Way to go, Greg!
It wasn't stellar, but it will do. The New York Times reports:

The Cubs' Greg Maddux became the 22nd pitcher to win 300 games, despite giving up four runs on seven hits and three walks on Saturday... the Chicago Cubs scored two runs in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings and defeated San Francisco, 8-4, at SBC Park.

Maddux is my idea of a great pitcher: 2.89 lifetime ERA as of the end of 2003 season, and a 300-170 lifetime won-loss record as of today, a phenomenal 64%, all done more with control than with power. The only thing wrong with this picture is that he should have won it as an Atlanta Brave, it's a shame they let him go. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:03:00 PM -- |  

 
Kerry's speech, Bush's character, America's options
I'm only now getting around to commenting on Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. I found a lot to like in the speech, particularly:

For four years, we've heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Values are not just words. They're what we live by.

...I don't wear my own faith on my sleeve. But faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.

But there was also a substantive key issue joined:

As President, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war. Before you go to battle, you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say: "I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm's way. But we had no choice. We had to protect the American people, fundamental American values from a threat that was real and imminent." So lesson one, this is the only justification for going to war.

That seems uncontroversial at first, but it begs the questions, "When do we no longer have a choice?" and "How imminent must the threat be?" In the past, I've emphasized Bush's 2003 State of the Union statement:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

With all due lack of confidence in George W. Bush, I think that is a reasonable statement, and Kerry should be able to answer it.

One kind of response I've made before is that the combination of regime, (perceived) threat, and expected cost in Iraq's case is unlikely to occur again any time soon. North Korea's deterrent trump isn't just whatever nuclear weapons it may possess, it's the colossal artillery gun it's got pointed at South Korea's head. Iran doesn't present quite the kind of mad undeterrability issues that Saddam (and Kim) pose, nor is there a string of U.N. resolutions about Iran corresponding to those governing Saddam's probation.

In any case, it's been clear since at least the first Shia uprising back in April that the United States has all it can handle in Iraq for the foreseeable future. An Iraq-style "war of choice" isn't in the cards -- at least not without the kind of massive international support a Bush administration is unlikely to win, or even pursue. Thus the "imminent vs. gathering threat" issue may turn out to be more of academic than practical interest.

But a better response, I think, is simply that yes, it may be necessary in the future to act on assumptions and indications rather than proven imminence. But in that case you'd better (1) make sure that's very clear to your country -- as opposed to, say, letting your Vice President and Secretary of Defense run around pretending they know something everyone else doesn't. And (2) -- you'd better be right. And if (3) you're not just wrong, but you also make a hash of the aftermath -- including at best failing to prevent criminal, repugnant behavior by too many of the prison guards and interrogators you command -- you ought to resign or at least not run for re-election. You've failed your country, your troops, and your many honorable, decent supporters, all of who deserved better from you.

I think this election actually boils down to character, not security -- and it seems crystal-clear to me by now that's a comparison Bush loses badly. At the end of the day, I trust Kerry to see things as they are, not as he imagines or fears or wishes them to be -- and, when necessary, swerve towards that river shore and attack the enemy.

But even more importantly, I trust Kerry to take responsibility for his actions and his mistakes. And that is something I believe George W. Bush has never learned to do, and never will do. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:55:00 PM -- |  

 
Notes to Blogger.com: so far, I liked it better before
Over the past weeks and months, the folks at blogger.com have changed their tools (1, 2) to add, edit, and manage posts to blogs. So far, I liked the old ways better; it seems to me that once again, a software company's efforts to solve "problems" and add features has resulted in setbacks rather than progress. My criticisms:

1. ...by far: I liked the old split screen editor much, much, much, much better than toggling back and forth between the window for editing and the "preview" one where you see the results. That's because the "results" window is -- or was -- the handiest place to "jump off" back to web pages with the stuff I'm writing about. A possible solution would be to make the links active and functional from within the editor screens.
   
2. I will occasionally draft long posts. (NO!! Really? --ed.) That's why I wish the edit screen would expand to the full width and especially the full height of the computer screen; it's currently fixed in both dimensions. There's a lot of room at the bottom of the screen, with big fat "save as draft" and "publish" post buttons floating in a lake of white space.
   
   (In the good old days, the division between the edit and product halves of the split-screen could be moved, so you could get a better look at either one, without losing a view of the other.)
   
3. The WYSIWYG editor ("what you see is what you get," for any recently surrendered Japanese Army island holdouts among my readers) introduces lots of unwanted spaces -- unwanted by me, anyway -- into the final product, and isn't really undo-able. If it's not really undo-able, it's not really WYSIWYG, because WYG with this product is a mysterious mess if you change your mind about formatting.
   
   One thing that's particularly annoying is the way blockquoting something introduces hard returns, so that the result is generally a misshapen mess instead of a single block of text that wraps where it should. Since the editor screen isn't resizeable (see #2), I can't see that until I've clicked on the preview screen. I know, I can turn off the WYSIWYG editor, and I'm probably going to soon...
   
   ... except that my past means of doing certain formats may have left a lot to be desired. For example, I've used [font size="1"][/font] tags for footnotes to my posts. By contrast, the blogger.com WYSIWYG editor does these with [span percentage] tags, which for all I know may be better, more universally readable ways to do these things. Unfortunately, font size (and choice) control tools aren't available in the simple editor.
   
4. The list of posts can't be sorted by post date! Instead, it can only be sorted by modification date, so that if I go back and update an old post, it rises to the top of the heap. I'd like to be able to see a list of posts in the order they're found on my blog.

Here are some things I wish they'd done instead:

1. ...by far: Add the ability to categorize posts by topic! (better yet, by multiple topic) and easily provide an open-ended list of those topics in an archive-like list. I.e., like Moveable Type.
2. Add the ability to go to "next week" and "previous week" from an archive file. That would add a nice dimension for those of us who have (wisely) kept an open-ended growing list of archive files off the content pages, and instead put them on a separate archive index page.
3. Add the ability to insert a table into a post, and edit it with a simple or WYSIWYG tool.
4. Add the ability to modify the archive index page with a simple or WYSIWYG tool; in particular, I'd like to be able to easily add and modify divisions and columns.

Yep, things were better in the old days. What's that? You think I don't hear you snickering, you goldurn kids? I'd say more, but my fingers don't type like they used to, and I'm a little tuckered out from this post. Mutter, grumble, I oughta, mutter...

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:27:00 AM -- |  

 
Malkin vs. Muller
The preceding post concerns Eric Muller's (and Greg Robinson's) criticisms of Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment. This one concerns Ms. Malkin's response.

Ms. Malkin responded first to the initial item by Mr. Muller, and then, in a long post, to each of Muller's posts individually. I acknowledge that I was inclined to sympathize with the Japanese American point of view when I began reading. While acknowledging this bias, I feel that Muller (and Robinson, of the University of Quebec) generally got the better of the historical argument. For examples:

• Malkin serves up some fairly weak brew as evidence of an ongoing threat after Midway (see part 6 above) -- a sub with a fold-up plane, a tanker nearly sunk off Oregon, efforts to set forest fires with balloon-carried incendiaries, that kind of thing.
• Malkin cites the importance of German American population to the war effort, without acknowledging the potential of same with the Japanese American population on the West Coast.
• Malkin seems disingenuous when she claims that she merely adds MAGIC decrypts to the rationale for internments, and doesn't rule out simple racism. If a book concentrates 99% of its analysis on X, and says "therefore X, not just Y," it makes an argument about the relative importance of Y by implication. But I haven't read her book, and must take the (implied) 99% estimate by Muller and Robinson on faith.

But I think Malkin also fails in the deeper argument she intended to spark: what lessons can and can't be drawn from the Japanese internments for the present day? In the course of rebutting Muller and Robinson, Malkin protests that she's really only concerned with pre-Midway events:

Eric points out that once the decision was made to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, many ancillary decisions were made-and MAGIC doesn't explain all or even most of them. True, but beside the point. My book focuses primarily on the policies formed in early spring 1942, when the decision was made to evacuate all ethnic Japanese from the West Coast.

That is, she implies(/moves the goalposts) that she's concerned with the defensibility of Roosevelt's EO 9066 when it was issued, without benefit of hindsight even half a year later. But since (a) the camps proper began after Midway and (b) at any rate lasted well into 1946,* it would seem she's left defending quite a small sliver of the events called "the Japanese internments." The events she defends clearly made no provision for the possibility of error, victory, or apparent West Coast security. Instead they appear to have been wholly unnecessary even by mere military standards shortly after the order was given, and probably unnecessary before that as well.

Replying to Muller's final question in part 10, Malkin writes,

Um, no, I’m not. As I make plainly and thoroughly clear in both the lengthy introduction and conclusion, I am advocating narrowly-tailored and eminently reasonable profiling measures such as [additional scrutiny for some foreign visitors in the country on temporary visas, heightened scrutiny for some foreign nationals at airports...]

By now, I'm not even sure what Malkin's point was to begin with, and I'm not sure she's kept track either. No one argues that immigration, visa, and counterintelligence policies shouldn't be handled with great care, with a view to protecting the American people from harm. Reasonable people can differ on how or whether Malkin's specific recommendations can be implemented in ways that adequately safeguard civil rights and human rights.

But great care and reasonable debate is precisely what didn't happen with Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead, they were all rounded up wholesale and sent to the American version of Siberia -- to be sure, with the ability to apply for the right to visit the friendly local town down the road from their barbed wire enclosure. Malkin's strenuous and shaky defense of the wholesale internments of the 1940s makes it hard to believe she wouldn't rather quickly rise to the defense of the same today. I suppose it's a measure of moderation that she's willing to start small.


=====
*See, for example, the historical overview provided by the Smithsonian exhibit "A More Perfect Union":

• June 4-7[1942]: Battle of Midway mangles Japanese navy, a turning point in the war in the Pacific.
• June 5: Incarceration of persons of Japanese ancestry from designated military zones now complete.
• October 30: U.S. Army completes transfer of inmates from Army transit camps to ten permanent War Relocation Authority (WRA) detention camps. Formation of Japanese American combat units. [...]
• March 20 [1946]: Tule Lake, last of ten major concentration camps, closes.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:45:00 PM -- |  

 
Muller vs. Malkin
Over the last few days Eric Muller (usually of isthatlegal.org) has been discussing Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment," which defends the Japanese-American internments during World War II. Kudos to Eugene Volokh for giving Muller the space on Volokh Conspiracy to do so.

This post is mainly intended as a resource for me and interested readers to follow Muller's argument. I'll link to Ms. Malkin's responses in a separate post following this one. (Mr. Muller's posts are actually all on a single weekly archive file, so you only have to open one window to have access to all eleven of the posts he wrote, just scroll up or down to find the others.)

Part 1 Introduction: Muller sets up the discussion, and links it to prior ones he's had about the issue of Japanese-American internments in the 1940s.

Part 2 Muller discusses the cover of the book, which Richard Kotoshorido, a Japanese-American spy shares with Mohammed Atta:

...this cover will, I think, suggest to the ordinary person that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today. If that's not a scandalous aspersion on the loyalty and character of Japanese Americans, I don't know what is.

Part 3 Muller doubts Ms. Malkin spent enough time researching secondary, uncited sources.

Part 4 (a)A discussion of modern-day political (ab)uses of the Japanese internment issue. Muller partly agrees with Malkin about some of the hyperbole about the camps, but adds:

But--to foreshadow my next post on this topic--the way to counter a comparison of Manzanar to Buchenwald is to describe Manzanar carefully. It is not to compare Manzanar to a Boy Scout Camp, which Michelle comes very close to doing.

Part 4 (b) "The Robinson Rebuttal." Muller publishes an e-mail from Greg Robinson, a professor at University of Quebec, and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. Malkin's argument apparently rests on supposing that "MAGIC" decrypts of Japanese communications served to justify the internments. Robinson:

Let me divide [my rebuttal] into three parts: first, that the MAGIC cables do not present the image of a Japanese American spy network; Second, that the people who pushed the case for evacuation would not have had access to the MAGIC excerpts in any case; thirdly, that those who did have access to MAGIC did not base their decision on it.

Part 5 Muller raises his own objections to Malkin's emphasis on MAGIC decrypts explaining the necessity for incarceration under military guard. Among them:

Do you know how it happened that Japanese Americans ended up spending years in desert camps under military guard, unable to leave without clearance? If you think that any federal government actors (let alone Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, or John McCloy) made that decision, you're wrong. The federal government, having evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in the late spring of '42 in racetrack and fairground "assembly centers," wanted to move Japanese Americans to wide-open, unguarded agricultural communities in the interior, modeled after Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But in early April of 1942, the governors of the Mountain States unequivocally rejected that idea, saying (I quote here the words of Governor Chase Clark of Idaho) that "any Japanese who might be sent into [the state] be placed under guard and confined in concentration camps for the safety of our people, our State, and the Japanese themselves." The federal government, needing the cooperation of the states, had no choice but to accede to the governors' demands.

Part 6 Muller essentially fisks Malkin's single (he says) one-paragraph attempt to deal with the disproportionality of the actions taken against Japanese Americans to the security risks they may have posed. Malkin argues, for example, that the significance of the Battle of Midway (June 1942, a crushing defeat of the Japanese Navy) was only realized in hindsight. Not so, says Muller, and presents a number of articles in the American press that immediately saw its significance.

Part 7 More from Robinson:

[Malkin's] central premise is that the government acted justly in establishing camps to which Japanese Americans were "free to move elsewhere (initially)" "free to leave" and " free to enter". This is a serious distortion. [...]

The author correctly notes that those with permits who were adjudged loyal by the governments were able to leave. Again, she might have gone on to mention that as time went on the camp inmates were able in many cases to get day passes to go into town for supplies or on hikes. However, the Japanese Americans were held for months without individual trials, hearings, or charges. Until individuals were able to arrange to get paroled through the long, cumbersome and inevitably arbitrary loyalty and sponsorship procedure, they had no way to escape being confined against their will. ...

Part 8 Robinson fires additional salvos on the military necessity of incarcerating West Coast Japanese-Americans: why not East Coast German-Americans as well?

As Attorney General Biddle, who was responsible for control of enemy aliens, stated in an unpublished section of his memoirs, "There was more reason than in the West to conclude that shore-to-ship signals were accounting for the very serious submarine sinkings all along the East Coast, which were only sporadic only the West Coast...But the decisions were not made on the logic of events or on the weight of evidence, but on the racial prejudice that seemed to be influencing everyone. (cited in Robinson, BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT, p.112)."

Part 9 Robinson on the work as a whole:

She must be aware that trying to discuss the process of evacuation without mentioning the long campaign by Californians to get rid of the "Japs" or the political pressure on the Administration from West Coast congressmen and commercial groups is unreal--like trying to discuss the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment without bringing in slavery.

Part 10 Muller concludes:

Michelle's purpose in writing the book, you'll recall, was to "offer a defen[se] of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II." (p. xiii) "Even with the benefit of hindsight," she argues on page 80, "it is not at all clear that mass evacuation [of all people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens] was unwarranted." Why? Because information (especially from the MAGIC decrypts) about subversive activities by Japanese Americans (which, she notes, happen to be just like the sorts of subversive activities that Arabs and Muslims are engaging in) provided a "solid rationale for evacuation." (p. 141.)

So here's what I don't get. On page xxx of the book's Introduction ("A Time To Discriminate"), Michelle tells us to "[m]ake no mistake": she is "not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps."

She's not?

- FURTHER READING -

• A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & The U.S. Constitution -- online exhibit by the National Museum of American History. (I saw the exhibit when it was on physical display there, it was unforgettable.) The exhibit also provides a bibliography, last updated in October 2001.
• The Sparky vs. Muller debate at Sgt. Stryker and isthatlegal.org -- mentioned by Malkin as a catalyst for writing her book.
• The 100th/442d Brigade -- perhaps an emotional digression.
• UPDATE, 8/9: Not surprisingly, most of Muller's own blog is devoted to the subject during the week of 8/1; he and Greg Robinson respond to Malkin's rebuttal (see above). There's more during the week of 8/8.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:35:00 AM -- |  

 
Wonderful wide world of web: Halfbakery
Think "web site apparently populated by Kramer clones": Halfbakery, a site where people can submit nitwit or not-so-nitwit ideas to a vote. Consider:

• Einstein: legally change your name to Einstein
  "Then when you do something dumb and someone sneeringly calls you "Einstein," their irony will be totally disarmed because your name actually will BE Einstein." (5 for, 13 against)
• You, Me and the Cockroach Makes Three: predesignate a meeting place for all survivors of an apocalypse.
  "just in case. rebuilding civilization is a daunting task. many hands make light work. might need a bunker or something there. some gear. maybe a bunker in each nation equipped and wired to one another so a coordinated attempt to rebuild the global society would be just a little more convenient. would eliminate searching the globe for one another. see you there." (14 for, 6 against)
• Panic PIN: Entering alternate ATM PIN number summons help
  "In addition to the regular PIN number (*), each bank card would have a second PIN number that would indicate the user was in some sort of distress (such as being forced to withdraw money at gunpoint). Use of this alternate PIN would summon the police and perhaps put the ATM's camera in a higher resolution and/or frame rate mode." (547 for, 72 against)

(Via Praschl) posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 AM -- |  

 
Ridin' down the campaign trail

I can't wait to vote.org: Buttons are $5 for 105, or make them yourself using this Photoshop file (you're then just asked not to sell them).

Bikes Against Bush: Joshua Kinberg, a student at Parsons School of Design, is developing a device that will allow him to write chalk skywriter-style messages while biking. He plans to use it in New York City during the Republican convention. (Here's a video.)

"Armenstock" -- an Armenian music festival supporting John Kerry, will be held at a campground southwest of Boston on August 28. Check it out -- for the "JibJab"-like site intro with John and Teresa folk dancing, if nothing else...

"2004 Election Jokes and Presidential Campaign Humor," extremely neatly arranged for you by About.com. The Republican Convention Schedule Parody is pretty good:

6:00 PM Opening Prayer, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell
6:30 PM Pledge of Allegiance
6:35 PM Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)
6:45 PM Salute to the Coalition of the Willing
6:46 PM Seminar #1: Getting your kid a military deferment
(etcetera)

(Yes, there's a Democratic Convention Schedule Parody, too, just relax.)

=====
RUBBING EYES, 8/5: Huh? Deferment?

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:10:00 PM -- |  

 
The Andalucian front
In the August 2 issue of the New Yorker, Lawrence Wright's article "The Terror Web" retells the story of the Madrid 3/11 bombings, and constructs an interesting, detailed, and (of course) disturbing new picture of Islamist terror today. I found the article absorbing, having mentioned a number of the major and minor items it discusses.* Wright weaves these elements into a complex story, one of a 21st century Islamist movement that has spread to Europe, and is working toward an Islamic Restoration.

Homage to Andalucia
One part of Wright's thesis is that March 11 may have been the opening salvo of an Islamist Spanish Front. Wright points out that a second major bombing, avoided on April 2 (apparently by sheer luck), could not have had the purpose of forcing Spain's withdrawal from coalition forces in Iraq, since its new government was already eagerly meeting that demand.

Even more tellingly, Wright observes,

One of the most sobering pieces of information to come out of the investigation of the March 11th bombings is that the planning for the attacks may have begun nearly a year before 9/11. In October, 2000, several of the suspects met in Istanbul with Amer Azizi, who had taken the nom de guerre Othman Al Andalusi—Othman of Al Andalus. Azizi later gave the conspirators permission to act in the name of Al Qaeda, although it is unclear whether he authorized money or other assistance—or, indeed, whether Al Qaeda had much support to offer. In June, Italian police released a surveillance tape of one of the alleged planners of the train bombings, an Egyptian housepainter named Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, who said that the operation “took me two and a half years.” Ahmed had served as an explosives expert in the Egyptian Army. It appears that some kind of attack would have happened even if Spain had not joined the Coalition—or if the invasion of Iraq had never occurred.
(emphases added)

One act can have many motives. While it remains likely that by the morning of 3/11/2004, the Madrid terrorists hoped to end Spain's involvement in Iraq's occupation, the original motive for the plotters in 2000 may well have been -- wait for it -- rolling back the Reconquista of Spain: the centuries-long war that ended with Ferdinand and Isabella wresting all of "Andalucia" -- as Spain was known to the Arab world -- from its Muslim rulers.

When Spanish police stormed an apartment where seven Madrid bombing suspects had barricaded themselves, the apartment exploded in a huge blast, killing all seven suspects and one policeman. Wright:

In the ruins, police found twenty-two pounds of Goma-2 and two hundred copper detonators that were similar to those used in the train bombings. They also found the shredded remains of a videotape. These fragments were painstakingly reassembled, to the point where police could view the final statement of Fakhet and two other members of the cell, which called itself “the brigade situated in Al Andalus.” Unless Spanish troops left Iraq within a week, the men had declared, “we will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tariq ibn Ziyad.”

Al Andalus is the Arabic name for the portion of Spain that fell to Muslim armies after the invasion by the Berber general Tariq ibn Ziyad in 711. It includes not only the southern region of Andalusia, but most of the Iberian Peninsula. For the next eight hundred years, Al Andalus remained in Islamic hands. “You know of the Spanish crusade against Muslims, and that not much time has passed since the expulsion from Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,” Fakhet says on the tape. He is referring to 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella completed the reconquest of Spain, forcing Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave the Iberian Peninsula. “Blood for blood!” he shouts. “Destruction for Destruction!”

It's true such rhetoric may be pure bravado, designed to demonstrate an uncompromising radical stance for posterity. But it's apparently also true that Spain's Moorish inheritance -- the Alhambra, Grenada, etc. -- still exerts a wistful fascination throughout the Arab-speaking world. Bin Laden referred to the "tragedy of Andalucia" in his first communique after the start of "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan (October 7, 2001), and has continued since then:

This January, bin Laden issued a “Message to the Muslim People,” which was broadcast on Al Jazeera. He lamented the decline of the Islam world: “It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus.”

Eurotrash Islamists
The other half of Wright's thesis is that while Al Qaeda and Bin Laden have tried to capitalize on the 3/11 atrocities,** , the events in Spain were never fully under their control. A loose-knit network of interests, increasingly using the Internet to organize, discuss, and justify terror acts has arisen that is beyond the direct reach of Al Qaeda control, yet shares many of the nutty goals and aspirations any right-thinking madrassa graduate or half-baked Eurotrash Islamist might come up with. Think of it as anarcho-Islamism; at times, the home office somewhere in Waziristan may send a vice president of operations to network with the locals, but that's often as far as it goes:

“Al Qaeda is not a hierarchical organization, and never was,” Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist, a former C.I.A. case officer, and the author of “Understanding Terror Networks,” told me. “It was always a social movement.” The latest converts to the cause didn’t train in Afghanistan, and they approach jihad differently. “These local guys are reckless and less well trained, but they are willing to kill themselves, whereas the previous leaders were not,” Sageman said. Moreover, as the Spanish attacks showed, the new generation was more interested in committing violence for the sake of immediate political gain. [...]

Gustavo de Aristegui, a prominent Basque and Spanish politician who is "considered one the country's top terroism experts" (according to this Boston Globe item), summarizes Al Qaeda as consisting of several different networks including the 9/11 terror group proper; an ad-hoc group of allies like Abu Sayyef in the Phillippines; and an emerging strategic alliance with Hamas and perhaps even Hezbollah. Aristegui continued:

Finally, there is the fourth network—“imitators, emulators,” who are ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda but are less tied to it financially. “These are the ones who committed Madrid,” Aristegui said.

The Internet itself has played a role in shaping not just the tactics but the community and membership of this wider network, by allowing the creation of virtual communities where disaffected Muslims abroad can find encouragement -- and helping them shop for the radical vision of their choice:

“The Internet is the key issue,” Gilles Kepel, a prominent Arabist and a professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques, in Paris, told me recently. “It erases the frontiers between the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Kufr [roughly, lands under Islamic rule vs. those not under such rule – ed.]. It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an Internet Sharia and fatwa system.” Kepel was speaking of the Islamic legal code, which is administered by the clergy. Now one doesn’t have to be in Saudi Arabia or Egypt to live under the rule of Islamic law. “Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca,” Kepel said. “In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site.”
(links, emphasis added)

Burning their bridges to the 21st century
Understandably -- given the lack of many survivors of the 3/11 plot to talk to -- guessing at their mix of motives must be an imprecise science. One Spanish analyst suggests the strategic and the ideological may be one and the same:

“Spain is the bridge between the Islamic world and the West,” Haizam Amirah Fernández said, when we met in a conference room at Madrid’s Real Instituto Elcano shortly after the train bombings. “Think of that other bridge to the east, Turkey. Both have been hit by jihadist terrorists—in the same week.” In Istanbul, on March 9th, two suicide bombers attacked a Jewish club, killing one person and injuring five others. “The whole idea is to cut off these bridges,” Amirah said. “If the goal is to polarize people, Muslims and infidels, that is a way of doing it. Jihadists are the most fervent defenders of the notion of a clash of civilizations.”

Wright concludes with words from a second Spanish analyst, Florentino Portero:

“The real problem of Spain for Al Qaeda is that we are a neighbor of Arab countries—Morocco and Algeria—and we are a model of economy, democracy, and secularism,” Florentino Portero, a political analyst at the Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos, in Madrid, told me. “We support the transformation and Westernization of the Middle East. We defend the transition of Morocco from a monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. We are allies of the enemies of Al Qaeda in the Arab world. This point is not clearly understood by the Spanish people. We are a menace to Al Qaeda just because of who we are.”

The oft-derided "they hate us for our freedom" may be largely accurate -- with the proviso "but really, these guys would hate us no matter what."

As they say, read the whole thing. The story Wright tells is necessarily complex and uncertain, given the shadowy world and nearly alien motivations he's writing about. There are seeming inconsistencies in Wright's account; for example, suicide is said to provide a "scant moral cover" for mass murder in one place, yet described as sin condemned by Islam in another. Overall, though, this is a must-read for anyone interested in Al Qaeda and the future of the war on terror.

It's tempting to describe the Islamist movement as a mutating disease, forever one step ahead of complete prevention or cure. But the movement also faces an insoluble strategic problem with its turn-back-the-clock pipedreams like a new Andalucia. What Islamist terror’s program lacks in feasibility, its adherents do their level murderous best to make up for with persistence and ruthlessness. The bad news from Madrid may be that "9/11" Al Qaeda is just the tip of the iceberg.


=====
* The New Yorker article touches on several topics mentioned in the past on this site, including:
1) The "Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers" document noticed by a Norwegian defense agency that threatened to hit Spain "with two, maximum three blows" to force it out of the occupying coalition in Iraq. The document suggested a cool political mind at work -- "political science applied to jihad," as Wright quotes a Spanish analyst.
2) The Abu el Hafs statement taking responsibility for the bombings, which eschewed the formal style and language of Islamic theology favored by top level Al Qaeda leadership -- suggesting the operation was not directly controlled by Bin Laden.
3) The implications of the perceived triumph of train bombers over a western democracy -- due more to fecklessness by the new government than to the election itself, Wright's article argues: "I doubt whether anyone can seriously suggest that Spain has not acted in a way that suggests appeasement,” Ramón Pérez-Maura, the editor at ABC, told me shortly after Zapatero had announced plans to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq in May, without waiting to see if U.N. peacekeeping troops would become involved.
4) The terrorists' practice of drinking holy water from Mecca in order to absolve them of their sins in advance, which I presume is unorthodox Islamic practice. The news report I saw didn't make clear whether the sins in question were mass murder or (as Wright reports the Spanish police believe) suicide. Wright reports that one 3/11 ringleader, Abu Dujan al-Afghani, was wearing funeral robes in the video taking responsibility for the bombings, suggesting plotters may have considered 3/11 a suicide mission.
** On April 15, Bin Laden offered a cease-fire and negotiations to Europeans, an offer that was rejected.

EDIT, 8/4: "'9/11' Al Qaeda is just the tip of the iceberg" from " their numbers are growing." posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:15:00 AM -- |  

 
90 years ago today: the guns of August
The 90th anniversary of some of the most fateful days in human history is passing almost unnoticed and unremarked:

FIRST WORLD WAR ERUPTS:
August 1, 1914
Four days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany and Russia declare war against each other, France orders a general mobilization, and the first German army units cross into Luxembourg in preparation for the German invasion of France. During the next three days, Russia, France, Belgium, and Great Britain all lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the German army invaded Belgium. The 'Great War' that ensued was one of unprecedented destruction and loss of life, resulting in the deaths of some 20 million soldiers and civilians.
(via The History Channel's "This Day in History")

And millions more in Russia via the Russian Revolution, millions more again in the Second World War, finishing what the First did not, and doubtless millions in named and unnamed consequences of both. The conflagration began burning 90 years ago.

There are doubtless many superb literary evocations of World War I; one I know and can recommend is Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. The first book that brought home World War I to me is the classic work by John Keegan, The Face of Battle: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme -- as beautifully written, eye-opening, and richly researched a work of history as I've ever come across. From Keegan's description of the Somme, (July 1, 1916):

In some battalions, the men were able to walk upright, with arms sloped or ported, as they had been expecting. In others they were soon bent forward, like men walking into a strong wind and rain, their bayonets fixed and their rifles horizontal. 'Troops always, in my experience', wrote Lord Chandos, whose observation this is, 'unconsciously assume this crouching position when advancing against heavy fire.' [...]

[T]he last brigade [had] a mile of open ground to cover before it reached its own front line, a safe enough passage if the enemy's machine-guns had been extinguished, otherwise a funeral march. A sergeant of the 3rd Tyneside Irish (26th Northumberland Fusiliers), describes how it was: 'I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men. Then I heard the "patter, patter" of machine-guns in the distance. By the time I'd gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone twenty yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself.'
(pp. 244-245 of my paperback copy)

If you're interested, other books you might consider are The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War, and Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Like Trotsky once said: "You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you." posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:54:00 PM -- |  

 
Various and sundry

From a nationally televised July 4th sermon by Pastor Ronnie Floyd, of the First Baptist Church of Springdale, Arkansas:

One candidate believes that the United States is at war with terrorism. The other candidate believes we're not at war at all, but in a lawsuit. One candidate believes in the sanctity of an unborn life, signing legislation banning partial birth abortion and declaring that human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. The other believes in abortion on demand, voting six times in the United States Senate against the ban and insisting there is no such thing as a partial birth. One candidate believes that marriage is a God-ordained institution between one man and one woman and has proposed a constitutional amendment protecting marriage. The other was one of only 14 U.S. senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996. One candidate publicly and unashamedly confesses faith in Christ and acknowledges that, 'My faith helps me in the service to people.' The other encourages private belief and argues that religious beliefs need not influence his decisions as a public official.

Since it's clear from this and other statements that the sermon is pro-Bush politicking, and since federal tax law bars most non-profit groups from endorsing or opposing candidates for public office, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State is petitioning the IRS to investigate; Pastor Floyd disagrees.

Via Pastor Floyd: iVoteValues.com, developed by For Faith & Family of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Mathew Brady's National Portrait Gallery: A Virtual Tour: photographs and lithographs by the Civil War era photographer: Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, William Tecumseh Sherman, George McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, and many more ... courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

...also from the NPG: Marilyn Monroe in Korea, 1954.

Scientific American reports on efforts to make Army vehicles more resistant to attack:

The spray-on armor is similar to a polymer commonly used as a spray-on truck bed liner. It's made from either polyurethane, polyurea or a mixture of the two. When applied to steel, the polymer spreads out the shock of an explosion and helps prevent impacted material from shattering. In tests, a 500-pound bomb detonated near two trailers obliterated the unarmored trailer but only buckled the walls of the trailer whose walls were coated with the rubbery polymer.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:10:00 AM -- |