Two prominent Iraqi bloggers respond very differently to the anniversary. The anti-US Riverbend at Baghdad Burning has nothing positive to say:

It has been three years since the beginning of the war that marked the end of Iraq’s independence. Three years of occupation and bloodshed.

Spring should be about renewal and rebirth. For Iraqis, spring has been about reliving painful memories and preparing for future disasters. In many ways, this year is like 2003 prior to the war when we were stocking up on fuel, water, food and first aid supplies and medications. We’re doing it again this year but now we don’t discuss what we’re stocking up for. Bombs and B-52’s are so much easier to face than other possibilities.

I don’t think anyone imagined three years ago that things could be quite this bad today. The last few weeks have been ridden with tension. I’m so tired of it all- we’re all tired.

Three years and the electricity is worse than ever. The security situation has gone from bad to worse. The country feels like it’s on the brink of chaos once more- but a pre-planned, pre-fabricated chaos being led by religious militias and zealots….

..Three years after the war, and we’ve managed to move backwards in a visible way, and in a not so visible way.

In the last weeks alone, thousands have died in senseless violence and the American and Iraqi army bomb Samarra as I write this. The sad thing isn’t the air raid, which is one of hundreds of air raids we’ve seen in three years- it’s the resignation in the people. They sit in their homes in Samarra because there’s no where to go. Before, we’d get refugees in Baghdad and surrounding areas… Now, Baghdadis themselves are looking for ways out of the city… out of the country. The typical Iraqi dream has become to find some safe haven abroad.

Three years later and the nightmares of bombings and of shock and awe have evolved into another sort of nightmare. The difference between now and then was that three years ago, we were still worrying about material things- possessions, houses, cars, electricity, water, fuel… It’s difficult to define what worries us most now. Even the most cynical war critics couldn’t imagine the country being this bad three years after the war… Allah yistur min il rab3a (God protect us from the fourth year).

Maybe people still remember how Iraqis first reacted to the change; they directed their rage against anything that reminded them of the regime they hated, burning and looting anything that represented Saddam and his regime. The rich and the poor both stormed those buildings because those angry crowds felt those buildings were Saddam’s property and few of us realized at that time that that was wrong yet the emotions driving it were understandable.

The smoke faded away and we woke up to see all the chains gone and instead of the God-president and his iron grip over our destinies, we found ourselves without a guide, without any guidance but our long buried primitive nature, the long repressed nature of loving freedom and practicing it.

The change began then, at that moment where reason mixed with sentiments; were we free…or, were we lost?

Actually it was a lot of both and there was also a sense of great relief that the terrifying warnings from hundreds of thousands of deaths, famine and mass refugees were not true at that point, on the contrary the military operation itself was clean and successful by all standards and didn’t cause any serious harm to the civilian population, the infrastructure, or the marching troops…

..Was it the right decision to remove Saddam?

I say yes, and that’s what most Iraqis said and still say even if they became divided over what happened later…the truth is that virtually no one wants Saddam back.

I will just ignore the weepers, whiners, teenagers and half educated naive people and their silly rallies as I don’t want to waste time on people who can do nothing but blindly oppose everything without thinking.

I will ignore them and focus on the more important goals we want to reach here…

Life stopped and time stopped when Saddam ruled Iraq, actually that totalitarian regime was moving backwards and dragging us with it and nothing could stop the deterioration that began the moment Saddam came to power.

We had to accept the change and live with all that would come along with it whether good or bad.

The democracy we’re practicing today in Iraq is the exact opposite of what we had for decades and until three years ago. This democracy carries the essence of life, the differences, the dynamics and yes, the failures but also the seed of a better future.

Robert Irwin discusses the reasons for the decline of Arabic and Islamic studies at British universities. At a time featuring a conspicuous need for this specific cultural and linguistic expertise, a suitable candidate to occupy the Sir Thomas Adams Professorship in Arabic, established at Cambridge in 1632, is not in evidence. Irwin attributes the decline in Arabic studies partly to the politically correct disrepute of the field brought about by the influence of Columbia University’s late professor Edward Said:

As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented.

Broader intellectual trends have had a role—a flight from difficulty, a suspicion of old-fashioned, fact-bound scholarship and a taste for deconstructive readings of classic works.

The Washington Post recently announced that it will be terminating 80 of 870 newsroom positions. It’s too much to hope, I’m sure, that Dana Priest (mouthpiece for the Pouting Spooks) will be among those departing.

WaPo Ombudsfem Deborah Howell looks at the Post’s declining readership (and profits), and tries a little whistling in the dark.

In the future, newspapers probably will be smaller, more expensive and more tailored to readers’ needs. Lavine says newspapers will be fine “if they discover more interesting stories and then tell them in profoundly more interesting ways and then drive all of this by understanding and connecting with their audience—and then use the Net and wireless to expand their ability to provide all of that where, when and how the readers want it.”

There’s one big intangible in all this: a paper’s connection with its readers. Readers who feel respected and who love their newspaper don’t depart easily. If Post journalists write every story, take every photo, compose every headline and design every page with readers in mind, and the newspaper is printed well and delivered on time, The Post will be fine.

Having read the Sunday New York and Washington’s newspapers of records’ weekly imitation of Tokyo Rose’s WWII reporting today, I can only point in reply to this year’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media Report and its polling results on just how much confidence today’s readership has come to place in Times and Post reporting.

Stephen Hayes lists more evidence emerging from declassified documents captured in Iraq: a series of memos from the spring of 2001, showing that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s; memos on efforts by Iraqi Intelligence to support Saudi opposition groups, including evidence of cooperation with Osama bin Laden 1994-1996; and a memo from “Republican Command, Intelligence Division,” dated September 15, 2001, addressed to “Mr. M.A.M.5,” reading:

Our Afghani source number 11002… has provided us information that the Afghani consul Ahmed Dahestani (his biographic information attachment #2) has talked in front of him about the following:
1. That Osama bin Laden and the Taliban group in Afghanistan are in communication with Iraq and that previously a group of Taliban and Osama bin Laden have visited Iraq.
2. That America has evidence that the Iraqi government and the group of Osama bin Laden have cooperated to attack targets inside America.
3. In the event that it has been proven that the group of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban planning such operations, it is possible that America will attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
4. That the Afghani consul heard of the relation between Iraq and the group of Osama bin Laden while he was in Iran.
5. In the light of what has been presented, we suggest to write to the committee of information.

In a document dated May 1999, Saddam’s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for “special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].” Preparations for “Blessed July,” a regime-directed wave of “martyrdom” operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

News sources are reporting that the US Navy exchanged gunfire with pirates yesterday off the coat of Somalia, ultimately capturing twelve. A Dutch medical team is being flown in to treat the wounded pirates.

They used to deal with piracy more sternly and expeditiously.

Jaws as G-rated human-animal friendship picture. link

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

LEGENDARY HISTORY OF ST. PATRICK

The principal enemies that St. Patrick found to the introduction of Christianity into Ireland, were the Druidical priests of the more ancient faith, who, as might naturally be supposed, were exceedingly adverse to any innovation. These Druids, being great magicians, would have been formidable antagonists to any one of less miraculous and saintly powers than Patrick. Their obstinate antagonism was so great, that, in spite of his benevolent disposition, he was compelled to curse their fertile lands, so that they became dreary bogs: to curse their rivers, so that they produced no fish: to curse their very kettles, so that with no amount of fire and patience could they ever be made to boil; and, as a last resort, to curse the Druids themselves, so that the earth opened and swallowed them up.

A popular legend relates that the saint and his followers found themselves, one cold morning, on a mountain, without a fire to cook their break-fast, or warm their frozen limbs. Unheeding their complaints, Patrick desired them to collect a pile of ice and snow-balls: which having been done, he breathed upon it, and it instantaneously became a pleasant fire—a fire that long after served to point a poet’s conceit in these lines:

‘Saint Patrick, as in legends told,
The morning being very cold,
In order to assuage the weather,
Collected bits of ice together;
Then gently breathed upon the pyre,
When every fragment blazed on fire.
Oh! if the saint had been so kind,
As to have left the gift behind
To such a lovelorn wretch as me,
Who daily struggles to be free:
I’d be content—content with part,
I’d only ask to thaw the heart,
The frozen heart, of Polly Roe.’

The greatest of St. Patrick’s miracles was that of driving the venomous reptiles out of Ireland, and rendering the Irish soil, for ever after, so obnoxious to the serpent race, that they instantaneously die on touching it. Colgan seriously relates that St. Patrick accomplished this feat by beating a drum, which he struck with such fervour that he knocked a hole in it, thereby endangering the success of the miracle. But an angel appearing mended the drum: and the patched instrument was long exhibited as a holy relic.

In 1831, Mr. James Cleland, an Irish gentleman, being curious to ascertain whether the climate or soil of Ireland was naturally destructive to the serpent tribe, purchased half-a-dozen of the common harmless English snake (matrix torqueta), in Covent Garden market in London. Bringing them to Ireland, he turned them out in his garden at Rathgael, in the county of Down: and in a week afterwards, one of them was killed at Milecross, about three miles distant. The persons into whose hands this strange monster fell, had not the slightest suspicion that it was a snake, but, considering it a curious kind of eel, they took it to Dr. J. L. Drummond, a celebrated Irish naturalist, who at once pronounced the animal to be a reptile and not a fish. The idea of a ‘rale living sarpint’ having been killed within a short distance of the very burial-place of St. Patrick, caused an extraordinary sensation of alarm among the country people. The most absurd rumours were freely circulated, and credited. One far-seeing clergyman preached a sermon, in which he cited this unfortunate snake as a token of the immediate commencement of the millennium: while another saw in it a type of the approach of the cholera morbus. Old prophecies were raked up, and all parties and sects, for once, united in believing that the snake fore-shadowed. ‘the beginning of the end,’ though they very widely differed as to what that end was to be. Some more practically minded persons, however, subscribed a considerable sum of money, which they offered in rewards for the destruction of any other snakes that might be found in the district. And three more of the snakes were not long afterwards killed, within a few miles of the garden where they were liberated. The remaining two snakes were never very clearly accounted for; but no doubt they also fell victims to the reward. The writer, who resided in that part of the country at the time, well remembers the wild rumours, among the more illiterate classes, on the appearance of those snakes: and the bitter feelings of angry indignation expressed by educated persons against the—very fortunately then unknown—person, who had dared to bring them to Ireland.

A more natural story than the extirpation of the serpents, has afforded material for the pencil of the painter, as well as the pen of the poet. When baptizing an Irish chieftain, the venerable saint leaned heavily on his crozier, the steel-spiked point of which he had unwittingly placed on the great toe of the converted heathen. The pious chief, in his ignorance of Christian rites, believing this to be an essential part of the ceremony, bore the pain without flinching or murmur; though the blood flowed so freely from the wound, that the Irish named the place St. fhuil (stream of blood), now pronounced Struill, the name of a well-known place near Downpatrick. And here we are reminded of a very remarkable fact in connection with geographical appellations, that the footsteps of St. Patrick can be traced, almost from his cradle to his grave, by the names of places called after him.

Thus, assuming his Scottish origin, he was born at Kilpatrick (the cell or church of Patrick), in Dumbartonshire. He resided for some time at Dalpatrick (the district or division of Patrick), in Lanarkshire; and visited Crag-phadrig (the rock of Patrick), near Inverness. He founded two churches, Kirkpatrick at Irongray, in Kireudbright; and Kirkpatrick at Fleming, in Dumfries: and ultimately sailed from Portpatrick, leaving behind him such an odour of sanctity, that among the most distinguished families of the Scottish aristocracy, Patrick has been a favourite name down to the present day.

Arriving in England, he preached in Patterdale (Patrick’s dale), in Westmoreland: and founded the church of Kirkpatrick, in Durham. Visiting Wales, he walked over Sarn-badrig (Patrick’s causeway), which, now covered by the sea, forms a dangerous shoal in Carnarvon Bay: and departing for the Continent, sailed from Llan-badrig (the church of Patrick), in the island of Anglesea. Undertaking his mission to convert the Irish, he first landed at Innis-patrick (the island of Patrick), and next at Holmpatrick, on the opposite shore of the mainland, in the county of Dublin. Sailing northwards, he touched at the Isle of Man, sometimes since, also, called. Innis-patrick, where he founded another church of Kirkpatrick, near the town of Peel. Again landing on the coast of Ireland, in the county of Down, he converted and baptized the chieftain Dichu, on his own threshing-floor. The name of the parish of Saul, derived from Sabbal-patrick (the barn of Patrick), perpetuates the event. He then proceeded to Temple-patrick, in Antrim, and from thence to a lofty mountain in Mayo, ever since called Croagh-patrick.

He founded an abbey in East Meath, called Domnach-Padraig (the house of Patrick), and built a church in Dublin on the spot where St. Patrick’s Cathedral now stands. In an island of Lough Deng, in the county of Donegal, there is St. Patrick’s Purgatory: in Leinster, St. Patrick’s Wood; at Cashel, St. Patrick’s Rock; the St. Patrick’s Wells, at which the holy man is said to have quenched his thirst, may be counted by dozens. He is commonly stated to have died at Saul on the 17^th of March 493, in the one hundred and twenty-first year of his age.

Poteen, a favourite beverage in Ireland, is also said to have derived its name from St. Patrick: he, according to legend, being the first who instructed the Irish in the art of distillation. This, however, is, to say the least, doubtful: the most authentic historians representing the saint as a very strict promoter of temperance, if not exactly a teetotaller. We read that in 445 he commanded his disciples to abstain from drink in the day-time, until the bell rang for vespers in the evening. One Colman, though busily engaged in the severe labours of the field, exhausted with heat, fatigue, and intolerable thirst, obeyed so literally the injunction of his revered preceptor, that he refrained from indulging himself with one drop of water during a long sultry harvest day. But human endurance has its limits: when the vesper bell at last rang for evensong, Colman dropped down dead—a martyr to thirst. Irishmen can well appreciate such a martyrdom; and the name of Colman, to this day, is frequently cited, with the added epithet of Shadhack—the Thirsty.

‘In Burgo Duno, tumulo tumulantur in uno,
Brigida, Patricius, atque Columba pins.’

Which may be thus rendered:

‘In the hill of Down, buried in one tomb,
Were Bridget and Patricius, with Columba the pious.’

One of the strangest recollections of a strange childhood is the writer having been taken, by a servant, unknown to his parents, to see a silver case, containing, as was said, the jaw-bone of St. Patrick. The writer was very young at the time, but remembers seeing one much younger, a baby, on the same occasion, and has an indistinct idea that the jaw-bone was considered to have had a very salutary effect on the baby’s safe introduction into the world. This jaw-bone, and the silver shrine enclosing it, has been, for many years, in the possession of a family in humble life near Belfast. In the memory of persons living, it contained five teeth, but now retains only one—three having been given to members of the family, when emigrating to America; and the fourth was deposited under the altar of the Roman Catholic Chapel of Derriaghy, when rebuilt some years ago.

The curiously embossed case has a very antique appearance, and is said to be of an immense age: but it is, though certainly old, not so very old as reported, for it carries the Hallmark ‘plainly impressed upon it.’ This remarkable relic has long been used for a kind of extra-judicial trial, similar to the Saxon corsnet, a test of guilt or innocence of very great antiquity; accused or suspected persons freeing themselves from the suspicion of crime, by placing the right hand on the reliquary, and declaring their innocence, in a certain form of words, supposed to be an asseveration of the greatest solemnity, and liable to instantaneous, supernatural, and frightful punishment, if falsely spoken, even by suppressio veri, or suygestio falsi. It was also supposed to assist women in labour, relieve epileptic fits, counteract the diabolical machinations of witches and fairies, and avert the baleful influence of the evil eye. We have been informed, however, that of late years it has rarely been applied to such uses, though it is still considered a most welcome visitor to a household, where an immediate addition to the family is expected.

The shamrock, or small white clover (trifolium repens of botanists), is almost universally worn in the hat over all Ireland, on St. Patrick’s day. The popular notion is, that when St. Patrick was preaching the doctrine of the Trinity to the pagan Irish, he used this plant, bearing three leaves upon one stem, as a symbol or illustration of the great mystery. To suppose, as some absurdly hold, that he used it as an argument, would be derogatory to the saint’s high reputation for orthodoxy and good sense: but it is certainly a curious coincidence, if nothing more, that the trefoil in Arabic is called skamrakh, and was held sacred in Iran as emblematical of the Persian Triads. Pliny, too, in his Natural History, says that serpents are never seen upon trefoil, and it prevails against the stings of snakes and scorpions. This, considering St. Patrick’s connexion with snakes, is really remarkable, and we may reasonably imagine that, previous to his arrival, the Irish had ascribed mystical virtues to the trefoil or shamrock, and on hearing of the Trinity for the first time, they fancied some peculiar fitness in their already sacred plant to shadow forth the newly revealed and mysterious doctrine. And we may conclude, in the words of the poet, long may the shamrock,

‘The plant that blooms for ever,
With the rose combined,
And the thistle twined,
Defy the strength of foes to sever.
Firm be the triple league they form,
Despite all change of weather:
In sunshine, darkness, calm, or storm,
Still may they fondly grow together.’
W. P.

The serpent every Monday morning calls out in Irish, ‘It is a long Monday, Patrick.’

That St Patrick chained the serpent in Lough Dilveen, and that the serpent calls out to him every Monday morning, is firmly believed by the lower orders who live in the neighbourhood of the Lough.

The Resolution was introduced by Senator Steen Miles of suburban Atlanta, and cited cited Fonda’s work as founder of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, her donations to universities and charities, and her role as (Clinton-appointed) goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund.

“I can think of no living American who is less worthy of this honor,” Republican Sen. John Douglas declared. “She is as guilty of treason as Benedict Arnold and Tokyo Rose.”

Defense Review has an article & video on the weaponized AutoCopter, a self-stabiized unmanned mini-helicopter, armed with the full-auto Auto Assault-12 shotgun designed to utilize the FRAG-12 family of 12-Gauge ammunition, offering a choice of High-Explosive (HE), High-Explosive Fragmenting Antipersonnel (HE-FA, or HEFA), and High-Explosive Armor-Piercing (HE-AP, or HEAP) rounds.
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More on the Auto Assault-12.

Somebody took some typical Chinese restaurant menus and ran the radicals through a translating program, one very much like Google’s language tools or Alta Vista’s Babelfish, producing predictably comedic results.

The government has finally begun to release unclassified documents captured in Iraq. link

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard played a conspicuous role in bringing pressure for their release. 3/20

Michelle Malkin is collecting coverage of this emerging news event.

The Afar Triangle, the sand-colored section to the north of the Horn of Africa, is separating from the African Continent as the result of the movement of different tectonic plates at speeds so fast that crevices in the ground may be seen opening and spreading. Scientists are enjoying a rare opportunity to see geological processes operating at a readily observable speed.

Daily Illini student Editor-in-Chief Acton Gorton was fired yesterday by the Illini Media Company board of directors, after “a thorough review, a report by a student task force of senior members of the staff, and a hearing” found that Gorton violated Daily Illini policies about “thoughtful discussion of and preparation for the publication of inflammatory material.” Gorton published the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons on February 9th.

The board, made up of University of Illinois students and faculty, voted unanimously to fire Gorton. Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska, who was also suspended on February 14th, was reinstated, but decline to return to the paper.

Earlier posting.

It’s not going to be necessary for the sons of the Prophet to attack Evansville. The local authorities have already accepted their status as dhimmis (subjugated members of an inferior culture and faith) and are prepared to enforce Sharia (Islamic law) voluntarily.
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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Bullied by the European Union into conformity with contemporary political shibboleths, the tiny (formerly) self-governing island of Sark voted grudgingly to replace its 450 year old system of rule by landowners, originally negotiated with Queen Elizabeth, into a conventional modern democracy. USATODAY—Telegraph.
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Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM in five minutes.
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Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok via Barcepundit.

Tasteless-and-talentless-and-communist cartoonist Ted Rall (whose dreadful work unfortunately appears in many SF-area independent papers) went panhandling to the readers of his blog to fund a lawsuit against Ann Coulter for alluding to him in a joke. Coulter, in the course of a speech to a Republican PAC, reportedly quipped:

Iran is soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. So far, only Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, and the NY Times have made submissions.

This year’s Academy Awards were destined, it was believed by many, to deliver an important symbolic victory for the forces of progress over Middle America. An exceptionally talented director had taken a sad little story by a fine writer, a story of capricious fate producing human tragedy beneath the indifferent sky of a hard land, and with the magic of cinematography, transformed it into a Gay Pride Manifesto.

The Academy’s award for Best Picture was unquestionably going to a leftwing “message picture,” but the gloating of the Hollywood Homintern evidently reached a sufficiently shrill falsetto pitch that it apparently produced a backlash within the ranks of even Tinseltown’s politically correct voters. Brokeback Mountain was denied the final accolade, and Annie Proulx has responded with a meltdown in the Guardian.

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver…

..For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

Yale and special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former Taliban ambassador, have doubtless been hoping the controversy created by that February 26th New York Times Magazine feature article would finally subside, but John Fund of the Wall Street Journal today is continuing his personal jihad, moving on to playing gotcha! with the Yale administration over a heated email.

Beyond a single vague 144-word statement (later expanded to 281 words, including a defense of Yale’s not hosting a ROTC program), Yale won’t let anyone comment officially, citing student privacy issues and hoping they can keep silent and last out the storm. But unofficially, some Yale administrators are privately trashing critics. One even anonymously sent scathing emails to two critics calling them “retarded” and “disgusting.”

That official—Alexis Surovov, assistant director of giving at Yale Law School—did talk to me. Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater’s refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they’ve launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni “not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail.”

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: “Y [sic] do you hate Yale.” Here is his email in its entirety: “What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you’ve never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting.”

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife’s giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia’s publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov’s Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale’s rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of “terrorist tactics,” which when challenged he amended to “terror tactics.”

John mentions, in conclusion, that he also spoke to someone sensible:

A former Yale admissions official told me Mr. Rahmatullah’s acceptance into the special student program normally would give him a clear advantage when he applies for the full-degree program next month. “Now that their stealth admission of a Taliban official is public after eight months, the best thing Yale can do now is suggest he ‘study abroad’ next year,” he told me. “Otherwise, they risk losing all credibility if they keep letting him study there while flatly refusing to explain their decision to anyone.”

Earlier posts.
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Mr. Justin Cox, one of the contributors to Opinion Work Product, which seems to be a two man blog originating at Yale Law School, posted a comment to a recent Rahmatullah posting here in which he rebuked me, saying that “the debate regarding Hashemi is far more nuanced and complex than you are letting on.” And advising me that, for a fairer treatment of the issue, I should run, not walk, over to Opinion Work Product to get the straight dope.

I looked at them, and thought their contents were less witty, and no more balanced, than my own postings, but I do thank Mr. Cox for bringing them, and his blog, to my attention. Mr. Cox supplied five links, which may very well be of interest to all true Rahmatullah controversy devotees.

Japanese video

Fragmentary selections of the contents of captured Iraqi tapes featuring Saddam’s pre-war conversations and plans have been appearing bit by bit for some time now, shedding light on what the dictator and his senior advisors were actually thinking and planning. But, the New York Times today has all the answers.

Apparently, the Times has gained acesss to a secret history prepared by the US military in April 2005, titled “Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Combat Operations.” An unclassified version of the study is to be made public soon. Not altogether surprisingly, according to the Times, this study confirms every key liberal meme about the war.

Saddam was far more concerned about the dangers of a Shiite uprising, or a domestic coup, than a US invasion, says the Times.

Mr. Hussein did take some steps to avoid provoking war, though. While diplomatic efforts by France, Germany and Russia were under way to avert war, he rejected proposals to mine the Persian Gulf, fearing that the Bush administration would use such an action as an excuse to strike, the Joint Forces Command study noted.

In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein’s compliance was not complete, though. Iraq’s declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government’s control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator’s goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview “deterrence by doubt.”

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein’s efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

Isn’t it pretty to think so, if you happen to be a liberal and an administration adversary, who has been peddling the no WMDs line ever since seeing Michael Moore’s movie.

The problem is that believing all this requires ignoring the factual precedent of the evacuation abroad of the entire Iraqi air force prior to the First Gulf War to avoid the capture or destruction of an especially prized military asset, and it requires dismissing reports at the time of the US invasion of large convoys departing in the direction of Syria, along with more recent statements by the former Israeli Chief of Staff General Yaalon and former second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force General Sada on the transfer of Iraqi chemical weapons to Syria.

But even more difficult are the required intellectual acrobatics necessary to reconcile the intrinsically conflicting notions of Saddam desperately trying to avoid war by a “crash effort” at compliance with WMD disarmament, while at the same time fecklessly steering his regime into full-scale conflict with the United States by a continued charade of WMD possession, and (unmentioned by the Times) resistance to inspections.

One wonders why the same analysis isn’t also being applied to Iran and North Korea. Maybe they both really have no nuclear weapons programs underway at all either, and are just bluffing, too. Isn’t that an inevitable theoretical next step?

David Warren contemplates the underlying assumptions behind George W. Bush’s Wilsonian crusade to establish democracy in the Midde East, and confronts the unthinkable prospect that they could be mistaken.

The Americans went into Afghanistan and Iraq with my blessings, as my reader may recall…

.. In (the) view—which I hold to be Mr Bush’s—we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.

But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

My own views on the issue have been aloof. More precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so “post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is: the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.

The F355 challenges the Viper on a mountain road until someone flies off!

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Tom Wolfe in an interview by Joseh Rago discusses the bigoted politics of the American community of fashion.

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of “what a fashion liberalism is.” A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the “Charlotte Simmons” book. “I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing,” he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. “The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m a child molester.’” For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, “and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves.”

George Bush’s appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his “great decisiveness and willingness to fight.” But as to “this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say—‘Fools like you!’ . . . But then they catch themselves, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.’ So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don’t go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They’re usually called blue states—they’re not blue states, the states on the coast. They’re parenthesis states—the entire country lies in between.”

The Wall Street Journal yesterday (3/10/06) did a feature on China Exploration and Research Society founder Wong How Man’s effort to preserve the Tibetan Mastiff, threatened by mixed breeding opportunities created by new roads and towns.

GUJI VILLAGE, YUNNAN PROVINCE, China—Wong How Man is rounding up the toughest puppies he can find. For the past two years, he has spent weeks at a time scouring the Tibetan plateau for mastiff puppies with bushy tails, big heads and very bad dispositions.

One of the world’s oldest breeds, the dogs have long guarded their Tibetan owners from wolves and bandits. But true Tibetan mastiffs are under siege from another adversary: smaller dogs. New roads and towns have brought mixed-breed canines to the plateau, and they’re diluting the mastiff gene pool.

“It’s a totally out-of-control situation,” says Mr. Wong, 56 years old, an explorer and conservationist.

The Hong Kong native has been a guardian of China’s nature and culture for two decades, as founder of the nonprofit conservation group China Exploration and Research Society. Last year, he led an expedition that found a new source of the Yangtze River. He’s also documented the vanishing Ewenki nomadic hunting tribe, the only ethnic group in China to raise reindeer.

Mr. Wong’s current obsession is preserving the massive mastiff in its native Tibetan habitat. About six years ago, he noticed that the dogs were getting smaller, their barks higher-pitched—indications that they were mixing with mutts and other breeds like German shepherds. He also had the worrying realization that they no longer pursued his car.

Another issue: their rising popularity as status symbols. “They want Hummers; they want Tibetan mastiffs,” says Mr. Wong of China’s wealthy urban dog owners. Often, the best dogs fall into the hands of commercial breeders. They’ve even become the target of thieves.

No one keeps data on the number of Tibetan mastiffs in China, although it is widely agreed that purebred ranks are in decline. Rather than see the best dogs leave their native habitat, Mr. Wong is dedicated to finding pups, breeding them and then placing their offspring in the care of Tibetan villagers. The dogs are “an integral part of the plateau,” he says.

Tibetan mastiffs have awed animal lovers through the ages. Thirteenth-century explorer Marco Polo, traveling through China’s Sichuan province, described them as “so fierce and bold that two of them together will attack a lion.” The iconic dogs were later used as diplomatic gifts. In 1847, the British governor of India sent Queen Victoria a male named Brut. President Dwight D. Eisenhower received two from the Foreign Ministry of Nepal in 1958.

Mastiffs still play a key role in Tibetan society. Nomads who live off their cows and yaks rely on the dogs to guard the herds. The best specimens, they believe, should have a bark low and loud enough to terrify intruders. Called “dohkyi,” which means “gate dog,” in Tibetan, they can reach 150 pounds and stand 2 feet tall.

Mr. Wong remembers his first mastiff sighting, in 1982, on the plateau of western Sichuan province. The giant black-and-brown dog had a bark “from deep,” he recalls.

In the summer of 2004, Mr. Wong led his first mastiff expedition on the plateau, covering 3,700 miles over almost four weeks. There, he and a team of 16 dog seekers scoured the grasslands for nomads’ black yak-hair tents. “Where there is a tent, there are dogs” tethered outside, explains Zhang Fan, the research society’s China director.

The group roamed at elevations of around 14,000 feet. Many lowland dogs, lacking the Tibetan mastiff’s efficient oxygen intake, have a hard time penetrating such high altitudes. Out of some 200 dogs sighted, the team bought five puppies from nomads that appeared to be purebreds. They paid $400 for the female they dubbed Aiyee, or “Auntie,” because she looked older than her age. Chili, a male, was a bargain at $120. That’s considerable cash for the nomads, who measure their assets in yaks; one yak is worth about $200.

Though the dogs are technically domesticated, tempers flared and leashes frayed on the way back to base camp in Zhongdian. “Aiyee got very upset,” says Mr. Wong, recalling how the then-four-month-old dog chased down a monk, tearing into his red robes before six team members subdued her.

Today, eight adult Tibetan mastiffs and three puppies live at a newly built CERS-funded kennel in Guji Village in Yunnan, about 80 miles from the Tibetan border. Three times a day, the dogs dine on a soupy mix of rice, cabbage and yak bones. The Saturday special is yak-milk cheese. Spring will see the construction of a landscaped playground.

Mr. Wong hopes that this 11,500-foot-high site, with its thin air and icy nights—temperatures can fall to 14 degrees Fahrenheit—will keep his dogs tough.

He plans to start giving puppies away to Tibetan families next year. Villagers from Guji have already asked for them, with the understanding that they must keep a few generations of the offspring rather than sell them.

Mr. Wong, who draws a salary as president of the CERS, raises money from corporate sponsors as well as a circle of private patrons. These include Hong Kong business elites like Marjorie Yang, chairman of textile giant Esquel Group.

Every fall, Mr. Wong hosts informational dinners in a cavernous Hong Kong ballroom, where prime patrons sponsor tables for about $13,000. To raise additional funds, he auctions off yak-hair blankets, photographs (Mr. Wong used to shoot for National Geographic magazine) and trips to exotic destinations. So far, he’s spent about $125,000 for the mastiff effort.

In its quest to find and raise the most authentic mastiffs, Mr. Wong’s team looks for big heads, broad muzzles and thick forelegs, as well as tan spots above the puppies’ eyes. Tibetans consider such marks lucky because they’re viewed as an extra set of watchful eyes.

“The most important thing is character,” says Qiju Qilin, a 54-year-old CERS staff member. “Tibetans don’t like mastiffs if they aren’t aggressive.”

Their hardy, macho nature has won them other fans. Chinese dog lovers prize the mastiff purebreds as symbols of status and patriotism. Breeders have been combing Tibetan communities in recent years, paying thousands of dollars for good mastiff studs and shipping the offspring to big cities such as Beijing.

Appreciation for the dogs is spreading. Though Tibetan mastiffs are a relatively new breed in the U.S., they’re slated to receive full recognition from the American Kennel Club within a year, which means that the breed will be able to compete for titles in shows.

American Tibetan-mastiff owners note the breed’s fierce protective qualities—as well as their limitations as pets. “This is a dog you would get to discern the inner motivations of the people in front of you,” notes Mary Fischer, an Egyptologist who keeps two of the massive dogs in her California home. New York lawyer Martha Feltenstein, owner of six mastiffs, says “I no longer have dinner parties.”

Although he’d rather see the dogs thrive in their natural habitat, Mr. Wong acknowledges that the growing interest in the breed isn’t all bad. If more villages become famous for having purebreds, he figures, they could host Tibetan-mastiff festivals and attract dog lovers from around the world. “If they ever have the Winter Olympics in Tibet,” he adds, “I would like this to be the mascot.”

If you want to buy pet insurance for your dog. Its important to compare pet insurance as many companies don’t reimburse as much money as you think. Even the government supports people getting pet insurance for your animals.

Little Japanese girls may not want to wear seal hats near the polar bear tank….. video

Sir Benjamin Slade’s Trans-Atlantic DNA search for an heir to Mausell House made NBC’s Today program. The baronet was interviewed by host Katie Couric. No drug addicts, no alcoholics. Their habits are too expensive… No gays either. They can’t produce an heir. And no leftwing democrats or Communists… They might give the place away or do something silly… need apply.

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earlier posting

From Steve Bodio:

SMALL POEM ABOUT THE HOUNDS AND THE HARES

After the kill, there is the feast.
And toward the end, when the dancing subsides
and the young have sneaked off somewhere,
the hounds, drunk on the blood of the hares,
begin to talk of how soft
were their pelts, how graceful their leaps,
how lovely their scared, gentle eyes.
(Lisel Mueller)

John Derbyshire from FrankJ’s blog:

Here’s a good list of Derbyisms:

*** Journalists are scum.

*** Is this any way for free people to live?

*** Cry Havoc! And let slip the appropriate dogs.

*** I don’t see how you can ever have enough nukes.

*** I do have some opinions that aren’t very respectable.

*** Like any honest reactionary, I loathe the New York Times.

*** For most people, college education is a waste of time and money.

*** The ducks aren’t ever going to line up. The ducks are trying to kill you.

*** American society is increasingly a conspiracy of the smart against the dumb.

*** Marriage is one of those things that works best when people don’t think about it too much.

*** The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of them are crazy as coots.

*** Carve into your mind in great stone letters: This nation is the hope, and the conscience, of the world.

*** Let’s face it, in the great 20th-century struggle between the state and the individual, the state has won, game, set, and match.

*** The fact is that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with intelligence, or with other varieties of stupidity.

*** Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

*** I want to live among people who can read, write, give correct change and name the capital of their state. Beyond that, I think education is a luxury that people should pay for themselves.

*** Stereotypes are, in fact, merely one aspect of the mind’s ability to make generalizations, without which science and mathematics, not to mention much of everyday life, would be impossible.

*** This is life. People stumble and grope blindly hither and thither, wondering if they did the right thing, occasionally knocking something over and hoping no-one noticed, striving for illusory goals, addled with guilt and insecurity.

*** Look at our fool diplomats, poring over their treaties and resolutions and communiqués, while young men with burning eyes slip silently into our cities with boxes, canisters, cargoes, vials, and suitcases curiously heavy. Look at this proud tower! And feel its foundations tremble.

*** Does it not occur to you…that by purging all sacred images, references, and words from our public life, you are leaving us with nothing but a cold temple presided over by the Goddess of Reason—that counterfeit deity who, as history has proved time and time and time again, inspires no affection, retains no loyalties, soothes no grief, justifies no sacrifice, gives no comfort, extends no charity, displays no pity, and offers no hope, except to the tiny cliques of fanatical ideologues who tend her cold blue flame?

One can find him at the Corner as well.

Male Organs of Ox and Snake

The Telegraph reports on a Chinese restaurant in Beijing specializing in male organ dishes.

China’s cuisine is renowned for being “in your face” – from the skinned dogs displayed at food markets to the kebabbed scorpions sold on street stalls – and there is no polite way of describing Guo-li-zhuang.

Situated in an elegantly restored house beside Beijing’s West Lake, it is China’s first speciality penis restaurant.

Here, businessmen and government officials can sample the organs of yaks, donkeys, oxen and even seals…

..In China, you are what you eat, and The Daily Telegraph’s nutritionist, Zhu Yan, said the clients were mainly men eager to improve their yang, or virility. Women could benefit, too, she added, although she told the Telegraph’s female photographer: “I wouldn’t recommend the testicles. The testosterone might interfere in fertility. But many women say bian is good for the skin.”

Wretchard, who consistently produces superb foreign policy perspectives, responds to a Robert Kaplan article in this month’s Atlantic, The Coming Normalcy (available to subscribers only, alas!), on the strategic necessity of overcoming anarchy:

Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon’s strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon’s campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies—and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.

Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.

Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.

It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq. Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue “states” will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.

Kaplan correctly understands that no campaign against Iran, Syria or any similar state can be expected to succeed until the lessons of OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom- JDZ] are successfully internalized. And the key he hints, is learning how to use force to allow indigenous order to emerge. If Napoleon wrought the army-killer in the 18th century as the answer to his strategic dilemmas, America must invent a anarchy-killer in the 21st; or a globalized world in which boundaries are ever more tenuous will be permanently at risk.

Chris Bliss juggling to the Beatles: video.

Hat tip to David Nix.

Ben Stein had some comments in the American Spectator.

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars’ ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil—this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave—this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working class heroes to attack America—which has made it all possible for them. They are not. They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin. But someone might yell at them or even attack them with a knife if they said that, so they never will.

I avoided watching the Awards show, but yesterday I read a comment by Ann Coulter noting that the award for Best Original Song went to a number titled It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. (I won’t quote it. You can read click the link and read the lyrics if you like.)

Anybody willing to take seriously the aesthetic judgements, political opinions, and moral perspective of a community prepared to treat the expression of the point of view of a practitioner of that particular occupation as suitable entertainment fare, let alone the subject of an award for excellence, is obviously some kind of an idiot.

(Non-Yalies, please excuse the New Haven trivia. I feel obligated to post it for friends and classmates. This kind of post is bound to come along once in a while, I’m afraid.)

This week’s New Yorker mentions a project by Leslie Kuo (Y ‘03) consisting of cards depicting local New Haven characters.

Reading all this made me heave a sigh, as I can remember (and miss) a lot of people who flourished long before Ms. Kuo’s time: the elderly Italian peddler with the ancient green truck who used to sell balloons, penants, and programs on football weekends; Johnny of Johnny’s Pipe Center (at the corner of Chapel & College) who blended the best pipe tobacco in the universe; Reverdy Whitlock and (long ago) Epraim Eliot, beloved used book-dealers; Bob Muller of Merwin’s; the ubiquitous Bill Dodson; Brother John; and a host of New Haven personalities now… forgotten with the rest.

Popular Science (I didn’t know that it was still being published) tells us how to preserve a snowflake in superglue. Cool.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Mike Reed has a web-site devoted to a gallery of the types of belligerents infesting Internet discussion forums. I recognize myself in more than one of his specimens, and my regular correspondents in many others.

Some right-wing angry alumni (who can’t be all that conservative, since I don’t know them), are proposing a new form of protest over the presence at Yale of special student Sayed Rahmatulah Hashemi, former spokesman for the Taliban.

Clint Taylor ‘96 and Debbie Bookstabber ‘00 report receiving the idea by email:

One email stood out from the rest — “I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!”

She was referring to the Taliban’s policy of pulling the fingernails off of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish. Some of these women even had their thumbs sliced off as punishment. To date, Mr. Rahmatullah has not apologized or taken responsibility for his support of this brutal regime, though he told the Times he wished he’d been “a little bit softer” in his advocacy.

If you’d like to show your outrage at Yale’s decision to admit the Taliban’s spokeman, join us in “giving Yale the finger.” It would be disgusting— not to mention really painful — to mail your own fingernails, but you can buy glamorous, decadent, shameless-hussy-scarlet press-on nails (ask for “nail tips”) from any drug store or beauty shop. They’re cheap; a box costs about $5.00. (Caution to Harvard-educated readers: do not eat the press-on nails. Sure, they look tasty, but they will make you sick.)

Send them to Yale’s Office of Development, along with a polite (or not-so-polite) letter explaining what you think of their decision to admit Rahmatullah:

Yale University
Office of Development
P.O. Box 2038
New Haven, CT 06521-2038

President Richard C. Levin
Woodbridge Hall
Yale University
New Haven Connecticut 06520

I bought a share of Berkshire Hathaway’s B stock back in 2000, and allowed it to sit around in my portfolio as a mascot until very recently. It did increase in value almost 70% over more than five years, but Nucor (one of Karen’s picks) has done about as well in one year, and Nucor pays a dividend. True, Berkshire treated me better than JDSU, Pacific Century Cyberworks, or Global Crossing did back in the tech wreck. But my investing philosophy has developed since then, and Berkshire Hathaway neither performed well, nor met my investment criteria. After five years, I had also gotten tired of Warren Buffett’s hype. So I sold that share.

John Markham, in his column in MSN Money today, IMHO, hit the Buffet nail right on the head.

Oh, lords of the market, let this be the last straw. The last paean from the pious. The last time we must see simpering reporters, Rotarians and retirees blow kisses to a man once celebrated as the Oracle of Omaha but now best described as the Natterer of Nebraska.Surely there was a time when Warren Buffett was a chief executive worth studying, and even investing alongside. But it sure seems like that time is long past, particularly in contrast to a couple of similar, but much better, conglomerateurs that I’ll introduce you to in a moment…

..Buffett released the fiscal 2005 earnings report of his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), on Saturday, as well as an annual report and 22-page chairman’s letter.

And when you get past all the juvenile humor, unseemly criticism of rivals, self-promotion and homilies, you are left with one impression: This is one heck of a way to disguise the fact that—outside of an accounting gain—earnings were down 29% in 2005. And that shares turned in a fifth-straight year of underwhelming performance in the only metric that investors truly care about: the advance of the price.

Did I say the stock price is all that matters? Gosh, that seems so craven. I am so sorry to bring it up. But that is what investors are paying him for, isn’t it? To boost earnings in a way that encourages new buyers to be more aggressive than sellers, making the price go up?

That is why we buy most stocks. But Berkshire Hathaway is more a cult than a security.

Just read the 2005 report, and you will see that it is largely filled with boasts that the chairman has goosed book value by slapping together an insurance, retail, media and construction conglomerate that looks more like something the cat dragged in than a streamlined earnings machine.

ISN# 049 – 8 pages – Detainee: W (Detainee has two names. He admits that one is an alias.) (Arabic name, origin unclear, somewhere “with harder and stronger weapons” than at Al Farouq and where 30,000 Americans visit evey year and “go about having fun.” Has been in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.)

Reasons for Detention:

There are no official statements in this transcript. Detainee admits that he went to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia for a job consisting of “preparations” (for armed defense). He did not need small arms training. He was already familiar with them, as they are common in his homeland. He was at Al Farouq for two weeks. He had a rifle. He left the camp with a group, after 11 September 2001, and went to Khost, where after three months he was injured by the accidental explosion of a grenade in the possession of another person. He was seriously injured, stayed in two hospitals, and had several operations. He admits to having previously been in Palestine, and to being familiar with the use of the Kalashnikov, the M-16, and grenades.

Detainee’s position:

Denies that he desired to become a jihadi. There were Americans he could have attacked in his hometown, if he wanted to attack Americans. He went to the Al Farouq camp, looking for work. He was there, but did not train there. You should not judge someone as an enemy combatant, just because he went to Afghanistan or attended the camp in Al Farouq. He went there because he needed a job.

JDZ Conclusions:

It is impossible to answer many of the questions we are trying to resolve with respect to a case like this one where we only have a transcript of one hearing. It is not a very good defense. He obviously trained with Al Qaeda, and bore arms against the Coalition. His history is not revealed clearly, but the alias and his past presence in Palestine certainly provoke further suspicion. I certainly would not release him.

ISN# 055 – 10 pages – Detainee: M (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee traveled from his home in Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, via Kuwait and Pakistan, in March 2001. He was trained at the Al Farouq camp in the use of the AK-47 and rocket propelled grenades. Detainee carried a rifle, and engaged in military operations against both the Northern Alliance and US forces. Detainee retreated from the battlefield to Pakistan, where he surrendered as part of a group of thirty men to Pakistani forces.

Detainee’s position:

Detainee says he was at Al Farouq and trained with rifle and pistol, but not RPG. He says that he had been recruited in Saudi Arabia by Saleh al Harbi to be trained at Al Farouq. His intention, he says, was to fight in Chechnya. He denies fighting against both the US and the Northern Alliance. He says he left Al Farouq, prior to September 11, 2001, because of a quarrel with a trainer named Abu Haruya. He says he went to Kabul, and did not participate in the war, then left Kabul to travel to Pakistan via Khost in the company of fellow residents of the same house in Kabul. He denies membership in Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

JDZ Conclusions:

After reading a few of these, one senses a pattern. An effort is made to deny being a combatant against US or Coalition forces, but many of these detainees still fail to deny travelling to Afghanistan for training at the Al Qaeda facility ar Al Farouq. This detainee simply claims that he had made a personal farewell to arms conveniently just in time to avoid incurring responsibility for participating in the fighting against the US or its allies. The circumstances of his surrender in Pakistan contradict his story that he was travelling with a random group of housemates. It would have needed to have been a large house to accomodate 30 insurgents. We do not have a detailed account of the arrest of his group in Pakistan, but the US record states that the group of 30 surrendered to Pakistani forces. The use of the term “surrender” suggests strongly that the group was carrying arms. Mere post-defeat-and-capture claims of innocence of hostile intentions toward the United States are insufficient to exculpate known attendance at a terrorist training camp.  I would not release him.

I have a lot of books. Only part of our library is here in California, but it is still a lot of books by normal people’s standards, and a sufficient quantity to make moving something of an ordeal. My personal opinion is that real estate prices in the Bay area are as demented as the local politics, and I don’t have any real desire to buy the sort of house persons who are not Larry Ellison can afford, so we’ve been renting. Our first house had major electrical issues (the computers in the office reverted to UPS backup power whenever the pool vacuum came on), and the landlord would not invest in better power, so we moved.

I was walking through the old dump, doing some final clean up, and found casually discarded on the floor one miniature book. It was a 1991 facsimile reprint of Antoni Swach’s tiny Polish Armorial of 1705, only 3 3/4” (95 mm.) by 2 1/4” (55 mm.) in size. The Swach was small enough that the Mexican movers obviously did not think it could possible be a real book, or of any value at all, and just swept it to the floor when emptying its shelf. I was deeply annoyed, and was (at that particular moment) thirsting for Mexican blood on a scale reminiscent of Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

But miniature books, as the Wall Street Journal tells us today, come a lot smaller than my Antoni Swach, and are frequently lost.

The one on the left is less than one
millimeter square.

Poor little Rahmatullah was mercilessly pursued around the Yale campus by Sean Hannity playing paparazzi last week. And John Fund, in the Journal, also still refuses to bury the Khyber knife, dredging up hostile memories and furnishing them up with all the trimmings:

Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah’s remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal’s offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn’t help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

We do need to look at the facts. The Taliban regime, though ultimately proving highly objectionable and decidedly ungrateful, did emerge originally from the ranks of allies of the United States against the Soviet Occupation. So Taliban ties were not (originally, at least) ipso facto anti-American. Ramahtullah was kind of an ersatz diplomat, really, not a meaningful official of the noxious government. He was a junior Afghan State Department officer, who was essentially allowed to assume the title of ambassador-at-large, and go abroad on a trip paid for by overseas sponsors (like that nice Mr. Hoover) to act as a spokesman for the regime, which undoubtedly had a serious shortage of English-speaking personnel or PR resources.

Rahmatullah took some barbarous positions during his 2001 visit, but he was (a) young, and (b) a barbarian, after all. I agree with Mr. Fund that Rahmatullah’s views were deplorable, but if Mr. Fund were as well acquainted as I am with the kinds of views which used to be popular among my contemporaries at Yale during our own domestic Taliban’s period of ascendancy during the War in Vietnam era, he wouldn’t think Rahmatullah as bad as he does. Who knows? Perhaps, like so many fiery revolutionaries I used to know, Rahmatullah will, in the end, wind up a dentist in Cleveland, or a stock broker in Houston, and a Republican.

It is, of course, untrue, that Rahmatullah is usurping a seat at some Yale dining hall table, which ought to have gone to a highly qualified American, who was turned down by Yale, and who therefore had to settle for Harvard. Rahmatullah was admitted as a supernumerary special student, and will have to perform academically before Yale will graciously consider allowing him to become a candidate for a degree. They won’t consequently admit one fewer person next year. Nor are they giving him a scholarship. His tuition is being paid by a foundation, so Rahmatullah is really currently a minor profit center for the university.
———————————————————-

Clinton W. Taylor, Y’96, mocks the administration’s gesture at ecumenicism, in the American Spectator, with gusto:

Yale’s then-Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Richard Shaw (for whom I worked as an undergraduate, and who at that time seemed like a nice man with no indications of incipient lunacy) told the New York Times Magazine that “another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber” applied to Yale the year before, but “we lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” So that’s what happened to Baghdad Bob!

RAHMATULLAH
(Formerly “Boola, Boola!”)

Rahmatullah, Rahmatullah,
Mullah Omar’s speaking through ya,
When they blew up
The Bamyan Buddhas
Did you holler Boola Boola?

DHIMMI YALE
(Formerly “Bulldog! Bulldog! Eli Yale!”)

Burqa! Burqa! Get your gals
Behind the veil…
Burqa! Burqa! In-fi-dels
Are going to burn in hell…
Oh, when Jews and Christians step o’er the line
We’ll behead those we don’t impale
Burqa! Burqa! Enslave each frau…
Dhimmi Yale!

BRIGHT SCIMITARS
(Formerly “Bright College Years”)

(Talib)
Bright sci-mi-tars, both swift and sharp
Keep women cow’ring ‘neath a tarp
We’ll stone the sluts in Woolsey Hall,
Then crush the gays beneath a wall…
(Student Chorus)
The Taliban is here, you see
And primitive barbarity
Is peachy kee-e-een at Yale today
Jihad’s apologists are here to stay.
(Talib)
The skulls and bones of those we’ve killed,
The seas of guiltless blood we’ve spilled,
Those Buddhas that we bombed to scrap,
Are excused by multicultural crap…
(Student Chorus)
So let us strive that ever we
More tolerant of Jihad be
For, just like all of us, the Taliban
Has suffered uh-uh-under Dubya’s hand!

ISN# 507 – 8 pages – Detainee: (Unnamed) (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee travelled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, via Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in July 2001. The detainee’s name was found on a list of trust accounts for Al Qaeda mujehidin captured in raids on Al Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan between 11 September 2002 and 1 March 2003. The detainee participated in military operations against the United States or its coalition partners. The detainee fled to Zubair Centre in Tora Bora in November 2001 where he was wounded in an air strike. The detainee was captured by coalition forces while convalescing at an unknown location.

Detainee’s position:

Detainee worked as a driver in Saudi Arabia, driving female teachers from his city to the next city. Detainee says that he went to Afghanistan as a tourist, and to study religion with Jamaayat al Tabliq (Islamic Missionary Society, often an Al Qaeda front), and because he is afflicted “with magic and demons or magic and the devil,” and if someone from Jamaayat al Tabliq read the Koran over him, the demon would be cast out. He originally intended to go to Afghanistan for two or three weeks, depending on whether he was enjoying his stay. He met some members of Jamaayat al Tabliq at a mosque in Pakistan, and travelled with them. He was robbed by the Afghans, who took his passport, watch, wallet, and shoes, and held him prisoner for a month, before turning him over to the Americans. He says elsewhere that he never fought,and resolved to surrender to the Americans himself in order to avoid being killed.

JDZ Conclusions:

It seems remarkable how much Saudi tourism was underway in Afghanistan just at the time of the US invasion. I had never known of Afghanistan’s need for Islamic missionary activity, or its particular suitability as a site for exorcism of personal demons. “Who, me? I’m not a foreign jihadi. I’m just another tourist from Saudi Arabia with no passport, as I too was robbed by the Afghans.” One begins to suspect that the US tribunals get a bit tired of hearing the tourist robbed by the Afghans line. No, I don’t believe him, and I would not release him.

ISN# 245 – 19 pages – Detainee: S (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee is associated with Al Qaeda. He travelled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan via Quetta, Pakistan. He spent 9 months in Afghanistan, receiving training at the Al Qaeda Camp at Al Farouk. He participated in military operations against the Coalition, carrying a rifle.

Detainee’s position:

The detainee played games at length, demanding a new personal representative, complaining he had been mistranslated, but refusing to answer questions or identify specifically where he thought he had been inaccurately quoted. He did not apparently retract the statements:

I was trained at Al Farouq on the Kalashnikov rifle. I did carry a weapon, but not in battle. A lot of people went to the mountains. I was given a a weapon to protect myself and five others. Each person had to guard the group of people for one hour. We were in a burrow approximately the size of this room.

Although he refused to clarify his position on which earlier statements he desired to deny, he still apparently intended to try to distinquish carrying a rifle in the mountains from bearing arms on the battlefield. He simply declined to answer a direct question as to whether he participated in military operations at Tora Bora.

JDZ Conclusions:

He is obviously a jihadi, who travelled to Aghanistan to fight the Coalition. He was trained by Al Qaeda. One infers from his refusal to deny it that he was indeed at Tora Bora. At the time of this hearing, he was still arrogant and obviously held his captors in contempt. He made repeated cynical (and naive) efforts to exploit Western due process and respect for a defendant’s rights to try to frustrate the operation of the tribunal. I would not release him.

David Schmidtz at Cato discusses which forms of inequality matter, i.e., which deserve intervention and redress. Replies from Peter Singer, Tom G. Palmer, and Jacob Hacker will be forthcoming. The essay is excerpted from his new book, The Elements of Justice.

The key philosophical point: that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours (i.e., society’s) to arrange, lies outside the specific scope of this essay’s focus.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

ISN# 581 – 21 pages -Detainee: S (Pakistani)

Reasons for Detention:

He was a member of the Taliban, and held a high-ranking position as a military judge, in which position he tortured, maimed, and murdered Afghani nationals.

Detainee’s position:

He says that he has previously also been accused of being Deputy Foreign Minister and of being a prison guard in Kandahar named Bacha. He says he once went to Afghanistan for two days to attend a funeral. He says he is a chicken farmer. He also worked part-time providing religious instruction a local school.

In January 2002, Pakistani authorities came to his house looking for looted artifacts. He had none, and they took him to the police station, where they demanded bribes. He would not pay, so they put him in jail for 36 days, then identified him as a person they were looking for, who had a similar name. His testimony is supported by letters from a brother and a son in Pakistan.

DZ Conclusions:
He seems to have evidence confirming his identity as different from that of the Taliban judge. No evidence that he is that person he is accused of being is cited. His statements of not seeing weapons in many years seem to be an exaggeration, and may possibly have been taken by the tribunal as impeaching his entire testimony. Reading this transcript, however, I find no real evidence against him, and am obliged to suppose that he is not the person he is accused of being. I would release him.

ISN# 068 – 19 pages – Detainee: X (not named) (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Associated with Jama’at al Tabligh (an Islamic missionary organization commonly used as an Al Qaeda cover). Captured by Pakistani forces with group of Al Qaeda mujahedin. His name was on a list of Al Qaeda mujehedin seized from an Al Qaeda safehouse in Pakistan.

Detainee’s position:

Denies being a member of Jama’at al Tabligh. Says he was arrested at the airport travelling from Afghanistan to Pakistan with no passport.

He says that he is a high school graduate and works for the chamber of commerce. He claimed to have been on a one month summer vacation devoted to a personal mission correcting Islamic errors (which he later extended). He started in Dubai, and then proceeded to Pakistan for three months, then to Afghanistan for one month. He says his passport was stolen. Claimed complete ignorance of Al Qaeda and Taliban.

JDZ Conclusions:

This detainee has a great deal more to say than the others. But his story of readily expandable vacations, random travel decisions, and ignorance of politics is not compelling. What is a Saudi doing in Afghanistan at the time of the US invasion, other than being a jihadi?

There is a possibility that he is telling the truth, but some actual evidence and the weight of the circumstances are completely against him. I would not release before the conclusion of hostilities.

SN# 342 – 5 pages – Detainee: M (Saudi Arabian)

Reasons for Detention:

M was arrested by Pakistani police in Quetta 25 November 2001. M. was identified as a member of Al Qaeda by several witnesses. He is reported to have been a member of the security team assigned to Al-Nashri, Al Qaeda Persian Gulf commander linked to the attack to the USS Cole. He is reported to have been the manager of the Al Qaeda guesthouse in Kabul. He is reported to have been on a Taliban airplane carrying fighters to Northern Afghanistan. He was identified as an Al Qaeda member by a former guard at Osama bin Laden’s complex in Kandahar.

From December 2000 to November 2001, he traveled extensively. His passport records his visiting Saudi Arabia (several times), Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Malaysia. A Malaysia stamp was used by Al Qaeda in passport forgery used to eliminated evidence of travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan. His passport stamp record conflicts with information reported by Saudi Arabia.

Detainee’s position:

Denies everything. Declines to take Islamic oath.

JDZ Conclusions:

Clearly an Al Qaeda terrorist. I would not consider releasing him for a moment. He is probably an accomplice in capital crimes.