observation still holds."

OPTION #2: "Unless Lee Kuan Yew can be cloned, this is a unique example of political leadership that doesn't generalize beyond the borders of Singapore."

OPTION #3: "Oh, Singapore won't remain an exception for long. A one party state cannot be combined with information technology and a free market and live to tell the tale. You just wait.... yes, you wait right over there in the corner."

OPTION #4: "Singapore is merely the exemplar to demonstrate that these kind of feel-good generalizations break down when applied outside of OECD countries. Deal with it."

Some of these options are not mutually exclusive.

My thought piece on information technology and regime type takes some steps towards the third position. So I'm pleased to see that Associated Press reporter En-Lai Yeoh is also moving in that direction:

Singaporeans are seeing "Sex and the City" on TV. Actors may utter four-letter words on stage. Opposition parties can gather without police permission--as long as they do it indoors.

Tiny and famously disciplined Singapore is turning 40 on Tuesday, and continuing to lighten up. Gone are the days when chewing gum and long hair were banned. Singaporeans are even being allowed to bungee-jump and dance on bar tables.

In April, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong explained: "We risk being relegated to the second league if we rely only on past achievements. We must continue to reinvent ourselves."

Political analyst Ho Khai Leong of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies says the ruling People's Action Party is being pragmatic without relaxing its grip on power over the island and its 4.2 million citizens.

"It can't remain authoritarian when globalization is on your doorstep," he said. "There is a dynamic to the desire to be more open."....

The Internet puts the government in a quandary. It knows the future depends on an Internet-savvy public but recognizes the Web's power to bypass state-controlled media and foment its own kind of people power.

The Internet effect was evident in June, when an online petition became a driving force behind the ouster of the head of the largest government-backed charity, the National Kidney Foundation, for allegedly misusing funds.

"Rarely have Singaporeans showed such unanimous purpose in demanding change, and it worked--an undeniable plus for democracy," said political commentator Seah Chiang Nee.

I'm not holding my breath anytime soon for displays of Singaporean people power. But this story suggests that maybe there are limits to how far Singapore's exceptional identity can be maintained.

Mauritania is a not-so-pleasant reminder of a relatively pleasant fact: military coup d'etats are a post-Cold War rarity. According to Patrick McGowan (‘African Military Coups d’Etat, 1956–2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribution’, Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 41, issue 3, 2003.):

[T]he military coup is today almost exclusively an African phenomenon. Once frequent and widespread in the global South, since the mid-1980s successful military coups d’e´tat have become relatively rare in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia; whereas between 1985 and 2001 SSA [sub-Saharan Africa] experienced 21 successful coups and 41 failed coup attempts.

Outside of Africa, the only successful coups in the past decade have been in Haiti and Pakistan. Interestingly, the only countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have been independent for 25 years and have avoided coups are Botswana, Cape Verde and Mauritius -- all of which are multiparty democracies. [UPDATE: Hmmm..... this previous sentence came straight from the McGowan article, but Jacob Levy is right to wonder why South Africa isn't on this list. One possibility is that McGowan includes attempted coups, and there might have been one in the late eighties/early nineties that escapes our collective memory.]

Even inside Africa, there is relatively good news -- although the pace of coup activity has not abated, according to McGowan the relative success of coup attempts has declined. In other words, there are as many coup attempts as in the past, but fewer of them succeed.

Why? One obvious reason for the decline in coups is the absence of great power support for them. Another reason might be contained in this London Times story by Jenny Booth:

The African Union today suspended the membership of Mauritania after yesterday's bloodless military coup deposed President Maaouiya Ould Taya.

The AU Peace and Security Council said that the suspension would remain in place until "constitutional order" is returned to the west African state.

"In light of the coup d’etat that took place on August 3... Mauritania’s participation in all AU activities should be suspended until the restoration of constitutional order in the country," the council said in a statement.

Here's a link to an earlier AU condemnation of the coup.

Whether this will actually alter the behavior of the coup plotters is doubtful at this point, but it's worth remembering that even this gesture would never have taken place ten years ago. And such gestures in the past have helped to thwart coups in Latin America.

The rest of the world's response has been along similar lines to what's happened in Mauritania.

Alas, focusing on Mauritania itself, it seems pretty clear that the coup does not do wonders for U.S. foreign policy, according to Booth's report:

The quick return to calm appeared to suggest there was widespread acceptance of President Taya’s overthrow. Islamic opposition parties celebrated the deposition of a ruler who had looked increasingly to the West, in response to alleged threats from al-Qaeda linked militants with ties to radical groups in Algeria.

On the other hand, this International Crisis Group report from March 2005 suggests that fears of radical Islamic activity are overblown. See also Princeton Lyman's CFR briefing on the coup.

Developing...

The past few days have seen a lot of hand-wringing over Iran's decision to defy the principal EU countries and IAEA and proceed with "uranium enrichment activities" as the FT's Gareth Smyth and Najmeh Bozorgmehr put it.

Ordinarily, this development would fill the Bush administration with glee. After all, the administration cut a deal with the Europeans agreeing to let them have the negotiation lead with Iran, and even remove the block from Iran's WTO candidacy -- provided that if the talks ever broke down, the EU countries would back at U.S. resolution to bring the matter to the UN Security Council.

Now, however, I see this front-pager by Dafna Linzer in today's Washington Post:

A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis.

The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal. The new estimate could provide more time for diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. President Bush has said that he wants the crisis resolved diplomatically but that "all options are on the table."

....At no time in the past three years has the White House attributed its assertions about Iran to U.S. intelligence, as it did about Iraq in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion. Instead, it has pointed to years of Iranian concealment and questioned why a country with as much oil as Iran would require a large-scale nuclear energy program....

The new estimate extends the timeline, judging that Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before "early to mid-next decade," according to four sources familiar with that finding. The sources said the shift, based on a better understanding of Iran's technical limitations, puts the timeline closer to 2015 and in line with recently revised British and Israeli figures.

The estimate is for acquisition of fissile material, but there is no firm view expressed on whether Iran would be ready by then with an implosion device, sources said.

If you read the whole article (oh, and here's a Q&A with Linzer about the story) , you'll see that the big question Bush officials are asking is whether there will be regime change in Iran before that country acquires a nuclear capability.

I have a different question -- is it possible that the mullahs are copying Saddam Hussein? Recall that even though Iraq's WMD program turned out to be relatively moribund, Hussein repeatedly refused to cooperate fully with UN officials. Among the many possible motivations, one hypothesis was that Hussein was unwilling to expose his relative weakness.

Right now every country in the Middle East fears Iran's growing power -- could the mullahs have an incentive to exaggerate perceptions of that power?

Developing....

UPDATE: Frank Foer, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan, frets that the new NIE will be counterproductive to the "broad consensus that the mullahs must be stopped."

There appears to be a rift brewing between former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad and his successor, current Malaysian PM Abdullah Badawi.

After reading this excerpt from John Burton's story in the Financial Times, see if you can guess which one I hope prevails:

The future of Proton, Malaysia's national carmaker, appears to have caused a schism in the government, with the issue pitting Abdullah Badawi, the prime minister, against his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad.

Dr Mahathir, who has championed Proton's cause, has claimed that a system of import licences for foreign cars has damaged Proton sales and demanded that those who have received the privileged licences should be revealed.

Mr Abdullah, who has favoured reducing trade barriers protecting Proton, this week named the licence holders, which have long been secret, in a move to promote government transparency ahead of the ruling party's annual meeting.

The prime minister's disclosure is seen as calling his predecessor's bluff to embarrass him. Among those holding the approved permits was Mokhzani Mahathir, Dr Mahathir's son, who was allowd to import 95 Saab and Porsche cars....

High tariffs have protected Proton until recently. But aggressive sales tactics by Toyota and Hyundai among others have reduced Proton's domestic market share from 70 per cent to 45 per cent in the last five years. Malaysia is south-east Asia's largest passenger car market.

Doubts about the survival of Proton have increased after Mr Abdullah agreed to nearly eliminate car tariffs by 2008 under south-east Asia's free trade agreement.

Analysts say Proton's best hope for survival is a partnership with a foreign carmaker. Volkswagen last year agreed to produce cars for the regional market at Proton plants in return for providing technical assistance.

But Proton officials have indicated that they would resist VW taking a majority stake in the company.

Since stepping down as prime minister in 2003, Dr Mahathir has become a key defender of Proton in his role as the company's special adviser.

CNN reports on the group claiming responsibility for the London transport bombings:

A previously unknown group calling itself the "Secret Organization group al Qaeda Organization in Europe" released a statement Thursday claiming responsibility for the subway and bus bombings in London earlier in the day...

CNN could not confirm the authenticity of the statement, which was posted on a Web site connected to Islamic radicals....

The claim of responsibility from the group said it had repeatedly warned Britain.

"The mujahedeen heroes have launched a blessed attack in London," the statement said.

"Here is Britain burning now out of fear and horror in its north, south east and west. We have often and repeatedly warned the British government and people."

The statement said the group had carried out the attack after exerting "strenuous efforts ... over a long period of time to guarantee" its success.

"We still warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the crusader governments that they will receive the same punishment if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan," it said. "We gave the warning, so we should not be blamed."

Click here for dueling translations of the short statement..

The clumsy-sounding name (at least in English) of this group makes me wonder if this is another of Al Qaeda's local subcontractees.

UPDATE: Stephen Flynn has some thoughts at the Council on Foreign Relations home page that sound this theme as well. Some highlights:

[This attack] tells us that al Qaeda is increasingly more of a movement than it is an organization. There are splinter groups and it would appear, in this instance, that many of these groups are homegrown--that is, they're made up of U.K. citizens rather than foreign fighters who have arrived on British soil....

I don't have a lot of detail, obviously--but what I've picked up from the web and the bit of reporting I've heard from Scotland Yard indicates that is likely the case. Many of the folks who are setting up these [Qaeda-affiliated] organizations carry a European Union passport. In some instances, they are first generation. Others are established citizens living in the cities, as opposed to Saudis who come in to carry out these attacks. Of course, that was the case with [the March 2004 al Qaeda bombings of commuter trains in] Madrid as well....

[I]n the aftermath of the London attacks, it's likely that very quickly you'll see law enforcement identify the responsible parties and to start to roll up their organization. In Madrid, the group responsible for the attacks was rolled up relatively quickly. Terrorist groups have to be careful about carrying out attacks. They have to be successful, because they put their organization at high risk whenever they carry out an attack. It's impossible not to leave bread crumbs. The scale of the forensic evidence for this kind of coordinated, large-scale attack endangers an organization. It suggests that attacks, when they happen, are more likely to be of this sophisticated, coordinated nature, not a single event.

Read the whole thing.

LAST UPDATE: Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser make a similar point to Flynn's in the Washington Post:

Now more a brand than a tight-knit group, al Qaeda has responded to four years of intense pressure from the United States and its allies by dispersing its surviving operatives, distributing its ideology and techniques for mass-casualty attacks to a wide audience on the Internet, and encouraging new adherents to act spontaneously in its name.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, terrorism experts in and out of government have warned that the movement has appeared to gain ground, particularly in Europe, where a large, mobile, technology-savvy and well-educated Muslim population includes some angry and alienated young people attracted to the call of holy war against the West.

The simultaneous bombings of four rush-hour commuter trains in Madrid on March 11, 2004, the shooting death of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh last November and recent preemptive arrests made by European police suggest a less top-down, more grass-roots-driven al Qaeda. The movement's ability to carry off sophisticated, border-crossing attacks such as those Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants mounted against New York and the Pentagon almost four years ago appears diminished, some experts say.

Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri, and more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi, have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.

Comment here on the prospect that Iran's president-elect might have been one of the students involved in the 1979 embassy takeover.

More generally, It's still unclear to me what the precise relationship is between Ahmadinejad and the clerics that actually run Iran. Yesterday's New York Times op-ed by Abbas Milani said the clerics "masterminded Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory." However the NYT editorial of the same day argues that Ahmadinejad, "offered a populist economic platform that implicitly challenged the cronyism and corruption of more than a quarter-century of clerical rule."

I don't know enough about Iran's internal politics to comment -- but I'm sure that will not deter you from commenting.

[Isn't this just a case of life being complex? Maybe Ahmadinejad agrees with the clerics on some issues but not others?--ed. Undoubtedly true -- but the question that's still unanswered is whether he's willing to address certain sacred cows within the clerical establishment even as he's agreeing with them on other issues.]

Some stories are so odd that all you can do is post them without comment:

Russian President Vladimir Putin walked off with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft's diamond-encrusted 2005 Super Bowl ring at a recent meeting with U.S. business executives.

But not to worry: Kraft says the ring was a gift to Putin, presented out of ''respect and admiration.''....

''I showed the president my most recent Super Bowl ring,'' Kraft said in a statement. The Russian president ''was clearly taken with its uniqueness.''

''At that point, I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.''

Putin met with the businessmen Saturday near St. Petersburg, Russia. Near the end of the meeting, Kraft took off the ring, and handed it to Putin. Putin tried it on, put it in his pocket and left, according to Russian news reports.

It's an amazing coincidence.... it's my understanding is this is exactly how it worked with Gazprom as well.

The Economist asks the questions on many people's minds following Iran's presidential elections:

WAS it a backlash by Iran’s devoutly Muslim poor against a corrupt elite? Or was it a massive fraud perpetrated on the people by the hardline clerics? Perhaps it was a bit of both. Whatever the case, the margin of victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the second round of Iran’s presidential election, on Friday June 24th, was striking. Mr Ahmadinejad, the mayor of the capital, Tehran, and a hardline religious conservative, garnered around 62% of the vote, despite having gone almost unnoticed in the field of seven candidates who had contested the first round of voting, a week earlier.

However, Gordon Robison has an op-ed in the Beirut Daily Star suggesting that the western media fell down on the job in covering the Iranian elections:

So Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is not Iran's new president. That result must come as a particular surprise to anyone who tried to follow the campaign by light of the Western media.

As recently as last Thursday - the day before the run-off vote between Rafsanjani and his rival, Tehran mayor Mahmood Ahmadinejad - reputable polls gave the latter a clear lead. Yet headlines in the International Herald Tribune continued to describe Rafsanjani as the "front-runner." In the run-up to the first round of voting on June 17, his campaign was the focus of most election coverage in the Western media. CNN's interview with Rafsanjani during the campaign treated him as a president-in-waiting.

So what happened, exactly?....

The answer may be much simpler, if no less embarrassing: Granted how little most of us outsiders know about the politics of the Islamic Republic, it was probably just easiest to focus on Rafsanjani because he, alone among the candidates, was a familiar figure to Western journalists....

Prior to the election [reformer Mustafa] Moin was often seen in the West as Rafsanjani's main competition. The assumption in that narrative was that Rafsanjani represented the conservative old guard. Moin, a former cabinet minister who was initially barred from standing by Iran's Council of Guardians (the body that approves potential candidates for Parliament and the presidency), was seen as the obvious successor to Khatami. That might have been true, but it ignored the fact that there is more than one type of "reform." Reform can mean loosening restrictions on how people dress and behave in public and private. But it can also mean tackling corruption and cronyism - which was the vein of popular anger into which Ahmadinejad tapped.

Well, to be fair, some of the western media had already figured some of this out:

In truth, so much of this [analysis about Iran's election] is rubbish and disinformation. The country's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, remains firmly in charge of the country -- exactly as he would have been had Mr. Rafsanjani won the other day. The pop analysis aside, the election will have no effect on Iran's weapons of mass destruction or its role in supporting terrorism.

The constant in U.S. policy towards a rising China for the past three administrations is encapsulated in the current National Security Strategy:

China has begun to take the road to political openness, permitting many personal freedoms and conducting village-level elections, yet remains strongly committed to national one-party rule by the Communist Party. To make that nation truly accountable to its citizen’s needs and aspirations, however, much work remains to be done. Only by allowing the Chinese people to think, assemble, and worship freely can China reach its full potential....

The power of market principles and the WTO’s requirements for transparency and accountability will advance openness and the rule of law in China to help establish basic protections for commerce and for citizens. (emphasis added)

In other words, by trading with China, and by encouraging them to embrace the information revolution, the Chinese will inevitably morph into an ever-more-open society that will therefore become more benign in world politics.

There are valid reasons to doubt the second part of that logic, but I'm more concerned about the first part for now: is U.S. trade with China making the country more free?

I ask because of this Philip P. Pan front-pager in the Washington Post from last week on how Chinese President Hu Jintao is consolidating his power:

More than two years after taking office amid uncertainty about his political views, Chinese President Hu Jintao is emerging as an unyielding leader determined to preserve the Communist Party's monopoly on power and willing to impose new limits on speech and other civil liberties to do it, according to party officials, journalists and analysts.

Some say Hu has cast himself as a hard-liner to consolidate his position after a delicate leadership transition and could still lead the party in a more open direction. There is a growing consensus inside and outside the government, however, that the 62-year-old former engineer believes the party should strengthen its rule by improving its traditional mechanisms of governance, not by introducing democratic reforms.

Hu has placed particular emphasis on tightening the party's control over public opinion, presiding over a crackdown to restore discipline to state media and intimidate dissident intellectuals. He has also gone further than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, by adopting new measures to regulate discussions on university Internet sites and the activities of nongovernmental organizations.

Meanwhile, Paul Mooney reports similar information about the Chinese academy in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, subscription only):

Shortly before a new, younger generation of Chinese leaders took office in 2002, intellectuals in Beijing were hoping that Hu Jintao, who is now the country's president, would be a force for reform.

Since taking the reins of power, however, the new regime has launched a bitter attack on freedom of expression. Newspapers have been shut down, books banned, journalists and dissidents imprisoned, and scholars brought under increased pressure to toe the official line. The political situation is the worst it has been in years, many scholars say.

"I'm very pessimistic," says Xu Youyu, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "I'm sure that these harsh policies are not just for a short time."

As for the power of the Internet to make China more free, Rebecca MacKinnon has tirelessly covered the Chinese government's recent efforts to expand its monitoring and filtering capacities -- click here for one example.

This would all seem to suggest that our open trade policy with China ain't generating a lot of political openness on their side. By the Freedom House measures, China has been rated as "not free" for the entire history of our expanded trade relationship with them. Within that category there are some subtler trends -- in the eighties both the poliitical rights and civil liberties measures improved slightly. Both went back down after Tiannamen, and then since 1998 the civil liberties score has improved marginally.

So does China vitiate the underlying premise that an open economic relationship leads to political openness?

Well consider that even the Freedom House data and the Chronicle story suggests that economic openness can have an effect on civil liberties -- it's just that the effect is very small and trumped by Hu Jintao. See this section of the Chronicle story:

Free speech was given a big boost in China in recent years by the commercialization of the news media and the advent of the Internet, two channels that gave scholars unprecedented ways to disseminate their opinions. Newspapers and magazines once controlled by the government are now scrambling to attract readers. The Beijing News, which has won a large readership with its bold reporting, devotes an entire page each day to articles written by prominent intellectuals.

However, nothing has been as important as the Internet. "It's almost revolutionary," says Jiang Wenran, associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, in Canada, and a native of China. "Without the Internet, how could they speak out?"

Anything important that has been written can be found online, and that, says Mr. Jiang, "gives intellectuals confidence that they have a voice and can use it to express their opinions."

Academics have also set up numerous Web sites, though they have had to exercise caution. Some sites voluntarily shut down every year before the anniversary of the May 4th Movement, marking the 1919 student demonstrations on that day in Beijing against the Treaty of Versailles, and the 1989 crackdown that grew out of the student protests in Tiananmen Square. If they did not take that self-imposed break, China's vigilant Internet police -- said to number in the tens of thousands -- might take more drastic action, forcing them to shut down permanently.

Second, remember that China is a special case because of its market size. China can get Microsoft to do what it wants, but smaller countries cannot.

Third, when questioning the utility of a certain policy, one always needs to compre it to the alternative set of options. There is no other option that would cause China to democratize any faster that a policy of openness.

Fourth, as I argued earlier this year, the effect of the information revolution on authoritarian states is not a continuous one. It is possible that repressive regimes can succeed in maintaining control for long periods of time -- but then crumble quickly. One reason for Hu's recent decision to crack down is his acute recognition of this fact.

So maybe current U.S. policy will work in the long run. The thing is, none of those points makes me feel any more sanguine about current U.S. policy in the short run.

UPDATE: David Shambaugh has an interesting piece in The Washington Quarterly on the complex triangle between the U.S., China, and Europe.

I've been remiss in not posting about the surge of anti-Japan protests in China over the past ten days or so, and the official Chinese reaction, which ranged from tacit support at the outset to a hasty, clumsy effort to assuage the Japanese and characterize the protests as part of an evil plot to undermine the Communist Party.

Comment away on the implications. I will only make one observation -- the Chinese government has been extraordinarily maladroit over the past six months. Until recently, the government was keenly aware about the geopolitical anxiety caused in the Asia-Pacific region by its growing economic and military strength. Being a rising, somewhat opaque power is tricky terrain for any state to navigate. Post-9/11, the Chinese had been pretty deft, tolerating the U.S. focus on the Middle East while pointing out to its neighbors, Europe, and even Africa the value of close economic relations with Beijing. Chinese academics have labeled this the "peaceful rising" strategy.

However, in the past six months, the Chinese government has:

1) Looked stingy following the meager tsunami aid allotment;

2) Looked stupid following their anti-Taiwan law;

3) Looked out of control with their handling of the anti-Japan riots.

I'm curious to see how both the Chinese and the other countries in the region will respond.

Developing....

When we last left the French referendum on the EU constitution, President Jacques Chirac had bungled a TV appearance designed to bolster support for a "oui" vote.

In today's Financial Times, John Thornhill reports that France's neighbors are warning of the apocalypse if France says non.

A French rejection of the European Union's constitutional treaty would result in the “fall of Europe,” Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission, warned on Sunday.

His words came as the Yes campaign stepped up its increasingly desperate search for a strategy to turn the tide of public opinion ahead of the May 29 vote. In the starkest warning yet of the consequences for the EU if French voters reject the treaty Mr Prodi who was in office when it was drawn up told a French newspaper: “There would be no more Europe. We will pass through a long period of crisis.

“The problem will not only be a catastrophe for France, but the fall of Europe.”

Mr Prodi said the treaty was not perfect but was the best compromise possible. “It is impossible for me to imagine a French No. I have always thought of France as a pillar of Europe.

“A No would be catastrophic for Europe, from a social and economic point of view, not only political. And that is the whole contradiction: everybody knows very well that there is no Europe without France, yet France does not realise the chance it has with Europe. She should reflect on that because an isolated France would be very weak,” he said....

However, the latest opinion polls in France suggest the No camp is consolidating its lead with 58 per cent support. They also suggest that a growing number of French voters are playing down the fallout from a No vote.

The fact that articles like this one and this Charlemagne column in the Economist are being printed suggests that experts are taking the likelihood of a non vote very seriously.

Of course, this begs the question -- would a rejection of the EU constitution really mean the end of the EU project? I'd like to hear from the Europeanists in the audience, but this strikes me as a gross exaggeration. The European project has managed to generate a common market, a common Court of Justice, the euro, Schengenland, an increasingly assertive European parliament, and even the faint stirrings of a common foreign and defense policy -- all using the current set of legal and political arrangements. None of these will disappear if the French say non (a good indicator of its significance will be to see what happens to the value of the euro as the probability of a non vote approaches one. If it actually starts to fall in value, then I'm wrong).

The "end of Europe" claim by Prodi is an extreme version of the "bicycle theory" of international integration, which says that if there is any slowdown in integration, the process starts to wobble like a slow bicycle, eventually toppling under its own weight. This line was also used after the Maastricht accord was signed in the early nineties. I suspect that warnings like Prodi's will, if anything, further turn off people against what elites tell them about the European Union.

Does this mean the EU would just sail along after a French rejection? Non, it would not, but I'm not sure that the ensuing difficulties would be any more severe than, say, what the World Trade Organization experienced after the 1999 Battle in Seattle. The EU will live on.

What will be interesting to see is whether the rest of Europe would interpret a negative vote as an actual rejection of the planned future of the EU or explain it away as a rejection of Jacques Chirac and nothing more.

In six weeks, the French will vote on a referendum to ratify the EU constitution. Current polling in France runs about 55% against, and twelve straight polls have had the "no" camp in the lead.

In an attempt to combat this trend, last night French President Jacques Chirac held a nationally televised town hall-style meeting with 83 "young people."

Two things were interesting about the event and its aftermath. The first was Chirac's principal arguments for ratification -- political and economic balancing against the United States. According to the Wadhington Post's Erika Lorentzsen:

"What would be the role of France tomorrow if we block this process?" [Chirac] asked during a question-and-answer session with young people and journalists, broadcast from the Elysee Palace. "We will not be strong, and Europe would not be strong enough against the big powers."

Proponents of the constitution contend that it is crucial to making the European Union, an often internally divided alliance, more influential in world affairs. Among many Europeans, this means standing up to the United States....

In his remarks, Chirac sought to convince voters that irrational worries were standing in the way of the constitution, which he said would protect Europe from an "ultra-liberal" and "Anglo-Saxon" economic model, code words for American-style free-market capitalism.

"I'm always surprised to see this expression of fear," he said. "Europe needs to feel proud of itself and France in its principal role in defending our interests. This fear of young people I don't understand. I have confidence in France and our future."

In the Financial Times, John Thornhill and Peggy Hollinger provide an even more explicit quote:

Mr Chirac said the treaty, which established a new set of rules for the expanded European Union of 25 countries, was essential to preserve French values. “What is the interest of the Anglo-Saxon countries and particularly the US? It is naturally to stop Europe's construction, which risks creating a much stronger Europe tomorrow,” he said.

The second interesting thing was that Chirac's line of argumentation floundered. Both the BBC and CNN International have recaps of the French media response, and they were not good. From the latter's round-up:

"In front of an audience in which those favoring the 'No' seemed to be in the majority, the head of state often struggled to make heard his pro-European plea during a muddled broadcast," the conservative Le Figaro wrote on its front page.

"Chirac: difficulty reassuring," LCI television said, while the left-leaning Liberation newspapers said Chirac appeared "strained, almost clenched-up" in the meeting.

Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister and leading "no" campaigner accused Chirac of trying to scare voters into backing the charter.

"I found Mr. Chirac, like the constitution, long and not very convincing," he told RTL radio.

"I was very struck to see Mr. Chirac saying on the one hand, 'don't be afraid', but his main argument was to try to create fear."

The Economist, among others points out that much of the "no" support might have less to do with the EU constitution and more to do with Chirac's growing unpopularity. However. going back to the FT, it's possible that the two may actually be linked:

[S]ome of the audience said the constitution was too complex and doubted it would make any difference to their lives. They quizzed Mr Chirac aggressively over France's high unemployment, the threat to the country's public services and the possible influx of cheap labour from eastern Europe.

Asked by one voter why the unemployment rate was so much lower in the UK than in France, Mr Chirac replied that Britain had social rules that would not be “acceptable to us”.

....Mr Chirac's greatest political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, the populist president of the ruling UMP party, on Thursday contradicted the president's upbeat views by saying that the “French social model” was failing the people.

In a speech in southern France, Mr Sarkozy said that with a 10 per cent unemployment rate France should stop saying its system worked better than that of others. “In 20 years both the left and the right have doubled the credits to combat unemployment but we have not produced one fewer unemployed person,” he said.

Even the Economist acknowledges that, "in contrast to the Maastricht vote, which led to the euro, it is hard to say what is at stake in the EU constitution."

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the next six weeks. My hunch is that support for the "yes" side will increase as the vote nears -- and even if the referendum fails, the French can simply schedule another referendum. On the other hand, if the quixotic combination of realpolitik and social democracy doesn't generate majority support in France, then I'm not sure where it will work.

Developing....

You have to think that things are going pretty well in Afghanistan when a major subject of public debate is.... what's on television. Kim Barker explains in the Chicago Tribune:

The two men spend several minutes debating which came first, the chicken or the egg. They argue over whether people dream in color.

This hardly seems like the most controversial TV show in Afghanistan. But in between the polite chitchat, these men--the Afghan version of MTV veejays--play music videos, which sometimes feature heaving bosoms, dancing women and sexually suggestive lyrics.

Such videos have turned the show "Hop" into one of the most popular programs on the Afghan capital's most popular new television station, Tolo TV. They also have drawn the ire of the country's clerics and the scrutiny of the government.

"Watching a woman with half-naked breasts and a man and a woman sucking each other's lips on TV, like on Tolo, is not atocceptable," said Abdul Malik Kamawi, spokesman for the country's Supreme Court.

The debate over programming on the five private TV stations in Kabul highlights a major difficulty facing the new Afghanistan: trying to balance democratic freedoms and a largely conservative Islamic society. The constitution protects freedom of expression and prohibits anything that is against Islam. That inevitably leads to conflict, because what is against Islam often depends on who is watching.

Several new stations are pushing the limits in the land where the Taliban once banned TV sets and forced women to be hidden. They are playing Indian movies, which mostly focus on love and sexy couples dancing and singing. Some have shown movies from the United States, such as "Conan the Barbarian," with sex scenes....

On Tolo, people Rollerblade and fly kites at a New Year's celebration. Men and women talk to each other, even laugh together. Jennifer Lopez videos are shown frequently, and commercials tout the benefits of chicken bullion and dandruff shampoo. In many ways the station shows a vision of Kabul not as it necessarily is, but as many young people would like it to be.

A short makeover feature takes ordinary Afghans off the street and turns them into fashionable young people who would blend into any Western city. Think of it as "Hip Eye for the Traditional Afghan Guy." On one recent show, a young Afghan man with a beard, an uneven haircut and the typical Afghan knee-length shirt and matching pants got a shave, a haircut and a shower and was dressed in jeans and a modern shirt....

Most people on the street say Tolo TV is their favorite Afghan station. They like the news and the investigative reporting--new to Afghanistan. They like "Moments," a prank program similar to "Candid Camera." But most people, young and old, say their favorite show on Tolo is "Hop," which features videos from India, Iran, Turkey, the U.S. and Afghanistan.

"It's a good program," said Walid Shahbaz, 22, who was out shopping. "Mullahs are usually talking about things that are against Islam. But I don't think `Hop' is against Islam."

The TV station is planning to air a new program, one that station workers are certain will be a hit. It shows just how much the clerics are up against, and how much Afghanistan has changed since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

That show, modeled on a popular U.S. program, will feature men and women singing their way to fame. "Afghan Idol" will start shooting in a few weeks. (emphasis added)

I can just picture Virginia Postrel smiling at the bolded section.

UPDATE: Barker has a follow-up piece in Tuesday's Tribune on the opening of the first plastic surgery clinic in Kabul:

Most patients want their scars removed, all evidence of burns, skin diseases and even gunshot wounds erased. But others, hiding beneath their burqas, want nose jobs.

Cosmetic surgery has arrived in Kabul, in the form of the tiny Hamkar Surgical Clinic, across the street from the bombed-out Cinema Theatre building, in need of its own face-lift. In this clinic, tucked away at the top of a dark stairway, people can pay for tummy tucks, although no one has been brave enough yet to try. Women will be able to buy larger breasts, although only one woman has expressed interest so far.

"It's peaceful now in Afghanistan," nurse Mohammad Fazel said. "People can get rid of their wrinkles. They can get rid of their bad figures."

LAST UPDATE: Oxblog's Afghan correspondent provides an update on the situation on the ground outside of Kabul. Quick summary: "[E]nthusiasm, continued commitment, and some degree of optimism -- these are I think proper attitudes when considering the situation in Afghanistan."

As a follow-up to my previous post on the question of transfering police and security functions to Iraqis, it's worth linking and quoting from Spencer Ackerman's Iraq'd blog. Ackerman -- hardly a fan of the administration's Iraq policy in the past -- was a huge fan of the raid on foreign insurgents that took place yesterday.

Why is Ackerman in such a good mood about this raid?:

It's hard to overstate how fantastic a development this is, but let's try. I wrote last December about insurgent overconfidence. Is this ever a case in point! Insurgents have had their bloodiest successes in urban areas. Establishing training camps in remote locations plays to the strengths of the U.S. military and its Iraqi proteges by offering discrete targets to be wiped off the face of the earth, without the prospect of civilian casualties to inflame the sensibilities of the broader Iraqi population. What's more, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, an intelligence tip came from nearby residents about the precise location of the camp, indicating a disgust for the jihadists in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. (We've seen this from civilians before in areas devoid of U.S. troops that the jihadists infest.) And not only did the police commandos lead the raid, they fought for hours despite taking casualties. (Though not many: According to The New York Times, Iraqi commandos went in massively, with a force of between 500 and 700. Seven were killed and six wounded, which should say something about their training and fighting prowess.)

A quick word about the politics of the raid. The apparent isolation of the jihadists from Sunnis in the area is one the most hopeful signs we've gotten yet from Iraq. At the risk of succumbing to wishful thinking, it suggests a fracturing of the insurgency, which is crucial to victory, might be within sight.

Developing....

Derrick Jackson argued in the Boston Globe last Friday that the U.S. has no exit strategy for Iraq and this is costing us allies:

Country by country, the coalition is wilting from such uninspired leadership from the United States. Once Italy, Poland, Ukraine and Netherlands finish jumping ship, the U.S. percentage of the dubious Iraq mission will creep to 90 percent from 85 percent. Italy is pulling out because it sees no exit strategy. The coalition of the willing is no longer willing to accept America's rosy scenario on Iraq.

Jackson cites this Government Accountability Office report detailing the difficulties the United States is having with reconstituting Iraqi security forces. From the abstract:

U.S. government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped. As of March 2005, the State Department reported that about 82,000 police forces under the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and about 62,000 military forces under the Iraqi Ministry of Defense have been trained and equipped. However, the reported number of Iraqi police is unreliable because the Ministry of Interior does not receive consistent and accurate reporting from the police forces around the country. The data does not exclude police absent from duty. Further, the departments of State and Defense no longer report on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are equipped with their required weapons, vehicles, communications equipment, and body armor....without reliable reporting data, a more capable Iraqi force, and stronger Iraqi leadership, the Department of Defense faces difficulties in implementing its strategy to draw down U.S. forces from Iraq.

Sounds like Iraqification is not going well. However, two press reports from inside Iraq suggest that in fact progress has been made. John F. Burns reports in the New York Times that the transfer of duties from the U.S. military to Iraqi security forces has helped in one Baghdad neighborhood:

When most roads in central Baghdad are choked with traffic, there is rarely more than a trickle of vehicles on Haifa Street. At the day's height, a handful of pedestrians scurry down empty sidewalks, ducking into covered walkways that serve as sanctuaries from gunfire - and as blinds for insurgent attacks in one of Iraq's most bitterly contested battle zones....

In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital's core with something approaching impunity.

But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed.

American military engineers, frustrated elsewhere by insurgent attacks, are moving ahead along Haifa Street with a $20 million program to improve electricity, sewer and other utilities. So far, none of the work sites have been attacked, although a local Shiite leader who vocally supported the American projects was assassinated on his doorstep in January.

But the change American commanders see as more promising than any other here is the deployment of large numbers of Iraqi troops. American commanders are eager to shift the fighting in Iraq to the country's own troops, allowing American units to pull back from the cities and, eventually, to begin drawing down their 150,000 troops. Haifa Street has become an early test of that strategy.

Last month, an Iraqi brigade with two battalions garrisoned along Haifa Street became the first homegrown unit to take operational responsibility for any combat zone in Iraq. The two battalions can muster more than 2,000 soldiers, twice the size of the American cavalry battalion that has led most fighting along the street. So far, American officers say, the Iraqis have done well, withstanding insurgent attacks and conducting aggressive patrols and raids, without deserting in large numbers or hunkering down in their garrisons.

If Haifa Street is brought under control, it will be a major step toward restoring order in this city of five million, and will send a wider message: that the insurgents can be matched, and beaten back....

Iraqi units still complain about unequal equipment, particularly the lack of the heavy armor the Americans use, like Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks. But the complaints among American officers about "tiny heart syndrome" - a caustic reference to some Iraqi units' unwillingness to expose themselves to combat - have diminished.

"Now, they're ready to fight," said Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American officer overseeing the retraining effort, in a recent interview at his Green Zone headquarters.

Lethal intimidation of recruits - the suicide bombing of army barracks, police stations and recruiting lines, with scores of volunteers killed - remains the single biggest problem in building the Iraqi forces, the general acknowledged. But an overwhelming majority of new recruits have refused to buckle, he said, and they understand that they are fighting, not for the Americans, but for their own country. "Guys who get blown up in the morning get themselves bandaged up, and they're back in the afternoon," he said.

The uncompromising image is one that Gen. Muhammad al-Samraa, 39, the commander of the Iraqi 303rd Battalion, based on Haifa Street, is eager to push. "My aim is 100 percent clear: all the terrorists living here, they go now," he said, in halting English. He was a major in Mr. Hussein's air defense force, and spent a year as a bodyguard and driver for a Shiite tribal leader in Baghdad before signing up for the new army.

Meanwhile, Time's Christopher Allbriton reports on the growing professionalism of The Iraqi Special Forces Brigade (ISOF):

Two years since the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is scrambling to train and equip a new Iraqi army to take over combat duties and pave the way for a reduction in the size of the U.S. troop presence. After a slow start, the training program appears to be picking up momentum: last week the Pentagon announced plans to trim the number of U.S. troops in Iraq from 150,000 to 105,000 by early next year, a move that reflects the improved capabilities of the Iraqi forces. The top commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, said that "very much sooner rather than later, Iraq will be able to provide for its own security."

....While their numbers are few, Iraqi special forces have assumed a bigger role in sensitive counter-insurgent operations, often acting as the lead teams in raids and rescue missions. In some cases, Iraqi units have used intelligence gleaned from locals to identify their own low-level targets, and then execute small raids on their own. Trained by Task Force Pioneer, a unit drawn from a support company from the U.S. Special Operating Force's 10th Group, the emerging Iraqi commando units have impressed U.S. commanders with their combat performance and bolstered confidence that Iraqis can keep the insurgents at bay on their own. "We can step away more now," says the U.S. commander of Task Force Pioneer, who, like all of the special forces in this story, cannot be named. "It's about 50-50."

....Advisors from the U.S. Green Berets say the Iraqi special-ops teams have suffered none of the problems of desertion in the face of enemy fire seen in most of the regular Iraqi units. None have refused to fight, they say, and rates of those absent without leave are well below other forces. "It's unbelievable, but it's all down to the espirit de corps," says the Americans' Executive Officer.

Putting Iraqis on the front lines, U.S. officials say, is yielding results in the shadow war against the insurgents. When the key to unraveling insurgencies is denying the rebels the support of the population, putting an Iraqi face on the offensives is vital. It also helps avoid blunders. Often targeting information is slightly off, with troops raiding the wrong house. Local Iraqis are loath to point the Americans in the right direction. "They're not scared of Americans, but when an Iraqi in a ski mask confronts them they talk a lot more, and they're more likely to say, 'He's not here but lives across the road,'" says Task Force Pioneer's commander. During the raid on Tamimi's safehouse, the joint U.S.-Iraqi team hauled off Tamimi and another insurgent suspected of being a key bombmaker. The other men upstairs were left behind, a mark of the more "surgical" style of business the Green Berets are hoping the Iraqis can deliver them, blunting locals' perceptions of Americans as brutish and arbitrary. "In the past, we'd have scooped them all up," says an American with the CTF, "but we only took the guys our Iraqis said were dirty.

At this rate, the departure of other coalition country forces from Iraq is less a sign of failed American leadership than a sign that they can hand over their duties to the Iraqis themselves. Everyone agrees that this is the best possible exit option.

Developing....

Barbara Slavin reports in USA Today that Iraqis are feeling better about Iraq:

More Iraqis believe their country is headed in the right direction and fewer think it's going wrong than at any time since the U.S. invasion two years ago, according to a new poll.
The poll, by the International Republican Institute (IRI), due to be made public Wednesday, also found that nearly half of Iraqis believe that religion has a special role to play in government.

The survey of 1,967 Iraqis was conducted Feb. 27-March 5, after Iraq held its first free elections in half a century in January. According to the poll, 62% say the country is headed in the right direction and 23% say it is headed in the wrong direction. That is the widest spread recorded in seven polls by the group, says Stuart Krusell, IRI director of operations for Iraq. In September, 45% of Iraqis thought the country was headed in the wrong direction and 42% thought it was headed in the right direction. The IRI is a non-partisan, U.S. taxpayer-funded group that promotes democracy abroad.

Pollsters did not survey three of Iraq's 18 provinces because of security and logistical concerns. Two of those omitted, Anbar and Ninevah, are predominantly Sunni Muslim. A third, Dahuk, is mostly Kurdish. Krusell said that even if those areas had been included and 100% had expressed negative views, the poll would still have shown that most Iraqis believe that the situation in their country is improving.

Here's a link to the IRI press release of the poll.

Assume for the moment a best-case scenaio in which the insurgency starts to die down. Given that the National Assembly has just started to meet, don't be surprised if that satisfaction figure were to go down. This is the funny thing about democracy -- one people get it, their dissatisfaction from seeing the process up close seems to increase.

Eventually, most people adopt the Churchillian posture: democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.

This is one of those blog posts where I have to say up front that I don't know enough to gauge the significance of the event I'm posting about. That said, the information is interesting enough to link and mention.

Apparently the Chinese Communist Party has been suffering from a rash of resignations as of late -- approximately 200,000 in four months. At The Epoch Times, Stephen Gregory reports on what's going on:

On November 19, 2004 The Epoch Times published in Chinese the first of “The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party”. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been scrambling ever since to find a way to respond.

The “Nine Commentaries” are a book-length set of nine editorials that tell the true history of the CCP. Written under the auspices of The Epoch Times editorial board, the authorship is anonymous.

The “Nine Commentaries” lay out the Party’s crimes: its campaigns of mass murder, brainwashing and terror; the 80 million plus unnatural deaths; the avoidable famines; the degradation of the environment; the corruption that goes from top to bottom, and much more....

On December 3, 2004 The Epoch Times established the Tuidang (“withdraw from the Party”) website in order to give the people of China the opportunity to renounce their membership in the CCP and its related organizations, such as the Communist Youth League (CYL).

On December 4, the website received its first solemn declarations by Party members who wished to renounce all ties with the CCP. In December the rate of such statements was a few hundred a day. But the rate has increased exponentially. On March 7, the Tuidang website recorded over 22,000 renunciations. The website has been limited in the number it can post by its ability physically to keep up with the huge volume of statements....

The CCP and its state-controlled media have not publicly responded to the “Nine Commentaries”. This is not surprising. If the CCP were to issue a statement condemning the “Nine Commentaries,” then everyone in China would want to know more about them.

Now, the thing is, the CCP isn't the only institution that hasn't responded to these resignations -- I can't find a non-Epoch Times report on this. On the other hand, they've been all over the story. What's going on?

Gregory is candid in an e-mail he sent to me:

To avoid the suspicion I am attempting to hype a story, I should point out a few things about these resignations. First, the resignations or withdrawals are from the CCP and its affiliated organizations, such as the Communist Youth League (CYL), which almost all Chinese are required to join. Second, the resignations, or perhaps more accurately, renunciations, are from any association with the Party, even if that association is many years in the past. Thus, former members of the CCP and former members of the CYL are posting their withdrawals to organizations of which technically they are no longer members. Third, in order to protect those who are withdrawing from harm, the website accepts resignations made under assumed names. Fourth, the relatives of deceased family members are allowed to post withdrawals on behalf of their now dead relatives. Finally, while the pace of resignations has increased rapidly all along, it really shot up after the founder of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, published his own withdrawal from the CYL on the Epoch Times.

Having said all of that, the resignations are real, and they represent a real and dramatic challenge to the rule of the CCP. And, given the amount of detail included in the resignation statements, they often are done at great risk, even if they are done under an alias. These resignations are the most important story in China today, and no one outside the Epoch Times is covering them.

So there it is. I'll leave it to my readers to decide how much weight to put on this. I would also love to see the mainstream media do some digging on this story.

Last week I said that the re-appointment of Lebanese PM Omar Karami would trigger more protests. It turns out that was a mild understatement. The Associated Press reports that the anti-Syrian proestors in Lebanon have responded to the reappointment -- and Hezbollah's pro-Syrian rally from last week, which was undoubtedly a factor in Lebanese President Emile Lahoud's decision to reappoint Karami -- with the largest demonstration of people power yet:

Hundreds of thousands of opposition demonstrators chanted “Freedom, sovereignty, independence” and unfurled a huge Lebanese flag in Beirut on Monday, the biggest protest yet in the opposition’s duel of street rallies with supporters of the Damascus-backed government.

Crowds of men, women and children flooded Martyrs Square, spilling over into nearby streets, while more from across the country packed the roads into Beirut — responding to an opposition call to demonstrate for the removal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

“We are coming to liberate our country. We are coming to demand the truth,” said Fatma Trad, a veiled Sunni Muslim woman who traveled from the remote region of Dinniyeh in northern Lebanon to take part....

Monday’s protest easily topped a pro-government rally of hundreds of thousands of people last week by the Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah. That show of strength forced the opposition to try to regain its momentum.

Publius Pundit has much, much more on this.

UPDATE: Neil MacFarquar reports on the protest for the New York Times. The telling section:

The most notable element in the rally was that it did represent a broad cross section of Lebanese from all around the country.

"They can say that they represent a wide spectrum of Lebanese factions, including some Shiites, and they have been able to bring the Sunnis into the streets, which is not easy," said Ghassan Salame, a former minister of culture and political science professor, speaking by telephone from Paris. "They have an upward momentum now after a week that was full of uncertainty." ....

"This will counterbalance last Tuesday, and now we can sit and talk," said Mazen al-Zain, a 30-year-old financial analyst, noting that he himself was a member of an illustrious Shiite clan from southern Lebanon. "What is really important after today's gathering is that we all sit down at the same table."

That's not a particularly powerful prediction given this Voice of America story:

Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud has renamed pro-Syrian Omar Karami as prime minister, just two weeks after he resigned the post following massive opposition protests against Syrian influence in Lebanese politics.

The decision Thursday, came after Mr. Lahoud held consultations with parliamentary deputies. The parliament, where Syria's allies have a majority, overwhelmingly advised in favor of reappointing Mr. Karami.

Mr. Karami, a pro-Syrian Sunni Muslim politician, immediately called for a national unity government and urged the opposition to join, saying it is the only way out of Lebanon's crisis.

The opposition, which did not present a candidate, has been demanding a full Syrian withdrawal from the country.

Jenny Booth reports in the London Times that the opposition has already rejected joining a unity government.

The Beirut Daily Star's Nada Bakri has the reaction from protestors. They're pretty mixed. Here's one example:

Boutros Fadel, 41, from the Lebanese National Liberal Party (LNLP) and who has been camping out at Martyrs' Square for over a week, said: "We oppose Karami's reappointment as he is part of the pro-Syrian regime. However, he won't and can't affect our will and determination to free Lebanon from the Syrians."

He added: "Karami resigned to calm protesters down, like giving them a morphine injection. It won't work and the cure to the virus which entered Lebanon in 1976 is UN Resolution 1559."

Developing....

As change continues to roil parts of the Middle East, media focus is increasing on Lebanon. The Syrian government is getting more specific in its plans for a partial pullout of its troops. However, the really interesting development is within Lebanon's domestic political scene. Scott Wilson explains in the Washington Post about Hezbollah's decision to maintain its support for Syria:

The leader of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim movement that for weeks has stood on the sidelines of Lebanon's political upheaval, called Sunday for national demonstrations against what he characterized as foreign influences seeking to expel Syria, a key sponsor of the party, from the country.

Hassan Nasrallah, a Shiite cleric who serves as Hezbollah's secretary general, was critical in particular of the United States and France. His announcement dashed the hopes of Lebanese opposition leaders that the large, disciplined movement would join their cause to drive Syrian troops and intelligence services from Lebanon.

The first demonstration is scheduled for Tuesday in Beirut, along an avenue near the central square where Lebanon's anti-Syrian opposition movement has staged round-the-clock protests since the Feb. 14 assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Nasrallah appeared after what he called an "emergency meeting" of more than 30 political parties aligned with the Syrian government, which is facing international pressure and a popular uprising here to end its 30-year presence in Lebanon....

"Freedom means that we decide for ourselves the best way to address what we see today as clear intervention of the United States and France in Lebanese internal affairs," Nasrallah said at a news conference in the Shiite suburbs of south Beirut. "The opposition must give us explanations regarding the foreign intervention. We must convince each other that only true sovereignty means independence."

Nasrallah's defiant position comes as an emerging Lebanese alliance of Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim parties has turned its attention to winning parliamentary elections scheduled for this spring in the hopes of forming a government free of Syrian influence. Nasrallah appeared to serve notice that Hezbollah and a variety of smaller pro-Syrian parties intended to mount a unified campaign to prevent a government hostile to Syrian interests from emerging after the elections....

With an extensive social services network and an armed wing celebrated here for helping end the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah is perhaps the most formidable player in the power-sharing system among religious-based parties. Linked to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Hezbollah is now recognized as a legal political party in Lebanon and controls a 12-seat bloc in parliament. The United States has placed Hezbollah and its satellite television channel on its list of terrorist organizations, and the European Union is considering adopting a similar designation.

Nasrallah's ability to mobilize perhaps hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah followers for demonstrations, in addition to other large Shiite, Sunni and pan-Arab parties that will likely take part, threatens to expose a deep gulf in Lebanese society that Syrian officials have warned could widen into the kind of sectarian strife that fueled Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

Assad, in a speech to parliament Saturday, said: "We should not remain in Lebanon one day after there is a Lebanese consensus over our presence," something Hezbollah's counter-demonstrations are likely to show does not exist....

Nasrallah said the international pressure against Syria and Hezbollah, which increased sharply after the assassination of Hariri, was designed to further Israel's political goals, and he has called on several important Arab governments that have aligned themselves with the U.S. position to change course. Some Lebanese opposition leaders have called openly for Lebanon to recognize the 1949 armistice with Israel signed after the first Arab-Israeli war, a position Hariri was believed to have supported at the time of his assassination.

This will be interesting. There is no denying Hebollah's political strength in Lebanon -- however, there is also no denying that the group has been very slow to react to recent political developments.

Many commentators question whether democratization in Lebanon necessarily advance U.S. interests in the region if all it does is empower groups in Hezbollah. I've maintained in the past that even if that short-run effect takes place, democratization remains the proper long-term strategy. However, Tuesday will provide fresh evidence of whether even the short-run costs are as great as many people fear. If Hezbollah musters fewer people than expected in counter-demonstrations, then it suggests the fear of radicalism in a democratizing Middle East might be misplaced. [And if there are huge counter-demonstrations?--ed. Hey, then I'm wrong. But the social scientist in me is more excited about the prospect that there will soon be data to examine the hypothesis than worried about being wrong.]

UPDATE: The Council on Foreign Relations has an informative interview with Stephen A. Cook on the Syria-Lebanon dynamic from late February. Two useful tidbits:

Q: How much does it cost Syria to keep thousands of troops in Lebanon? Do the Lebanese pay for their expenses?

A: No. The Lebanese don't pay for them per se, but Lebanon has become an economic lifeboat for Syria. There are thousands of Syrian workers, along with Syrian soldiers, in Lebanon who send money back to Syria. There is a certain amount of smuggling that goes on through Lebanon. And so Syria, which is facing a dire economic situation right now, sees Lebanon as very important economically....

Q: Talk about the street demonstrations we're seeing now in Lebanon. There was another one yesterday demanding that Syria get out. What are we seeing here?

A: Yesterday's demonstration was the largest yet and, according to press reports, there were tens of thousands of people in the streets screaming, "Syria out!" And like what happened in the Ukrainian situation, people are now draping themselves, not in orange, but in [the Lebanese national colors of] red and white, expressing their opposition to the Syrian presence and their opposition to the Syrian government.

But there was also a rather sizeable demonstration that was held under the auspices of Hezbollah over the weekend that was a counter-demonstration, saying people should not trifle with the government, should not trifle with the Syrians, and that Hezbollah supported the current arrangements. And Hezbollah is the largest and most powerful militia--the only remaining militia--in Lebanon. So there seems to be a groundswell of average people--Muslims, Christians, and Druze--who are opposed to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. But at the same time, Hezbollah is also able to mobilize a significant percentage of the population in support of this continued Syrian presence.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lee Smith will be posting daily dispatches for Slate this week from Beirut. His first posting contains this amusing paragraph:

[D]uring Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday commemorating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Saudi tourists have just about taken over downtown, especially the restaurants where the Saudi women seem less interested in the various food choices—French, Lebanese, Moroccan, Italian, TGIF, Dunkin’ Donuts—than in smoking water pipes underneath see-through plastic tents set up in the middle of the cobblestone streets. Some of the women are fully veiled in black, but most seem to be availing themselves of the opportunity to show off their latest purchases. After a little time checking out their dresses, jewelry, hair, and make-up, it dawns on me that underneath every Saudi veil, there's a Jersey girl dying to break free.

Smith also links to two expert blogs on what's happening in the Fertile Crscent -- Across the Bay and Syria Comment. Go check them out.

In the past 72 hours, there have been a number of developments in the Middle East -- suicide bombings in Iraq, Egyptian announcements about political reform, Lebanese people power bringing down the government, half-brothers being captured, reformist cabinets being named.

I was going to post something about how in the political change in the Middle East used to follow a one step forward, two steps back mentality, but as of late the trend has been more of a two steps forward, one step back nature of -- but Greg Djerejian and David Brooks beat me to it, so go check them out.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe happened after reformists first attained power through elections in Poland and Hungary. It happened rapidly, with no one comprehending the speed with which the old, corrupt edifices of power crumbled. Could the example of elections in one Muslim country in the Middle East have a similar ripple effect?

[You forget the backward steps--ed. True, true, I'm probably engaging in the error of analogy. Still it's interesting that such an analogy is even conceivable now.]

Richard Cohen pointed out recently that:

When coming to Saudi Arabia from the United States, you need to set your watch. Officially, the time difference is eight hours ahead of the East Coast. Unofficially, I think it's about 250 years behind.

Indeed, as Glenn Reynolds has recently pointed out, the Saudis remain a potent source of terrorist support.

Neverheless, the Saudi regime does seem to be moving forward -- however slowly -- in altering their behavior in constructive ways. Again, it's maddeningly slow, but progress nevertheless.

This week saw further evidence of this. This past week the British and Saudis held a two-day conference entitled "Two Kingdoms: The Challenges Ahead," and some constructive things were said. Khaled Almaeena reports an example of this in Arab News :

It was a cold day in London, but the near zero degree temperature did not chill the second day of Saudi-British conference, where the two nations’ chief diplomats reflected on eight decades of warm relations between their two peoples and charted an equally amicable course for the future.

Addressing the conference, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal announced plans to appoint women to the Foreign Ministry for the first time this year. He pointed out that successful political reforms required “an evolutionary process.”

Similarly, the Saudi government is making tentative noises about giving women the right to vote in future election. Beth Gardiner explains this in an Associated Press report:

Women may be allowed to vote in future Saudi Arabian elections, but such political reforms must be implemented "gradually," the kingdom's foreign minister said Wednesday.

The Gulf nation, an absolute monarchy, recently held its first regular election, for city council members. But the vote was open only to men.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, in London for meetings with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and other officials, said his country's election commission had recommended women participate in the next vote.

"I would not be surprised if they do so in the next round of elections," he said.

Two more phases of the municipal vote will be held in March and April, but it was unclear whether Saud was referring to those elections....

Saud, however, said political reforms would have to come slowly.

"The wish is to move as fast as we can, the reality says that you have to move gradually," he said. "We in Saudi Arabia believe in the necessity of political reform, but it must be evolutionary."

He said the government wanted to improve human rights, an issue Straw said was on the agenda for the ministers' talks.

"We're working very hard for that ... to assure that justice reaches every single human being in the country," Saud said.

One wonders if the strong performance of the conservatives in the first round of regional elections convinced the regime that giving women the political franchise might be in their own self-interest.

This post is not meant to be a jumping up and down saying, "Look, Saudi reforms!! Yippee!!" Clearly, this is going to take a while.

But it would be nice if one could say that the Saudis were only 85 years behind the times -- instead of 250.

Developing.... very, very, slowly.

Roula Khalaf and Kim Ghattas report in the Financial Times that the Lebanese pound could be in trouble:

Lebanon's central bank on Thursday sought to calm nervous local markets and contain the fallout from the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister who had led the country's reconstruction efforts after its civil war.

After meeting senior bankers, Riad Salame, the central bank governor, stressed his institution would support the Lebanese pound amid fears there might be a rush to convert local currency into dollars on Friday, when markets reopen after a three-day shutdown. "The central bank is present in the markets to ensure liquidity in all currencies," Mr Salame said....

Mr Hariri, who led the country for 10 of the past 15 years but resigned his post in October, had been instrumental in providing confidence to currency markets and attracting investment into Lebanon, though his governments had also built up a $35bn (€27bn, £18.6bn) debt. In November 2002 he pulled the economy from the brink of collapse when he agreed a financial rescue package with western and Arab creditors. Bankers said his resignation last year forced the central bank to intervene in the markets, spending $2bn of its foreign exchange reserves between October and November.

But since then reserves have been replenished and now stand at $11.7bn, around 20 months of imports. Yesterday's central bank statement followed a report from Credit Suisse First Boston warning that the risk of political instability in Lebanon would hurt investor confidence, at least in the short term.

The report said the likely decline in tourist receipts, higher conversions of the Lebanese pound into foreign exchange and other capital outflows would "very likely" put renewed pressure on foreign exchange reserves.

What's historically intriguing about this is that if memory serves, the Lebanese pound managed to retain its value throughout the 1975-1991 civil war.

UPDATE: Daniel Davies points out in the comments that my memory is faulty, and that the Lebanese pound suffered hyperinflation during the civil war. As it turns out, the historical data says we are both correct. The pound did a decent job holding its value in the first stage of the civil war, from 1975 to 1983. After the Israeli incursion, however, hyperinflation did kick in.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, I wrote the following at TNR Online:

The area specialists aren't necessarily wrong; democratizing Iraq won't be easy. But the conditions aren't nearly as barren as these experts suggest, and the potential upside is enormous. If a democratic transition were to succeed in Iraq, then Syria, suddenly surrounded by established democracies (Israel and Turkey) and emerging democracies (Iraq and Jordan), might start to feel nervous as well.

Note that Lebanon was not mentioned in that graf, because that country has essentially been a Syrian fiefdom since the end of the Lebanese Civil War.

However, the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri yesterday highlights the increasing crunch Syria now faces. David Hirst -- who's covered the Middle East for over forty years -- explains what's going on in the Guardian:

It is Syria, with only one real ally left in the world, Iran, that is on the defensive. So are its Lebanese allies, inside and outside the regime. The conflict is an outgrowth of American strategies in the Middle East, from the war on terror to regime change, democratisation and the invasion of Iraq. Syria is not a member of President Bush's "axis of evil", but, with Iran, it is increasingly targeted as a villain. It is regularly charged, for example, with aiding and abetting the insurgency in Iraq, interfering with the Arab-Israel peace process and sponsoring the Hizbullah militia in Lebanon. The Hizbullah are in turn accused by Israel of aiding and abetting Hamas.

For decades now Syria has been losing card after card in a steadily weakening strategic hand. Its domination over Lebanon is one of the last and most vital of them. Ultimately it will perhaps be a bargaining counter in some grand deal to be struck with America that secures the Ba'athist regime's future in the evolving new Middle East order.

Conversely, however, Lebanon, as a platform that Syria's adversaries exploit against it, is liable to turn into a source of great weakness, if not an existential threat. The Ba'athists, now under siege in so many ways, feel that they are struggling desperately to keep their grip on Lebanon.

But the methods Syria uses, such as political intimidation and backstage manipulation by its intelligence services, seem, if anything, only to be backfiring against it....

Down the years the Lebanese have attributed many political assassinations to Syria, but never dared say so publicly. This time, they have.

Rami G. Khouri, writing in the Beirut-based Daily Star, agrees on the tectonic political shifts uinleashed by the assassination:

The speed, clarity and intensity with which Lebanese opposition groups Monday blamed Syria and its allied Lebanese government for the killing spoke volumes about the troubled Syrian-Lebanese axis being the central political context in which this whole matter must be analyzed....

The events of Monday have unleashed political forces that could transform both Lebanon and, via the Syrian connection, other parts of the Middle East. The already intense backlash to the assassination may lead to an accelerated Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and faster reform movements inside both Lebanon and Syria.

The fact that within just hours of the murder five distinct parties were singled out as possible culprits - Israel, Syria, Lebanese regime partisans, mafia-style gangs, and anti-Saudi, anti-U.S. Islamist terrorists - also points to the wider dilemma that disfigures Lebanese and Arab political culture in general: the resort to murderous and destabilizing violence as a chronic option for those who vie for power, whether as respectable government officials, established local warlords, or freelance political thugs.

The New York Times' Steven Weisman and Hassan Fattah report that the assassination itself has already made life more difficult for Syria:

The Bush administration recalled its ambassador to Syria on Tuesday to protest what it sees as Syria's link to the murder of the former prime minister of Lebanon, as violent anti-Syrian protests erupted in Beirut and several other Lebanese cities.

At the United Nations, the administration also demanded that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon, and the Security Council called for an urgent investigation into the killing of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who died Monday with 13 others when a huge car bomb blew up his motorcade in downtown Beirut....

In Beirut, large crowds went to the site of the explosion, which investigators said appeared to be the work of a suicide attacker who managed to drive in between cars of Mr. Hariri's motorcade. Another theory was that the bomb had been placed in a sewer or under the pavement.

Though there were some in Lebanon who argued that the murder might have been engineered by Al Qaeda, presumably to punish Mr. Hariri for his ties to Saudi Arabia, demonstrators mobilized throughout the country to blame Syria. In Damascus, Syrian officials continued to vigorously deny involvement in the explosion.

In Sidon, Mr. Hariri's hometown, Syrian workers were attacked by dozens of protesters before the police intervened, and hundreds of Lebanese marched with black banners and pictures of the slain leader. A mob also attacked a Beirut office of Syria's ruling Baath Party.

Thousands of protesters also massed in the northern port city of Tripoli, according to Reuters.

Megan K. Stack and Rania Abouzeid have additional reporting in the Los Angeles Times. And Greg Djerejian has a post up on this at Belgravia Dispatch.

Anthony Shadid and Doug Struck provide a summary of Iraq's election returns in the Washington Post. The highlights:

A coalition dominated by Shiite Islamic parties and tacitly backed by the country's most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, won the most votes in results released Sunday from Iraq's landmark elections, but fell short of a symbolically important majority that many of its leaders had projected.

The results, expected last week but delayed because of allegations of vote-tampering, were the culmination of Iraq's Jan. 30 vote for a 275-member parliament, the country's first democratic ballot in more than a half-century and one of the freest in the Arab world. The results represented one of the most sweeping statements of Iraq's shifting political terrain, as the country's long-repressed communities are set to assume power in the National Assembly, which will have to confront a durable, Sunni Arab-led insurgency, persistent power cuts, widespread joblessness and the task of drafting a constitution, among other challenges....

According to the returns, which are considered preliminary until they are certified in three days, the largely Shiite coalition known as the United Iraqi Alliance won 48.2 percent of the vote, the low end of what its officials had predicted. A coalition of two major Kurdish parties won a surprising 25.7 percent of the vote, and a bloc led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi got 13.8 percent. Together, the three coalitions accounted for nearly 88 percent of the vote, making them the dominant players in a new parliament, which will choose a largely ceremonial president and two deputy presidents. They, in turn, will appoint a powerful prime minister, who will choose a cabinet....

As expected, Sunni Arab-led parties won just a fraction of the vote. The Association of Muslim Scholars and other influential Sunni groups had declared a boycott of the election, deeming it illegitimate as long as U.S. troops occupied Iraq, and many in Sunni-dominated provinces said they stayed home because of pervasive threats against candidates and voters.

A party led by Iraq's interim president, Ghazi Yawar, won less than 2 percent of the vote, although that was enough to assure his list a handful of seats. A prominent Sunni politician, Adnan Pachachi, did not win a seat, and it remained unclear whether other well-known Sunni figures, such as Mishan Jubouri, had sufficient votes to win a seat.

"The Association of Muslim Scholars is responsible for the catastrophic results," Jubouri said.

The election commission said 8.55 million votes were cast; about 14.66 million people were registered to take part in the election. The 58 percent turnout fell short of the 60 percent that officials had predicted soon after the vote.

Jeff Weintraub, analyzing the results, suggests that "On first impression, the latest news about the Iraqi election returns has confirmed my most optimistic hopes." Juan Cole, looking at the same numbers, concludes, "[current Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi's defeat... is a huge defeat for the Bush administration, though it will not be reported that way in the corporate media."

UPDATE: Robin Wright has an odd news analysis piece in the Washington Post today. It's odd becuse the headline reads, "Iraq Winners Allied With Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision" -- and the piece consists of expert quotes (including Cole) making this point. However, in the 16th paragraph there's this casual admission that, "U.S. and regional analysts agree that Iraq is not likely to become an Iranian surrogate." I'll have more to say about the question of Iran's influence in Iraq sometime this week.

Meanwhile, Weintraub e-mails the following:

[W]hat [Cole] says in this particular quotation is not incompatible with what I said. Holding the elections now was not the preferred outcome for the Bush administration, and the results of the election are probably not their preferred outcome, either. But as one Iraqi put it (addressing people whose positions on Iraq are simply a function of whether they like or hate the Bush administration): "It's not all about you."

Also, the fact that some people in the US government would have preferred to see a victory for the Allawi list--which is plausible--doesn't necessarily mean that, in objective terms, this would actually have been the best outcome for long-term US interests in Iraq.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It's intriguing to compare the New York Times news analysis by Dexter Filkins with Wright's analysis in the Washington Post. Filkins' analysis differs from Wright's in two ways: a) no expert quotes from American sources (though plenty of quotes from Iraqis); and b) a more optimistic piece. The highlights:

The razor-thin margin apparently captured by the Shiite alliance here in election results announced Sunday seems almost certain to enshrine a weak government that will be unable to push through sweeping changes, like granting Islam a central role in the new Iraqi state.

The verdict handed down by Iraqi voters in the Jan. 30 election appeared to be a divided one, with the Shiite political alliance, backed by the clerical leadership in Najaf, opposed in nearly equal measure by an array of mostly secular minority parties.

According to Iraqi leaders here, the fractured mandate almost certainly heralds a long round of negotiating, in which the Shiite alliance will have to strike deals with parties run by the Kurds and others, most of which are secular and broadly opposed to an enhanced role for Islam or an overbearing Shiite government....

[S]ome Iraqi leaders predicted Sunday that the Shiite alliance would try to form a "national unity government," containing Kurdish and Sunni leaders, as well as secular Shiites, possibly including the current prime minister, Ayad Allawi. Such a leadership would all but ensure that no decisions would be taken without a broad national consensus.

One senior Iraqi official, a non-Shiite who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the slim majority won by the Shiite alliance signaled even greater obstacles for the Shiite parties in the future. If the Sunni Arabs, who largely boycotted the election, decide to take part in the future, they would almost certainly dilute the Shiite alliance's already thin margin.

"This is the height of the Shiite vote," the Iraqi official said. "The next election assumes Sunni participation, and you will see an entirely different dynamic then."

See this James Joyner post for more.

The Chicago Tribune has two stories on developments within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia today -- kind of a good news/bad news deal.

The bad news is that those provincial elections didn't turn out like Saudi reformers had hoped. Evan Osnos explains:

In a blow to reformers in Saudi Arabia, candidates backed by Islamic clerics appear to have won a key region in the country's first nationwide election.

Preliminary tallies Friday for the capital city of Riyadh showed that at least five of the seven winning candidates in Thursday's municipal elections have close ties to Saudi Arabia's clerical establishment. Though the results apply only to a municipal race for the capital, they had been widely anticipated here and in Washington as a rare referendum on reform efforts in one of the world's most traditional absolute monarchies.

The Islamists' victory in the political heart of the country could be a setback for reform-minded Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto Saudi ruler, who had gambled that elections could loosen hard-line clerics' grip on the government. Abdullah has clashed with more conservative royals who do not support his reforms and who had watered down his balloting plan by barring women from the election and setting aside half the seats to be appointed by the ruling family....

Moderate candidates say they are worried that a victory by the religious establishment might undermine Saudi Arabia's halting reform efforts, including expanding women's rights, strengthening the rule of law and revamping the educational system.

"We have enough religious power in our country, and they will increase it even more. The result is not promising," said al-Homeidi, a professor of public administration at King Saud University. "I am concerned about the future. Once they get into the level of municipality, then I'm sure they will get more power and will get into the higher levels [of government]."

Read the whole thing -- it's not clear how much of a setback this is, given that it was only one region, and a conservative one at that (though I'd love a Saudi expert to identify a liberal region in the country). Of course, the decision to exclude women from the vote probably didn't help the moderates much.

One other nitpick at this report is the history it provides of Islamist movements:

The success of Islamist political parties has roots that date to political events a generation ago. Political analysts point to the devastating Arab loss to Israel in the 1967 war and the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had advocated a secular pan-Arabism.

In the ashes of that secular vision stirred a revival of religion as the possible salvation of the Arab world, and that spirit gathered strength after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Islamist parties, which call for a greater role for Islam in the affairs of state, tend to have more unified messages and stronger organizations, while moderate candidates often spread votes across an array of agendas.

I'll be happy to be corrected on this, but if memory serves that's not quite accuate. It's true that the Six Day War was a triggering event for the rise of Islamist parties -- but the motivation was different. Secular Arab regimes were afraid of the growing political power of leftist/communist parties in their countries. As a result, they permitted the rise of Islamist parties to offer a counterweight.

On the good news side of the ledger, Christine Spolar reports that the Saudi regime is reaching out on the war on terror:

Saudi officials this week reached across borders and bureaucracies to underscore domestic efforts in pursuing terrorist networks and to refocus the nation's role in global discussions on combating terrorism.

For the first time since Al Qaeda surfaced, the Saudis publicly sought to trade and share technical information about counterterrorism operations with professional delegations from more than 50 nations.

The international anti-terrorism conference, a first for the Arab Peninsula, was deemed remarkable by several participants if only for the fact that the Saudis, once defensive about extremist elements within their borders, openly acknowledged that they needed counsel for their own "war on terror."

The four-day conference drew diplomats and intelligence professionals from the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, Pakistan, Turkey and other countries.

It produced a single resolution: that the creation of a global counterterrorism center should be explored. But participants in closed workshops that focused on the origins, financial underpinnings and criminal elements of terrorism said there was additional value in dialogue and building personal contacts.

"Two years ago, the Saudis wouldn't even admit the problem was in their back yard," said a European intelligence official who requested anonymity. "There is a shift in approach. They are being more open in their exchanges."

The internal steps to combat radicals is particularly interesting:

The Saudi remarks appear to be confirmed in a recent assessment by the Center for Strategic & International Studies, an independent research group in Washington.

During the first half of 2004, the kingdom fired 44 Friday preachers, 160 imams and 149 prayer callers for incompetence, according to a report released in January. Nearly 1,400 religious officials were suspended and ordered to undergo retraining, the report said.

The Saudis also have begun grass-roots campaigns aimed at promoting stability. Web sites have been created to seek discourse and chats with a younger generation. Cell phone users in Riyadh now are peppered with text messages that reject terrorism. The week of the conference, even the family of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought a public moral high ground.

"We strongly condemn all kinds of terror," exclaimed a large newspaper ad placed by the construction company owned by the bin Laden family. The family, close to the royal family, has previously condemned Al Qaeda's activities and said it has no ties to Osama bin Laden, who was stripped of Saudi citizenship more than a decade ago.

Here's a link to the one-page summary of that CSIS report. Click here for a copy of the draft reports by Anthony H. Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid.

I'm typing this in Princeton, NJ, as I'm giving a talk here today -- so there will not be much blogging for the next 24 hours.

Talk amongst yourselves. Here's a topic for discussion -- why has North Korea decided now is the time to publicly announce that they have nuclear weapons and suspend participation in six-nation non-proliferation talks?

Is it because Kim feels he can widen the diplomatic wedge between the United States and the other members of the talks (Japan, South Korea, China, Russia) -- or is it that Kim fears his regime is tottering on the abyss and the only way he can stay in power is to gin up a new international crisis? These are not mutually exclusive reasons, of course -- but which one is the primary cause?

Be sure to check out NK Zone for more blogging on the Hermit Kingdom. Also worth reading: In Foreign Affairs, Mitchell Reiss and Robert Gallucci rebut Selig Harrison's claim that North Korea doesn't really have a uranium enrichment program (link via Josh Marshall).

UPDATE: Oh, man did that first header date me -- I meant the current leader of the DPRK, Kim Jong il -- not his father, Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994. Apologies to all for the error.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Follow-up post here. Over at NRO, S.T. Karnick offers the following speculation on Kim's motives:

If there is a calculation by which North Korea's action makes sense, the law of Occam's Razor suggests we should apply it. I believe there is such a possibility.

It is unlikely mere coincidence that North Korea made this announcement and pulled out of talks just a few days after the elections in Iraq. In fact, it seems quite plausible that the Kim regime saw the recent comments by Secretary of State Rice as a warning that the United States was going to come after North Korea, and sooner than anyone might think.

The statement by the North Korean foreign ministry said Pyongyang has "manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's undisguised policy to isolate and stifle" the nation. Thursday's New York Times reported that Pyongyang's statement "zeroed in on Dr. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, where she lumped North Korea with five other dictatorships, calling them 'outposts of tyranny.'"

It seems plausible, then, that Pyongyang came to the conclusion that the United States and a coalition of other nations was about to do something that would ultimately lead to the fall of the Kim regime and a reunification of Korea on terms determined entirely by South Korea and its powerful allies. Today's statement, then, was Pyongyang's way of forestalling such action by raising the stakes radically, in suggesting that any U.S. move to impose its will on North Korea would lead to the use, however inefficient and elementary, of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang.

I think that's a major stretch. As CNN points out today, there have been ample rhetorical opportunities as of late for the administration to target North Korea -- and they haven't used them:

In his inaugural address on January 20, U.S. President George W. Bush did not mention North Korea by name, and he only briefly mentioned the country in his February 2 State of the Union address, saying Washington was "working closely with governments in Asia to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions."

Bush's tone was in stark contrast to his State of the Union address three years before, when he branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq.

The new, more restrained approach raised hopes for a positive response from North Korea. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun agreed to push for an early resumption of the six-nation talks.

No, Rice's testimony was a useful rhetorical hook for North Korea's actions, and not the cause.

In the International Herald-Tribune, there is more speculation about this being an example of internal DPRK strife:

[S]ome analysts suggested that North Korea's retreat from the peace process may simply be a reflection of political confusion in Pyongyang.

"I wonder if this is an inability to come back to the table, resulting from divisions in the North Korean leadership over reaching a deal," said Peter Beck, who heads the Seoul office of the International Crisis Group.

Developing....

This was one of the more interesting paragraphs in Bush's State of the Union:

To promote peace and stability in the broader Middle East, the United States will work with our friends in the region to fight the common threat of terror, while we encourage a higher standard of freedom. Hopeful reform is already taking hold in an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain. The government of Saudi Arabia can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future. And the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.

The lines about Egypt and Saudi Arabia were nicely phrased, in that they represented a challenge to the regimes there.

Coincidentally enough, the Wall Street Journal has a front-pager by Karby Leggett on Egypt's economic reforms. From the opening, it appears that Egypt's latest prime minister is adopting a much more market-friendly posture:

When Ahmed Nazif was appointed prime minister of Egypt last year, it came as a surprise. Mr. Nazif, 52 years old, was the youngest of 32 ministers in the previous government. His name hadn't appeared on any of the internal U.S. embassy briefs handicapping the leadership race.

What Mr. Nazif did next was even more surprising: He introduced the most far-reaching economic changes in Egypt's modern history, cutting customs tariffs by 40%, signing a trade deal with Israel and the U.S., and chopping income taxes in half. Now he's planning more painful steps. He wants to slash the government payroll and scale back subsidies on everyday goods.

The moves are designed to spur foreign investment and coax Egypt's long-dormant economy to life. "Egypt is open for business," says the Canadian-educated prime minister.

Sounds good -- but what about democracy? Here's where things get sticky:

Economic change doesn't necessarily mean political change. In the wake of Iraq's election, in which voters chose freely from a wide range of candidates, attention is turning to Arab states such as Egypt where the government keeps a leash on political competition. Mr. Nazif argues that if Egypt gives full rein to democracy before prosperity spreads, an "organized minority" -- referring to Islamic fundamentalists -- might take over. He says "nobody in his right mind today would be against democracy" but "when and how is the real challenge."

Egyptian intellectuals and government officials speculate that Mr. Mubarak is hoping for an economic revival to pave the way for his son to take over from him one day. The president has repeatedly denied that he wants to hand power to his son. He has also ruled out significant changes to the political system.

So, what does the U.S. do? Hope that the economic reforms trigger future political reforms, or apply more leverge on the Mubarak regime -- even if a more democratic government might not pursue such market-friendly policies?

Sumit Ganguly -- a gentleman who knows a thing or two about India -- has an interesting piece in TNR Online about what India's response to the tsunami implies for India's future. The highlights:

The country--which suffered more than 15,000 deaths in the southern coastal state of Tamil Nadu and the Andaman Islands chain in the northeastern Indian Ocean--has a civilian bureaucracy with a much-deserved reputation as slothful and hidebound. On this occasion, however, Indian bureaucrats belied every popular stereotype. Within hours after the tsunami hit, officials in India's Ministry of External Affairs were on the phone with their American, Japanese, and Australian counterparts, negotiating a division of labor: India would concentrate on providing assistance to its most immediate neighbors, such as Sri Lanka, freeing others to focus on more distant areas.

India is still considered by most observers to be part of the "developing world," a group of countries that frequently depend on assistance from others. But the day after the tsunami, India became the leading regional provider of assistance to others. The country's surprising reaction to the tsunami may signal its coming of age as a regional and even global power--with significant consequences for South Asia and beyond....

What does all this mean geopolitically? First, there is the fact that the left-of-center Congress Party-led government willingly worked with the United States in responding to the tsunami. In the past, such a regime would have gone to great lengths to torpedo any American effort to provide relief in the region. For example, when a massive cyclone hit Bangladesh in 1991, leaving extensive devastation in its wake, India expressed misgivings about the U.S. response, which was called "Operation Sea Angel." These anxieties, a product of the cold-war years, have steadily dissipated over the past decade, replaced by a willingness to work with, and even court, the United States on a range of issues, from anti-piracy operations in the Indian Ocean to jointly confronting terrorism. Indeed, the growing scope of military-to-military contacts between the two countries over the past several years (a centerpiece of the new Indo-U.S. relationship) made it possible for the two states to play a leading and coordinated role in post-tsunami relief. To be sure, the countries remain at odds over certain issues, such as India's ties to Iran and the brutal regime in Myanmar. But the signs point in a positive direction. For example, in a sharp departure from the past, the ongoing U.S. military presence in Sri Lanka to provide humanitarian assistance has not elicited any visceral, reflexive comments from New Delhi officialdom. The latent suspicion of all American initiatives in the region that until recently preoccupied India's foreign policy elite now appears to be in steady decline.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Thanks to Balasubramani for linking to this recent Fareed Zakaria column. Zakaria also knows a thing or two about India:

To understand how much and how fast India is changing, look at its response to the tsunami. I don't mean the government's reaction but that of individual Indians. In the two weeks after the tidal wave hit, the Prime Minister's Relief Fund, the main agency to which people make donations, has collected about $80 million. After the Gujarat earthquake of April 2001, it took almost one year to collect the same amount of money. And remember that the 2001 earthquake was massive (7.9 on the Richter scale), killed more Indians (30,000) than the tsunami appears to have, and also got intense media attention (Bill Clinton headed the fund-raising efforts). What has changed in these four years is the most important new reality about India: the growing wealth, strength and confidence of Indian society....

20 years of modest but persistent reforms in India have had huge effects. Over the past 15 years, India has been the second fastest-growing large economy in the world (after China), with an average growth rate of 6 percent. Per capita income in the country has almost doubled (from an admittedly tiny base), and more than 100 million Indians have moved out of poverty. The animal spirits of Indian capitalism, long suppressed, have been unleashed.

Gurcharan Das, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble in India, and one of the first chroniclers of these shifts in attitude, told me a story of a poor young teenager he encountered. The boy told Das that in order to succeed, he had three goals. He wanted to learn to use Windows, to write an invoice and to learn 400 words of English. "Why 400 words?" asked Das. The boy explained that that's what it took to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language, the base requirement for admission to an American university. "Now, this guy probably won't get into an American college, but this is the way people are thinking all over India," Das said.

Kieran Healy has an excellent post at Crooked Timber on what needs to happen in Iraq after this first election. It boils down to, "those in power who lose elections have to be willing to step aside," but Kieran says it better than that -- and provides an encouraging example from Irish history.

Hassan Fattah provides an interesting answer in the New York Times:

Sometime after the first insurgent attack in Iraq on Sunday morning, news directors at Arab satellite channels and newspaper editors found themselves facing an altogether new decision. Should they report on the violence, or continue to cover the elections themselves?

After nearly two years of providing up-to-the-minute images of explosions and mayhem, and despite months of predictions of a blood bath on election day, some news directors said they found the decision surprisingly easy to make. The violence simply was not the story on Sunday morning; the voting was.

Overwhelmingly, Arab channels and newspapers greeted the elections as a critical event with major implications for the region, and many put significant resources into reporting on the voting, providing blanket coverage throughout the country that started about a week ago. Newspapers kept wide swaths of their pages open, and the satellite channels dedicated most of the day to coverage of the polls....

For many Arabs, the strong turnout on election day proved a unique opening, one that made the debate on television screens more nuanced. On Al Jazeera, especially, many Iraqis lauded the process even as analysts from other Arab countries and Iraqis tied to the former government of Saddam Hussein denounced the elections for having occurred under occupation, and for having been centered on sectarian issues.

"Things used to be a negotiation between political parties where you scratch my back and I scratch your back," noted one commentator, Abas al-Bayati, on Al Jazeera. "Now, this new government will approach all the parties as having the backing of the people. It will have legitimacy." And that legitimacy should allow the government to face down the insurgents, he added.

With the relative lack of violence, many nerves appeared calmed. Iraqis, especially, may have been emboldened by the coverage.

Read the whole thing. One wonders whether the election coverage will embolden residents of the Middle East beyond the borders of Iraq.

UPDATE: In Slate, Michael Young provides another rundown of how the Middle Eastern media covered the election. It has a great opening paragraph:

If there was one message from the Iraqi election on Sunday, it was that newspapers are often vast repositories of conventional wisdom just begging for demolition. What had been broadly pegged by the media in recent months as a likely "illegitimate" election that might lead to an Iraqi civil war appeared to be nothing of the sort (even though 36 people died and nearly 100 others were injured in insurgent attacks). On Monday, the international press was scrambling to make up for having been so wide of the mark.

This would apparently include the New York Times editorial page, as Andrew Sullivan observes.

Feel free to comment here on today's historic election in Iraq. Both the wire service reports and blog accounts suggest that the turnout has been higher than expected. The Washington Post reports that, "Carlos Valenzuela, the United Nations' chief election adviser in Iraq, told CNN that he believed that overall turnout was considerably 'better than expected.'"

Certainly a 72% turnout represents a pretty humiliating political defeat for the insurgency. [UPDATE: hmmm.... the Financial Times now says turnout estimates have been scaled back to 60%] The Reuters story has the most encouraging detail:

Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited to vote.

"We want to be like other Iraqis, we don't want to always be in opposition," said Ahmed Jassim, smiling after he voted.

Dexter Filkins' account in the New York Times is positively effusive:

[If] the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.

No one was claiming that the insurgency was over or that the deadly attacks would end. But the atmosphere in this usually grim capital, a city at war and an ethnic microcosm of the country, had changed, with people dressed in their finest clothes to go to the polls in what was generally a convivial mood.

Matthew Yglesias acknowledges the turnout but has an odd post declaring, "The important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that if the lack of problems does hold up, that will be a testament to the success of our extraordinary security measures, not to the success of our political project." Actually, I'd say it's a testament to both factors -- though it's certainly true that the political project can't be judged a success or a failure based on only one election.

On the other hand, Yglesias' post is a ray of sunshine compared to this morose Juan Cole post.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ran for president in Brazil, he took great delight in railing against the Washington Consensus, the IMF, and the United States more generally. Since he's won, however, he's pursued a somewhat different course.

How different? Raymond Colitt has a story in the Financial Times that highlights the gulf between Lula then and Lula now:

For all his charisma, even Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who came to power as the idol of Latin America's Left, found it hard to sell his orthodox economic policy at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on Thursday.

His audience of 10,000 anti-globalisation activists was already miffed at the Brazilian president's decision to attend the World Economic Forum on Friday to meet the bigwigs of capitalism they so despise.

But having to defend two years of textbook economic orthodoxy and cosy relations with the International Monetary Fund was too much for disenchanted supporters at an event launched as a challenge to Davos, Switzerland, five years ago.

As a former union leader who in the late 1970s took on big business and a military dictatorship, Mr Lula da Silva was quick to snap back at his hecklers. “That noise comes from those . . . who don't have patience to hear the truth,” he retorted, in reference to spontaneous jeering.

Back on November 25th, at the beginning of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, I blogged the following:

When a government facing a popular uprising, there is a moment when all of Burke's "pleasing illusions" about power fade away, and the rulers face a choice between using raw coercion or backing down. At this juncture, there is one of three possibilities:

1) The leadership backs down;
2) The leadership cracks down;
3) The leadership tries to crack down but the coercive apparatus splits.

That moment is rapidly approaching in Kiev.

In the New York Times, C.J. Chivers has a riveting behind-the-scenes look at Ukraine's security services during the election campaign, suggesting that in the case of Ukraine, it was a combination of options (2) and (3). Here's one key moment:

The state was leaking power. The next day, Nov. 27, Mr. Kuchma summoned [S.B.U. chief] General Smeshko to a meeting at Koncha Zaspa, a government sanitarium outside Kiev.

In a conference room were Mr. Yanukovich and politicians from eastern regions supporting him, with the leader of the Interior Ministry, or M.V.D., Mykola Bilokon, one of Mr. Kuchma's loyalists, who made no secret of his support for the premier.

Mr. Yanukovich confronted Mr. Kuchma, asking if he was betraying them, four people in the meeting said. Then came demands: schedule an inauguration, declare a state of emergency, unblock government buildings.

Mr. Kuchma icily addressed his former protégé. "You have become very brave, Viktor Feyodovich, to speak to me in this manner," he said, according to Mr. Bilokon and General Smeshko. "It would be best for you to show this bravery on Independence Square."

General Smeshko intervened to offer the S.B.U.'s assessment of the situation, warning the premier that few of Ukraine's troops, if ordered, would fight the people. He also said that even if soldiers followed an order, a crackdown would not succeed because demonstrators would resist. Then he challenged Mr. Yanukovich.

"Viktor Feyodovich, if you are ready for a state of emergency, you can give this order," he said. "Here is Bilokon," he continued. "The head of the M.V.D. You will be giving him, as chairman of the government, a written order to unblock the buildings? You will do this?"

Mr. Yanukovich was silent. General Smeshko waited. "You have answered," he continued, according to people in the meeting. "You will not do it. Let us not speak nonsense. There is no sense in using force."

Mr. Kuchma left the room to take a phone call, then returned with a state television crew. Mr. Yanukovich slammed down his pen and left.

The government's position was set: there would be no martial law. It was formalized the next day, on Nov. 28, when the National Security and Defense Council voted to solve the crisis through peaceful means.

"This was the key decision," Mr. Kuchma later said. "I realized what it meant to de-block government building by force in these conditions. It could not be done without bloodshed."

Read the whole thing.

Zhao Zhiyang, the former leader of the Chinese Communist Party until the Tiananmen Square crackdown, has died. Jasmine Yap has an obituary in Bloomberg; here's a link to the New York Times obit by Jim Yardley.

Combined, the obituaries make a telling point about China in the eighties -- and set up a test to see how much China has changed.

As Yardley points out:

At Mr. Deng's behest, he acted boldly, embracing economic reform by expanding self-management for peasant farmers and some industries. In 1987, after the ouster of Hu Yaobang, who was deemed too lenient toward student protests, Mr. Zhao became general secretary of the Communist Party, a job that made him Mr. Deng's presumptive heir.

Yap's obit points out the initial trigger for the Tiananmen protests:

Zhao, also a former prime minister, lived under house arrest after he opposed the military crackdown on pro-democracy activists and was removed from power by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. He was last seen in public on May 19, 1989, begging student protesters to leave Tiananmen Square, a day before Chinese authorities declared martial law in the capital and shot dead hundreds of the demonstrators.

Students began filling the square in April 1989 to commemorate the death of former party Secretary General Hu Yaobang, whom they considered was sympathetic to demands for more democracy in China. By May, the square had turned into an encampment for students from across the nation, who called for democracy and an end to Communist Party corruption and defied government orders to leave.

If Hu's death triggered Tiananmen, one wonders whether Zhao's death will trigger any similar kind of political mobilization against the government.

To be honest, I'll be surprised if it does. This is for one of three reasons:

1) China's communist government has delivered robust economic growth in the 15 1/2 years since Tinanmen;

2) The Chinese government's tools of political coercion and suppression have become more sophisticated and aware since 1989 -- therefore, they are more likely to nip a poential Tiananmen in the bud;

3) China's citizenry has become more nationalist in the past fifteen years, and therefore do not have the same amount of political antipathy towards the government.

Developing....

UPDATE: Looks like the Chinese government is attempting to try hypothesis no. 2 out, according to the New York Times' Joseph Kahn:

Chinese leaders imposed a ban today on news reports about the death of Zhao Ziyang, the former Communist Party chief who opposed the 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters, suggesting that his official obituary would treat him as a pariah.

The New China News Agency issued a terse dispatch announcing that Mr. Zhao, who was 85 years old, died early today. But the news agency identified Mr. Zhao simply as a "comrade," not as China's former top political leader, and the main evening news broadcast made no mention of his passing.

Editors said that propaganda officials had ordered television stations and newspapers not to report about Mr. Zhao, and popular Web sites were instructed to ban public discussion of the former leader.

It looks like Mahmoud Abbas won a healthy mandate in Palestine. What should he do now?

Seth Jones offers some suggestions in the Financial Times [Full disclosure: Jones did his graduate work in poli sci at the U of C.] Some highlights:

An opinion poll regularly conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, an independent body, shows the percentage of Palestinians who believe there is significant corruption in Palestinian Authority institutions jumped from about 50 per cent in 1996 to more than 85 per cent last year. This explains the frenzied demonstrations by Palestinian crowds against corruption in the authority last year.

The first step after Sunday's election to create a better security and justice system for Palestinians is to restructure their “Balkanised” security services. There are roughly nine Palestinian security services in the West Bank and Gaza each. They range from civil police to the General Intelligence service, or Mukhabarat Salamah. Arafat retained power and control over these services with few checks and balances. They were organised under the rule of political leaders rather than the rule of law. The restructuring should include decreasing the number of services, eliminating direct executive control over them and separating law- enforcement functions from intelligence and other security aspects by placing them in different ministries.

Read the whole thing. And offer your comments about whether Abbas will be able to turn the Palestinian Authority into a functioning, law-abiding state.

As part of the Chicago Tribune's continuing series on the internal struggle among Islamic societies between the forces of moderation and the forces of radicalism, Lisa Anderson has a fascinating front-pager on the country of Mali.

Mali appears at first glance to be one of the most improbable democracies in existence -- life expectancy is at 45 years, infant mortality is higher than 100 deaths per 1,000 live births, it's literacy rate is 46%, and according to the CIA World Factbook, "is among the poorest countries in the world, with 65% of its land area desert or semidesert and with a highly unequal distribution of income."

However, as Anderson chronicles:

Mali's young democracy is thriving with all of the attendant institutions, including a legal system, however still imperfect, and a free news media that includes 42 privately owned newspapers and 124 private radio stations, the most popular medium in a highly illiterate country. It also is essentially free of human-rights abuses, according to a 2003 State Department report.

The bulk of her story is on efforts by Islamic radicals from Algeria and Pakistan to attract supporters in the arid northern part of the country, and American efforts to combat this push. Some highlights:

Democracy also guarantees freedom of religion, though, and new types of Islam are challenging the traditional faith. In the past three years, ultraconservative Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia have opened 16 mosques in Timbuktu, a development termed disturbing by the city's mayor, Aly Ould Sidi.

"All these people who are Wahhabi are not citizens of Timbuktu. They come from outside," he said. "Their presence here has raised a kind of conflict with the people."

Added Abdrahmane Ben Essayouti, imam of the Djingareiber Mosque, the oldest of three great 14th Century mosques: "Wahhabis come here from Saudi Arabia. They have means. They give money and build mosques and schools and buy books.

"If you don't have means, you cannot stop them," he said. "And if we don't pay attention, they will use the students against us."

Moreover, Wahhabism often clashes with Malian practice of Islam.

"According to Wahhabism, you cannot go through someone, but should go directly to God. That's why we have a problem here--we have 333 saints," said Imam Sidi Alpha Maridje of the Sareikeina Mosque.

He's not the only one disturbed by the situation, however.

As dusk fell, some two dozen men of Araouane, many swathed in the turbans and the long, loose robes of desert nomads, solemnly crammed into a one-room, mud-walled house, settled onto woolen mats strewn across the sandy floor and looked expectantly at Vicki Huddleston.

Seated on the floor before them in a modest white shirt and mushroom-colored, ankle-length skirt, she smiled and respectfully thanked the village chief for receiving her.

Throughout Mali's history, every village, however small, has had a chief, who either inherits the job or is selected by the village. Accountable to the people, he and his council make important decisions for the village, listen to problems and adjudicate disputes. The institution thrives under democracy and, in many ways, helped prepare the way for it....

The settlement, half-buried in sand, has a rudimentary Koranic school but no electricity, running water, roads or medical facilities. It needs everything, but most of all a source of clean water that isn't contaminated by the camels and goats.

Huddleston and her staff have come to discuss a new well and solar pump the U.S. will provide. But she takes up a more urgent matter first.

"I will be very frank with you," she began, sweeping the room with her eyes. "We are very worried about the Salafists who have been seen in this zone. We know you want to preserve your traditional religion. We think democracy depends very much on a traditional Islam like yours."

The chief said he had heard about the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC, an Islamist group advocating overthrow of Algeria's secular government, but never had seen any of its members. Nonetheless, he assured Huddleston that Araouane had not abandoned the traditional and tolerant Malakite Islam of Mali. "We are against those who would try to change our religion and culture," he said.

Another element seeking to change Malian culture in recent years is the fundamentalist Pakistani sect Dawa al-Tabligh, which has joined the Wahhabis in seeking converts in Mali, particularly in the northern areas.

Fundamentalist bans on smoking, wearing protective fetishes and praying to ancestral saints do not easily endear these austere versions of Islam to easygoing Malians.

Many Malians, including President Toure, are skeptical that fundamentalists or terrorists will sink deep roots here.

"Mali is a very old Islamic country where tolerance is part of our tradition," Toure said.

"I'm not worried, but it's always good to take precautions," he said, noting that Mali has expelled some visitors and denies visas to others but declining to identify them.

Nonetheless, Toure agreed that in an environment like the north, where people are poor and opportunities are few, preachers bearing hope and extremists offering pride--and often cash--have their appeal.

"Poverty is the fertile ground of terrorism. Some get involved to get to heaven tomorrow. Others believe it can change the world today," he said, but he added that he sees no evidence of an immediate threat to the country.

Huddleston sees it differently.

"Like the Malians, I tend to agree that Mali is not going to change into a Wahhabi state," she said. "But it is worrisome because the more fundamentalism [there is], the more women are disenfranchised and the development of democracy is more difficult.

Read the whole thing. Anderson's implicit thesis -- and it's not a bad one, is that Mali's history of tolerant Islam is resilient enough to resist outside efforts at fundamentalism. Philip Smucker had a story in November's International Herald Tribune chronicling the efforts of African scholars -- with an assist from Harvard's Henry Louis Gates -- to exploit Mali's written history to reinforce this moderate brand of Islam:

Particularly relevant, black African and Arab scholars say, are accounts of how the African interpretation of Islam helped regulate the affairs of men, resolve disputes and provide a model of tolerance. Buried in the crumbling manuscripts of Timbuktu and neighboring cities, scholars are finding evidence of wars averted, sieges ended and lawlessness put to rest.

The information is all the more valuable for moderate Muslim leaders because of the rise of less tolerant forms of Islam, like Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism or the Salafist movement in Algeria, that are expanding their foothold.

[Oh, c'mon, this is French West Africa -- does this stuff really matter to Americans?--ed. Check out Nick Tattersall's report for Reuters on the significance of West African oil to the U.S. economy. This part stands out in particular:

The United States shares [China's] concern as it ventures into remote corners of West and Central Africa in search of alternative oil supplies to the turbulent Middle East which could also act as counterweight to OPEC's monopoly power.

The world's biggest energy consumer hopes the African region will provide up to a quarter of its oil imports within a decade, up from 14 percent now, and is working to guarantee stability in one of the most volatile parts of the planet.

From coup attempts inspired by dreams of petrodollars to concerns over Islamic extremists, political anarchy, civil war and piracy, the region around the Gulf of Guinea is seething with tensions that would faze the most intrepid investor.

"We are in no position to endure a serious oil supply disruption from the Gulf of Guinea today. The global oil market is stretched to capacity," said David Goldwyn, a former assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration and head of a Washington-based strategy think tank.

"We are not ready for trouble, but trouble is on the horizon," he told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year.

Washington is particularly concerned that militant Islamists may gain a foothold in its new oil haven, where policing is often lax, millions of youths are unemployed and the sheer size of territories makes maintaining full control almost impossible.

"It's a good place for people who want to be left alone to operate outside the reach of the law -- to go unnoticed, to take time to recruit, to regroup," General Charles Wald, deputy commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM), told Reuters.

Click here for an African perspective on why the continent matters to the Bush administration. And, finally, check out John Donnelly's report in the Boston Globe on the military side of U.S. efforts to prevent Islamic terrorist groups from making further gains in the West African region.

Patrick Belton links to this Economist story on the state of Iran's domestic polity. The highlights of their analysis:

Iran's liberals and reformers feel increasingly beleaguered, and [hardline] voices... are louder and more menacing than they were even six months ago. In that period, says one of Tehran's longer-serving foreign diplomats, “there has been a dramatic change in mood”. Bullying militias are again trying—so far without much success—to enforce the old morality. Last month a female MP from the conservative camp suggested that if ten “street-walkers” were executed, “We will have dealt with the problem [of prostitution] once and for all.”

More worrying from the liberals' point of view, the reform-minded but disappointingly dithery Mr Khatami has been the lamest of ducks since the ruling clergy and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Mr Khomeini in 1989, presided over a rigged general election in February when the candicacy of 2,000-plus reformers was blocked. As a result, the new parliament is distinctly more xenophobic and illiberal than its predecessor. Of its 290 members, more than a quarter share the sort of rabid views expressed by Mr Shariatmadari, and they seem to be mocking Mr Khatami with impunity in his last months in office....

Not that mass repression is needed to keep the media, or the Iranian people in general, in line. According to a respected human-rights campaigner, between 2,000 and 4,000 Iranians, including about 30 journalists, are behind bars for political reasons. The reason for the overall figure's vagueness is that many of those incarcerated are in “unofficial” prisons: even their relatives are not told they are there.

In the past few months detentions have swelled of “bloggers” who have set up internet sites, which the state has taken great trouble to block. A number of well-known campaigners for human rights have been prevented from going abroad or arrested on their return. Human Rights Watch, an independent lobby group, said this week that “secret squads operating under the authority of the Iranian judiciary have used torture to force internet journalists and civil-society activists to write self-incriminatory confession letters”.

The clampdown seems to be working. Many of the liberal and sophisticated professionals of northern Tehran, downcast by Mr Khatami's failure, seem to have withdrawn into a private life behind the walls of their villas. Many are emigrating, at an estimated rate of 200,000 a year, especially to the United States (where there may be 800,000 Iranians), Canada (perhaps the most popular destination), Britain, France and Australia....

The one thing everyone knows is that Iran is in a jam. Above all, plainly, there is a crisis of legitimacy. Only half of Iranians bothered to vote in February's election; not much more than a quarter of those in Tehran, which embraces at least 8m people, turned out. Western diplomats reckon that barely 15% of Iranians still support the ruling order. The low turnout reflected not just apathy and fatalism, which are indeed strong. Many sour and embittered Iranians consciously decided not to go to the polls as a gesture of protest....

According to some reports, disaffection with the regime even among the clergy is spreading. A cleric from an influential religious family, also out of favour with the supreme leader, derides the Council of Guardians for mostly taking “orders and hints from the powers that be”—a euphemism for Mr Khamenei. Most striking of all, sociologists and educators report that religious belief and observance, especially among the young, have slumped since the mullahs took power a quarter of a century ago. Instead of fortifying the people's devotion, the system seems to have switched many people off the spiritual side of life, inspiring a shallow materialism instead....

The mullahs have patently failed to revamp an economy that remains distorted by subsidies, closed to competition within Iran or from abroad, locked in the hands either of the state or of state-connected foundations known as bonyads, and increasingly reliant on the high price of oil: Iran has about a tenth of the world's known reserves. Barely a fifth of the economy is in private hands. The conservatives have made it hard for the timid Mr Khatami to sell off state firms or open up to foreigners. The merchants of the bazaar, a longstanding pillar of the mullahs' power, still protect their own cartels. Capital flight continues apace. Only four private banks exist (three of them linked to bonyads or to the state), with just 4% of the banking sector's assets. Corruption in every sphere of business stunts growth and puts off investors. People mutter about the mullahs' wealth and patronage....

In the face of such gloomy contrasts, Iran cannot make up its mind whether to co-operate with the perfidious infidel West to save its economic skin and strengthen its security, or to keep its Islamist soul unsullied. That dilemma is at the heart of the present wrangle over nuclear power....

The American administration's hope that sanctions and other pressures will eventually force a change of regime in Tehran looks, in the foreseeable future, forlorn. And an Israeli or American attack might well have the adverse effect of rallying Iranians to their rather unpopular regime.

Otherwise, only three things could jolt Iran out of its present torpor of stagnation and depression. One is the presidential election due in May. Another, further down the road, is a dramatic slump in the oil price. The third is the possibility of a Gorbachev figure emerging from within the clerical establishment to open up the deadening political and economic system. At present none of these three possibilities looks likely, at least not in the short run.

As I've said before, I'm very gloomy about the prospects of the theocratic regime toppling from "people power." [On the other hand, I was similarly skeptical about Ukraine, and events have progressed there in a far more peaceful and positive direction that I anticipated. Point is, I could easily be wrong.]

One question is whether expanding Iran's trade with the rest of the world would nudge them in a more positive direction. Based on this report, the Bush administration doesn't think so -- or, to be fair, they think it wouldn't lead to regime change prior to the mullahs developing nuclear weapons.

Commenters are heartily encouraged to devise a policy that would ensure peaceful regime change in Iran. I don't think it can be done -- but that could just be because I'm still jet-lagged.

So, what dirt was able to be gleamed from my trip to Paris? Here's the tidbits about the people, the place, and the ideas that are worth divilging:

1) I love it when stereotypes don't hold up. There was a moment in the second day when Ambassador Francois Bujon De L'Estaing sneeringly mocked Lawrence Kaplan's presentation about the European Union as the embodiment of the neoconservative stereotype -- after which Kaplan jibed back about the Ambassador also fulfilling his stereotype equally well.

For me, what was refreshing was the number of people who didn't conform to my preconceived expectations. For example, the big mooseheads at the conference -- William Schneider, Charles Cook, and Thomas Mann -- did a great job on their panel. Schneider, in contrast to his CNN smiling-face persona, was perfectly willing to cross swords with the other participants. Furthermore, the three of them actually attended every panel presentation. At events like these, the headliners often decamp after they've presented their own spiel -- particularly if they're in Paris. Not these three.

Similarly, it was refreshing to hear ACLU head Nadine Strossen say that 90% of the USA Patriot Act was completely unobjectionable (actually, it was just refreshing to hear a reasonable conversation about the Patriot Act). It was good to hear Dan Mitchell from the Haritage Foundation say that larger budget deficits do put upward pressure on interest rates (though he thinks the magnitude of that effect is pretty damn small). It was amusing to hear a French businessman blast the Kyoto Protocol -- not because the U.S. hadn't signed, but because the agreement put serious constraints on France but not China.

2) In an act of stunning symbolism for French diplomacy, the Foreign Ministry was supposed to host a grand lunch reception for all the participants, with an address by the Foreign Minister himself. When we got to the Quai D'Orsay, however, the Foreign Minister turned out to be a no-show -- and the "lunch" consisted of a paltry selection of finger foods that appalled even the French interlocuters.

3) Olivier Blanchard gave an excellent, accessible talk on the implications of the current account deficit that nevertheless bucked conventional wisdom on the topic. His basic argument was that the distribution of costs from a declining dollar was going to adversely affect Europe far more than the United States. A rising Euro renders European goods uncompetitive in the global marketplace, and for a variety of reasons, European consumption is not likely to increase by all that much. In contrast, the U.S. will benefit from an improved balance of trade, while inflationary pressures remain muted.

4) If Chuck Hagel delivers on-the-record talks like the one he gave to our group, the man has zero chance of becoming President. He spent so long praising the conference coordinator for assembling such a "distinguished panel of experts" that for a minute I thought he had misplaced his speech and was just tap-dancing while an aide found it. I've heard Hagel before in an off-the-record format, and he was pretty good there, but this was awful. More amusingly, until Hagel spoke the French had cleverly kept the conference room somewhat chilly to ensure that everyone stayed awake. Hagel requested the room be warmed up. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of closed eyes for the rest of the day.

By contrast, Connie Morella -- a former U.S. Representative for Maryland and currently U.S. Ambassador to the OECD -- was more interesting (though, to be fair, she didn't have to give a talk). Four years from now, any Republican nominee should short-list her for VP consideration. She's a blue-stater, was able to get re-elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic district until she finally succumbed in 2002, and after her OECD stint will have diplomatic and economic policymaking experience.

5) One wonders just how much anti-Americanism abroad is driven by the distorted lens of American expats. Whjile I was waiting in line to enter the magnificent Musee D'Orsay, I overheard one conversation between an American expat living in Germany and the French couple in front of her. The American explained that Bush is worse than Hitler and that he really didn't win the 2004 election -- he made Democrat ballots disappear.

C'est tout.

The Ukrainian Supreme Court has now declared the presidential runoff election results invalid -- and has ordered that a repeat of the runoff be re-staged throughout the entire country on December 26. The Ukrainian parliament speaker has already urged the implementation of the Supreme Court ruling.

All of this comes less than 24 hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed the idea of holding a runoff election. (click on this San Jose Mercury News timeline for the backstory.] After President Bush made a rhetorical push-back, Putin responded today by muttering dark warnings about the unipolar world:

"Attempts to rebuild the multifaceted and diverse modern civilization, created by God, in line with the barrack room principles of a unipolar world appear to be extremely dangerous," Putin said in a speech at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund in New Delhi.

"The more persistently and effectively the authors and followers of this idea act the more often mankind will come up against dangerous disproportions in economic and social development and against global threats of international terrorism, organized crime, and drug traffic," he said.

What's becoming clear is that the correlation of forces within Ukraine are tilting in favor of a runoff election that would presumably lift Viktor Yushchenko to power. The emerging question is whether the correlation of forces outside Ukraine will permit this to happen. Will Putin tolerate the blow to his reputation that would come with a Yushchenko victory (remember, he and his administration campaigned hard for Yanukovich)?

Still developing....

As my previous posts suggest, I've been very wary of what happens if Ukraine blows up. Fred Weir and Helen Womack's piece in the Christian Science Monitor encapsulates these fears pretty well.

That said, it's cheering to see signs that maybe Ukraine won't blow up -- this week.

AFP reports that President Kuchma has come out in favor of new elections in the disputed regions (Donetsk and Luhansk):

Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma said he was in favor of staging new elections in Ukraine to resolve a bitter dispute over a November 21 presidential vote won by his pro-Moscow prime minister.

"If we really want to preserve peace and agreement in Ukraine, and really want to build a legitimate democratic society that we so often talk about... then let's hold new elections," Kuchma said Monday in televised remarks.

Kuchma said he was ready to seek new solutions to the crisis even if this meant stepping outside the standard procedures for resolving the standoff.

"The situation we find ourselves in today in Ukraine demands not only strictly legal decision, but also political decisions," Kuchma said.

That last quotation is significant, because Yanukovich has stated his preference all along for strictly legal solutions.

Yanukovich has acceded to Kuchma's preferences, according to Reuters:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich said Monday he would agree to stage a new presidential vote in two regions if mass fraud were proven to have occurred in the Nov. 21 election.
"If there is proof of cheating, that something illegal occurred there and if there is no doubt among experts, I will agree with such a decision," he said in televised comments, referring to two regions in his native eastern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the Kyiv Post reports that the secessionist threat has freaked out some of the oligarchs:

Signs are emerging... that factions in Ukraine’s political and business elite who previously supported the candidacy of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych are switching sides and putting their chips on Yushchenko.

Citing a statement issued by President Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk, opposition television station Channel 5 reported on Nov. 29 that the deputy and business mogul opposes separatist movements in eastern Ukraine that are being spearheaded by Yanukovych and the Donetsk-based tycoons who continue to back him.

Pinchuk is reportedly Ukraine’s second richest man. His assets have been valued at about $3 billion.

Meanwhile, insiders allege that Donetsk-based businessman Rinat Akhmetov continues to back Yanukovych and the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine.

On Akhmetov, check out Tom Warner's story in the Financial Times.

Encouragingly, Interfax reports that Ukraine's defense minister has rejected the idea of a state of emergency.

What's going on? There are three possibilities:

1) Yanukovich's secessionist ploy has alienated/frightened even those with a vested interest in the status quo in Ukraine. Stephen Lee Myers suggests this in his NYT piece today. To them, Yushchenko in power is (barely) preferrable to civil war.

2) Yanukovich and Kuchma are confident that a revote in Donetsk and Luhansk can be stage-managed by them to produce a favorable outcome. Regardless of vote-tampering, Ukrainian nationalists are very unpopular in that neck of the woods.

3) Kuchma is making an offer that he knows Yushchenko will refuse. See this SCSUScholars post for more on that possibility. UPDATE: This Bloomberg report by Halia Pavliva and Julian Nundy has some details that suggest this possibility:

Kuchma's offer to recount the vote would include the participation of international observers, his spokeswoman, Olena Hromnytska, said. If a recount doesn't satisfy the opposing sides, then he would offer fresh elections in the two regions.

If that isn't accepted, Hromnytska said, the president would call new nationwide elections. Under Ukrainian law, any candidate in the initial two-round balloting, including Yanukovych or Yushchenko, would be disqualified from the rerun, she said. (emphasis added)

Developing....

Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and his supporters are now making demands of president Leonid Kuchma. Here's the Reuters report -- but Maidan has an English translation of the actual demands:

The Committee of National Salvation of Ukraine, headed by Viktor Yushchenko, has issued an ultimatum to Leonid Kuchma.

Within 24 hours, the Committee demands that Kuchma fulfill the following terms:

1) Discharge Yanukovych from his position of Prime Minister, because of his instigation and support of the falsification of the election and in the separatist actions;

2) On the demands of of the decision of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) of November 27, immediately to begin an investigation into new candidates for membership of the Central Election Committee;

3) Discharge from their positions the directors of the Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regional administrations -- the initiators of the break-up of Ukraine;

4) Give a deadline to the Attorney General and the Security Services of Ukraine to open a criminal investigation against the separatists/secessionists of Ukraine.

In the case of noncompliance with the ultimata, "we will judge Kuchma's inaction as a crime against the people, with results indicated in the Criminal Code of Ukraine," continues the ultimatum.

"If the demands are not met, we will begin blocking with people the movements of Kuchma himself on the territory of Ukraine. We know where he is and how he is moving about. And we are able to ensure that he will not make a single step without complying with our demands," stated Yulia Tymoshenko, who read the ultimatum at the meeting.

That 24 hours thing is funny, because according to the Post-Modern Clog, "Kuchma has given the protesters blockading the Cabinet building a 24-hour deadline to clear out."

Actually, it's not funny. Supporters of Yushchenko want to believe that Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich commands little support, even in the Eastern part of the country - but Reuters reports that "an estimated 150,000 demonstrators took to the streets in Donetsk" in support of Yanukovich. Yanukovich may be a toady of Kuchma and potentially Vladimir Putin, but he's not wrong when he says, "If only one drop of blood is shed, we won't be able to stop the flow." The thing is, both sides have now dug in, and although the Ukrainians are masters at muddling through, it's becoming increasingly difficult to see how this can be resolved through non-violent means.

Peter Finn writes in the Washington Post:

The stoking of historical fears about what many perceive as a Russophile East and a nationalist West could continue to split this country long after the dispute over voting is settled, if they do not rupture it beforehand, analysts say.

"I think the tragedy of this campaign is the use of stereotypes by both sides, but especially Yanukovych's people," said Yulia Tishchenko, an analyst at the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research, "and the dangerous consequences are now becoming apparent. Everyone thinks that if they lose, they lose everything."

[Why can't there be a velvet divorce between the regions, a la Czechoslovakia?--ed. Erin Arvedlund explains the myriad economic problems with this idea in the New York Times, but it's even more problematic than that. Yushchenko's response to the eastern threats of autonomy show that nationalists are, well, nationalist -- they don't want only half the country.]

I have to think Yushchenko is gambling on Kuchma lacking the ability to use force. However, Mark Franchetti reports in London's Sunday Times that:

Some feared that the joyful street parties and open-air concerts could still turn into a bloodbath. Lurking in the background, phalanxes of stone-faced riot police and Ukrainian special forces in black body armour and helmets, brandishing machineguns and batons, stood guard silently around the presidential palace.

The key to the revolutions of 1989 was the compliance of the security forces in bowing to the wind of change. There has been little sign that today those same forces would be prepared to switch sides and join the opposition.

(link via NRO's Andrew Stuttaford)

The other thing to worry about is the Russian response to any escalation in the crisis. What will Putin do? Helen Womack reports in the Christian Science Monitor that, "The likelihood for a fresh poll increased when a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Russia, which had overtly backed Yanukovich, said Moscow also now favored a rerun." However, Askold Krushelnycky and Mark Franchetti report in London's Sunday Times about a more disturbing possibility:

A senior figure in the Ukrainian presidential administration who declined to be identified said that Boris Gryzlov, President Vladimir Putin’s personal envoy to Ukraine, had promised “diplomatic cover” against any international backlash prompted by such a move.

Developing... and not in a way that I'm at all sanguine about.

Richard Balmforth reports for Reuters that multiparty talks among the parties with a stake in last week's disputed election aren't going well in Kiev:

Talks to end Ukraine's presidential election standoff are going badly, the outgoing president says while the country seethes with street rallies and threatened to break apart over the crisis.

"As I understand, the (working group) talks are going on with considerable difficulty. No one can say what sort of compromise can be found or whether one will be found at all," President Leonid Kuchma said on Sunday.

"But I believe ... that a compromise is very necessary for Ukraine," he said opening the meeting of the National Security and Defence Council.

In the capital Kiev, tens of thousands of supporters of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko rallied again, undaunted by freezing drizzle. Yushchenko told them talk of autonomy in eastern regions loyal to his opponent threatened national unity.

The formal winner of last week's election, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, told a rally of his supporters in the east of the country that the rowdy but so far peaceful protests had brought Ukraine to the edge of disaster.

"As prime minister, I say that today we are on the brink of catastrophe. There is one step to the edge," he told a packed hall in Severodonetsk.

"Do not take any radical steps. I repeat, none ... When the first drop of blood is spilled, we will not be able to stop it."

Yanukovich was in eastern part of the country to rally regions and elites loyal to his cause:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich on Sunday called for an emergency meeting of local congressmen to safeguard the constitutional system and break the election standoff.

Yanukovich, who was announced to have won the Nov. 21 presidential runoff by the Central Elections Commission on Wednesday, made the appeal in his tour to the eastern town of Lugansk.

According to the Ukraine National News Agency, about 3,500 deputies from councils at various levels, including 30 from the Supreme Council of Ukraine, will attend the meeting in Severodonetsk, another eastern town.

The reports said Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov is also expected to attend the meeting, which will explore ways to handle the election standoff and "safeguard the constitutional system."

In a somewhat ominous development, the AP's Anna Melnichuk reports that Kuchma is calling for an end to the protestors' blockade of government buildings in Kiev, calling it a "gross violation of the law." In Kiev, Post-modern Clog posts that, "Everybody is buzzing right now about martial law." To be fair, he also notes, "at this point it's only a report of discussions and nothing more solid than that." Still, Yushchenko now seems more cognizant of this possibility. UPDATE: SCSU Scholars is keeping track of this thread of scuttlebutt.

Meanwhile, Time has its Ukraine package, which has three interesting tidbits of information. The first suggests the depth of the protest at the vote-rigging:

It was both a symbol and a symptom of the revolution that rippled across Ukraine last week. On Thursday, as the presenter of state-controlled UT-1's main morning news program was updating viewers on the Central Electoral Commission's decision to declare Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych the winner of the country's Nov. 21 presidential vote, Natalya Dmitruk, the woman who translates broadcasts into sign language for the deaf, decided to send a very different message. "When the presenter started to read the news," Dmitruk told TIME, "I said: 'I address all deaf viewers. [Challenger Viktor] Yushchenko is our President. Do not believe the Electoral Commission. They are lying.'" In a week filled with extraordinary acts of political protest, Dmitruk's silent rebellion was one of the most defiant.

The second tidbit suggests the extent to which Putin wants to keep Ukraine within its orbit:

Sources well briefed on Kremlin affairs tell TIME that as protests in Kiev gathered momentum, Putin urged the much-discredited outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, eager to secure a safe retirement amid charges of corruption and political violence, to declare Yanukovych the winner. The sources say Putin made it clear that Moscow would not accept a Yushchenko victory. If the Russian President sticks to that hard line, it could provoke serious trouble, abroad and at home. "The Russians have raised the stakes," says Stephen Sestanovich of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. "They've made this a very emotional issue domestically and there will be a lot of people on Putin's nationalist flank saying, 'Are you going to take this lying down?'"

Finally, the Time writers note that should the Ukraine problem fail to resolve itself, the Bush administration would find itself in a pickle:

However the disputed election finally plays out, it has undermined the Bush Administration's cozy relations with Putin, at least behind the scenes. In his first term, Bush was willing to give Putin a free hand in what Russia calls the "near abroad," the states that spun off from the broken Soviet Union. At the same time, Bush has made encouraging democracy around the world a central pillar of his presidency. In Ukraine, those two policies clash mightily. Washington spent much of Ukraine's bitterly fought presidential campaign studiously avoiding confrontation with Putin, and stuck to that line in the early days after the vote. But at midweek, Secretary of State Colin Powell made clear Washington's support for Yushchenko, saying the U.S. was "deeply disturbed by the extensive and credible reports of fraud." The following day, at an E.U.-Russia summit in the Hague, Putin emphasized that the dispute should be settled without outside interference. No other country has a "moral right to push a major European state to mass disorder," he warned. The Kremlin regards countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus as vital buffers between Russia and the West. Like Russian rulers for the past two centuries, Putin "equates security with well-defined 'zones of interest,'" says James Sherr, an Eastern Europe specialist at Oxford University. Those zones have shrunk in recent years as the Baltic states and Georgia turned sharply toward the West. Putin doesn't want to see the same thing happen in Ukraine. But analysts in the U.S. worry that Putin may have overplayed his hand. If he were seen to be encouraging the east in its secessionist plans, the protests could turn violent.

This puts Bush's comments from this Friday in the proper perspective.

Developing.....

UPDATE: This BBC report has a good summary of the developments to date.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There appears to be another problem with the blog which is preventing people from posting comments -- and for that I apologize. Hopefully the problem will be fixed tomorrow. Problem solved!!

The latest developments in the country:

1) The Associated Press reports that the Ukrainian parliament has declared the last election invalid. This has no binding authority without Kuchma's signature, but it can't hurt Yushchenko's position;

2) After multiparty talks yesterday, one of the options on the table is holding a re-vote, according to David Holley of the Los Angeles Times.

3) The Kyiv Post reports that the country's oligarchs are keeping a low profile.

4) Interfax reports that the eastern regions of the country (which are Yanukovich's base) are threatening to hold referendums on autonomy should Yushchenko come to power. Meanwhile, the BBC's Lisa Kushch reports on the mood in Donetsk (my old stomping grounds). They're not happy with what's going on in Kiev.

5) The BBC's Sebastian Usher reports that the state-run media outlets, "have joined the opposition, saying they have had enough of 'telling the government's lies.'" (link via Glenn Reynolds)

6) The New York Times has the following blind quote:

A senior Western diplomat in Kiev, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivities, said it appeared questionable whether Mr. Kuchma could seize control of the situation with a crackdown on the mass demonstrations, even if he wanted to.

Demonstrators blocked access to much of Kiev for a sixth day on Saturday and have essentially paralyzed the government. Some law enforcement officers have crossed the lines and sided with Mr. Yushchenko's supporters.

"The ship of state is leaking power like a sieve," the diplomat said.

Speculate on what you think will happen here. What keeps gnawing at me is that whatever the outcome, one region of the country is going to be supremely pissed off.

Whether this leads to an attempt at secession -- and how the Russians would react to this -- are the questions on my mind.

UPDATE: Much obliged to Andrew for the link (and for his startling link to before/after shots of Yushchenko and the mysterious illness that plagued him this summer). For more Ukraine posts, click here and here. And let me add one admission of fallibility -- I'm genuinely surprised that Yushchenko and his supporters have made as much headway as they have to date.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the one hand, this Interfax report suggests at least some degree of comity among the parties contending for power in Ukraine.

On the other hand, Roman Olearchyk's analysis in the Kyiv Post suggests that elites in the eastern parts of the country would take steps beyond autonomy to protect their interests:

The business tycoons in eastern Ukraine that supported Yanukovych appear to be taking extreme measures to protect their interests, which include lucrative assets in Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkiv and Luhansk. Government officials and legislators in these oblasts have in the past two days demanded the formation of an autonomous eastern-southern Ukrainian republic and are threatening to split their oblasts away from Ukraine altogether.

Kharkiv governor Yevhen Kushnyarov on Nov. 26 declared that his oblast would rule itself and control the military on its territory before it takes orders from what it calls extreme right-wing factions allied with Yushchenko. Parliamentarians in the eastern oblasts Donetsk and Lugansk and in the southern part of the Crimean peninsula called for the creation of an eastern autonomous Ukrainian republic... They began blacking out Ukrainian television channels that are reporting objectively about the current situation in Ukraine, leaving only propaganda outlets on the air. Officials from these regions also pledged to stop sending budget revenues from their industrial regions to the capital.

Granting autonomy to these regions would provide guarantees to the business elite in these regions, such as Donetsk tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, who fear that Yushchenko’s inner circle would attempt to gain control over their multi-billion dollar business empires should they come to power.

Olearchyk goes on to dismiss these moves because they lack popular support. If these protests in Dniepropetrovk are any indication, Olearchyk may be right -- it's a bad, bad sign for Yanukovych if he doesn't have a lot of support in Kuchma's old stomping grounds (however, Steven Lee Myers reports in the New York Times that, "in eastern Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of supporters of Prime Minister Yanukovich took to the streets"). However, I fear he underestimates the trouble the elites in these regions can create -- particularly if they want to generate a pretext for Russian intervention.

Finally, pro-Yushchenko blogs worth checking out for the situation on the ground include Tulipgirl, Le Sabot Post-Moderne, and Orange Ukraine. I'm not aware of any pro-Yanukovich blogs in English, but Jonathan Steele's essay in the Guardian gives you a sense of what they would say if they existed. Oh, and check out SCSUScholars -- one of them has in-country experience.

Ron Popeski reports for Reuters that Ukraine's Supreme Court has rebuffed the Central Election Commission's certification of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich as the presidential winner over Viktor Yushchenko. As previously noted, this is not an outrageous surprise, as Kuchma's influence over the Supreme Court was not strong.

More intriguingly, Roman OLearchyk reports in the Kyiv Post that at least one television station has replaced it's Kuchma-crony news director and recast its broadcast in a more "objective" manner.

Stefan Wagstyl and Tom Warner report in the Financial Times on the increasingly uncomfortable position Ukraine's two top oligarchs (Viktor Pinchuk and Rinat Akhmetov) find themselves. If they stick with Yanukovich, they risk a general strike that would have some effect on their businesses. If they permit Yushchenko to come to power, they'll be on the uncomfortable end of a corruption probe.

When a government facing a popular uprising, there is a moment when all of Burke's "pleasing illusions" about power fade away, and the rulers face a choice between using raw coercion or backing down. At this juncture, there is one of three possibilities:

1) The leadership backs down;
2) The leadership cracks down;
3) The leadership tries to crack down but the coercive apparatus splits.

That moment is rapidly approaching in Kiev.

UPDATE: Check out this blogger, based in Kiev, for a straightforward explanation of the interrelationships between Kuchma, Yanukovich, and the Ukrainian Oligarchs.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Anatoly Medetsky has an amusing and revealing account of Ukraine's "blue/orange" split among Kiev protesters in the Moscow Times. The description of the Yanukovich supporters -- who come from the region of Ukraine I lived in -- ring true.

Meanwhile C.J. Chivers reports in the New York Times of hints that the security forces are split on the crisis:

Mr. Yushchenko's followers also received a lift in morale when a general in the S.B.U., Ukraine's successor to the K.G.B., appeared on the stage with Mr. Yushchenko in the evening. While not in itself indicating the disposition of the S.B.U., the appearance of the uniformed officer, who identified himself as General Skipalksy of the Kiev region, was the first public display of support for the opposition from within the security services, whose role could be crucial if the peaceful political crisis turns violent.

Developing....

A few years ago there were sizeable protests in Kiev because of "Kuchmagate," in which tapes came to light suggesting that President Leonid Kuchma played a role in the disappearance of Ukrainian journalist Georgy Gongadze in September 2000. There was tangible evidence that Kuchma personally ordered Gongadze -- who was investigating corruption in Kuchma's administration -- to disappear. Despite months of protests, however, Kuchma stayed in office (click here for an exhaustive World Bank study on this case).

Not to put a damper on what's going on right now in Ukraine, but that example should be kept in mind when speculating whether the protests at the rigged election results in Ukraine will actually cause a change in government a la the Rose Revolution in Georgia [Quickly: opposition leader/reformer/nationalist Viktor Yushchenko led by double digits in Western-run exit polls over Kuchma stalwart/Russophile Viktor Yanukovich. However, the preliminary election results had Yanukovich winning by three percentage points. Outside observers are pretty much unanimous in their belief that there was massive vote fraud].

The two most salient facts in assessing what will happen are that:

a) Leonid Kuchma wants Yanukovich to win;
b) Vladimir Putin really wants Yanukovich to win.

I would love to be wrong about this, but it doesn't look good for Yushchenko.

Stefan Wagstyl and Tom Warner have a pretty sophisticated analysis in the Financial Times pointing out the limits to Kuchma's influence within legal institutions. My concern, however, is whether the "party of power" will be willing to use extrralegal means to secure their position in the country. They have in the past (though this has not included firing on crowds) -- I see no reason it will change now. The one difference between now and what happened two years ago is that the opposition has a clearly identified leader -- who went so far as to swear himself in as president yesterday.

We'll see if that makes a difference. As a political scientist who's spent time in-country, my guess is no.

UPDATE: The International Herald-Tribune has more details -- but I still don't see any evidence that Kuchma or Putin are prepared to back down.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ukraine's Central Election Commission has declared Yanukovich the winner, and Yanukovich supporters have been bused into Kiev.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to the CEC announcement, Yushchenko has called for a national strike. Meanwhile, both the US and EU have (appropriately) slammed the election process. Powell said:

If the Ukrainian government does not act immediately and responsibly there will be consequences for our relationship, for Ukraine's hopes for a Euro-Atlantic integration and for individuals responsible for perpetrating fraud.

I'm not sure how costly a sanction that would be to a Yanukovich government -- which reveals the fundamental asymmetry when talking about Ukraine as the pivot between Russia and the West. If a Russophile is elected, they can get by with Russian assistance (which Putin would be happy to provide). If a nationalist/reformer is elected and tries to move closer to the West, it doesn't change the fact that the country is completely dependent on Russia for its energy supplies.

One interesting diplomatic dimension will be the extent to which both the US and EU bypass the Ukrainian actors entirely and lobby Putin directly. CNN International already reports that Powell "repeated [his] concern to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a separate phone call.... 'Tomorrow is the EU-Russian summit in Europe, and I'm confident this will be a subject of discussion between the EU leadership and the Russians,' the secretary said."

Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum provides useful analysis in the Washington Post.

Developing....

Feel free to comment on the significance of Yasser Arafat's death here.

In particular -- is it good for the Palestinians?

If this Glenn Kessler story in the Washington Post is any indication, the Bush administration is intent on making progress on the Israeli/Palestinian issue:

President Bush yesterday signaled deeper U.S. engagement in Middle East peace efforts, saying he sees an "opening for peace" now that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is near death dead. When the new Palestinian leadership requests assistance, he said, the United States "will be more than willing to help build the institutions necessary for a free society to emerge."

Bush's comments, the most extensive on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since his reelection, reflect a growing realization by administration officials that Arafat's death would provide a rare diplomatic opening. One administration official said the president has come to understand that much of the opportunity depends on how the United States responds in the first days and weeks after Arafat dies, because it might ensure that moderate leadership takes hold in the Palestinian Authority.

"The vision is two states, a Palestinian state and Israel, living side by side in peace," Bush told reporters as he met with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. "I think we've got a chance to do that, and I look forward to being involved in that process."

....Two senior White House officials met last Friday on short notice with European officials to lay out administration thinking on the next steps in the Middle East, which include building on the planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and following the path outlined in the U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map." But they told European officials it would be a mistake to leapfrog a deliberative process and move directly to trying to settle vexing "final status" issues, such as Jerusalem.

An administration official said the meeting, conducted by National Security Council staff members Elliott Abrams and Daniel Fried, was intended to begin discussions on the issue at an early stage with European officials, rather than have administration decisions dictated to allies after the fact.

Assuming that Arafat's successor recognizes the futility of the second intifada, one wonders whether, to use a crude analogy, the Palestinians will be to Bush what the Soviets were to Reagan -- an implacable foe that was transformed into a near ally after a display of toughness on the U.S. side and a change in leadership on the other side.

Of course, this requires a Palestinian version of Gorbachev. I leave it to the commenters to comment on the odds of that happening.

The Guardian reports on a serious crisis in Hungary:

It is the country's national spice, a fiery seasoning of which the average Hungarian devours half a kilogramme a year. But now consumers in Hungary been advised to steer clear of paprika.
Shop shelves are being cleared of the spice and products that contain it after a possibly carcinogenic toxin was found in supplies.

The police are investigating whether South America was the origin of a batch of paprika containing high levels of the chemical aflatoxin, which was distributed by three Hungarian companies.

In some cases, the concentration was 10-15 times higher than the permitted level. The chemical can lead to illnesses such as liver cancer if consumed in large amounts.

The EU has advised member states that they can ban paprika products from Hungary.

Sales of the spice, an important ingredient of the national dish goulash, were banned on Thursday, and dozens of products are being tested....

Hungary is one of the biggest paprika exporters in the world, about 5,000 tonnes a year going most to Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

Hungary without paprika is like... like... [China without rice? Italy without pasta? Russia without cabbage?--ed.] No, it's worse than that. There are dishes in those countries without the essential ingredient. I'm sure it's true of Hungary as well, but during my time there, I can't recall of a single thing I ate that didn't have paprika in it [Even the paprika ice cream?--ed. Oh, shut up.]

Everyone here at danieldrezner.com wishes the Hungarians the best of luck as they deal with this gastronomic crisis.

Susan Sachs has a New York Times story highlighting one of those below-the-radar developments in world politics that gets drowned out during the campaign season -- the institutionalization of the Turkish military's slow withdrawal from politics:

For the first time since the 1980 military coup, a civilian presided over Turkey's National Security Council on Wednesday, reflecting a quiet but major shift toward limiting the political power of the country's generals.

The council's new civilian secretary general is Yigit Alpogan, a diplomat who was most recently ambassador to Greece. His appointment followed amendments to the Turkish Constitution this year that reduced the number of posts reserved for the military in the council and several other government institutions.

The army's influence has hurt Turkey's drive to join the European Union, which has urged it to bring the generals to heel and impose civilian control over the military....

The Turkish Army intervened four times in the last 50 years to remove elected governments, most recently in 1997. In what was widely described as a "soft coup," the generals pressured the prime minister at the time, Necmettin Erbakan, to resign by criticizing his Islamist leanings and acting without consulting him....

The recent changes have caused grumbling, but senior commanders did not act to block or delay the latest constitutional move reducing the army's influence over higher education and increasing civilian control of the National Security Council.

"I believe that the army also felt the necessity of eliminating politics from its structure, given the progress of civil society in Turkey," said Serap Yazici, a professor of constitutional law at Bilgi University in Istanbul. "The more involved the military is in politics, the more it becomes politicized, and this would ultimately contradict its primary function as the protector of the country."

...It is too early to judge whether those changes, and the imposition of a civilian administrator, will reduce the military's influence, said Umit Cizre, a military affairs specialist at Bilkent University in Ankara.

If this change is genuine, it makes Turkey more democratic -- but it would also make Turkey a more "Eurocentric" country, as the country bends over backwards to gain entry into the European Union. This should act as an excellent bulwark in keeping Turkey a secular country -- but it would also probably mean a worsening of Turkey's relations with Israel (the Turkish and Israeli militaries are on very good terms).

On the whole, this is probably a net benefit to U.S. foreign policy -- but I'm sure that others may disagree.

A few days ago, James Dobbins laid out the basic timetable for resource allocation when it comes to statebuilding in the New York Times (link via David Adesnik):

The object of nation-building is to return power to a competent, responsible and representative local government as soon as possible.

In a country like Iraq where the governmental structure has collapsed, the first priority is to establish public security. Second is to begin rebuilding the local structures for governance. Third is to create an environment in which basic commerce can occur - where people can buy and sell goods and services and get paid in a stable currency. Fourth is to promote political reforms, stimulate the growth of civil society, build political parties and a free press, prepare for elections and organize representative government. Fifth, and last, is improving roads, bridges, electricity, water, telephones and the rest....

The Defense Department brought a perspective to the tasks of nation-building that reflected its own experiences in building military bases and procuring weapons systems, which led it to largely ignore recent and historical experiences with nation-building. Instead, the Pentagon focused more on hardware than software, on improving infrastructure rather than social structures. It also relied more on large American military contractors than on Iraqi contractors and smaller nonprofit groups specializing in political transformation.

To be fair, Dobbins' lead paragraph pointed out that the Bush administration was reallocating resources towards security provision. And in Sunday's Washington Post, General David Petraeus lays out a forceful program of reconstituting Iraq's security forces (link via Glenn Reynolds):

Helping organize, train and equip nearly a quarter-million of Iraq's security forces is a daunting task. Doing so in the middle of a tough insurgency increases the challenge enormously, making the mission akin to repairing an aircraft while in flight -- and while being shot at. Now, however, 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up.

The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq....

Iraq's borders are long, stretching more than 2,200 miles. Reducing the flow of extremists and their resources across the borders is critical to success in the counterinsurgency. As a result, with support from the Department of Homeland Security, specialized training for Iraq's border enforcement elements began earlier this month in Jordan. (emphasis added)

Read all of Petraeus' essay. I hope his prediction is correct. However, that bolded section stood out because of what Steve Negus wrote in today's Financial Times:

Only a two-foot embankment or a $2 bribe stand in the way of a Syrian Islamist wishing to wage jihad in Iraq.

The US military and the Iraqi interior ministry have pushed in recent months to seal Iraq's long western border against the infiltration of "foreign fighters" as part of an overall plan to beef up security before January elections.

But for now, US and Iraqi officials say, the border is virtually no obstacle at all.

Until earlier this month, travellers at this remote desert border crossing could enter Iraq without a visa. Now a visa is required - but Iraqi officials freely admit the requirement can easily be circumvented with a bribe.

Travellers mingle in an immigration hall before being called one by one to have their papers stamped. It is a chaotic environment in which money can easily change hands without anyone noticing.

Asked if his men are genuinely interested in stopping infiltration, one Iraqi customs official shrugs and says: "To be honest, no."

An infiltrator who wants to avoid even the minor inconvenience and expense of the official posts would have little trouble doing so, US officers say.

Rumsfeld's Defense Department was in charge of ensuring post-invasion security. It's been eighteen months since the invasion, and while Rumsfeld is clearly aware of the problem, there is little indication that he has made any strategic adjustment to the situation at hand.

Why does he still have a job?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan links to this Rajiv Chandrasekaran report in the Washington Post:

Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the U.S. government.

Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.

In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

The Economist runs an interesting story on the debate within Islamic societies about their future. This part stood out in particular:

Three years ago, it was only Americans who asked Why Do They Hate Us? The same question is now being asked by Indonesians, Spaniards, Turks, Australians, Nepalese, French, Italians, Russians and others whose citizens have fallen victim to jihadist “vengeance”. The puzzle is how so many Muslims could for so long remain oblivious to the extremism in their midst.

Egypt's leading newspaper, the government-owned daily Al Ahram, provided a clue recently. On September 1st, it relegated to inside pages the brutal massacre of 12 Nepalese kitchen workers by Iraqi guerrillas, who claimed to be “executing God's judgment” against “Buddhist invaders”. A day later, Al Ahram put on its front-page news that rioters in Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, had attacked a mosque—but did not explain what they were angry about. A slip, perhaps, but the omission reflected a pattern, repeated across the Muslim world, of harping on Muslim injury.

There is nothing abnormal in rooting for your own. American coverage of, say, Iraq, is hardly exemplary in even-handedness. The trouble comes with the cumulative effect of repeating a tale of Muslim victimhood, of amplifying it through mosque sermons and manipulating it for short-term political gain. All too many governments have found it convenient to direct their own peoples' grievances into offshore arenas, such as Iraq, and so deflect demands for empowerment closer to home.

Seeing the world through a lens of victimhood has grown into a comfortable habit. So it is that some Arab commentators have explained the kidnapping and murder of foreign civilians in Iraq as the work of American agents.

Suddenly the raging debate about media bias in this country seems.... well, not insignificant exactly, but.... small. On the other hand, it would be an interesting question to see whether the growth of blogs in places like Iran help to correct flaws with the Middle Eastern "mainstream" media.

The article concludes on this vaguely hopeful note:

[T]he sheer nastiness of jihadist violence has begun to generate a powerful groundswell of angry Muslim opposition. The coincidence of the anniversary of September 11th 2001 with the horrific slaughter of schoolchildren at Beslan provoked a chorus of condemnation. This was not only against terrorism, but also against the clerics whose extremist interpretations support that terrorism.

Why, demands a former Kuwaiti minister writing in the Saudi daily Al Sharq al Awsat, have we not heard a single fatwa against Osama bin Laden, when Muslims fell over themselves to condemn Salman Rushdie for writing a “vapid” novel? Who has done more damage to Islam? Muslims must no longer remain silent, declares an editorial in the Egyptian weekly Rose al-Yusef; our fear of speaking out has become the terrorists' fifth column.

Developing....

Screw Bush or Kerry -- why can't someone like Mikheil Saakashvili run for president in the United States? As someone who witnessed first-hand the Soviet-style traffic police in action when living in Ukraine, I could only weep with joy after reading C.J. Chivers' account in the New York Times of Saakashvili's police reforms. The good parts:

Georgia has had what it calls its Rose Revolution, the bloodless nudge last year that pushed President Eduard A. Shevardnadze from power. Now it is having a road revolution, utterly changing what it is like to drive in one corner of the former Soviet Union.

This summer Mikhail Saakashvili, Mr. Shevardnadze's successor, dismissed his nation's traffic police officers, almost to a man, and a month later he replaced them with a force whose Western influences are unmistakable.

Two remarkable things followed.

First, for a month in Georgia there were almost no traffic police at all, a condition that led one Russian visitor to declare that in the summer of 2004 it was as if the White Guard had left the city, but the Red Guard had not arrived. According to Mr. Saakashvili, the accident rate held steady, which says more about the ineffectiveness of the former traffic cops than about the defensive driving habits of Georgian drivers, such as they are.

The second and more lasting change is that Mr. Saakashvili appears to have struck a decisive blow against one of the most loathed figures to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union....

Even in the pandemic of corruption that is the former Soviet Union, traffic police officers are nearly universally regarded as an especially low form of social parasite, an opinion that holds true from Moscow to Samarkand.

Georgia's problems were of a type. It had become impossible to drive any distance without being stopped. Mr. Saakashvili said that was so because every traffic cop was expected to pay his supervisor a regular cut, and every supervisor paid his senior officer, up the chain of command. "It was like a pyramid," he said in an interview in his office in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. "The police were the biggest headache in this country."

For Mr. Saakashvili, who has taken to fighting corruption with vigor, the traffic police, known here as GAI (pronounced ga-EE), were the perfect opponent for his fight card - flabby, unpopular and crooked, ready-made for a quick knockdown.

He disbanded them in July. A new force was recruited, trained and dispatched by mid-August. Called the Patrol Police, it has a broader mission than traffic enforcement and is modeled after American state police.

It is also smaller than GAI, with 1,600 officers, and better paid than the old, to reduce the temptation to levy informal driving taxes.

Read the whole thing. And here's a backgrounder on Georgia's current situation.

Finally, a president who actually wants to shrink the state!

UPDATE: Thanks to Jonathan Kulick, who links to this Economist story from July about Georgia's new economy minister Kakha Bendukidze. The highlights:

If you want to buy a dysfunctional boiler house, an international airport, a tea plantation, an oil terminal, a proctology clinic, a vineyard, a telephone company, a film studio, a lost-property office or a beekeepers' regulatory board, then call Kakha Bendukidze, Georgia's new economy minister. His privatisation drive has made him a keen seller of all the above. And for the right price he will throw in the Tbilisi State Concert Hall and the Georgian National Mint as well.

Mr Bendukidze made his name and fortune as an industrialist in neighbouring Russia, putting together the country's biggest heavy-engineering group, OMZ, before returning to his native Georgia in June of this year with a mandate to reverse more than a decade of post-Soviet decay. He insists that he was taken by surprise when Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and prime minister, Zurab Zhvania, nobbled him for a chat in the course of a private visit he made to Tbilisi in May, and then offered him a ministerial job the same evening. But having said yes, he is cracking ahead, doing everything that businessmen must dream of making governments do. He says that Georgia should be ready to sell “everything that can be sold, except its conscience”. And that is just the start.

Next year—if not sooner—he will cut the rate of income tax from 20% to 12%, payroll taxes from 33% to 20%, value-added tax from 20% to 18%, and abolish 12 kinds of tax altogether. He wants to let leading foreign banks and insurers open branches freely. He wants to abolish laws on legal tender, so that investors can use whatever currency they want. He hates foreign aid—it “destroys your ability to do things for yourself,” he says—though he concedes that political realities will oblige him to accept it for at least the next three years or so.

As to where investors should put their money, “I don't know and I don't care,” he says, and continues: “I have shut down the department of industrial policy. I am shutting down the national investment agency. I don't want the national innovation agency.” Oh yes, and he plans to shut down the country's anti-monopoly agency too. “If somebody thinks his rights are being infringed he can go to the courts, not to the ministry.” He plans, as his crowning achievement, to abolish his own ministry in 2007. “In a normal country, you don't need a ministry of the economy,” he says. “And in three years we can make the backbone of a normal country.”

The rest of the story explains why this schedule may be just a tad optimistic -- but damn, do I like this guy's instincts.

Finally, a leader for the lower-right quadrant!!

LAST UPDATE: Gavin Sheridan has lots of posts on Georgia.

Gurcharan Das has a Financial Times op-ed (subsciption only) that points out the biggest constraint India faces in its economic development: its own government:

India's gross domestic product has been growing at close to a 6 per cent real rate for 23 years, making it one of the fastest-expanding major economies in the world. While this is slower than China, it is almost double India's growth rate of the preceding 30 years and double the rate at which the west grew during the Industrial Revolution. More recently, India's population growth has also begun to slow; in 1998 it was down to 1.6 per cent, compared to a historic 2.2 per cent annual growth rate. And literacy has begun to climb - it reached 65 per cent in 2000 compared with 52 per cent in 1990. Almost 190m Indians have risen out of destitution since 1980 and the middle class has more than tripled to about 250m. Had India's GDP growth continued to chug along at the pre-1980 rate, Indian incomes would only have reached the present US per-capita income level by 2250; at the current rate, they will reach today's American income levels by 2066 - 184 years earlier. This is not the same as convergence, but it is a valuable gain of 184 years.

The amazing thing is that all this growth is happening alongside the most appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy, Indians despair over the simplest public goods. The contrast between power and telecommunications is obvious to everyone. After a successful reform programme, we are in the middle of a telecoms revolution that is as profound as China's. The number of telephones has increased from 5m in 1990 to 75m and is growing by 2m a month. But power remains a "public good", as reforms have failed, and people whine about daily power cuts applied by the state monopolies.

No single institution has disappointed us more than our bureaucracy. When we were young we bought the cruel myth of the "steel frame" - a stable system that would provide continuity. We were told that Britain was not as well-governed as India because it did not have the Indian Civil Service. Today our bureaucracy has become the single biggest obstacle to development. Indians think of their bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive and corrupt. Instead of shepherding through economic reforms, they are blocking them.

In the 1950s, the idealistic Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, wanted a regulatory framework for his "mixed economy", but instead, in the holy names of socialism, the bureaucrats created a thousand controls and killed our industrial revolution at birth. In my 30 years in business I did not meet a single bureaucrat who really understood my business, yet each had the power to ruin it. Our failures have been due less to ideology and more to poor management.

Another Financial Times article by Edward Luce and Ray Marcelo highlights that these difficulties create macroeconomic as well as microeconomic difficulties:

India levies a 20 per cent import duty on refined oil products and 10 per cent on crude oil. Mr Chidambaram [India's finance minister] is expected to reduce both bands in order to keep a lid on rising domestic energy costs.

But finance ministry officials say Mr Chidambaram’s scope is restricted since too sharp a reduction in import duties would eat into the government’s revenues, which depend heavily on indirect tax collection.

Mr Chidambaram has committed to a recent law which mandates elimination of India’s revenue deficit the difference between current spending and taxes raised by 2008.

India’s overall fiscal deficit is about 10 per cent of gross domestic product. “We have a fiscal responsibility act which limits what we can do to reduce tariffs,” said an official.

At the state level, the Economist has an interesting story on the lack of accountability in Gujarat following the 2002 pogroms against the Muslim minority, and its aftereffects. And in Bangalore, poor infrastructure is causing leading IT firms to consider relocation.

Hugo Chavez is declaring victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum with 58% of the vote. His opponents are declaring a "gigantic fraud."

Daniel Davies has a nice summary of Chavez's post-referendum conundrum over at Crooked Timber:

[T]here is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.

Davies' analysis leads to an interesting corrollary affecting the U.S. presidential election. Gas prices are one of the few economic indicators that voters care about deeply. If the Chavez result causes gas prices to fall, one has to assume it would benefit Bush and hurt Kerry.

Hugo Chavez providing a political boost to George W. Bush? We certainly do live in interesting times.

UPDATE: The Organization of American States and the Carter Center announced that, "their results agree with the preliminary results announced by the 'Electoral National Council' on the presidential recall referendum."

Well, the good news is that the Saudis have decided to hold national elections in a few months, according to Reuters:

Saudi Arabia plans to hold its first nationwide elections starting in November, seen as the first concrete political reforms in the country's absolute monarchy, a government source said on Wednesday.
The source from the Municipal Affairs Ministry told Reuters the first stage of the local elections would be held in the capital Riyadh after the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan ends in mid-November.

The elections will elect half of the members of the nearly 180 municipal councils nationwide, while the rest are expected to be appointed by the government.

The conservative Gulf kingdom announced last October it would hold municipal elections -- the first in four decades -- after pressure from the United States and domestic reformers to grant some political participation and freedom of expression.

At the same time, the Economist reports that the House of Saud remains sensitive to media criticism:

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, suggested that several Arab and Muslim countries were prepared to send an armed force to help police Iraq. By lending Islamic legitimacy to Iraq’s transitional government, such a move could do much to quell the lingering hostility to it, both within Iraq and the surrounding region....

Yet scarcely was Mr Powell’s plane out of Saudi skies before the caveats blew in. The Islamic force was meant to replace the current coalition, not complement it, elaborated Prince Saud, and even then only at the express request of an Iraqi government that had “the full and clear support of the Iraqi people”....

To find reasons for the hasty retreat, look no further than the opinion pages in the Arab press. The troops offer was not really Saudi, said the popular London-based daily, Al-Quds al-Arabi, “but rather American orders clothed in Saudi garb so as to be more acceptable to other Muslim and Arab countries who are keen to please the American administration and fend off its official pressure to introduce reforms”. Talal Salman, editor of the Beirut daily, Al-Safir, commented acidly: “Washington has discovered that there are �unemployed’ Arab armies that have no duties, save to subdue Arab masses, and that those Arab armies could be employed in saving the United States from the Iraqi quagmire.”

The most interesting take on the current Saudi situation comes from David Gardner's Financial Times survey. The section on education is particularly revealing:

[P]robably it is in the field of education that this schizophrenia is most vividly and wrenchingly lived out. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia has an educated middle class, an estimated one million of whom have studied abroad - often to a very high level - and the kingdom has educated its girls for roughly the last generation and a half. Saudis, moreover, often have an intellectual depth to them that is less easily found in many Arab countries, where political and commercial pressures have debased and ground down the currency of ideas to convenient and remunerative cliche and myth.

But then turn to school textbooks, drawn up under the authority of the Wahhabi establishment, which drill into impressionable young Saudi minds the religious duty to hate all Christians and Jews as infidels, and to combat all Shi’ites as heretics. A theology text for 14-year-olds, for instance, states that “it is the duty of a Muslim to be loyal to the believers and be the enemy of the infidels. One of the duties of proclaiming the oneness of God is to have nothing to do with his idolatrous and polytheist enemies.”

This sort of teaching follows the theses of the theologian Ibn Taymiyya, a forerunner of Wahhabi thinking who died in 1328, and who asserted the discretionary power of Muslim scholars and clerics to “correct” their rulers. “It is really not very difficult to understand how we got to where we are,” says one reformist intellectual, asking rhetorically if there is any difference between the sectarian bigotry of an Osama bin Laden and the intolerant outpourings of the Wahhabi establishment.

Read the whole thing.

The OECD just released its economic survey of the Euro area for 2004. Here's the first bullet point fromthe executive summary:

Income per capita is lower in the euro area than in the best performing OECD countries and the gap is widening. Moreover, although the epicentre of many of the adverse shocks that prompted the global downturn since 2001 was in the United States, slack has been more persistent in the euro area. Key challenges are to reduce the persistent underutilisation of labour resources, to boost productivity growth and to bolster the area’s resilience against shocks.

In the Financial Times, Scheherazade Daneshkhu has more. :

Membership of a single currency has failed to inject dynamism into the economies of the eurozone or to raise their long-term growth rate, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Tuesday.

In its most critical report on the eurozone's economic performance, the Paris-based body said the first five years of European monetary union had been "more challenging than expected".

The eurozone had been "disappointing" in its lack of resilience to shocks, and its income gap against the OECD's best-performing countries remained large and widening. The differences between individual euro-area countries was even more striking, the OECD said.

Laurence Boone, one of the report's authors, said: "There's a huge potential for the euro area to gain from economic integration but not enough has been done to reap the benefits."

....Labour mobility was low and unemployment "stubbornly high". But the structural reforms needed to move the euro economy closer to the ambitious targets set at the Lisbon summit in 2000 had been "hesitant and piecemeal".

The need for reforms to boost non-inflationary growth and strengthen the public finances in the face of ageing populations had gained urgency with the accession of the 10 new members this year.

The OECD lamented the failure by countries to take advantage of the last economic upswing to improve their budgets. "Countries should avoid past fiscal mistakes by rooting their budgets in medium-term frameworks," the OECD advised. "More ambition in consolidating budgets is needed, independent of the fiscal rules enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact."

For those who believe this is me gloating about European stagnation, it's not. Sclerotic European growth reduced demand for U.S. exports, which widens the trade deficit, which increases protectionist sentiments in the United States (although protectionist sentiment in the EU is all too alive and well). I'm much rather see the Euro area growing like gangbusters.

[Well, yeah, but the Europeans have a higher quality of life than Americans, right?--ed. Not according to the latest UN Human Development Indicators, which incorporates health and education measures along with per capita income (link via the Economist). The United States ranks eighth; the average rank of the Euro 15 countries is 14, and eyeballing where the countries are, that looks like what their weighted average would be as well.]

Statebuilding can be a slow, painful process, with lots of reverses, lots of buried tensions, lots of frustration. On the other hand, a lot of time, patience, and money can occsionally yield partially successes.

In that light, it's good to read this Reuters report from the Bosnian town of Mostar:

The city of Mostar, a symbol like Sarajevo of the bloody end of Yugoslavia, has joyfully unveiled its rebuilt 16th-century bridge which some hope can help reconcile its Muslims and Croats.

Almost 11 years after Bosnian Croat artillerymen shelled it to destruction, the new "Stari Most" (Old Bridge) was officially inaugurated at a spectacular ceremony attended by international guests and delegations on Friday.

Fireworks lit up the sky high above the elegant single-span bridge at the end of a programe which featured Beethoven's "Hymn of Joy" and nine of Mostar's legendary divers jumping into the green rushing waters of Neretva with torches in their hands....

Throughout the day, the 29-metre (95-foot) bridge was the focus of all attention in the eastern, Muslim quarter ahead of the ceremony. The narrow streets in the Old Town were packed despite scorching heat and heavy security.

Rusem Srakic, a Muslim taxi driver who has returned to live in the western, Croat part of the town, said he felt "as if I was being born again, just like Mostar is being born again".

Mostar's Muslim mayor, Hamdija Jahic, told Reuters earlier on Friday: "I think this is a new beginning, that's what citizens have been telling me too. You can feel a special atmosphere all over."

UNESCO and the World Bank were helped in the $15 million project by other institutions and governments including the Council of Europe, Croatia, Turkey and Italy.

The original bridge was commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent about 100 years after Turkey's Ottoman empire claimed the Balkans.

It stood the tests of time and war until November 1993, when it succumbed to Bosnian Croat high explosives in an attack condemned globally as an act of sheer vandalism.

In a painstaking reconstruction, Turkish engineers and other experts used white marble from the original quarry nearby and a combination of old techniques and new technology to build an exact replica.

Last week I blogged about the UN envoy who reported that things were going to hell in a handbasket in the occupied territories -- in no small part because of the dearth of progress on reforming the Palestinian Authority's corrupt institutions.

So what's going on in Gaza this week? Lamia Lahoud reports some strange doings in the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian official sources in Gaza and the West Bank claimed Monday that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was behind the kidnapping of police chief Ghazi Jebali over the weekend.
One source said those who were behind the kidnapping were on Arafat's payroll. Another source said it was Arafat's way of removing the unpopular police chief from his post.

Arafat backtracked Monday from his appointment of Musa Arafat as Gaza security chief, saying the Central Committee of Fatah and Interior Minister Hakam Balawi appointed him.

Fatah protested the appointment accusing Musa Arafat of corruption.

A PA official said Arafat appointed his nephew to counter former Gaza security chief Muhammad Dahlan's growing influence in Gaza. The official said Dahlan was behind all the protests against Arafat's appointment. Dahlan did not deny the accusations.

As the Christian Science Monitor put it in an editorial:

Israel has already given up on him as a potential peacemaker. So has President Bush.

Now, 10 years after becoming the first president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat last weekend saw how his own people are willing to turn against him.

Cynthia Johnston has more in her Reuters report:

Scrambling to defuse a Palestinian leadership crisis, President Yasser Arafat has named a new security chief over the head of a cousin whose appointment led to a weekend of violence by gunmen protesting at corruption.

But Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie kept the heat on Arafat by saying he stood for now by his resignation, tendered in frustration over what he called an explosion of "chaos and lawlessness" that he has been powerless to stop.

Arafat, 75, is facing the stiffest challenge to his leadership since Palestinians received a measure of self-rule from Israel a decade ago. Some fear it could eventually boil over into civil war.

The confrontation is also widely seen as a power struggle between Arafat's old guard and younger rivals staking out turf before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carries out a plan to remove Jewish settlements from Gaza by the end of 2005.

A story by Laila al-Haddad in Lebanon's Daily Star suggests that, "most Palestinians agree that the latest developments are not conducive to their cause, and that this is not the time for power struggles." This is true only if Arafat's successors proved every bit as corrupt and anti-democratic as Arafat -- a depressing possibility.

Developing....

Two days ago, United Nations Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen briefed the UN Security Council on the Middle East Peace Process -- i.e., Israel and Palestine. Roed-Larsen placed blame on both the Israelis and the Palestinians for the lack of progress. Here's one relevant section from the press release:

He said that the Palestinian Authority, despite consistent promises by its leadership, had made no progress on its core obligation to take immediate action on the ground to end violence and combat terror, and to reform and reorganize the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli Government had made no progress either on its core obligation to immediately dismantle settlements outposts erected since March 2001 and to move towards a complete freeze of settlement activities.

Progress on the implementation of Palestinian reform remained slow and could not be explained except by the lack of political will to advance along that road, he said. The Palestinian Authority decided to begin holding local elections as early as this fall. The commitment to do so was a step towards creating more democratic local institutions and, as such, should be encouraged. However, the Palestinian Authority had not yet responded to repeated calls by the international community to reform its electoral institutional framework in line with minimal international standards. It had appointed a partisan body to supervise local elections instead of the existing Central Elections Commission, which should prepare and supervise voter registration. Instead, the Commission had been endangered by the Palestinian Authority’s intention to launch parallel registration without impartial supervision....

All those who yearned for peace had already and repeatedly urged President Arafat, in public and in private, to take immediate action to restore that diminished credibility, he emphasized. The Quartet, as well as the Arab peace partners, had also been active in trying to bring about the necessary reforms. The required elements of reform were clear to all: the consolidation of all security services into three main bodies; and rejuvenating its leadership by putting it under the authority of an effective interior minister, who reported to an empowered Prime Minister. The Palestinian Prime Minister and cabinet should be empowered in a way that enabled them to make the necessary changes and carry out the executive tasks entrusted to them by the Palestinian basic law. They must be given the power not only to make decisions, but also to implement them. Unfortunately, there was, so far, no sign of any of those measures being taken.

The fact that, under those conditions, the Palestinian leader remained confined to his headquarters in Ramallah in difficult conditions was no excuse for passivity and inaction, he said. Decisive, robust and enduring action, particularly in the critical field of security reform, should lead to more vigorous international engagement in the process and to an environment conducive to more bold leadership, consistent with requirements of the Road Map and the Egyptian initiative. Unfortunately, there was no sign of constructive movement at present, far from it. Despite a well-intended Prime Minister, the Palestinian Authority’s paralysis had become abundantly clear, and the deterioration of law and order in Palestinian areas was steadily worsening.

Continuing, he said that clashes and showdowns between branches of Palestinian security forces were now common in the Gaza Strip, where legal authority was receding fast in the face of the mounting power of arms, money and intimidation. Lawlessness and gang rule was becoming common in Nablus, the mayor of which resigned a few months ago in protest against the lack of Palestinian Authority support for the legal authorities. The perceived Palestinian Authority abdication of responsibility had led many Rafah residents to take matters into their own hands, up to the point where some of them had established a private checkpoint, preventing Palestinian Authority officials from crossing to Egypt or from entering Rafah. Jericho was becoming the only Palestinian city with a functioning police. That collapse of authority could not be attributed to the Israeli incursions and operations inside Palestinian towns.

“The Palestinian Authority was in deep distress, and is in real danger of collapse”, he said.

Roed-Larsen then went on to blast the Israelis for "lack of compliance on the sensitive issue of settlements." Again, go check out the press release for more on this. What interests me is the Palestinian reaction to Roed-Larsen's honest assessment of the Palestinian Authority. Steve Weizman provides the Associated Press report:

Furious Palestinian officials said Wednesday that they banned the UN Mideast envoy from the West Bank and Gaza Strip after he lashed out at Yasser Arafat, but the Palestinian observer to the UN later said Terje Roed-Larsen was not barred from visiting.

Arafat's top adviser, Nabil Abu Rdeneh, described the UN envoy as "useless" and said he was no longer welcome in the Palestinian areas.

Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian UN observer, echoed that anger at Roed-Larsen but said the UN envoy's legal status has not been decided and would be discussed with Secretary General Kofi Annan when he returns to New York next week....

Al-Kidwa called the briefing unacceptable, saying it "reflects basically an amalgamation of Israeli and American positions."

Eerily enough, the BBC reports that "The militant group, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades also said Mr Roed-Larsen was 'banned' from Palestinian territory." The Palestinian Prime Minister's reaction in a press conference echoed this rhetoric:

In his first official reaction to the latest remarks voiced by United Nations Envoy to the Middle East Peace Process, Terje Roed-Larsen, in which the latter held the President Yasser Arafat responsible for the current peace deadlock, Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei' expressed astonishment for the non-objective way Larsen had made his remarks....

Qurei' called on the United Nations Secretary General to give instructions to UN staff in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) to work in an objective way and in accordance with the UN’s principles of law and justice, that have deemed the Israeli settlement expansion plans since 1967 illegitimate.

President Arafat’s key advisor, Nabil Abu Rudaina, was quoted as saying that Larsen has become �persona non grata’ and that the United Nations was requested to dispatch an alternative representative to the oPt.

To Kofi Annan's credit, he issued a statement through his spokesman backing Roed-Larsen to the hilt.

The grand irony in all of this, as Agence-France Press observes, is that "Roed-Larsen has previously been something of a bete noire for the Israelis over his outspoken criticism of the occupation of the territories."

It's not like the U.N. has been unfriendly to the Palestinian cause. So what does it say that the political entity Israel is ostensibly supposed to negotiate with responds like that to an honest appraisal of their situation by an impartial outsider?

[Standard caveat when posting about the Middle East: This is not to exonerate the Israelis for their behavior on settlements.]

The Chicago Tribune has two stories today reflecting on U.S. efforts at statebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan. Aamer Madhani reports on the uneven progress in reconstituting Iraq's security forces by examining the town of Muqdadiyah. The highlights:

By the U.S. military's current expectations, the joint patrol by American and Iraqi troops was a success--only about a third of the Iraqi soldiers hid their faces out of fear of being seen with the Americans.

But Lt. Joaquin Meno of the 1st Infantry Division had even higher hopes as he led the patrol recently into an area where U.S. soldiers have been hectored for weeks. The Iraqi troops bounded out of their trucks and set up a right flank, just as they have been trained. Minutes later Meno did a double take: Several of the Iraqis had tugged their bandanas and kaffiyehs up to their eyes....

The small city and its surrounding area have been largely calm in recent months despite flare-ups in nearby Baqouba, the restive metropolis about 20 miles to the south. Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, which has a base in Muqdadiyah, said the peace is due largely to improvements in the Iraqi security forces.

In a matter of months, the Iraqi National Guard has gone from a ragtag group led by a purportedly corrupt commander to a force with a semblance of professionalism, 1st Infantry officials say.

The commander, who allegedly was skimming a third of the guard members' salaries, was arrested and awaits trial. The troops have started training with American soldiers in intensive 15-day boot camps. U.S. military and local Iraqi officials insist the Iraqi guardsmen are making great strides....

In meetings last week with Pittard and battalion commander Lt. Col. Peter Newell, the city's mayor and police chief praised the Americans.

U.S. military officials and Iraqis repeated the story of a recent solo patrol by the Iraqi troops that they said was emblematic of how far the security forces have come in Muqdadiyah.

"The people asked the soldiers if they were Iraqis," said Mayor Hussein Alwan al-Timimi. "They wouldn't believe that such a professional force could be Iraqi. They thought they must be Americans dressed up in Iraqi uniforms."

But there are indications from U.S. soldiers, as well as Iraqi officials, that there has been less progress in Muqdadiyah than sometimes meets the eye.

Meno, the platoon leader who directed the recent joint patrol, noted that only one of the 24 Iraqi soldiers on the patrol had a flak jacket. He added that he had come across checkpoints where Iraqi troops or police officers have been sleeping on the job.

A few weeks ago, Meno and his platoon were on guard duty with the Iraqi National Guard at the recently opened joint command center. During the watch, he said, they faced gun and rocket fire. As soon as the attack began, the Iraqi troops abandoned their posts, Meno said.

Read the whole thing. UPDATE: Christpher Dickey has a Newsweek story on the interim Iraqi government's efforts to restore order (link via Josh Marshall):

As I drove into Baghdad from the airport on Sunday, Iraqi cops were all over the streets. In some parts of town there seemed to be a road block on every corner. They stopped cars. They searched the trunks. They searched what was in the trunks—and in the glove compartments, and in my computer bag. No smiles. No pleasantries. These guys had new uniforms, but their pot bellies, their moustaches, and their AK-47 assault rifles were just the same as in the old Saddam Hussein days.

I never thought I'd be glad to see them. But I was. And so are most of the Iraqis I've talked to. "Things are more quiet these last weeks," a young baker explained to me this afternoon. He spread his hands as if he were smoothing the sheet on a bed. "I hope this is not the calm before the storm."

I hope so, too. And if it's not—if it really is a turning point toward peace and prosperity for Iraq—then there's a simple reason: The quasi-sovereign government installed June 28 is playing politics Iraqi style. Sure there's a lot of bluster and a fair dose of brutality. No doubt there's plenty of corruption, too. But there's also a feel for the mood on the street that the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, now defunct, never even began to have.

Meanwhile, the Tribune also runs an AP story by Stephen Graham documenting U.S. efforts to ensure a successful presidential election in Afghanistan. Particularly interesting was the sidebar reporting the results of an Asia Foundation survey conducted in Afghanistan back in February/March of this year. Some of the results:

DIRECTION OF THE COUNTRY

Right direction: 64%

Mixed/ don't know: 24%

Wrong direction: 11%

HAVE A FAVORABLE VIEW OF . . .

Hamid Karzai (Afghan president): 85%

the United Nations: 84%

the United States: 65%

The unfortunate caveat: "Pollsters didn't reach four of the nation's 34 provinces."

Last month I blogged about the designation of Iyad Allawi as the Iraqi president until January of next year, and the extent to which the U.S. did not want to be seen as puppetmaster. Other Iraq watchers were skeptical of the new government's ability to command legitimacy -- at the time, Spencer Ackerman wrote, "Any interim prime minister would surely face the accusation of being an occupation stooge. With Allawi, the charge is likely to have serious currency."

Well, it looks like Allawi was underestimated. The Washington Post's Robin Wright reports that Iraqis do perceive the new government as legitimate (link via Robert Tagorda):

A large majority of Iraqis say they have confidence in the new interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that is set to assume political power on Wednesday, according to a poll commissioned by U.S. officials in Iraq.

The results are a significant victory for the United States and the United Nations. Together they negotiated with squabbling Iraqi factions in an attempt to cobble together a viable government that balanced disparate ethnic and religious groups.

The first survey since the new government was announced by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi about three weeks ago showed that 68 percent of Iraqis have confidence in their new leaders. The numbers are in stark contrast to widespread disillusionment with the previous Iraqi Governing Council, which was made up of 25 members picked by the United States and which served as the Iraqi partner to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Only 28 percent of Iraqis backed the council when it was dissolved last month, according to a similar poll in May....

But 73 percent of Iraqis polled approved of Allawi to lead the new government, 84 percent approved of President Ghazi Yawar and almost two-thirds backed the new Cabinet. These impressive showings indicate that the new leaders have support spanning ethnic and religious groups, U.S. officials said.

"What comes across in the poll and what we've sensed for a while is that Iraqis remain open-minded about the new government," a senior coalition official in Baghdad said in an interview.

Four out of every five Iraqis expected that the new government will "make things better" for Iraq after the handover, with 10 percent expecting the situation to remain the same and 7 percent anticipating a decline, the poll shows.

U.S. officials are particularly encouraged because the poll showed high name recognition for the new leadership, in contrast with many members of the former council, U.S. officials said. More than 70 percent of Iraqis polled have heard or read a significant amount about the new leaders, who were named about three weeks ago.

"That's huge penetration -- and it happened quickly," said the coalition official, who asked for anonymity because of the rules on naming officials in Baghdad. "It's partly because Allawi is on all the Arab media every day talking about security. He's visiting sites, and there are constantly images of the prime minister tackling security, which is what Iraqis care most about right now. It resonates, and it comes across in these figures."

In a sign that Iraqis are more optimistic generally about their future after the occupation ends, two-thirds of Iraqis believed the first democratic elections for a new national assembly -- tentatively set for December or January -- will be free and fair, the survey shows.

Despite the growing number of attacks on Iraqi security forces, including several yesterday, public confidence in the new police and army has reached new highs, the poll shows. Seventy percent of Iraqis polled supported the new army, and 82 percent supported the police.

Hey, this and banking reform -- two in a row for the CPA!

There's one reason why Allawi is likely to be able to sustain this popularity -- he has a built-in scapegoat for his biggest headache, which is the security situation. If problems continue in that area, all he has to do is publicly harangue the Americans.

What will be particularly interesting is whether the new government and security forces' legitimacy gives them greater access to informants who will rat out insurgents.

The new government's popularity might go south in the future -- but this is certainly good news as June 30th approaches.

Developing....

I've been pretty hard on the CPA as of late, so it's only fair to highlight an area where they played a clearly positive role. The Economist reports on the state of reform in the banking sector:

During the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad in April last year, the ten-storey headquarters of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) was burgled and torched before it collapsed into a pile of soot-stained rubble. Fourteen months later, the charred ruins have been cleared, and the CBI's staff work on American-provided computers in a building nearby....

Despite the unpromising conditions, the CPA, which will be dissolved next week to make way for an interim government run by Iraqis, has made some headway. It has drawn up a framework of laws and rules for the new banking system. A law that came into effect in March established the CBI's independence and laid down its procedures for everything from the management of foreign reserves to bank supervision. A new commercial-bank law governs the functioning of Iraq's 17 private banks, which were legalised by Mr Hussein in the early 1990s in response to a cash crunch following UN sanctions.

A huge training effort has been going on. Advisers from America's Treasury and bank regulators have given classes on subjects ranging from the use of Microsoft Word to the basics of Basel 2, a new treaty on bank supervision. “It is a big challenge, a new way of thinking,” says one American adviser. “Banking based on risk and judgment is radically different from bank decisions based on Saddam's say-so.”

A basic currency reform was also necessary. Under Mr Hussein, there were two lots of dinars: one in the Kurdish north, another elsewhere. Because there were only two or three denominations, worth up to at most $5 or so, even basic purchases required thick wads of notes. So the CPA set to work designing a new, unified currency with several denominations. After frenzied printing in factories from Germany to Kenya, 27 Boeing 747s crammed with bank notes flew to Baghdad. Armed convoys delivered the cash to 240 bank branches across Iraq and officials distributed, in all, two billion pieces of paper. The exchange was completed by January this year with virtually no hitches, a remarkable feat given the insurgency already in progress.

The creation of a single currency has permitted the CBI to carry out a basic monetary policy. The central bank carries out daily currency auctions, receiving about a dozen bids a day according to the CPA. The new dinar has appreciated by 25% or so since its launch, and has traded steadily at around 1,450 to the dollar since January. Inflation has been kept in check, no small thing given that hyperinflation often occurs during and after wars....

Some observers worry that once the guiding hands of American advisers have gone, the CBI will become politicised and print money to pay off state debts. It is also possible that the new bank laws will one day be overturned altogether, because of nationalistic bias against foreign ownership or their lack of reference to Islamic teaching. And important as the state of the banking system might be, Iraq's economic health is sure to rest, in the final analysis, on political stability. The future, in other words, is still in the balance.

Of course, that last paragraph is kind of important -- and that goes back to the CPA's mistakes. Bill Powell and Aparism Ghosh are the latest to dissect Paul Bremer's errors in Time.

Things are getting very bad in Sudan, as Edith Lederer reports for the Associated Press:

NASA photos of the Darfur region of western Sudan show destruction in nearly 400 villages, and there have been reports of fighting or threatened attacks in every camp for displaced people, the U.S. aid chief said Wednesday.

Andrew Natsios, administrator of the Agency for International Development, warned that time is running out to help 2 million Sudanese in desperate need of aid in Darfur. He said his agency's estimate that 350,000 could die of disease and malnutrition over the next nine months "is conservative."

Fighting between Arab militias and African residents has killed thousands of people and forced more than 1 million to flee their homes. International rights groups say the government has backed the Arab fighters in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the African villagers.

Natsios put the blame for the crisis squarely on the Sudanese government, saying U.S. and U.N. reports from the country show clearly that the Sudanese military is directly connected to Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, that are fighting in Darfur.

"They arm them, they use them, and now they have to stop them," Natsios said in an interview with two reporters after meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan....

On Saturday, Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir ordered the military to begin disarming all militia groups. But Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, a U.S. State Department expert on Sudan, said "until now, we have not seen any systematic action to rein in the Janjaweed."

"What we've seen is a series of half-steps by the government in response to international pressure," he said.

U.S. officials have been highlighting the plight of the displaced Sudanese, mindful that the world's inattention to Rwanda a decade ago may have contributed to the genocide that occurred there.

Natsios said the U.S. government has spent $116 million on the relief effort in Sudan — more than all other donors combined — "and we pledged $188 million between now and the end of next year."

The United States is moving "with a maximum sense of urgency to try to save lives," said Ranneberger, who accompanied Natsios. "We don't have time to sit around also and decide, is this ethnic cleansing or is this genocide, or what is it."

The Economist examines the effects of Brazil's increasingly assertive foreign policy. The results may surprise you:

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country's left-leaning president, is carving out a role for Brazil as spokesman for poor countries, most notably by founding the G20 group which lobbies for rich countries to open up farm trade. His government is playing a more active role across South America. And it is seeking a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. “Brazil has begun to flex its muscles as a regional superpower,” says Miguel Díaz of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank.

If so, it is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, Brazil's fondest wish is to mitigate the United States' dominance of global affairs and thereby to enhance Brazil's influence. The foreign minister, Celso Amorim, calls for “a more balanced world” and justifies the Haiti mission in part as a step towards it. “You can't be a supporter of multilateralism and when it comes to act say it's [too] dangerous,” says Mr Amorim.

On the other hand, Brazil's new activism often, though not always, coincides with the interests of the United States. Both countries want democracy and stability in places in the Americas where these seem fragile. In some of those places, Lula's Brazil has more friends and influence than George Bush's more abrasive United States. The two sometimes back rivals in these countries, but that is one source of Brazil's usefulness....

Brazil is taking “more responsibility for calming things down in the region, which the United States finds fantastic,” says Alfredo Valladão of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris. That is one reason why Brazil has not been shunned by Mr Bush, despite Lula's opposition to the war in Iraq.

Read the whole thing -- there's a disturbing bit at the end about Brazil's nuclear program.

A brief follow-up to my last post on efforts to recall Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The New York Times reports that a referendum date has been set in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez:

A recall referendum on President Hugo Chávez, whose rule has bitterly divided Venezuelans, has been scheduled for Aug. 15, electoral authorities said Tuesday night.

The president's opponents learned Thursday that they had collected enough signatures to force a referendum but had worried that with administrative or legal challenges, he could push the vote past Aug. 19, the fifth anniversary of his coming to power. According to the Constitution, a vote to recall Mr. Chávez at that point would allow his vice president to run the country and permit Mr. Chávez to run for re-election in 2006.

In a brief statement, Ezequiel Zamora, vice president of the five-member National Electoral Council, said the Aug. 15 date would permit Venezuelans to remove Mr. Chávez's administration and, within 30 days, elect a new president.

So, hurdle one -- canceling the referendum via a technicality or legal delay -- has been cleared. However, the BBC reports that Chavez will not be taking this challenge lying down: "He has already begun campaigning, warning voters of the consequences of an opposition victory."

That Hugo Chavez and his Castro-lite policies sure are popular in Venezuala -- oh, wait, here's an interesting story by Andy Webb-Vidal of the Financial Times:

Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's president, looks set to face a recall referendum in early August that could see him ousted from office, after electoral authorities on Thursday declared valid an opposition-filed petition seeking a vote.

Jorge RodrĂ­guez, a senior director of the National Electoral Council (CNE), announced that a preliminary count had found that 2.45m signatures on a petition were valid - fewer than 16,000 signatures above the required threshold.

The preliminary result, which had not been expected until today, appears to mark the end of a year-long campaign by opponents of Mr Chávez to secure a recall vote.

The CNE previously said that a referendum could take place on August 8.

Opponents were in celebratory mood last night. In Caracas, the capital, last night fireworks were set off, and motorists sounded car horns.

"We made it," said Enrique Mendoza, an opposition governor and leader of the Democratic Coordinator, the loose opposition alliance.

"Nothing or no one will impede us from opening the door to a future without violence," he said.

Voice of America reports that Chavez sain in a televised address that, "he is ready to face a recall referendum." Chavez's supporters might not be, according to the FT:

Shortly before the CNE issued the results, gunmen apparently aligned to the government used automoatic weapons to attack the office of the mayor of metropolitan Caracas, a staunch opponent of Mr Chávez.

There were also warnings that a sector within the military is virulently opposed to the idea of a referendum.

An important group of pro-Chávez army battalion commanders stand to lose key privileges if there is a change of government arising from a referendum, which some polls suggest Mr Chávez would lose.

"This group is willing to effectively kick over the table to ensure there is no referendum," an army colonel said.

Be sure to check out this news analysis by Richard Brand of the Miami Herald as well.

Chavez has been counted out before, so the successful petition drive hardly ensures his removal. Still, this is an encouraging sign.

Apparently Ayad Allawi is to be the Prime Minister of Iraq from June 30th of this year to January 31st, 2005. He's consulted with U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi about the make-up of the provisional government's cabinet.

What else do we know from his selection? Josh Marshall doesn't offer much of a guide:

I continue to think that something very important happened in this selection of Iyad Allawi. Precisely what, though, remains unclear.

Juan Cole thinks that Brahimi preferred an exile who could not use the position to entrench himself in power. However, the BBC reports that Brahimi ain't exactly thrilled with the selection of Allawi.

I can offer zilch in the way of information about Allawi himself. But I do think that the nature of Allawi's selection contains two interesting nuggets of information. The first comes from Mike Allen and Robin Wright's Washington Post story about the selection. It suggests the extent to which the Bush administration did not want to be seen as puppetmaster on this one:

In a telephone conversation at 2:30 p.m., a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy sounded uncertain about whether Ayad Allawi would head Iraq's interim government after the United States transfers limited authority on June 30.

"We may or may not have heard the last word on the prime minister," the official said. "You have to put a lot of pieces together first."

A senior administration official in Baghdad said that L. Paul Bremer, the civilian U.S. administrator, and Robert D. Blackwill, the U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, knew about the impending selection on Thursday. But officials in Baghdad feared a leak and told few officials in Washington. Some members of President Bush's war cabinet knew where the process was heading but were surprised by the timing of the council's decision.

The administration's statements were reserved because the United States did not want to appear to be driving the process, officials said, especially because of the country's past ties with Allawi.

The second nugget of information is that whoever Allawi is, Ahmed Chalabi doesn't like him. I know this via another Laurie Mylroie mass e-mail, which contained a link to this scathing Al Arab commentary by one Dr. Haifa Al-Azawi. The last paragraph is all you need to read:

These kinds of people can put our U.S. government and our troops in bad positions and in danger. Laura [sic] Myroie, author of "Bush vs. the Beltway," and critical of the CIA handling of Iraq, blamed Allawi for what she said was faulty intelligence that endangered the U.S. troops at the end of the Gulf War. The United States plans to turn over power to Iraqis by July 1. We are all hoping to see reasonable, honest people in power; we do not want to see another potential Saddam. (emphasis added)

If Mylroie doesn't like him, Chalabi doesn't like him. [So does that mean he's a good choice or a bad one?--ed. My gut says to be mildly pessimistic. The IGC chose him so they wouldn't be locked out of the next government and the spoils that come with it. There had to have been some serious quid pro quos for Allawi to get the support from the council. My one prediction, therefore, is that some corruption scandal will break between now and January.

On the other hand, play the following game -- stack the accusations made against Allawi and Chalabi side by side and see if they're exactly identical or just roughly idential.]

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman has more on Allawi -- he's not a fan (link via David Adesnik).

The Economist has a survey of Russia this week. Its core thesis:

He [Vladimir Putin] wants Russia to be a strong country: economically powerful, politically stable and internationally respected. What is in dispute is what those goals mean to him, the methods he uses to achieve them, and whether he is as powerful as he seems.

This survey looks back at Mr Putin's first term and forward to the second. It tries to reconcile the optimistic and pessimistic views by showing that both contain much truth, and both are necessary to understand today's Russia. Economic liberalism and political illiberalism are complementary parts of Mr Putin's strategy, but his contribution to both is often exaggerated. Russia's new-found prosperity is fragile and will require deep and difficult reforms to sustain. At the same time the shrinkage of freedoms is less clear-cut than it seems, and not always the result of orders from the top.

What is clear is that an open economy and a closed political system make uneasy bedfellows. The overweening bureaucracy is harming business, and not just that of power-hungry magnates like Mr Khodorkovsky, but of the little people building the foundations of Russia's new economy. Encouragingly, business is fighting back, and citizens, increasingly deprived of a political voice at the top, are beginning to build democracy from the bottom up.

Now, if you read this survey on the Internet, you come away with a cautiously optimistic picture of the country.

However, there is the rare moment with looking at something in print provides greater information than reading it on the Internet. This is one of those times, and that information suggests that Russia is worse off than the survey's author, Gideon Lichfield, suggests.

Why? In the print edition of the Economist, most country surveys like these are filled with advertisements from either large companies indigenous to the country in question, or large multinationals with significant amounts of foreign direct investment. Generally speaking, the number of ads is a rough indicator of the economic dynamism of the surveyed country. In February, for example, a survey of India had five full ad pages.

For this 16-page survey, there was only one half-page advertisement -- and that came from the state-owned export-import bank.

In contrast, when Ukraine had a survey a decade ago, it was a basket case of hyperinflation and ethnic tensions -- but there were at least two ads.

Russia's economy is more fragile than the Economist believes.

I've blogged about the atrocities taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan before here and here. A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times' Robyn Dixon reported on the growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan:

Barefoot and half-naked, Hamesa Adam carried two sons on her back for six days across the searing Sudanese desert. Two other children, missing their dead father, walked barefoot, and two more rode a donkey.

But 6-year-old Mohammed, one of the children on the donkey, got weaker and weaker.

He cried constantly, clutching at his side. There was not enough food. On the fourth day, Mohammed struggled off the donkey and fell onto the sand.

They buried him nearby, about 2 feet down, placing branches on the grave to keep animals from digging up his body.

This is the story of the Adam family, Sudanese farmers chased from their homes by Arab militias on horses and camels who swept down on their village, Selti, about three months ago with a kind of ruthless, medieval wrath: killing, raping, looting, burning. Some attacked in Land Cruisers mounted with automatic weapons. From the air, two helicopters strafed the village.

About 100,000 farmers in the Darfur region of western Sudan have made the same epic journey as the Adam family these past weeks and months, fleeing west into Chad....

Some refugees say that Khartoum government forces have taken part in the scorched-earth attacks, swooping down on villages with helicopters and Antonov planes. Human Rights Watch, based in New York, reported that government forces, allied with the Arab militias, carried out widespread ethnic killings and dispossession.

The Arab militias, mainly herdsmen, are terrorizing black African farmers from the Zaghawa, Fur and Massalit tribes and grabbing the spoils: land, stock, money and anything else they can steal. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum denies it controls the militias, but observers point out that it serves the government's interests to repress areas where it is fighting rebels.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

This was probably not the best week for the Bush administration to take steps towards lifting the arms embargo on the Sudanese government.

This is the kind of goof that someone responsible for public diplomacy -- like an Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, let's say -- could have caught. Oh, wait....

UPDATE: It should be noted that despite the PR screwup I alluded to earlier in this post, Human Rights Watch -- not exactly the most Bush-friendly organization -- has praised U.S. behavior on this front:

The U.S. government has taken the strongest public stance on Darfur of any individual government, with repeated statements condemning the human rights abuses and calling on the government of Sudan to address the situation. On April 7, U.S. President George Bush condemned “atrocities” in Sudan and called for unrestricted humanitarian access.

The U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on Darfur, or in which Darfur was prominently mentioned. U.S. aid officials have frequently drawn attention to the enormous humanitarian needs in the region, with repeated visits to Darfur and statements. U.S. AID’s chief executive Andrew Natsios held a press conference to denounce the Sudanese government’s stalling on visas for twenty-eight U.S. emergency relief workers.

Contrast that with the EU's latest pronouncement on Darfur -- pretty weak beer. Click here for HRW's list of policy recommendations.

The Financial Times reports on some unsettling poll results from Iraq:

An Iraqi poll to be released next week shows a surge in the popularity of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical young Shia cleric fighting coalition forces, and suggests nearly nine out of 10 Iraqis see US troops as occupiers and not liberators or peacekeepers.

The poll was conducted by the one-year-old Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is considered reliable enough for the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to have submitted questions to be included in the study.

Although the results of any poll in Iraq's traumatised society should be taken with caution, the survey highlights the difficulties facing the US authorities in Baghdad as they confront Mr Sadr, who launched an insurgency against the US-led occupation last month....

Saadoun Duleimi, head of the centre, said more than half of a representative sample - comprising 1,600 Shia, Sunni Arabs and Kurds polled in all Iraq's main regions - wanted coalition troops to leave Iraq. This compares with about 20 per cent in an October survey. Some 88 per cent of respondents said they now regarded coalition forces in Iraq as occupiers.

"Iraqis always contrast American actions with American promises and there's now a wide gap in credibility," said Mr Duleimi, who belongs to one of the country's big Sunni tribes. "In this climate, fighting has given Moqtada credibility because he's the only Iraqi man who stood up against the occupation forces."....

Respondents saw Mr Sadr as Iraq's second most influential figure after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most senior Shia cleric. Some 32 per cent of respondents said they strongly supported Mr Sadr and another 36 per cent somewhat supported him.

The one piece of good news that skeptics and optimists about Iraq could agree upon was that Sadr did not command significant amounts of support among the Iraqi populace. This poll makes it much tougher to maintain that assertion. This isn't a question of media bias -- this is a very uncomfortable reality that must be acknowledged by policymakers and oundits of all stripes.

The one possible caveat, ironically, is that the poll was taken before the Abu Ghraib scandals [How the hell is that good news?--ed. Because that also means the poll was likely taken before a) U.S. troops demonstrated they were willing to take on Sadr's militia; and b) Grand Ayatollah Sistani vocally turned against Sadr. If Reuel Marc Gerecht is correct in saying that the prison scandals "have not elicited much condemnation from Iraq's Arab Shiites and Sunni Kurds, who represent about 80 percent of the country's population," then Sadr's popularity might actually have declined since the poll was taken.]

Josh Chafetz has assigned me the homework task of explaining the ramifications of the surprising Indian elections for India's economic development and relations with Pakistan.

Actually, I think the links Chafetz provides in his post do a fair job of capturing some of the dynamics. As this Washington Post editorial points out, it wasn't an increase in poverty that caused the BJP to fall:

Mr. Vajpayee is said to have been punished for the pro-market reforms that fostered India's high-tech boom; voters in the villages felt left out and took their revenge at the ballot box. This suggests that even the world's most successful economic reformers run big political risks. India conducted poverty surveys in 1993 and '94 and again in 1999 and 2000; over that period, the rural poverty rate fell from 37 percent to 30 percent, so the idea that the villagers have not benefited from India's growth is spurious. Given India's continued boom since 2000, poverty in the villages has almost certainly fallen further. Mr. Vajpayee apparently got no thanks for this.

Salman Rushdie suggests that it wasn't rural poverty so much as growing inequality that triggered this outcome:

The Indian battle for centrality in the debate about the country's future has always been, to some degree, a battle between the city and the village. It is between, on the one hand, the urbanized, industrialized India favored by both the socialist-inclined Jawaharlal Nehru and the free-market architects of "India Shining," the new India in which a highly successful capitalist class has transformed the heights of the economy; and, on the other hand, the agricultural, homespun India beloved of Mahatma Gandhi, the immense countryside India where three-quarters of the population still lives and which has not benefited in the slightest from the recent economic boom.

It's no accident that the ruling alliance lost heavily in Andhra Pradesh and in Tamil Nadu, precisely the states that wooed information technology giants such as Microsoft to set up shop, turning sleepy "second cities" such as Madras, Bangalore and Hyderabad into new-tech boom towns. That's because while the rich got richer, the fortunes of the poor, such as the farmers of Andhra, declined year by year. The gulf between India's rich and poor has never looked wider than it does today, and the government has fallen into that chasm.

Rushdie also points out the numerous sins of the government in power -- particularly it's hidden-hand role in the 2002 pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat. The Economist provides an excellent summary account as well.

My quick answers to Josh's questions -- the election returns aren't going to affect all that much of India's policy, except that there will be a ratcheting up of anti-American rhetoric. Congress has repeatedly said that its committed to the liberalization program -- and 8% GDP growth buys a lot more rural development aid than the 4% growth that would come if liberalization stalled. Relations with Pakistan might worsen a bit, in the sense that the BJP, as Hindu nationalists, had the credibility to compromise. Congress might not have that margin of error.

UPDATE: Looks like India's financial markets are less sanguine than I about the election results.

I've received a fair amount of e-mail traffic politely asking me to reconsider my call for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. Here's one snippet:

I do think that you... are falling into a kind of academic groupthink that is at least 160 degrees off of reality. As I see it, Rumsfeld has consistently been proven correct about the size of the force and the appropriate methods for achieving our objectives.

I agree that Rumsfeld has been proven correct in his warfighting strategies. I am completely unconvinced that Rumsfeld has been proven correct in his statebuilding strategies.

Others are accusing me of just following the crowd of lily-livered Bush-haters -- you know, George Will, David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Tom Friedman, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Max Boot, Peter Beinart, and Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, John Warner, and John McCain -- now voicing qualms about the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation.

So, let me collect the most optimistic news about Iraq that I've seen recently and see if I should change my mind:

1) It could be worse. At Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling and Charles Rousseaux list the various important things that haven't gone wrong in Iraq (Kling link via Milt Rosenberg). Rousseaux in particular reinforces an important about the lack of civil uprising:

One of the most important developments has been the gradual defanging of Muqtada al-Sadar and his Mahdi militia by both Coalition forces and moderate Shi'ites. When the radical cleric rose in revolt, he appeared to have put Coalition forces in an impossible position: If they attacked, they would risk alienating the Iraqi population with casualties and the destruction of holy places; if they failed to attack, they would give him the country. The persistent pressure applied instead appears to be having a pronounced effect. Earlier this week, a joint patrol of U.S. Marines and Iraqi forces entered Fallujah for the first time. While they weren't met by flowers, they weren't met by grenades either. In Najaf and Karbala, Coalition forces have cut down many members of the Mahdi militia and captured or destroyed a number of its arms caches. Last weekend, they captured two of Sadr's top aides. On Monday, Coalition forces blew up one of his two main headquarters in Baghdad.

Part of the reason that Coalition forces have acted so aggressively is that they no longer fear a popular revolt. Last week, a large group of influential Shi'ite leaders told Sadr to leave the holy places and the arms he had stored there. On both Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of individuals marched through Najaf calling for Sadr to depart. Even more are expected to turn out to demand Sadr's expulsion on Friday. They've been called into the streets by senior Shi'ite leader Sadruddin Qubanchi, who is allied with the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. For good reason, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on Tuesday titled, "Iraq Cleric Faces Showdown with Moderate Shiites." They want Sadr to go back to where he came from -- namely an embryonic state -- so that they can get back to the lucrative business of servicing the pilgrims who come to those holy places. It's something they can't do while being held hostage in their own cities, and the numbers of devout travelers have dropped to a trickle.

2) Some Iraqis are grateful. Andrew Sullivan links to this amusing Iraqi post.

3) Statebuilding has not completely failed in Iraq. The fact that I found most depressing over the past six weeks was the utter failure of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces to maintain their positions in the face of insurgent attacks, leading to a partial breakdown of order. This signaled the deep problems with the U.S. statebuilding effort.

Sullivan also links to this New York Times story suggesting that at least some of this statebuilding effort has not been for naught:

American soldiers were forced to fight insurgents holed up in the Mukhaiyam shrine, a domed building next to a high school and near the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Militiamen had regrouped at the shrine in the middle of the fighting and had begun launching mortars from there at the American-occupied mosque. Special Forces soldiers led teams of Iraqi commandos to the area and drove the insurgents from the shrine during an intense firefight.

The two dozen or so Iraqi commandos who helped the Americans in the battle were part of the Iraqi Counter Terrorist Force, trained in Jordan to combat insurgents. They acted under the supervision of Special Forces, who instructed them on clearing munitions from the Mukhaiyam Mosque and shrine and from the high school. Special Forces soldiers guided much of the battle on the ground, storming the mosque and setting up a base there to direct troops.

The Special Forces soldiers appeared impressed by the weapons caches found in the area. Those included powerful 155-millimeter artillery shells, Italian land mines and sniper rifles. In all, the munitions were the equivalent of more than 100 roadside bombs, one of the most effective killers of American soldiers in Iraq, a military intelligence analyst said. Sappers wired the caches with plastic explosives and detonated them as most of the American troops left the area.

Rumsfeld himself said in his Senate testimony that 80 to 90 percent of Iraqis are "being governed by local councils," which is pretty significant.

OK, that's the best I can do (readers are asked to provide links to even better news).

Is that enough for me to change my mind about Rummy? No, it's not.

The above list indicates that the situation in Iraq is not hopeless, which is an unambiguously good thing. What the list doesn't indicate is what Rumsfeld's doctrines and decisions have done to improve the situation in Iraq. After a year of Rumsfeld overseeing the handling of Iraq, opinion polls show that a majority of Iraqis want the U.S. to conduct an immediate withdrawal, and 80% of Iraqis don't have much confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority (both links via Mark Kleiman)

[What, you expected this to be easy? Show some backbone!--ed.] No, I didn't expect it to be easy. However, I did expect Rumsfeld, as a smart individual who wanted to be in charge of Iraqi statebuilding, to recognize some of the resource constraints he faced and take the necessary steps to solve them. Rumsfeld has been given clear and direct warnings on this since last summer, and there's strong evidence that he's correctly processed this information. There's just not much evidence that his solution -- train new Iraqi security forces from scratch -- has worked. The side effects have been serious. The absence of a proper U.S. constabulary force, combined with a failure to guard Iraq's borders, have led Iraqis to the opinions they hold now about American troops -- and those opinions aren't good. The failure to provide security, combined with Abu Ghraib, have tarnished perceptions of U.S. power and legitimacy. As much as Rumsfeld may want to deny it, perception and legitimacy are valuable in world politics. They make it much less costly to influence international interactions, by making the exercise of hard power less frequent. Donald Rumsfeld's management of the Defense

I don't think Iraq is hopeless -- but I also don't think that Rumsfeld has made much of a positive contribution since the end of the "major combat." It's precisely because I want to see the U.S. succeed in Iraq that I think it's worth it to replace Rummy ASAP.

The Sudanese government is aiding and abetting the killing of African Muslims in its western Darfur region. According to Bloomberg:

Government forces have helped so-called Arab Janjaweed militias kill thousands of members of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, according to the [Human Rights Watch] report. More than one million civilians have been driven into camps and settlements from their homes, and in excess of 110,000 others have fled into neighboring Chad....

The conflict escalated in February last year when the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement started a rebellion in Darfur, complaining that the region, particularly its black population, is marginalized by the government. Since then, the Janjaweed militia, who are also Muslim, has targeted civilians from the same ethnic groups as the rebels, according to the report.

The Janjaweed, supported by government forces and helicopters, have killed civilians and religious leaders, destroyed mosques, burned homes, and looted food and livestock, the report says.

"Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians, including women and children, burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa,'' the report says. The Janjaweed militias "have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Korans belonging to their enemies.''

Human Rights Watch documents the killing of more than 770 civilians in 14 separate attacks between September and February, and says the conflict has caused more damage than that. The HRW team spent 25 days in and near West Darfur investigating the abuses, entering from Chad.

"Our report covers particular villages in one small area,'' said Rone. "The killings are much more widespread.''

Here's a link to the actual Human Rights Watch report, "Darfur Destroyed." You can read HRW's press release by clicking here.

This looks like a job for the U.N. Human Rights Commission!! Oh, wait...

UPDATE: The Economist has a nice story encapsulating the Sudan problem.

As a first step to overcomung my funk, it's worth looking at the good news coming out of the country of Georgia. The Economist reports:

Almost all post-Soviet states are failing, but some fail more than others. That rule helps in understanding the success this week of Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s youthful president, in reasserting control over the breakaway region of Ajaria. In the days of his predecessor, Edward Shevardnadze, this comic-opera statelet in Georgia’s south-west corner functioned a bit less badly than the rest of the country: it was a fief of its diminutive leader, Aslan Abashidze, who enjoyed cosy relations with local Russian generals and a share of the spoils from cross-border trade in oil and other commodities. Compared with the chaos in the rest of Georgia, Ajaria was a haven of normality; streets were swept and opposition barely existed.

But things are different under Mr Saakashvili, who forced Mr Abashidze to flee the country on Wednesday May 5th—calling him a “mini-Saddam Hussein”—and then flew to Batumi, Ajaria’s capital, to savour victory. The new Georgian leader has brought fresh dynamism, plus a thumping popular mandate, to the task of making his country more of a proper state.

Mr Shevardnadze was swept from power six months ago in a peaceful uprising that became known as Georgia’s “rose revolution”. The 37-year-old Mr Saakashvili won the election that followed by a landslide and took office in January. Since then, he has managed to collect more taxes, raise the pay of customs officers, pay pensions and arrest some very rich people. The way these folk have been hauled in and induced to pay large sums of money to the Georgian treasury might not always satisfy Mr Saakashvili’s erstwhile law professors at New York’s Columbia University. But it has started to look as though Georgia is the real state—and Ajaria the failed one.

That is how Mr Saakashvili was able to raise the pressure on Mr Abashidze to step down and seek haven in Russia. “The time for babbling is over,” the president said, as he ordered his army—whose abilities American advisers have struggled to improve—to stage exercises on the statelet’s boundary. “We will never again allow the appropriation of any part of Georgia by bandits, narcotics dealers and local feudal lords.” For all his subsequent defiance, Mr Abashidze’s power melted away. His coastguard—one seaworthy ship—sailed to Poti. The commander of an army brigade based in Batumi declared his loyalty to Mr Abashidze, only to find most subordinates going the other way. Thousands demonstrated in support of Mr Saakashvili in Batumi (he claims to have 90% support in the region). Finally, late on Wednesday, a former Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who had helped to ease out Mr Shevardnadze last November, performed the same trick with Mr Abashidze. A jubilant Mr Saakashvili told the people of Batumi “you are heroes”. He added that “Georgia will be united”.

It may also become a bit less poor as a result of Mr Abashidze’s departure. Having introduced presidential rule in Ajaria, Mr Saakashvili can now get his hands on its port, which handles 200,000 barrels of oil per day, and a busy customs post on the border with Turkey. These could provide much-needed foreign exchange for the central government’s depleted coffers.

Glenn Reynolds links to The Argus, who has a passel of useful links and information, including the U.S. role in assisting Saakashvili.

The Economist -- and the Thai government, apparently -- seems stumped about the latest violence in the south of Thailand:

On Thursday, hundreds of extra troops poured into southern Thailand to try to pacify the region. The trouble is, the authorities still do not seem to have any clear idea whom they are fighting or why the violence has escalated so quickly. At various times, different officials have described the attackers as Muslim separatists, mafiosi, and arms smugglers. Some have accused parliamentarians from Mr [Prime Minister Shinawatra] Thaksin’s own party of abetting the insurgents, while others have criticised Malaysia for allowing suspects to escape over the border. Many consider the militants terrorists, and have hinted at connections with outfits like al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah.

Mr Thaksin, however, insists that the problem is purely domestic. Though pictures of the dead militants in the Thai media showed that many had Islamic slogans on their clothes, the prime minister insisted that they were nothing more than drug-crazed “bandits” on a crime spree, blaming local politicians for supporting them. But he has provided so many pat explanations of the violence, and promised so many times to bring it to a swift conclusion, that his assurance is beginning to look like bluster.

Reuters reports that despite some anger among the Thai Muslim minority, the religious establishment in the country has backed the government's show of force:

Critics were quick to question the insistence of Thaksin and his cousin and army chief, General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra, that drugs and crime rather than religious or separatist ideology lay at the root of the violence.

"What the two leaders do not see, or pretend not to see, is that this is not about addiction or banditry; this is about a fanatical ideology that none of us knew existed on such a grand scale," the Nation newspaper said in a front page editorial.

In the worst violence, troops fired teargas and stormed a centuries-old mosque, killing 34 gunmen holed up inside. An angry crowd gathered to watch as soldiers dragged bodies from the bullet-riddled building.

With Muslim sentiment divided between anger and support for military action at the mosque, Thailand's top Muslim cleric, speaking on national television, backed the operation.

"The authorities exercised reasonable restraint in dealing with the situation. They were patient and waited for a long time outside the mosque," spiritual leader Sawat Sumalayasak said.

"It was reasonable for the government to take such action."

Others disagreed.

"If the officers had waited for another couple of days they could have caught them alive, but they didn't. They killed them all," Uma Meah, secretary of the Central Islamic Committee of Pattani, said after a meeting of residents.

It's far from clear just what is driving the violence in the south. I'll leave it to the commenters to suggest whether the problem is local or transnational.

UPDATE: Hmmm... Indonesia is having problems with Muslim extremists as well.

Expect to read "Muslim extremism in Southeast Asia" stories for the next week.

The Chicago Tribune interviews Northeastern Illinois University accounting professor Yass Alkafaji, and Iraqi émigré who went to Baghdad in January to "serve in the Coalition Provisional Authority as the director of finance for the Ministry of Higher Education." Read the whole interview -- but here are some of his thoughts:

Q. What is your take on the mood of the Iraqi people?

A. They are thankful to the U.S. for getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and they are content that the military needs to be there. But after that, they are divided between how long should the U.S. military stay and whether they are doing a good job or not. The U.S. military presence is very visible, and they [the soldiers] are really scared, so their posture is very offensive. They see Iraqis, and they put guns in your face. They move in convoys, and they tell people to get away from them. When the convoys are in a traffic jam in the middle of Baghdad, that is the most dangerous thing. So they shout at people to get out of the way, and they drive up on the sidewalk of some stores. That creates a lot of hard feelings for the Iraqis.

Q. What about the economic and employment situation with ordinary Iraqis?

A. Most of the people are not informed of what the U.S. is doing because they don't see the visible improvement of their livelihood, especially those who don't have a government job . . . I think there is still a lot of confusion about who is the good Iraqi and who is the bad Iraqi. I think [the U.S.] has shown to the rest of the world that we are really ignorant when it comes to dealing with other cultures. We have a great military power, but when it comes to building nations we have no idea. You can see the tension in the clashes between the British and Americans in the palace. The Americans will say `do this or do that' and the British will just be shaking their head. But the British have a much longer history in the Middle East, and they know how to deal with the Arab mentality. They feel very marginalized....

Q. Depending on how people want to spin it, they characterize the recent violence as a few bad apples or a popular uprising. How do you see it?

A. Surveys show about 70 percent of the Iraqi people accept that there is a need for the American military to be in Iraq, otherwise it will be chaotic and there will be no security on the ground. Of course, if you talk to someone in Sadr City with a first-grade education, they will say otherwise. One day I was waiting seven hours to try to leave the compound to try to see my sister. We had some thugs from the Sadr group demonstrating 15 feet away saying, "We want the U.S. out." So I said, "OK, the U.S. is out and then what next? Who is going to control the country?" They don't think about the implications of what they say.

David Adesnik also has some good links on Iraq.

Larry Diamond -- one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures -- was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond's experiences in the field. He's still optimistic about democracy promotion -- but not about Iraq:

The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities.

"We just bungled this so badly," said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "We just weren't honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country."

Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq -- lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind.

Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane.

Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration's unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents.

"You can't develop democracy without security," he said. "In Iraq, it's really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don't get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that."....

His recommendations for rescuing the situation run counter to some of the policies that the Bush administration insists it will not alter. Diamond said that, in his view, the United States must more than double its current military force of about 135,000 and confront the violent Iraqi militias consistently, while offering political benefits to those who lay down their arms and accept democratic institutions.

The best he can say about the prospects in Iraq now is that, as he puts it, "civil war is not inevitable."

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times reports that Pakistan is having some success in its spring offensive against the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Northwest frontier:

The commander of American-led forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, said Monday that Pakistan had successfully disrupted the Qaeda network in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and had significantly affected its ability to support a suspected Taliban insurgency across the border in Afghanistan.

In an interview in Kabul, the Afghan capital, General Barno commended the Pakistani military for its "bold moves" against foreign fighters in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan in March. He said it had so far prevented an anticipated offensive this spring in Afghanistan by the remnants of Taliban fighters who are suspected to have taken refuge across the Pakistani border in tribal areas.

"There have been some tough fights, so I give them great credit for making some bold moves over there," he said. The Pakistani operation since January has been larger and more intense than the previous level of enforcement in the border area, he said. He added that it appears to have disrupted what had been a very stable area for Al Qaeda's foreign fighters and senior leadership, where they are believed to have lived and operated for two years.

"That has had a significant unsettling effect on their organization over there and to some degree on their ability to support the Taliban as well," he said of Al Qaeda. "But clearly they are concerned about what is going on over there."....

The Pakistani authorities estimate that 500 to 600 foreign Qaeda fighters are in the tribal areas, including top Qaeda leaders. In fighting in March, Pakistan said it killed about 60 people and captured 160 more, including Uzbeks and other foreigners. Nevertheless, there was no sign that any Qaeda members had escaped into Afghanistan, he said.

American forces positioned on the Pakistan-Afghan border to catch any fighters escaping the Pakistani operation, in what the general has described as a "hammer and anvil" tactic, had seen little movement across the border into Afghanistan, he said. "Our sense is that anyone who is there, is still there," he said.

There was every sign that the Qaeda fighters would stay in the Pakistani tribal areas and fight, partly because they knew it was "extraordinarily dangerous" for them to operate in Afghanistan because of the presence of American troops, he said.

The Economist has a good backgrounder in the Iraqi uprising(s), which may ironically be leading to greater interethnic coordination. This is the depressing graf:

A striking feature of the latest turbulence has been the failure of Iraq's fledgling police force to stand up to the rebels. Though police numbers have risen from 30,000 last July to over 78,000 today, they are clearly no match yet for determined militiamen such as those of Mr Sadr. In Baghdad this week, policemen simply abandoned their stations. Elsewhere, some switched sides.

Noam Scheiber converts some of these lemons into lemonade:

[B]efore this week, the administration's plan was to hand over power in Iraq as quickly as possible, and to begin withdrawing American troops soon after that. Had people like Moqtada al Sadr been savvier, they could have waited until after that transition had been completed, and after tens of thousands of American troops had been withdrawn, to start causing trouble. At that point we'd have been powerless to stop them, and, worse, more or less ignorant of what they were doing--since the whole point of the Bush administration's withdrawal would have been to get Iraq out of the newspapers in time for the election campaign. Now that al Sadr et al have jumped the gun, they've forced the administration to confront a problem--Iraq's utter lack of security and political stability--it was otherwise inclined to ignore.

Virginia Postrel typically has smart things to say:

I have the same problem blogging on this topic that I do blogging on every little twitch in the economic statistics: It's too hard to separate the transient noise from the long-run trend, and the long run is what matters. Things are bad in Iraq right now, but is this a last-gasp effort by our enemies, the beginning of a quagmire, or, most likely, something in between whose conclusion depends largely on our response? Rushing to judgment, especially from afar, is a prescription for foolish conclusions and bad policies.

In the wake of the second intifada and the increase in suicide bombings over the past four years, it's tempting -- particularly post 9/11 -- to pidgeonhole all Palestinians as a feckless, violent people. Sheik Yassin's assassination and the resulting protests in the occupied territories only reinforce that perception.

That kind of easy stereotyping is dangerous, because it obscures the complexities within Palestinian society that I've discussed in the past. I'm not saying that Palestinian civil society is in a healthy state -- merely that it would be a mistake to assume that Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Al-Aqsa = Palestine.

On that note, the Chicago Tribune reports the following:

Sixty prominent Palestinian political figures and intellectuals published a statement Thursday urging restraint and peaceful protest instead of violent revenge for Israel's assassination this week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the militant group Hamas.

The unusual appeal came after Hamas and other armed factions vowed to strike Israel on an unprecedented scale in retaliation for the killing of Yassin in a helicopter missile strike Monday in the Gaza Strip. It also came a day after a 16-year-old boy wearing an explosives vest was disarmed in the West Bank, an event that shocked many, including the boy's family.

The Palestinian statement, published on half a page of the Al-Ayyam newspaper, called on Palestinians to break the violent cycle of strike and response, reflecting a growing assessment among mainstream leaders that armed attacks have hurt the Palestinian cause....

The signatories included senior members of the mainstream Fatah movement, lawmakers, academics and peace advocates.

"We feel Sharon has dictated his agenda on both sides, condemning the Israeli people to acts of retaliation and more suicide bombings, and he has also forced the hand of the Palestinian organizations to exact revenge," said Hanan Ashrawi, a lawmaker who signed the statement.

"We want to expose Sharon's policy and prevent the Palestinians from reacting constantly, and to say that there is a way to resist occupation through non-violent means," she added.

Another signer, Ahmad Hilles, the head of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip, said that "it is not in the Palestinians' interest for the conflict to become an armed conflict, . . . the arena preferred by Sharon."

The Washington Post reports on an imminent deal to disarm the two big militias remaining in Iraq. The key parts:

Leaders of Iraq's two largest militias have provisionally agreed to dissolve their forces, according to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials. The move is a major boost to a U.S. campaign to prevent civil war by eliminating armed groups before sovereignty is handed over to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, the officials said.

Members of the two forces -- the Shiite Muslim Badr Organization and the Kurdish pesh merga -- will be offered a chance to work in Iraq's new security services or claim substantial retirement benefits as incentives to disarm and disband. Members of smaller militias will also be allowed to apply for positions with the new security services, but those that choose not to disband will be confronted and disarmed, by force if necessary, senior U.S. officials said.

The occupation authority is still negotiating with Kurdish and Shiite leaders, who want more extensive guarantees than they have been offered. But U.S., Kurdish and Shiite officials said they had secured an agreement in principle and likely will announce a formal deal within the next few weeks.

"We believe that all militia members should be part of one national army and police force," said Hamid Bayati, a top official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite political party that controls the Badr Organization, which is estimated to have at least 10,000 members.

Jalal Talabani, one of Iraq's two top Kurdish leaders, said in an interview that Kurdish officials have "an agreement with the coalition to find an honorable solution for the pesh merga."

Comment on the missile strike that killed Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin here.

Lee Smith has an provocative Slate essay on what Islamists are talking about when they talk about democracy. Among the highlights:

There is an ongoing debate in the Muslim world, American academia, and now also U.S. policy circles concerning the nature of Islamist democracy. Undoubtedly, Islam is as compatible with democracy as any other religion. But whether democracy comports well with a movement that has in the past advocated jihad and is responsible for thousands of deaths, 1,200 in Egypt alone, is another question entirely. Indeed, some of the Islamist movement's most influential ideologues have very specifically opposed democracy because it invests political sovereignty in the people—"We, the people"—rather than in God.

Nevertheless, recent books like Noah Feldman's After Jihad and Graham Fuller's The Future of Political Islam suggest that the Islamist movement may indeed be compatible with democracy. They find that while there are holdouts like Osama Bin Laden dead set against anything like democracy, there are many, perhaps even a majority of Islamists who favor free elections. Unfortunately, that's about as far as the Islamists go when it comes to democracy. Free elections are OK, since they see that they would do very well in polling places across the region. However, it's not at all clear that the Islamists have any interest in the broad array of liberties—like freedom of speech and equal rights—that most people, certainly most citizens of liberal democracies, associate with democracy.

Later on in the essay, Smith acknowledges that Islamists who actually understand/support what constitutes a liberal democracy may not say so publicly:

[D]issimulation is a well-established technique in the history of the 100-plus-year-old Muslim reform movement, even among two of its leading figures, Jamal al-din al-Afghani and his greatest disciple, Muhammad Abdu. Abdu once relayed to a correspondent that he followed his master in the belief that "the head of religion can only be cut with the sword of religion." The fact is, as another Muslim reformer, wrote, "We found that ideas which were by no means accepted when coming from your agents in Europe were accepted at once with the greatest delight when it was proved that they were latent in Islam."

So the $64,000 question -- what does Grand Ayatollah Sistani -- may be impossible to ferret out.

The New York Times reports that there was a human rights protest in a place where neither human rights nor protests are all that common -- Syria:

The security police quickly squelched an extremely rare public demonstration demanding political reform on Monday, the 41st anniversary of the Baath Party's seizure of power here.

Organizers and other reform advocates said the huge police presence in downtown Damascus, which far outnumbered the demonstrators, was a sign of how jittery the government and especially the overlapping security services remained just a year after the rapid fall of the Baath Party in neighboring Iraq.

"There was a band of about 20 to 30 nonviolent people, hardly a group that could threaten the government, yet it reacted in a way that is completely out of proportion," said a Syrian intellectual who declined to be quoted by name, fearing reprisals.

Rights advocates and others seeking reform planned to draw attention to their petition demanding the lifting of emergency laws, which have been in place throughout Baath Party rule, by staging a sit-in at the gates of Parliament. The reform advocates say they have gathered 7,000 signatures to support their demands.

But when the small band unfurled a few paper banners reflecting their demands, dozens of plainclothes security officers pounced. They shredded the banners and ripped up the notebooks of some reporters covering the protest, igniting numerous scuffles.

In addition to that, a U.S. diplomat was detained by Syrian security officials for an hour, prompting a vigorous protest from the United States.

Although security officials clamped down on the protest pretty much before it started, its organizer was released, because he gave an interview to the Associated Press after the protest. He sounds undaunted:

Aktham Naisse, who leads the Committees for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights in Syria, said Monday's sit-in outside parliament was a success even though police quickly detained all the demonstrators.

"As activists, we were able to send a clear message to the Syrian street, and to international public opinion, that we are serious about our demands and program," Naisse told The Associated Press in an interview. "We embarrassed the Syrian authorities which, unfortunately, showed they are unable and unwilling to meet our demands."....

Naisse, who was told to appear for further questioning later Tuesday, told AP: "I think the authorities realized it was foolish of them to arrest us, and would have been even more foolish to keep us under arrest. There would have been an extremely high political price to pay if they did."

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to this BBC story about the incident. And this BBC article provides some more backstory.

Fareed Zakaria argues that the attacks on Iraqi Shiites last week demonstrates that Islamic extremism are growing more desperate and less powerful (link via Josh Chafetz):

That Islamic extremist groups are now targeting Shiites is surely a sign of desperation. Unable to launch major terrorist attacks in the West, unable to attract political support in the Middle East, militant Islam is searching for enemies and causes.

Consider the progress of Al Qaeda and affiliated terror groups over the past three years. For a decade they had attacked high-profile American targets only—embassies, a naval destroyer, the World Trade Center. Once the United States mobilized against them, and got the world to join that fight, what have they hit? A discotheque, a few synagogues, a couple of restaurants and hotels, all soft targets that could not ever be protected, and all outside the Western world. As a result, the terrorists have killed mostly Muslims, which is marginalizing them in the world of Islam....

Support for violent Islam is waning in almost all major Muslim countries. Discussions from Libya to Saudi Arabia are all about liberalization. Ever since September 11, when the spotlight has been directed on these societies and their dysfunctions laid bare to the world, it is the hard-liners who are in retreat and the moderates on the rise. This does not mean that there will be rapid reform anywhere—there are many obstacles to progress—but it does suggest that the moderates are not running scared anymore.

If this effort pans out, it would certainly constitute another blow to Al Qaeda.

Is this true in Saudi Arabia, where the difference between Wahabbi fundamentalism and official Saudi policy is tissue-thin? Both the Economist and the New York Times Magazine have stories on that country's internal debate about its religious and political future. The latter story has this to say about the Saudi state:

In private, say Western-educated elites, reformists, Islamist reformers and even conservatives outside the cities, it is the royal family that must change. The leaders are old and out of touch with one of the fastest-growing populations in the world, most of whom are under 25. The princes are siphoning off the country's riches. There is no accounting of public funds. The welfare state -- or rather the royal dispensation system -- is collapsing, crime and unemployment are rising. ''It's an old political system like the Soviet system,'' one critic told me. ''We have one party, one ruler, corrupt judges, and all we're supposed to do is praise the government.''

Many in the royal family are aware that the kingdom must evolve. In December, Crown Prince Abdullah, the king's half brother and the royal thought to be the most reform-minded, convened a National Dialogue on extremism in Mecca -- an unusual event at which Wahhabi clerics were forced to listen to Shiites, Sufis and even women. But the royal family works in opaque ways. Crown Prince Abdullah, who is the most likely heir to the throne, talks about the need to change the education system, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, finances both the much-loathed religious police, who drive around in new American jeeps preventing vice and promoting virtue, and those in the interior ministry who keep a vigilant eye on the universities, ensuring they toe the Wahhabi line. Are the princes working at cross-purposes?

Few know. What is known is that every prince has his fief, while the kingdom, as Mansour put it, is like an orchestra without a conductor. King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995 and has been a mostly absent leader. By all accounts he can barely recognize his family members. Yet the question of succession is unresolved. And as long as the kingdom has no conductor, little will change, except that the religious radicals embedded within the establishment will keep seizing more ground -- a reality confirmed by engineers, religious professors and civil servants whom I met in Buraida, Asir, Jidda and Riyadh.

Shortly before Crown Prince Abdullah held his National Dialogue, a petition written primarily by Islamic reformists advocating a constitutional monarchy was submitted to the crown prince and signed by about 300 people -- mostly Islamists, including Abdullah Bejad, along with some liberals. Some of the princes were apoplectic and called the petition a treason. The signers responded with their own outrage. ''Seventy-five percent of countries in the world participate in planning their future,'' an angry professor who was one of the petition's authors ranted to me one night. ''All we are saying is we must have a role in our future. The royal family wants us just to drink camel's milk, ride dune buggies and sit by the fire. After a time you begin to go mad. When people realize no conferences or resolutions will get any results, they are going to do something primitive. And if things go worse here, America will be in trouble, too.''

The Economist concludes that there is some reason for hope:

The most hopeful sign of compromise, albeit outside the current power base, is that moderate Islamists and secular reformers sound prepared, so far, to work together towards winning greater representation for themselves and greater accountability from the royal rulers. Indeed, it is arguable that the al-Qaeda phenomenon has forced non-violent Islamists and secular gradualists to converge. Both lots, in any case, think the house of Saud must adapt or die.

Is there a Saudi Gorbachev—or could Crown Prince Abdullah become one? Probably not. Besides, he would point out that, though Soviet rule ended more or less peacefully, the Union collapsed and the ruling elite were chased out. Perhaps Spain's General Franco is a more hopeful model. But where is a Saudi Adolfo Suárez, let alone a democracy-loving constitutional monarch à la Juan Carlos. He could be there, among the vast array of princes. But no one seems to have found him yet.

According to the Financial Times, many citizens of the new European Union entrants literally cannot understand the acquis communautaire:

Less than two months before 10 new member states join the European Union, it has emerged that about half have failed to translate the EU's 85,000-page rulebook into their national languages.

The embarrassing disclosure could have serious legal consequences, because EU laws are only enforceable in the new member states when written in the national tongue.

Some countries began the vast translation exercise as long ago as 1996, but the complexity of the work - and a shortage of translators - has overwhelmed some accession candidates. "There is an urgent need for this to be done, or there will be problems in implementing EU law in some acceding states," said a spokesman for GĂĽnter Verheugen, the EU enlargement commissioner.

Patrick Belton at OxBlog has been following the Haiti situation, so go check out his posts (here's his latest).

Yesterday the Chicago Tribune had a front-page story illustrating the difficulty of dealing with either the government or the rebels on this issue. The highlights:

[E]xperts and diplomats say several of the top rebel leaders are former military and police officials who are suspected of major human-rights violations while in power and who allegedly have financed their insurgency with past profits from the illegal drug trade.

That puts the would-be leaders on similar footing with the government of embattled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who U.S. officials and others say has allowed Haiti to become one of the region's most significant transit points for Colombian cocaine on its way to the United States....

But as U.S. officials back away from Aristide, they risk helping to power a cadre of unsavory characters who may do little to stem the flow of cocaine and other illicit drugs into the United States, experts and diplomats say.

"There is absolutely nothing redeeming about these guys," said Alex Dupuy, a Haiti expert at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "They are a bunch of thugs. It's hard to imagine that the U.S. would want to support these guys back in power."

The two top rebel leaders have been suspected of involvement in the drug trade. Authorities in Haiti and elsewhere believe top commander Guy Philippe became involved in narcotics smuggling in the 1990s while he was a leading Haitian police official. Philippe denied in an interview with the Tribune that he ever participated in the drug trade....

Haiti's state institutions have long been weak because of the nation's devastated economy. And its now-crumbling police force and much of its political elite have been tainted by the cocaine trade, according to U.S. officials, experts and others.

For two decades, Colombian drug lords have used money and power to turn the island nation into a virtual base of operations, using its isolated beaches and even highways as landing strips to off-load cocaine later shipped to U.S. shores.

Judith Trunzo, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, said last year that an interior minister's travel visa to the United States was canceled because of suspected involvement in narcotics trafficking.

At least five other Haitian officials' visas were canceled under similar suspicion, a diplomatic source said last week.

Read the whole thing.

I've been woefully remiss in failing to mention the current crisis in Haiti. The U.S. has dispatched 50 Marines-- a FAST (Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team unit -- to protect the embassy.

For more, go check out HaitiPundit (link via Tyler Cowen, who's also worth reading on the topic).

Jay Drezner reports on what it's like to work in Jakarta:

[B]eing in Jakarta doesn't make you feel very safe. The security around the city is overwhelming. Every car is searched before it approaches any major hotel or office building (including mirrors on wheels which search under the cars) and to walk into any building you usually have to go through a metal detector and have your bag searched. Now this creates a bit of tension, but what makes it even worse is that almost every local or expat living here who I speak to admits that pretty much all of this activity is for show to make foreigners feel like they are safer. None of these measures would really stop something like the JW Marriott bombing which took place last October. Any security that tried to go to that level would drive itself out of business due to being too customer unfriendly (and its pretty close to that as it is already).

It would seem that hostility to the United States has not waned in Fallujah. The attack on General John Abizaid , the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, would seem to confirm this. This reporter's first-hand account of the attack contains this priceless passage:

Abizaid was walking about, seemingly unfazed, talking to some of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members he had come to visit. I grabbed my camera and began shooting pictures of him talking to an Iraqi commander. I noticed Abizaid, an expert in Arab affairs, was speaking in Arabic. He told me later the commander said, with regard to the attack: "This is Fallujah. What do you expect?"

This would seem to be Juan Cole's assessment as well. Certainly the increase in attacks in recent weeks is fueling fears of Balkanization.

However, the Chicago Tribune has another story on Fallujah today suggesting that the situation might not be as bleak as first thought:

The reputation of Fallujah is simple and fearsome: It's known as the toughest town in Iraq, the epicenter of the insurgency, the place where more than 35 American soldiers have lost their lives.

An attack Thursday--when a top U.S. general's visit was disrupted by rocket-propelled grenades--added more evidence to the indictment.

But something else is happening in Fallujah as residents look for a less violent way to get the Americans out. This city on the banks of the Euphrates River and at the edge of the desert is taking small but critical steps toward choosing its own government....

there are signs of progress in a city where Hussein recruited the shock troops of his military and industrial complex. Water has been restored to 80 percent of the city and there is more electricity now than immediately after major combat, although blackouts still occur.

And there is growing acceptance here that Fallujah has to join the rest of Iraq--at least politically--to secure a fair share of reconstruction cash.

"I am not cooperating with Americans; I am dealing with them," said Mohammed Hassan al-Balwa, president of Fallujah's provisional city council. "We need to help ourselves."

Read the whole article.

UPDATE: The New York Times has more.

The Chicago Tribune's Stephen Franklin reports on how life has changed for Baghdad's booksellers:

Up and down al-Mutanabbi Street, business was booming like never before. Buyers were bunched up in groups, studying piles of new and used books sprawled on the sidewalk or on carts. People wandered in and out of stores, carrying off several books at a time.

A thick crowd of shoppers ruminated over Iyad Nowfal's collection of used English and French historical and political texts, an eclectic assortment that included a worn paperback copy of Golda Meir's autobiography.

But the brisk trade failed to lift the spirits of the middle-age bookseller, a veteran of the street in a slightly decrepit Ottoman-era section of Baghdad that is famous for its printing presses, calligraphers, a coffeehouse frequented by intellectuals and an open-air book market every Friday.

"Freedom is good and not good," Nowfal grumbled, hunching his shoulders against a cold wind. "The good thing is that now you can express yourself. You can read whatever you want. But the bad thing is competition. There are a lot more bookstores, a lot more people selling books, and prices have gone down."

A few other veteran booksellers shared his dismay, recalling the days during Saddam Hussein's regime when they got high prices for forbidden books about politics or Shiite Islamic topics.

"Now you have bad people," complained Hussan al Fadhli, a seller of maps, among them a large, colorful 1990 chart that showed Kuwait as an Iraqi province. Bad people, he explained with a scowl, are merchants who do not respect each other and offer price cuts to customers....

One day Sadek Khadir was arrested because he had let a popular Arab world newsmagazine slip into the offerings he usually spreads out on the sidewalk. But Khadir, a government engineer who moonlights at the Friday book market, was lucky. He spent only a day in the police station, while others were imprisoned for years for selling banned publications. Now his sales of newspapers and magazines have doubled, and he sells whatever he can get his hands on.

Iyad Hamid similarly keeps running out of books for customers. He specializes in works written by Shiite scholars, books that he previously would have sold only to people he knew or who came with good recommendations. He was strict about such precautions because he didn't want to join his colleagues in prison.

With the regime's fall, his prices have come down because it is easier to buy such books. But that doesn't bother him because he sells so much more. His hottest items are anything written by or about Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, a revered Shiite cleric assassinated by the government in 1980. It is rare, he said, for one of those books to sit for more than a day.

Lest you believe that theological texts are the only things selling, let's move on to this anecdote:

Amir Nayef Toma, a translator, English teacher and self-professed guiding spirit for al-Mutanabbi Street's intellectuals, was studying an assortment of popular U.S. paperbacks. He was glad to see that they were cleaner than a few months ago.

The books came from American troops, who got them full of flies and dust during their time at war in the desert, he explained. Toma and other customers persuaded the booksellers to clean them up.

A lifetime devotee of popular American novels, Toma's guru is Sidney Sheldon, and he has an ambitious dream for the new Iraq. He wants to open a Sidney Sheldon Institute for Modern English, where he will teach English to Iraqis and reveal to them the literary magic of the blockbuster American novelist.

UPDATE: Juan Cole has useful thoughts about how the U.S. government could assist the spread of American ideas in the Middle East. One wonders if it will be a component of this initiative.

The New York Times reports on a 17 page memo seized in Badhdad in mid-January that was allegedly written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Al Qaeda operative who the Bush administration argued was the main conduit between the terrorist network and Iraq.

Glenn Reynolds links to the story and is concerned about media coverage. I'm more interested in the substantive implications.

This story makes me feel better about the security situation in Iraq than anything since Hussein's capture. Why? Because it's clear that the Al Qaeda-backed portion of the insurgency is running into serious difficulties:

[The memo] calls the Americans "the biggest cowards that God has created," but at the same time sees little chance that they will be forced from Iraq.

"So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle," the writer of the document said. "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of Shiites....

The Iraqis themselves, the writer says, have not been receptive to taking holy warriors into their homes.

"Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," according to the document. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house."

The writer contends that the American efforts to set up Iraqi security services have succeeded in depriving the insurgents of allies, particularly in a country where kinship networks are extensive.

"The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance," the document says. "When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region."

With some exasperation, the author writes: "We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases.

"By God, this is suffocation!" the writer says.

But there is still time to mount a war against the Shiites, thereby to set off a wider war, he writes, if attacks are well under way before the turnover of sovereignty in June. After that, the writer suggests, any attacks on Shiites will be viewed as Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence that will find little support among the people.

"We have to get to the zero hour in order to openly begin controlling the land by night, and after that by day, God willing," the writer says. "The zero hour needs to be at least four months before the new government gets in place."

That is the timetable, the author concludes, because, after that, "How can we kill their cousins and sons?"

"The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority," the letter states. "This is the democracy. We will have no pretexts." (emphasis added)

Assuming that the memo is real (and the Times does a good job discussing its provenance; I particularly love the circumlocution used to indicate that this didn't come from the INC: it "did not pass through Iraqi groups that American intelligence officials have said in the past may have provided unreliable information." See the Washington Post story for more) then U.S. efforts at statebuilding have been more successful than media coverage would have suggested to date.

Iraq might not have proven to be as hospitable to American troops as was previously thought -- but it's not fertile soil for Al Qaeda either.

[But would the Shia strategy work?--ed. Unlikely -- even Juan Cole points out that "So far most Shiites have declined to take the bait." Now that the strategy has been made public, it will be that much more difficult to implement.]

UPDATE: Josh Chafetz has further thoughts. Greg Djerejian thinks I'm being over-optimistic. Spencer Ackerman doubts the memo's provenance and logic.

FINAL UPDATE: Here's a link to the full text.

The New York Times reports that the godfather of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program has spilled the beans:

The founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has signed a detailed confession admitting that during the last 15 years he provided Iran, North Korea and Libya with the designs and technology to produce the fuel for nuclear weapons, according to a senior Pakistani official and three Pakistani journalists who attended a special government briefing here on Sunday night.

In a two-and-a-half-hour presentation to 20 Pakistani journalists, a senior government official gave an exhaustive and startling account of how Dr. Khan, a national hero, spread secret technology to three countries that have been striving to produce their own nuclear arsenals. Two of them, Iran and North Korea, were among those designated by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil."....

The Bush administration offered no public comment on the Pakistani announcement on Sunday. But in recent weeks, administration officials have said that they forced the government of President Pervez Musharraf to confront the evidence, after Iran and Libya made disclosures that showed their reliance on Pakistani-supplied technology.

"This is the break we have been waiting for," a senior American official said. But the account provided by Pakistani officials carefully avoided pinning any blame on General Musharraf, the army or the Pakistani intelligence service, despite the fact that some of the material — especially what was sent to North Korea — appeared to have been transported on government cargo planes.

Pakistani and American officials have said senior Pakistani Army officials would have known if nuclear hardware had been shipped out of a tightly guarded nuclear facility.

Quick hits:

UPDATE: Several commenters are assuming that I'm accepting the Pakistani investigation at face value, when in fact the Musharraf government knew about this all along. Actually, what I think is worthy of mention is that the government has finally admitted that there's a problem. Until two months ago they weren't even willing to do this.

One of the big questions in the wake of Saddam's capture is what effect it will have on the security situation in Iraq. Reports like these don't offer a world of comfort.

The Washington Post has a front-pager suggesting that the impact -- combined with a choking off of financial incentives -- could prove significant:

As U.S. forces tracked Saddam Hussein to his subterranean hiding place, they unearthed a trove of intelligence about five families running the Iraqi insurgency, according to U.S. military commanders, who said the information is being used to uproot remaining resistance forces.

Senior U.S. officers said they were surprised to discover -- clue by clue over six months -- that the upper and middle ranks of the resistance were filled by members of five extended families from a few villages within a 12-mile radius of the volatile city of Tikrit along the Tigris River. Top operatives drawn from these families organized the resistance network, dispatching information to individual cells and supervising financial channels, the officers said. They also protected Hussein and passed information to and from the former president while he was on the run.

At the heart of this tightly woven network is Auja, Hussein's birthplace, which U.S. commanders say is the intelligence and communications hub of the insurgency. The village is where many of the former president's key confidants have their most lavish homes and their favorite wives....

The families have sought to disperse the money around the country to make it available for local operations. U.S. forces discovered that Hussein loyalists had set up a network of front companies, in particular construction businesses and produce-sellers, to move the cash.

Raids have uncovered caches of millions of dollars, officers said. A series of strikes early this month proved especially successful in netting key financiers and revealing front companies. "When we take out pockets of inner-circle families, we also take out the money that we find," Russell said.

Now, U.S. officers said they suspect the resistance may be running low on funds because Hussein partisans have recently been selling off some of their properties, even hawking household items. At the same time, some local guerrillas are demanding higher pay, military officers said.

Hickey said the ambush last month of two U.S. convoys bringing new Iraqi currency to Samarra was carried out by insurgents badly in need of cash. The subsequent firefight left 54 guerrillas dead, according to U.S. military officials.

Hickey added he has detected very little movement of cash around his area. But he and other officers have reported efforts to smuggle munitions into the Tikrit area, an indication that U.S. raids on local weapons caches may have depleted the insurgency's stores. Most of the arms discovered during recent raids, such as rusting, decrepit Kalashnikov rifles, have been of poorer quality than the newer, more sophisticated weapons found during the summer, he said.

The caveat paragraphs should be read closely, however:

U.S. commanders said the resistance sometimes seems to be a nationwide network, with mid-level operatives and low-level fighters from one part of the country surfacing in other regions. A recent rocket attack on Tikrit, for instance, appeared to be carried out by guerrillas from Fallujah, located nearly 90 miles away on the Euphrates River west of Baghdad.

Within the past several months, U.S. officers have also noticed two or three waves of attacks that extended across the country, indicating an attempt at nationwide coordination, Hickey said. But he added that those efforts had failed to gain momentum.

At other times, commanders say, the resistance seems mostly decentralized, with mid-level operatives choosing targets locally and supplying weapons kept close at hand.

Developing...

Buried in a Newsweek story about the prospects of capturing bin Laden was the following nugget of information about Al Qaeda's strategy vis-Ă -vis Pakistan:

Qaeda terrorists may have tried to kill Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf with a bomb last week, missing his car by seconds. [bin Laden deputy Ayman] Al-Zawahiri, in the latest video aired by Al-Jazeera on Friday, warned of new attacks. Yet such operations—which require wide networks of operatives, one of whom might be interested in a $25 million reward—could provide intelligence-gathering opportunities to Western agents.

The real test of bin Laden's vulnerability may now come in Pakistan. If the attack on Musharraf proves to be Qaeda-linked—rather than an "inside" assassination attempt, perhaps by members of the Pakistani military—it could backfire against bin Laden by provoking the Pakistani president into decisive action. U.S. intelligence officials say their ability to capture bin Laden and his associates is largely dependent on intelligence assistance from Pakistan, an ally that once supported the Taliban and whose loyalties have sometimes been in doubt. "Most of Musharraf's actions against jihadis have been reluctantly taken under tremendous U.S. pressure, often preceding or just following a high-level American visit," says Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani diplomat. One U.S. intel official, asked about a potential breakthrough against bin Laden, responds simply: "That's going to be a Pakistani thing."

It's far from certain if this analysis is correct. As previously noted, Musharraf's domestic political situation is not great. His latest deal with the Islamic opposition could either be interpreted as a sign of democratization, a concession to hard-line Islamists, or both.

However, the failed assassination attempt on Musharraf two weeks ago -- the same day Saddam was captured -- has not deterred the Pakistani leader's opponents:

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has narrowly survived a second assassination bid in less than two weeks when suicide car bombers attacked his motorcade, killing themselves and at least 12 others.

Officials said on Thursday the two cars used in the attack were driven out of two petrol stations just 200 metres (yards) from a bridge on a main road in the city of Rawalpindi where Musharraf escaped a bombing on December 14....

Authorities suspect Islamic militants, who Musharraf has targeted as part of his contribution to the U.S.-led war on terror, were behind the December 14 attack. Musharraf told Reuters a few days later it could have been the work of al Qaeda and he believed "destiny" had shielded him.

The list of Musharraf's enemies has lengthened since he took a front-line role in the U.S.-led war on terror after the September 11 attacks in 2001.

He has angered militants by dropping support for the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan, arresting hundreds of members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and cracking down on domestic groups, and by edging towards peace with rival India.

The attack come just over a week before a regional summit in Islamabad due to be attended by India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

In September, Arabic television broadcast an audio tape purportedly from al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri urging Pakistanis to overthrow Musharraf for supporting the United States.

Gonna be an interesting 2004 for Pakistani politics!! [Every year is an interesting year for Pakistani politics!--ed. Point taken]

UPDATE: Ahmed Rashid has a disturbing analysis of Musharraf's domestic position in the Daily Telegraph.

While we're on the subject of coping with the weak leaders of key states, the latest issue of Foreign Affairs has an analysis by Michael Doran on the political struggle taking place within Saudi Arabia. The key part:

The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Relations between these two leaders are visibly tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher profile. But at home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret police, casts a longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.

Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis. The economy cannot keep pace with population growth, the welfare state is rapidly deteriorating, and regional and sectarian resentments are rising to the fore. These problems have been exacerbated by an upsurge in radical Islamic activism. Many agree that the Saudi political system must somehow evolve, but a profound cultural schizophrenia prevents the elite from agreeing on the specifics of reform.

The Saudi monarchy functions as the intermediary between two distinct political communities: a Westernized elite that looks to Europe and the United States as models of political development, and a Wahhabi religious establishment that holds up its interpretation of Islam's golden age as a guide. The clerics consider any plan that gives a voice to non-Wahhabis as idolatrous. Saudi Arabia's two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.

One must give the Saudis credit -- they make Pakistani politics look positively transparent.

Adeed Dawisha, a native Iraqi who teaches political science at Miami
University of Ohio, has an understandable interest in how to build a democratic Iraq.

He also has a forthcoming article in the January 2004 Journal of Democracy on the prospects for a democratic Iraq. Read the whole article, but here are some highlights, both good and bad:

The coalition forces have faced serious difficulties in Iraq, and these were apparently intensifying as the end of the year approached. But to portray these difficulties as definitively signifying the failure of the reconstruction or Iraqis’ rejection of the U.S.- and British-led coalition’s plans for their country would be a mistake, since it would mean unrealistically discounting many positive developments that augur well for Iraq’s future as a free, democratic, peaceful, and law-governed country. Iraq is obviously not out of the woods, but to pronounce the coalition’s effort a failure after just a few months of reconstruction following decades of dictatorship would be premature, to say the least....

In the early days after Saddam’s fall it was reported that one could buy five hand grenades for a dollar in the main markets in broad daylight. Some improvement had occurred by August, when the price had reportedly risen to $3 per grenade, though a bulk rate of $20 for ten grenades was also said to be available. Most of the armaments come from looted government arsenals: The CPA estimates that Saddam stockpiled a staggering 600,000 tons of arms and munitions. After six months of occupation, coalition forces had been able to destroy or secure no more than about 75,000 tons—or 12.5 percent—of the deadly stuff....

While the situation in Iraq gives rise to much concern, it is not by any stretch of the imagination desperate. Many observers, perhaps focusing too heavily on day-to-day media coverage, seem unable to shift their attention from the security situation to other developments in the country, many of which give grounds for optimism. Perhaps first among these is that Iraqis on the whole have chosen the path of peace. It is unfortunate that many in the Arab and Western press have bestowed on the perpetrators of attacks against coalition forces the grandiose label “the Iraqi resistance.” Such a categorization, whether purposely or inadvertently, creates an impression of a universal phenomenon supported by most Iraqis. Nothing could be further from the truth....

Probably the most encouraging development in Iraq has been the surge of activity at the level of local self-government and civil society. Most Iraqi towns and cities—including the major conurbations of Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, and Kirkuk—now have governing councils that have been chosen through consensual processes, often involving elections. In most cases these councils have run the affairs of their towns either in cooperation with, or independently of, coalition forces. The case of genuine “grassroots democracy” in Baghdad is particularly interesting. Suffering from widespread lawlessness, the city was still able in the fall of 2003 to form 88 neighborhood councils, which then in turn elected a 37-member council for the whole city.12 These councils will over time prove to be indispensable agents not only for political stability, but for the growth of a democratic political culture and institutional ensemble in the new Iraq.

Without a doubt, the mushrooming of local self-government councils
has been one of the major success stories of the occupation. Even those councils that have not been elected have been selected through peaceful and relatively (or even impressively) consensual means, in more than a few cases with initial advice and assistance from coalition military officers, and are providing scope for unprecedented amounts of open debate and citizen participation....

The mushrooming of political parties, syndicates, and newspapers
signals a nascent political pluralism upon which democracy can be built.

Go and give it a read. Dawisha is hardly Panglossian -- he just looks that way after you read Juan Cole for a while.

UPDATE: Dawisha is also quoted at length in this Peter Bronson column in the Cincinatti Enquirer. The highlight:

"In 18 months to two years, Iraq will be stable and democratic,'' says Adeed Dawisha, political science professor at Miami University.

"I am very confident this will happen. At the end of 2005, Iraq will have a freely elected parliament and government," says the Iraqi-born educator.

In the past, I've occasionally offered posts on what's going on in Iraq. However, this time, George Packer blows away anything I could muster. If you have the time, go read Packer's vivid dissection of the current state of Iraq from last week's New Yorker (link via Matthew Yglesias). I'll admit to liking it because it reinforces three points I've made repeatedly over the past few months:

1) There is still no coherent narrative about the future of Iraq. The Packer story is filled with anecdotes both good and bad, frustrating and promising. One hopeful sign is that Packer's updates from his reportage done during the summer suggests that both material and institutional conditions are improving;

2) Bureaucratic politics made an absolute hash out of the pre-war planning for the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. One key section:

In the summer of 2002, when the Administration began leaning toward an invasion of Iraq, [director of policy planning at the State Department Richard N.] Haass asked [Drew] Erdmann to analyze twentieth-century postwar reconstructions. In fifteen single-spaced classified pages—epic length for a State Department memo—Erdmann applied the ideas in his dissertation to a series of case studies from the two world wars through more recent conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo. One of Erdmann’s fundamental conclusions was that long-term success depended on international support. In the short run, he explained to me one evening, “the foundation of everything is security,” which partly depended on having sufficient numbers of troops. “You don’t have to look too far to see that isn’t the case here. And I don’t fault the people who are here. There’s no way any fault should be put on the kids in the 3rd I.D. or the brigade commanders. The question is, why weren’t more people put in? That was the concern of my project—were we prepared to do what it took in the postwar phase?”

Last fall, Secretary of State Colin Powell circulated Erdmann’s memo to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. “Maybe it wasn’t read,” Erdmann said.

Erdmann’s view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coördinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country’s physical and human infrastructure—and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. “You got the impression in this exercise that we didn’t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,” Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. “With the Department of Defense the first issue was �We’ve got to control this thing’—so everyone else was suspect.” White was fired in April. Feith’s team, he said, “had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.” (emphasis added)

[Oh, sure why didn't you raise this before the war, when you supported military action?--ed. Even Packer says in the article that prior to the war, "The Administration was remarkably adept at muffling its own internal tensions."]

3) Drew Erdmann is a smart, smart man (click here for my last post that mentioned Erdmann). Having been in Iraq from April to August, and having endured a lot while he was over there, he agrees with me on the "no coherent narrative" line:

In our last conversation in Washington, Drew Erdmann said that it made no sense to claim any certainty about how Iraq will emerge from this ordeal. “I’m very cautious about dealing with anyone talking about Iraq who’s absolutely sure one way or the other,” he said.

Developing...

At a cocktail party recently, someone explained to me that when engaging in political argument, there's a big difference between Brits and Americans. Because the Brits have been trained to debate from an early age, they always sound more coherent and erudite when advancing their arguments. There's certainly a ring of truth to this for anyone who has ever compared Question Time in Parliament to American-style press conferences or debates.

With this in mind, a hearty congratulations to Oxblog's Josh Chafetz for agreeing at the last minute to participate in an Oxford Union against two anti-war MPs on the resolution, "This House believes that we are losing the Peace." Chafetz was arguing in the negative.

According to Steve Sachs, one of Chafetz's opponents, "described Josh's speech as the best prepared speech he had heard at the Union in 17 appearances there." Josh and two undergraduates won the argument.

Josh has now posted his speech in its entirety on his blog. I'm not going to excerpt it -- just go read the whole thing.

I'm still not convinced that there's a positive and coherent narrative coming out of Iraq, but it does remind me that there isn't a coherent negative narritive either.

The Chicago Tribune reports on the latest success in restoring stability to Afghanistan, courtesy of a British-led Provincial reconstruction team. The vital grafs:

Sholghara owes its tentative peace to a rare combination of military and humanitarian efforts. In August, British soldiers from the Provincial Reconstruction Team, United Nations officials and top commanders of the two main armed factions in the north, collected about 400 weapons and expelled eight of the most recalcitrant commanders from the valley....

The innovative approach of the Mazar-e Sharif PRT, one of four such teams of coalition troops in Afghanistan, has won praise from Afghan officials and guarded support from aid groups that initially opposed the teams' creation. It also has made the British PRT a potential model for NATO's expanded peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan.

Instead of building schools and digging wells, as U.S.-led PRTs have done around the country, the British troops in Mazar have concentrated on improving security, leaving reconstruction to humanitarian and aid groups. Among other projects, the PRT is setting up an academy to train local police.

While the policy of the U.S.-led military coalition has been to track down remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda while steering clear of Afghan factional conflicts--known in military jargon as "green-on-green" fighting--the British soldiers in Mazar spend much of their time helping to resolve disputes between factional leaders and attempting to clear up misunderstandings that could lead to more fighting.

"If you want to stop factional fighting, you need to get stuck in and help," said Col. Dickie Davis, commander of the British PRT in Mazar. "I regard what we do as fundamental to our mission."

This follows up on previous Tribune reports indicating that PRTs can succeed in the nitty-gritty of stabilization.

Given that NATO just decided to expand its stabilization force outside of Kabul, do you think it would be possible to increase the number of PRT's to more than four?

For those readers skeptical of nation-building -- think of it as town-building.

The Chicago Tribune has a good story on successful U.S. efforts to rebuild the state in Afghanistan, one town at a time. The key grafs:

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- A remarkable transformation has taken place in recent weeks in this once-troubled provincial capital, now bustling with new businesses, new relief projects and a new optimism about the future.

The warlords have been driven away one by one.

In the past three months, the central government, with the help of U.S. forces based in the town, has succeeded in replacing all of them with police and army professionals, answerable solely to the government in Kabul....

But Gardez is only one town, a model rather than a trend, and extending its successes to the rest of the country won't be easy.

The U.S. military chose Gardez, a three-hour drive southeast of Kabul, as the pilot for its first Provincial Reconstruction Team, a concept the U.S. military hopes will restore stability and bolster reconstruction efforts across the country.

The team is made up of about 60 military and civil affairs officers doing mostly humanitarian work. But their presence was an undoubted deterrence to any thoughts of resistance the warlords may have had, said Asadullah Wafa, the governor of Paktia province. "Without the Americans, this would be very difficult," he said. "They are helping us a lot."

There are now only three other reconstruction teams, and although there are plans for four more, most towns and provinces won't benefit from the presence of U.S. forces.

Go read the entire article for an excellent account of warlord politics in Afghanistan, and the need to eradicate as many of them as possible before elections planned for 2004. The Guardian reports that the U.S. plans on sending troops to support another PRT to Kunduz.

Here's an idle thought -- why doesn't NATO create even more Provincial Reconstruction Teams? This is definitely an area where other countries can contribute -- indeed, this is an area where our allies may have a comparative advantage. New Zealand is already taking over one PRT. According to the Miami Herald, however, there is a problem with the European members of the coalition:

Some European members of NATO have been reluctant to put their soldiers in harm's way. "They're scared," said [country director for the aid agency] Mercy Corps' [Diane] Johnson. "I think they know they're going to get a lot of potshots. It all boils down to political will." (emphasis added)

Indeed. [But why should the Europeans help us? Aren't we too belligerent for their tastes?--ed. This ain't Iraq, it's Afghanistan. This is the country for which NATO invoked Article V and for which the Security Council unanimously approved force. So our interests coincide in Afghanistan. From a purely self-interested perspective, however, our European allies have a strong incentive to demonstrate the utility of their armed forces to the U.S. government and the U.S. public. The more useful their military units, the greater demand for their services. The greater the demand for their services, the more leverage they have in affecting American foreign policy.]

A lot of bloggers have linked to it already, but in case you haven't seen it yet, USA Today ran a story earlier this week on media coverage of Iraq that confirms my "no single narrative" argument from last month.

Go check it out.

After that, click over to a sound bite from Terry Gross' interview with Salam Pax (link via Bargarz.

To quote David Brooks:

Nation-building is too grand a phrase for much of the work that is being done; it's neighborhood-building in all its granular specificity.

Indeed.

The New York Times reports on a gala 80th birthday party for Shimon Peres, the grand old man of Israel's Labor Party. Some highlights:

Bill Clinton serenaded him. Mikhail S. Gorbachev saluted him. And the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, in a video greeting from his home, suggested that Mr. Peres extend his peacemaking horizons beyond the Middle East, to include "the Far East, and here, in East Hampton."

The elder statesman of Israeli politics and the country's leading dove, Mr. Peres has a world-class set of friends. From Austria to Angola, they flew in to join several thousand Israelis for the birthday event....

Tonight's slickly produced program resembled a show-business awards ceremony. Video testimonials came from Henry A. Kissinger, Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen.

Presentations included children singing peace songs, parodies of Mr. Peres and tearful testimonials from terror victims.

Mr. Clinton, who is wildly popular among many Israelis, received a standing ovation whenever he was introduced. He reviewed Mr. Peres's lengthy résumé, which includes two stints as prime minister, and almost every senior cabinet post. Mr. Peres was the architect of Israel's nuclear program in the 1950's, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in the first Israeli-Palestinian peace deal a year earlier.

It is, perhaps, indecorous to point out a man's flaws on his 80th birthday. [If you were a high-falutin' op-ed columnist, maybe. You're just a blogger--ed. Well, that does make me feel better.] Peres' legacy in Israeli history will probably not be as sparkling as his birthday party suggests.

Although Peres has been Prime Minister twice, he may be the most incompetent politician in Israel's short history. How incompetent? Peres, when leading the Labor Party into a general election, never won an electoral victory over the Likud party. The closest he came was in the mid-1980's when, despite the previous Likud government contributing to hyperinflation, Peres was only able to get Labor to win enough seats to enter a power-sharing deal with Likud. In the mid-1990s, despite a Nobel Peace Prize and a martyred leader in Rabin, Peres lost to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Peres may be respected worldwide, but in Israel he's the William Jennings Bryan of politics. Bryan was a three-time Democratic nominee for President and a three-time loser in the general election. Bryan may have achieved the ultimate Pyrrhic victory when he successfully prosecuted the Scopes monkey trial but lost the larger public debate on evolution.

I hope I'm wrong, but I fear that the Oslo accords will be Peres' monkey trial. Perhaps the most telling sentence in the NYT article, and the one that regretfully consigns Peres to a minor place in the annals of history: "No prominent Palestinian or Arab figures were present, though Mr. Peres has many longstanding relationships in the Arab world."

In anticipation of President Bush's progress report on Iraq and the war on terror tonight, here's a conundrum to consider:

Weak states are the incubator of terrorists. Pakistan is a weak, dusfunctional state that lacks a coherent sense of national identity. Its leader may be perceived as both strong and pro-Western, but that's only in comparison to the rest of the Pakistani elite, for whom the sectarian comes before the national.

The outcome from a weak Pakistani government is a perfect haven for Taliban remnants to harrass U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Ahmed Rashid makes this point in an article for YaleGlobal. Some highlights:

The war on terror has done little to address the issue of Pashtun desire for political autonomy. The Taliban's dramatic offensive in Afghanistan during the past few weeks has been fuelled by recruits, arms, money, and logistical support from Pakistan's two provinces of North West Frontier (NWFP) and Baluchistan, where Pashtun tribesmen and Islamic parties are sympathetic to the Taliban. Pakistan's Pashtuns find common ethnic and political cause with the Taliban, who are also largely Pashtun. Pashtuns on both sides of the border are bitterly opposed to the presence of US forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The sense of Pashtun brotherhood is even stronger in Pakistan's seven Federal Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), which run north to south forming a 1,200-kilometer wedge between Afghanistan and the settled areas of NWFP. FATA are nominally under the control of Pakistan, but the tribes have been semi-autonomous since the British Raj. They have always carried arms and sold arms to everyone in the region, from Tamil Tigers and Kashmiri militants to the Taliban. These days the bazaars in FATA are filled with Taliban – both Afghan and Pakistani – looking to stock up before going into Afghanistan. ''The Taliban are clean, honest, believe in Islam, and will rout the Americans,'' says Shakirullah, a Mohmand shopkeeper. ''Anyone fighting the Americans is our friend,'' he adds.

The Mohmands are just one of dozens of major tribes that straddle the border, but their views are similar to most tribal Pashtuns. Isolated from mainstream Pakistan and the media, misinformation is rampant. After dozens of interviews it is apparent that most Mohmands refuse to accept that Al' Qaeda carried out the attacks of September 11, believing instead that they were perpetrated by ''the CIA and Jews.'' Most Mohmands also believe that the Americans and, in particular, President George Bush, hate the Pashtuns.

Read the whole article. To be fair to the U.S. and Pakistani governments, they're not blind to the problem. They have taken actions to try and reverse the flow of arms and men across the border.

But as the article also makes clear, they haven't done enough.

[Thanks to alert DanielDrezner.com reader A.A. for the tip.]

A perfect follow-up to today's post on Bush's management of the Iraq situation comes in the form of this New York Times story on the job Major General David H. Petraeus is doing commanding the 101st Airborne in Northern Iraq. [Petraeus, Petraeus... that name sounds familiar--ed. I've blogged about him before.] A few nuggest from the story suggest the kind of management skills necessary to get results:

A five-day trip through the 101st Division's large area of operation showed that American military, not the civilian-led occupation authority based in Baghdad, are the driving force in the region's political and economic reconstruction.

The ethnic makeup of the north — a diverse blend of Arabs, Kurds, Turkoman and tribes — is less hostile to the American presence than the troublesome Sunni triangle around Baghdad, although it has the potential for ethnic strife. But that only partly explains the military's relative success here.

Other elements are the early deployment of a potent American force large enough to establish control, the quick establishment of new civil institutions, run by Iraqis, and a selective use of raids to capture hostile groups or individuals while minimizing the disruption to local civilians.

Another factor has been an American commander who approached so-called nation-building as a central military mission and who was prepared to act while the civilian authority in Baghdad was still getting organized.

An Army general who holds an advanced degree in international relations from Princeton, General Petraeus was steeped in nation-building before he arrived in Iraq. He served as the assistant chief of staff for operations for SFOR, the international peacekeeping force in Bosnia. His division is also well suited for its mission. Unlike an armored unit, it has lot of infantry soldiers — nearly 7,000 — to conduct foot patrols and stay in touch with the local population. It also has 250 helicopters to travel across northern Iraq.

"We walk, and walking has a quality of its own," the general says. "We're like cops on the beat."....

The 101st has also established an employment office for former Iraqi military officers, found grain silos for local farmers and trained the local police.

In some cases, like the creation of an internal Iraqi security force, the 101st developed policies that Mr. Bremer's authority only recently embraced.

"If there is a vacuum in the guidance from Baghdad or from Washington, Petraeus will study the situation and take action," said Gordon Rudd, the historian for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the civilian authority in Iraq before Mr. Bremer's appointment....

The 101st Division's sense of mission is swiftly apparent at General Petraeus's command center inside a Mosul palace.

"We are in a race to win over the people," reads a sign. "What have you and your element done today to contribute to victory?"

Obviously, the art of management at Bush's level is slightly different than at Petraeus' level. Still, the general's clear definition of the mission and willingness to take action should resonate in the White House.

My all-time favorite Simpsons line comes at the end of an episode when Marge repeatedly tries to offer what the moral of the story was. At which point the following exchange takes place:

Marge: Well... Then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! Just a bunch of stuff that happened.

I bring this up in the wake of recent attacks, bombings, and assorted mayhem in Baghdad. Military spokesman, pundits, journalists, and yes, bloggers, are trying to fashion a coherent narrative to events on the ground (e.g., "Islamic terrorism is on the rise")when there may not be one, for two reasons:

1) There are disparate narratives across the country. One can acknowledge the chaos in Baghdad while still pointing out that market forces and first-hand accounts suggest that resistance is fading in other parts of the country.

2) There are disparate actors involved in the violent resistance. It seems increasing clear that Mickey Kaus and Hassam Fattah are correct in pointing out that there exist multiple forms of organized and disorganized resistance. There are a couple of sources for attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq -- Baathists, foreign terrorists, radical Shiites, tribal chiefs, Al Qaeda infiltrators, etc. Juan Cole provides a list of possible suspects, including Ahmed Chalabi, which seems like a hell of a stretch to me.

Another wrinkle in this mix is that areas like the Sunni Triangle -- in which U.S. forces exercise precarious control -- are more likely to experience violence. Stathis Kayvas' work on this subject is particularly illuminating. One summary of his research contains this point:

violence is likely to be motivated more
by petty everyday personal and local disputes than by grand impersonal hatreds; few people engage in acts of direct violence (e.g. killings) but many people engage in acts of indirect violence (e.g. denunciations); and people tend to willingly engage in indirectly violent behavior during civil wars because they tend to be strongly disinclined to engage in directly violent behavior in general.

My point? A lot of stuff is happening, and I doubt any single narrative will be able to explain it.

Developing....

UPDATE: Josh Marshall has some similar thoughts on this issue.

For those who believe in media conspiracies, it's interesting to note that over the weekend both the Washington Post (link via InstaPundit) and the New York Times had long articles on efforts to reform Iraq's universities.

Both stories go over the myriad difficulties in this process -- primarily physical insecurity and infrastructure damage.

The Post story does a nice job of suggesting that the phrase "multicultural Iraq" will not necessarily be an oxymoron. The key quote:

On campus, though, the new atmosphere of debate and tolerance is already transforming Baghdad University into an oasis. Last week, students from various ethnic and religious groups -- once pitted against each other by Hussein -- chatted easily between exams. Some engaged in vigorous political arguments that would have been unthinkable only a few months ago.

During one exam break, a group of political science students volunteered opinions that ranged from passionately pro-Hussein and anti-American to the extreme opposite. Shiite students shared once-banned CDs of religious sermons. Kurdish students, whose minority group was severely repressed by Hussein, said they felt safe and comfortable on campus for the first time.

"There is a huge difference now, like between the earth and the sky," said Yaser Abdul Majid, 20, a chemistry student, as his classmates issued a chorus of complaints about the U.S. occupation, the crime problem and the dire lack of water and power in the capital. "The difference is that now, none of us will be killed for expressing our opinion."

Meanwhile, the Times story has more detail on curricular reform, suggesting that U.S. authorities are making the right decision by delegating a healthy share of responsibility to the Iraqis:

The next stage of reconstruction will be perhaps the trickier of tasks: depoliticizing the curriculum and reintroducing Iraqi students, scholars and scientists to the broader intellectual community through fellowships, exchanges and conferences. Professors were not able to leave Iraq without signed permission from the minister of higher education. So few did. And they have viewed education as a one-way street in which information is passed onto students, rather than encouraging critical, independent thought and analysis.

The presidents of all the universities, including from Kurdistan in the north, have been meeting weekly. A committee of representatives from each institution has been set up to prepare a plan on addressing the curriculum. Dr. Erdmann hopes to recruit consultants from American organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, though curriculum decisions will be up to the Iraqis. Experts say that's smart policy.

''Everyone agrees on de-Baathification of the curriculum, but if the U.S. intervenes in how Iraqis view America and globalization and Iran, you're going to see a lot of rebelling,'' says Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, who recently returned from Iraq. ''The whole Arab world is afraid the Americans are focusing on education and want to rewrite curriculums in all the Arab states. It's a threat to their culture and their identity, and they see it as heavy-handed and imperialistic. If we just leave the Iraqis to do it themselves, you'll see that anti-American sentiment won't be primary.''

Frankly, the progress described in both articles is extraordinary. As someone who spent a year in Civic Education Project working to rebuild Ukraine's university system after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it sounds like the Iraqis have a much firmer commitment to reform.

Full disclosure: I know Andrew Erdmann, the American administrator featured in both stories, from when we were fellows together at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. I take no responsiblility for Erdmann's decision to grow a moustache.

A few months ago I expressed pessimism about the state of affairs in Afghanistan. However, in scanning my recent posts about the country -- here, here, and here, I've noticed an encouraging trend of positive developments. An upbeat report from Glenn Reynolds' Kabul correspondent suggests statebuilding efforts are working. The key graf:

Last summer renegade police at the ubiquitous Kabul traffic circles might stop and board my cab uninvited, gleefully tease an automatic weapon and just as suddenly disembark a without explanation a few miles down the road. It was doubtful that many were legitimate police with any official status, nevertheless the judicious travelers never asked for credentials or complained when their vehicles were searched and belongings confiscated. This summer is completely different. Petty harassment has ended. Civil order has been restored to a remarkable degree on the highways by a professional police force that efficiently—if not always quietly-- patrols the highways in slick new trucks donated by the German government and trained in the latest law enforcement techniques by the American military. Great credit for this transformation must also be shared with the new Interior Minister, Jalali, who’s been able to bring more of an ethnically balanced and representative police presence into the agency. Kabul law enforcement now moves heavily armed but astonishingly restrained crews along the teeming streets, in a manner as unobtrusive as the ISAF patrols of last year. Consequently, one sees far fewer of the once omnipresent international peacekeepers on the highways.

Is this part of a more encouraging trend in that war-torn country?

The answer is still mixed. The good news is that the central government is getting its act together. Hamid Karzai's efforts to increase revenue flows from the provinces to the central government is a partial success. The central government is conducting the first census in 24 years. That sounds mundane, but these kind of statistics are vital for ensuring stable economic and political development. The new Afghan National Army is also conducting its first military operations, deploying 1,000 troops in a joint exercise with U.S. forces against Taliban remnants in the southern mountains.

The improvements in state institutions are matched by an increase in democratic activism and national pride. Consider a few grafs from this report:

Afghans in the capital Kabul have again been exercising their right to protest. Chanting pro-democracy slogans, around a hundred people marched through the city on Tuesday morning. The demonstrators called for the implementation of the Bonn agreement - a road map for Afghanistan's peaceful development - and urged the Afghan government not to bow to extremists.

"We don’t want fundamentalism," one participant told IRIN. Others said they wanted a constitution based on democracy and the rule of law.

The crowd also called for equal rights for men and women. "For survival and restoration of women’s rights the international community and Afghan government defeated the Taliban regime, but unfortunately women are still deprived of their participation in government, and political development is limited," Freba Charkhi, a member of the Freedom and Democracy Movement of Afghanistan, told IRIN....

According to Charkhi, the demonstration was organised by the Freedom and Democracy Movement of Afghanistan, a new moderate political party, made up of the Afghan Civil Society Forum, students from Kabul University and Afghan journalists.

Democracy and the right to peaceful assembly appear to be taking root in parts of Afghanistan following decades of conflict and totalitarian rule.

Quite a different take than Amnesty International's more downbeat assessment.

Meanwhile, in Kandahar -- the Taliban's old stronghold -- a thousand people filled the largest mosque to protest Pakistani incursions into Afghan territory. A top Taliban leader was arrested there earlier in the month.

The reduction of instability -- combined with an adjustment in tactics -- has permitted the United Nations to restart its de-mining operationsin the southern provinces.

Beyond the state, things are looking up as well. This year the country will experience its biggest wheat crop in two decades -- not a difficult achievement, but still important. A consortium of telecommunications firms are setting up the country's second cellular phone network. Movies are being shown in the provinces.

So has a tipping point been reached where stability will be the norm rather than instability? Not yet. In the short-term, attacks on coalition forces increased over the past month. Some of the provinces are still beset with Taliban activity and a paucity of reconstruction aid. Other provinces are still experiencing factional fighting. And the Afghan defense minister still seems to believe that confiscating opposition newspapers is a viable policy option. Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are badly strained. According to the Christian Science Monitor, this year also produced a bumper opium crop in addition to a good wheat harvest. More disturbing is the link between opium and the Taliban resistance:

Some of the regions hardest hit by regrouping Taliban forces are well known areas for opium cultivation, including Nangarhar in the east, and Uruzgan, Helmand, and Nimroz in the south. The latter two provinces serve as a smuggling route into Pakistan and Iran.

Drug money may be providing the funds needed to keep the Taliban insurgency alive. Sources in the Afghan government's antinarcotics department suggest that Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan collect money from the local drug smugglers for their attacks against US forces.

Such attacks have already scared off international aid workers and hampered US-aligned forces that could otherwise interfere with drug trafficking and create viable alternatives to farmers....

The Afghan government also claims that Al Qaeda operatives are helping the drug cartels to traffic heroin to the West.

"It is an unholy alliance," says Mr.Rasoolzai, head of Eastern Afghanistan's antinarcotics department. "Al Qaeda is using drugs as a weapon against America and other Western countries. The weapon of drugs does not make a noise. The victim does not bleed and leaves no trace of the killer."

Is there a pattern? Sort of. It's clear that conditions are improving in areas where the central government holds some sway. However, that remains a very small portion of the country. As state institutions improve, one hopes that it will expand.

Developing.... in an uncertain way.

In the wake of the Hussein boys' demise, it's worth stepping back and appraising the current situation in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, there is disagreement over whether this is just an ephemeral victory for U.S. forces or part of a more positive trend that will reduce the guerilla attacks against U.S. forces. Juan Cole, David Adesnik, and Matthew Yglesias say no [UPDATE: David was only joking]; Andrew Sullivan, Josh Chafetz, and the Christian Science Monitor say yes. The Economist, the Guardian, -- and most importantly, the U.S. Army -- are hedging their bets.

My answer is yes, not because of the attack itself but rather the shift in intelligence-gathering that preceded it. The Washington Post has an excellent story on how this shift in tactics may be creating a tipping-point phenomenon among the Iraqi populace:

After weeks of difficult searching for the top targets on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives, U.S. military commanders two weeks ago switched the emphasis of their operations, focusing on capturing and gathering intelligence from low-level members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who had been attacking American forces, according to military officials.

That shift produced a flood of new information about the location of the Iraqi fugitives, which came just before today's attack in which Hussein's two sons were killed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul, the officials said....

"You get a tip, you pull a couple of guys in, they start to talk," a Central Command official said. Then, based on that information, he continued, "you do a raid, you confiscate some documents, you start building the tree" of contacts and "you start doing signals intercepts. And then you're into the network."

"The people are now coming to us with information," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Army's 4th Infantry Division, told Abizaid in a briefing this week at Odierno's headquarters in Tikrit, Hussein's home town. "Every time we do an operation, more people come in."

The 4th Infantry, operating in a region dominated by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority, which was a major base of Hussein's support, conducted an average of 18 raids a day in recent weeks, he added.

The number and breadth of those follow-up raids also encouraged Iraqis who had been fearful of Baathist retaliation to speak up, officials here said.

Sullivan also links to this Free Republic letter from a U.S. soldier in Iraq suggesting that a similar phenomenon is taking place at the street level:

The only reason the GIs are pissed (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us.

Some do. But the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harm's way. So did the Iraqis.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields.The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem inthat neighborhood since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, never get reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers.

They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T- shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios.

They participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows up in the neighborhood.

It should also be stressed that outside the Sunni zone of instability, conditions are improving. A few days ago the Los Angeles Times reported two stories indicating that things are quite stable in the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq, as well as Basra (both links via this Kevin Drum post). As for the Shi'a, this RFE/RL report provides some excellent background of the current state of play among the various Shi'a groups. What's becoming increasing clear is that the Shi'a leaders posing the greatest problems for the occupation are those linked to the Iranian government.

Meanwhile, mobile phones are now working in Baghdad, and DHL is expanding its service to Iraq.

The United Nations is still downbeat about the current situation. However, there is reason to hope that the occupation authorities will be able to take the crucial steps towards stability that the Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission says is vital for the success of the U.S. mission.

Developing.... in a good way, I hope.

UPDATE: Brian Ulrich has some additional thoughts on the subject, and links to a story suggesting that Kurdish leaders are adopting a wait-and-see posture.

The mob assault on Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki's center (see also here) has prompted some follow-up coverage on ways in which Palestinian intellectuals are threatened when they deviate from the Palestinian Authority's party line. The San Francisco Chronicle points out that Shikali is not the only Palestinian academic to feel the effects of the state-organized mob:

Years ago, [Al- Quds University president Sari] Nusseibeh was beaten up at Bir Zeit University for promoting dialogue with Israelis. Last year, he was dismissed as the PLO's representative in Jerusalem after he publicly questioned whether demanding the right of return was either logical or feasible.

The leaflet distributed in Ramallah on Sunday recalled how Nusseibeh was denied entry to the campus of Al-Najah University in Nablus two months ago and prevented from discussing a new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.

"We warn anyone who considers harming the national rights that their fate will be similar to that of Shikaki and Nusseibeh," said a statement by the group that organized the egg-throwing, the Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Refugees' Rights.

"They will be ostracized and put on popular trial," the statement continued.

"The committee salutes the masses who care about their rights and who do not allow mercenary academics to spread their poison among our people.

"The committee calls on the Palestinian prime minister not to be lenient on such people and to take a clear position opposing their activities and to put them on trial for high treason."

Read the whole piece to see the links between the Palestinian Authority and mob attacks. The article also points out that beyond the intellectual class, independent journalists are feeling the heat:

"People are often very cautious about expressing their political views, especially with regard to the government and sensitive issues," said Khaled Abu Toameh, an ex-PLO employee who is now an independent reporter and analyst. "Some writers and journalists have been punished by the Palestinian Authority for simply expressing their views. In one case, a group of intellectuals was imprisoned or beaten up by Palestinian Authority thugs for signing a petition calling for reforms."

Abu Toameh added: "There has been a slight improvement in recent years with more people speaking out openly in favor of reforms and against corruption, but you always have the feeling that you're being watched.

"It's not as bad as Syria or Saddam's Iraq, but it can be frightening. Palestinian journalists know that you don't mess around with sacred cows."

It is this kind of thuggery that makes Shikali's work so dangerous -- a fact that he and Arafat understand clearly. Shikali's follow-up interview in today's Chicago Tribune spells this out:

At his center this week, Shikaki shrugged off the incident.

"I'm just going to continue, and it's not going to disturb me at all," he said. "No one succeeded in silencing me in the past and they're not going to silence me now."

The source of the uproar, he said, was that his poll, conducted among 4,500 refugee families in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jordan and Lebanon, for the first time "tapped into private opinion, not public opinion--what people are saying to themselves and not saying to their neighbors. A lot of people want it to remain private, not public."

It should also be pointed out that Nusseibeh is not backing down either. He is currently spearheading an extraordinary petition drive with prominent Israelis to promote an alternative path to peace. In the span of six weeks, this effort has already garnered 30,000 signatures in Israel and the occupied territories.

Israelis have criticized Palestinian intellectuals for not speaking truth to power. However, a small slice of Palestinian civil society has spoken truth to power, espousing nonviolence and negotiation as the proper tools of resistance, despite the overwhelming pressure these individuals must face to toe the party line.

Shikali and Nusseibeh demonstrate that there are Palestinian intellectuals who are willing to challenge official doctrine. One can only hope that in the future, such challenges do not require the ample amounts of bravery these men clearly possess.

UPDATE: Judith Weiss posts on the emerging opposition to the Arafat's disastrous economic policies. Go check it out.

Two days ago I blogged about the attack on Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki. Today, the Chicago Tribune has an editorial about it. The key section:

[T]he mob Sunday was not interested in polling techniques but in stifling an opinion--possibly a fact--that they didn't want to hear.

Shikaki's conclusions are not implausible. Israel was founded more than 50 years ago, and as practical a matter most Palestinians could well regard their return--to live in a Jewish state--it is no longer a realistic or appealing alternative. At this point, they may prefer financial compensation or relocation in a newly created Palestinian state or elsewhere.

If Shikaki's findings are confirmed by other researchers, they also may allay well-founded Israeli fears of the demographic cataclysm that would accompany millions of Palestinians returning to Israel.

In other words, there may be room for compromise as part of a comprehensive peace agreement. For Palestinians, the poll suggests, the "right of return" by now may be more of a symbol than a reality.

Certainly one poll doesn't defuse the issue, which has stymied negotiations in the past. If the current negotiations are to succeed, the "right of return" will be on the table at some point. How the Palestinian people feel about that issue could be crucial. Researchers like Shikaki should be encouraged, not intimidated by a gang of thugs.

Indeed.

The good news is that -- in contrast to many of its neighbors -- there exist Palestinian political scientists independent of the state and contributing to the stock of useful knowledge about the region. For an example, click here.

The bad news is, good political science is vulnerable to the rule of the mob, as this New York Times story makes clear:

A mob attacked an eminent Palestinian political scientist today as he prepared to announce a striking finding from a regionwide survey of Palestinian refugees: Only a small minority of them exercise a "right of return" to Israel as part of a peace agreement.

The political scientist, Dr. Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research here, had intended today to discuss for the Arabic-language press the tensions and complexities of Palestinian society. Instead, struck, shoved and pelted with eggs but not seriously injured, he wound up starkly illustrating them....

The rioters marched from Dr. Shikaki's office to Mr. Arafat's compound a few blocks away, where he received them, Palestinians here said. It was not clear if Mr. Arafat knew what they had done. (emphasis added)

Click here for the Voice of America report, which makes it clear that the idiotarians who ransacked the center don't seem to realize that the poll results suggest that the right of return issue is tractable rather than intractable.

Well, so long as this kind of behavior is not condoned by the public authorities, then -- oh, wait.

This Financial Times article reinforces what I said last week about Uganda and Botswana being exemplars for the rest of Africa. The key grafs:

Only two African countries have over the past three years taken up an offer by a German pharmaceuticals company to make free donations of an important Aids prevention drug to poor countries.

Boehringer Ingelheim said that only Uganda and Botswana had taken delivery of supplies of nevirapine, the drug it offers free for use in preventing mothers from infecting their babies with HIV/Aids....

The company said that 44 countries were now taking part in the initiative and that it was working with a number of non-governmental organisations in Africa, but only two national governments in the region were involved. Four South African provinces had also applied for donations.

"We are not at all satisfied with how it is running," said Rolf Krebs, chairman of the private German company. "It is very frustrating."

Heavy customs charges, poor logistics and lack of the necessary healthcare infrastructure were some of the reasons why many African countries had not taken part in the programme, he said....

Nevirapine was the subject of a bitter political battle in South Africa where the constitutional court last year ordered the government to make it available to HIV-positive pregnant women following legal action taken by Aids activists.

That last graf is just devastating.

The FT article jibes with what Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist emphasized as necessary for fighting AIDS in Africa in a speech he gave last month at the Council on Foreign Relations:

The U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003 will provide $15 billion over five years to combat these global diseases. Equally important, it links for the first time the concepts of prevention, care, and treatment into a single comprehensive policy.

Remember ... this little virus was unknown in this country just 22 years ago when I was a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. Since then it has killed 23 million people.

Through this simple effort, 7 million new infections will be prevented. 2 million people will be treated. And 10 million HIV-infected individuals and AIDS orphans will be cared for.

But just as essential as the money, this law will build a new, robust infrastructure -- to better communicate with health workers, to educate, and to establish delivery systems.

And this infrastructure will serve as the foundation upon which a whole host of other medical and public health issues will be addressed for decades to come.

It's all about the infrastructure.

Yankee Blog, responding to my Botswana post of yesterday, points out the following:

[M]ore than any kind of developement, their [Botswana's] wealth is due largely to the presence of some large diamond mines. While the country has not fallen into such unrest that even diamond mining is not productive, it is still difficult to see Botswana as a model for the rest of Africa. Botswana has one of the highest HIV rates, a life expectancy at birth of around 35 years, and unemployment somewhere between 20 and 40%. I doubt this is a great model for showing what happens when Africa is able to help itself.

Two responses.

First, Botswana's ample natural endowments make it an excellent model for much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. The problem with these countries is not a lack of resource endowments, but the ability to exploit them in a way that leads to sustainable economic growth.

Second, the point about AIDS (which Virginia Postrel also made in an e-mail) is dead-on, as this CNN report suggests. The model African nation on this front is Uganda. The national AIDS commission has their own web site; according to this page, the percentage of the population infected with HIV has declined from 18% in the early 1990s to 6.5% in the end of 2001.

However, economic freedom plays an interesting role here as well. Click here for a very revealing CNN interview with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. One highlight:

Q: Why should people in Uganda pay for the R&D costs?

A: But ...why should they not? You see if they don't, you are really being naive, idealistic. These people are business people. They are in business because they make profits. First, they recover what they put into the development, and then they make a profit. How can you reasonably argue with them to produce these drugs at a loss to themselves? This is not common sense.

Then there's this quote from a speech Museveni gave last month to the U.S. pharamceutical lobby:

[The] real solution to the defeat of the pandemic lies in economic development and trade. In Africa, we have a terrain in which HIV, malaria, TB and other infections thrive to a degree nowadays unthinkable in Europe and the U.S. The common thread is poverty. For poverty creates an environment, physical as well as social, highly favorable to disease.

So, even as we mobilize our people to change their behavior to protect themselves against HIV, we have to promote broad-based economic growth that will lead to improvement in living conditions and levels of education. The surest path to that kind of growth is trade and investment

Indeed.

Alas, I was too busy with other things to post on Iran. Fortunately, the rest of the blogosphere is on the job.

For more info on the cancellation of Iranian student protests in Tehran today -- but not elsewhere -- go to Jeff Jarvis, Winds of Change, Oxblog, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, Kevin Drum, and all of Pejman Yousefzadeh's posts for today.

Given the spate of recent coverage about Africa's political, economic, and humanitarian woes, it's worth pointing out Botswana as a clear success story. Canada's Fraser Institute just released its 2003 annual report on economic freedom of the world. In their press release, they point out the following:

The least economically free nations tend to be clustered in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. "But, even here exceptions show the power of economic freedom," says McMahon.

"Botswana has long had significantly higher levels of economic freedom than other sub-Saharan African nations and this is demonstrated by how much better off the people of Botswana have become compared to the citizens of other African nations," he explains.

In 1970, Botswana's per capital GDP was US$590, less than the sub-Saharan average of US$609. After three decades of relatively high economic freedom, Botswana's per capita GDP rose to US$3,950 while in the rest of Africa, where economic freedom levels were dismal, per capita GDP shrunk to US$564.

In the 2003 report, Botswana has the 26th highest level of economic freedom, tied with eight other nations including Japan and Norway.

Foreign aid and preferential trade agreements can help African countries, but only if they also help themselves.

I've been pessimistic about the state of affairs in Afghanistan, so I'm happy to highlight more positive news. Glenn Reynolds links to this USA Today story indicating optimism among Afghans regarding the current state of affairs in the country.

And this VOA story strongly suggests that Afghans do not want to see a return to Taliban rule. Ransacking an embassy is over the top, but it does indicate the salience of this issue to ordinary residents of Kabul.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to resign unless given more latitude in his negotiations with Israel, according to the AP:

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas threatened to quit as premier and resigned from a key body of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement Tuesday, reflecting turmoil within the Palestinian leadership over negotiations with Israel....

Abbas has been facing strong pressure within his Fatah movement to adopt a tough line on the prisoner releases. In a letter to Arafat, he said he would step down as premier unless he gets clear instructions from Fatah over how to handle contacts with Israel....

Palestinian leaders proposed Monday that Abbas and security chief Mohammed Dahlan meet with Israeli Knesset members to help press Palestinian demands for a prisoner release. The meeting has yet to be scheduled.

Israel holds an estimated 7,000 Palestinian prisoners -- an issue that threatens to become a major crisis between the sides -- and this week Sharon's Cabinet decided to free perhaps 5 percent of them. Israel thought the planned prisoner release would strengthen Abbas' position. But top Palestinian officials say its limited scope could weaken Abbas by making him look ineffectual.

This will be an interesting test for the Palestinian leadership. Abbas' primary lever of power is that the Americans and Israelis will actually negotiate with him. The question is whether losing that link is costly enough to force the rest of Fatah to back down.

Sudhir Muralidhar has a link-filled post updating the various areas of instability in Africa.

Critics of U.S. foreign policy tend to focus on the statements/actions of policy principals (i.e., cabinet secretaries) and their immediate deputies. However, a signal virtue of U.S. diplomacy is the ingrained habit of trusting subordinates to innovate and adapt to local circumstances, and then copying those innovations when they work. This is true even in the most centralized and hierarchical foreign policy organization -- the U.S. military.

Two examples. The first should make the guys at OxBlog happy. According to the Chicago Tribune, in Afghanistan the U.S. military has modified its position on how to deal with incidents that lead to civilian causalties:

One night last month, an American bomb killed all of Mawiz Khan's children.....

The U.S. military says it is not liable for death and damage suffered by civilians in combat. Publicly, it says it does not compensate families for the deaths of relatives, even in cases like the one in Shkin, when the bombing was a result of American mistakes.

Yet here, U.S. military officers did something they have rarely, if ever, done in Afghanistan. They went to Mawiz Khan's house, apologized and promised to rebuild it, relatives and Afghan officials say.

"They came and visited, about 40 people including the Americans, and they said, `Please forgive us,'" Khan said. "I said, `What can I do? I am not a powerful man. I forgive you. That's all I can do. It's already happened. It's over. It's finished.'"

The apology represents a subtle shift in the way American forces are dealing with civilian casualties here, 19 months after the U.S.-led coalition began bombing Afghanistan. No longer are the dead labeled collateral damage. Quietly, the U.S. government is searching for ways to win back those who have suffered--by rebuilding their homes and villages, giving them money and gifts or simply expressing condolences.

"It is a big change," said Mohammad Ali Paktiawal, governor of Paktika province, where the Shkin bombing occurred.

Another example is the extent to which local commanders in Iraq are fostering the beginning tendrils of democratic institutions. First it was Mosul -- now it's Kirkuk:

Voting in an election that U.S. officials are calling an early but significant step in the democratization of Iraq, a council of community leaders selected Abdulrahman Mustafa, a mild-mannered lawyer, as the interim leader of Kirkuk, a vital oil town plagued by conflict between Arabs and Kurds.

The landmark poll took place even as U.S. intelligence reports indicate that high-level fugitives from Hussein's crumbled regime--including figures on Washington's list of 55 most wanted Iraqis--may be hiding out on boats southwest of the city, on an isolated tributary of the Tigris River.

"I believe this is a true historic moment for Kirkuk," Army Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, told an auditorium filled with delegates after the often-raucous election. "For the first time in nearly 30 years, you have the new freedom to determine your future."

The 4th Infantry Division organized the vote as part of a U.S. program to return a degree of political control to the Iraqi people as a means of preparing the country for national elections and as an escape valve for anti-U.S. sentiments.

Such makeshift experiments in democracy have been carried out in Mosul, Basra and a handful of other major Iraqi cities, with mixed success.

Both of these examples are small steps. They'll probably have a mixed record of success. However, actions like these by local foreign policy operators are a key way in which the wellspring of successful American foreign policy is constantly replenished.

While the administration scrambles to improve order and security in Baghdad, it's worth noting that post-war reconstruction is progressing in other places -- like Mosul. This Chicago Tribune story does an excellent job of contrasting the situation in Mosul with Baghdad:

As Baghdad pops with daily gunfire and limps along with intermittent electricity and water, Mosul has accomplished near wonders under the active command of an American general: Water flows from taps, road crews pick up trash, and Iraqi police and U.S. troops, working side by side, patrol the streets.....

In this tale of two cities, Mosul is an unlikely success. The sprawling northern hub of 2 million--a combustible mix of Iraqis, Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrians that American forces feared would roil with ethnic warfare--became the first place, early this month, to hold local elections for an interim government. And it was one of the swiftest to open its government bank vault to dole out back pay to Iraqi workers.

Read the whole story, and it's clear that a big reason for this is the sage leadership of Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division. The story notes the following

The commanding general, Petraeus, fresh from battle in the south, said he quickly adapted his force of 17,000 to the needs of Mosul's 2 million people. The infantry walked along the streets to convey a sense of order. The first day in town, Petraeus went on Al Jazeera television to talk about the future of Iraq.

Petraeus soon found that people in Mosul were eager for direction. A manager from the local airport knocked on his door. Could Petraeus give him the authority to call back workers? Yes, the general replied, sending armed soldiers to help.

The head of the central bank phoned. He had money to pay government workers, but no one in Baghdad could give him the authority to open the vaults. Petraeus, writing on 101st Airborne stationery, commanded that the cash flow begin.

And then Petraeus embarked on a political campaign unlike anything Iraqis who were interviewed for this story had ever seen. He and his aides contacted tribal leaders, Kurds, Arabs, former military officials and former police and rounded them up for talks.

Every day, for nine straight days and for three to five hours at a time, Petraeus urged and cajoled the townsmen of Mosul to figure out what they could do for Iraq.

The 50-year-old general, a West Point graduate who has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University, appealed to the Iraqis' sense of duty, knowing that Mosul had been an important source of generations of military men. (emphasis added)

I don't mean to suggest that training in international relations improves one's ability to engage in post-war reconstruction. [Yeah, right--ed.]

Seriously, it seems pretty clear that Petraeus's actions should be a template for Baghdad and elsewhere.

Josh Chafetz links to this New York Times report explaining the dearth of WMD caches in Iraq:

A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.

They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.

The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.

The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants.

I can't count the number of times someone in the Blogosphere (myself included) has posted initial reports of this variety and have them turn out to be either overblown or just plain wrong. There's an additional strike against this story -- the conditions under which it was reported:

Under the terms of her accreditation to report on the activities of MET Alpha, this reporter was not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials.

So why am I posting it?

Because the Times reporter is Judith Miller. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and has authored/co-authored books on biological warfare and Middle East extremism. So I'm thinking the probability of her jumping the gun on a story that turns out to be a bust is unlikely. [SEE RETRACTION]

That said, take this information with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus offers additional reasons for why we should keep our skepticism in check regarding this story. Of course, he also offers a link to a Los Angeles Times story that would confirm Miller's version of events.

I've generally avoided blogging about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because, well, it's a profoundly depressing situation.

However, I do agree with Mickey Kaus about Ariel Sharon's latest move to expand housing settlements in the occupied territories. It's toxic.