From an interview with Jeff Goldstein by Norman Geras:

What would you do with the UN? > Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Either that, or provide John Bolton’s moustache ‘Regis’ with a handful of armed deputies, a couple barrels of whiskey, and two weeks alone with all the UN diplomats and their staffs. When the doors swing open, all the UN’s problems will be solved.

Alexis Debat discusses that intriguing question:

Osama bin Laden’s tapes — like his operational directives — are hand carried from courier to courier in a long and intricate route that involves several dozen “runners.”

According to al Libbi, it takes six to 12 weeks of travel in the remote and inhospitable areas along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahri are still hiding. Based on this piece of intelligence, the Pakistani government succeeded in infiltrating parts of these courier networks in 2005.

But because of the extraordinary precautions taken by al Qaeda’s messengers, the Pakistanis were unable to trace them back to either Zawahri or bin Laden.

The system involves each courier hand delivering the tape or the written message to another courier or location without knowing the courier’s identity, the origin of the tape or message or its destination. It makes it almost impossible for intelligence agencies to roll up the entire network.

Some of these intermediaries are recruited among the thousands of travelling Muslim preachers who roam Pakistan’s tribal and northern areas, usually on foot.

Analysts believe this system is still in place today, and may span several countries. According to a senior Pakistani intelligence source, the latest tape was hand delivered by an anonymous source to al Jazeera’s Dubai bureau in the United Arab Emirates.

Hat tip to Andrew Cochran.

The same article in Counterterrorism Blog reveals that the supposedly “new” Zawahiri tape is a recycled older one. This fact provokes the suspicion that perhaps the CIA Predator strike might have really bagged Al Qaeda No. 2 after all, and efforts are being made to conceal the US success.

Accidentally discovered compassionately tutoring minority kids, Larry Wilkerson (splendid in maroon suspenders) poses for the admiring camera of the Washington Post.

The occasion was a lengthy exercise in puffery establishing (Colin Powell’s former State Department chief of staff) retired Colonel Larry Wilkerson as a great man, after which the hero climbs down from his monument, and goes to work bashing the Bush Administration.

One former commander is quoted saying of Wilkerson:

He is the most principled individual I have ever met and ever worked with. He is a remarkable guy with essentially no ego.

No ego? It must have been somebody else who “offered tart and colorful opinions” on adversaries within the administration, and said Powell was tired “mentally and physically,” in a May 2004 GQ interview which went all sorts of places Secretary of State Powell was unwilling to go, and which left egg all over his boss’s face.

Does someone with no ego boast openly to the Washington Post of his Vietnam combat service nearly forty years ago, and indulge in (what even the Post refers to as) a “predictable aside on hawks like Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz:”

“None of these guys ever heard a bullet go by their ears in combat.”

Do individuals with no ego commonly describe the President of the United States as “inept” and “unsophisticated?”

What we really find here is a preening snob whingeing bitterly about the unworthiness of his former superiors. And it’s always touching to observe the sterling character of those members of the liberal establishment who alert the media whenever they perform a charitable act.

All the admiring verbiage in the Post concerning Wilkerson’s alleged restraint since leaving the administration is more than a little disingenuous. Wilkerson has been on the war-path against the Bush Administration for months, making a wide round of public appearances and doing press interviews in which he has leveled any number of sensational and highly partisan charges.

Previously discussed Guardian interview.

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Hat tip to Reid Detchon (on my College Class email list).

New National Geographic article.

Previous

Jeff Goldstein links evidence from Daily Kos, via Ian Schwartz.

Urban dwellers like their experiences of Nature pre-packaged and predictable, and anything out of the ordinary will invariably throw them into a tizzy. The Press will emotionalize the situation and self-importantly opine. The government will step forward, inform everyone that it’s in charge, and proceed to do something designed to make itself appear necessary.

The latest collision of Nature with urbanized humanity is occurring in London, where –as the BBC reports — a 16-18 foot Northern bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) for reasons of its own has swum up the Thames directly through the heart of London.

The Press is describing the event as unprecedented, but one suspects that the same species probably visited the Thames fairly regularly before Industrialization rendered the river inhospitable to cetean visits. Contemporary environmental measures (and the outsourcing of industrial activity to more remote regions) have obviously made the Thames cleaner today than it has been for a couple of centuries.

Concerned authorities and solicitous private well-wishers are hovering around the whale (accompanied by media helicopters), trying to prevent its stranding itself, overlooking the fact that bottlenose whales make a regular practice of doing precisely that in all the Northern European waters they frequent. See this Faroese account.

MSN video

Allan Poster’s 1968 Corvette, stolen in New York in 1969, has been found and returned to him in California.

Spengler argued against John Keegan’s optimism regarding the inevitability of Western victory in Asia Times shortly after 9/11:

The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy “des Schreckens” (to cause horror) and “Entsetzens” (terror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale…

America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America’s experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad’s story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: “The horror! The horror!”…

From America’s moral collapse in the face of the horror of Vietnam, there arose a repudiation of classical Western culture unlike anything seen previously in the English-speaking world….

…how can Al-Qaeda overcome the West with horror? Let us suppose that some state or state agency over which Al-Qaeda wields influence possesses a weapon of mass destruction, with sufficient potency to cause a very large number of deaths in a Western country. If it deploys that weapon and causes a very large number of casualties, the West may have no choice but to bombard the offending country with nuclear weapons and destroy its capacity to make war. Given that Al-Qaeda has tendrils deep in numerous governments, even a nuclear bombardment of one rogue state might not diminish its capacities. The West would be left with the horrific fact of mass destruction of civilians combined with continued insecurity.

Time is on the side of Al-Qaeda…

…the West should think of itself as the underdog, fighting against the clock, and seize the tactical initiative. It should act unpredictably, with the objective of confusing and disrupting an enemy who until now has chosen his targets at leisure… the West should act unexpectedly and without mercy against states which allow Al-Qaeda. There is no need to go into details here. Doing so now offers at least the chance of gaining the respect of the Islamic world. Failing to do so makes probable a gradual accumulation of failures. It means that the war will be Al-Qaeda’s to lose.

We were lucky with Hitler. We may not be so lucky again.

George W. Bush should have pinned this article on the wall above his desk. He was right to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, but he allowed the War against Terrorism to lose momentum. Syria should have been invaded and its regime dismantled immediately after Iraq. We should have invaded Iran long ago.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker rubs it in:

Yesterday, we caught Slate cluelessly recycling the fake photo the New York Times posted to its home page last Saturday. In less than an hour, Slate removed the photo without comment. Then AT pointed out their lack of decency in failing to acknowledge their publication of a fake. Slate eventually added a paragraph explaining their error.

Time Magazine needs to broaden its sources, though. It repeated the same error, as noticed by blogger The Spirit of Entebbe and several emailers.

The MSM, which is best referred to as the antique media, have a general disdain for the blogosphere, often citing their own “fact checkers” and layers of editors. It turns out that the peer review function of the blogosphere, lnked by instantaneous email and suffused with the ethic of admitting and correcting mistakes, is far, far more effective than the creaky 19th century bureaucratic model in use at places like Time Magazine, and even websites like Slate staffed with antique media personnel.

The antique media death spiral accelerates.

And who can blame him?

Jack Kelly at Real Clear Politics reports a possible terrorism connection the MSM studiously overlooks:

Last month Italian authorities arrested three Algerians who were members of the al Qaida -linked terror group GSPC.

The three were plotting attacks on ships, railway stations and stadiums in the United States in a bid to outdo the casualties caused on 9/11, said Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu.

The arrests made front page news in newspapers in Italy, Britain and France. But apparently the only U.S. newspaper to mention them was the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a short AP dispatch on page A-6. The AP did not mention that the principal targets of the plotters were in the U.S.

The incuriosity of our news media about the plotters and their plots is curious, especially in light of the mysterious death of Joel Hinrichs, 21, a Muslim convert who, wearing a suicide vest, blew himself up Oct. 1 on a park bench outside the stadium in Norman where the university of Oklahoma football team was playing Kansas State. When Hinrichs’ apartment was searched after his death, the FBI found a plane ticket to Algeria.

Hat tip to AJStrata

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And Thomas Joscelyn has an article in the Standard backgrounding the same al Qaeda-affiliated Algerian terrorist group, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC).

Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog discusses news reports of a new Osama bin Laden tape broadcast by Al Jazeera offering a truce. If it really was bin Laden, this would be his first new broadcast since December 2004. He links also an Evan Kolhmann posting arguing against the likely veracity of the recent Michael Ledeen story of Osama’s death in December in Iran.

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Reuters reports that Major General Jay Hood, the US Guantanamo Bay commander, told the press yesterday that prisoners held at the US facility had provided important information on last summer’s UK bombings:

He said “a good, significant number” of mid-level al Qaeda associates were captured during the war in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo and had discussed men they knew or trained who may have since moved up in the hierarchy of the militant Islamist group.

“Who knows those people better than anyone else? The people that were training them, the people that were preparing them for future roles in that terrorist organization,” Hood said.

He said the Guantanamo prisoners learned about the London bombings shortly after they occurred, probably from visiting lawyers who are challenging their detention in the U.S. courts.

“Most of the information available to detainees comes to them from their contacts with legal counsel,” Hood said.

Michelle Malkin thinks these lawyers’ relationships with terrorist prisoners will bear watching, asking “How many of those lawyers are the next Lynne Stewarts?”

“Never pick a fight you know you cannot win.” advises Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins.

Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid…

I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has “no right” to nuclear defence?..

Iran is the regional superstate. If ever there were a realpolitik demanding to be “hugged close” it is this one, however distasteful its leader and his centrifuges. If you cannot stop a man buying a gun, the next best bet is to make him your friend, not your enemy.

Now what do you suppose Jenkins would have said in the period of 1936 to 1939 about Nazi Germany? One can only assume that poor fellow has been living in Paris for too long.

Mr. Jenkins ought to remember that, historically, large barbarian armies have done remarkably poorly against far smaller Western forces on numerous occasions.

The Persian experience of the overwhelming superiority of Western arms in ancient times at Thermopylae and Marathon, during the Retreat of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, and at Issus and Gaugamela will inevitably be repeated all over again today, if the Iranian regime persists in its course.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army, though repulsed in its initial invasion of Iran, was still able to fall back, stand on the defensive, and battle Iranian military forces to a draw over the final six years of an eight year war. That same Iraqi Army was twice beaten by US forces virtually effortlessly in a matter of days. The disproportion of technology, of military capabilities, is so great that an Iranian Army confronting US forces would not be much better off than the Mahdi’s dervishes were facing Kitchener’s machine guns a century ago at Omdurman.

The US invasion of Iran can only result in one of history’s classic turkey shoots, as any Iranian forces which fail to surrender or flee would be quickly and efficiently annihilated by precision-directed American firepower. The Iranian military would have about the same prospects against contemporary American military forces that the ants in my front yard have against the garden pesticide sprayer.

Nor is it likely, for that matter, that the current brutal and tyrannical regime can expect so much loyalty from its own citizens that substantial portions of its Army and civilian population will fight for it to the death. Frankly, there is every reason to suppose that Iranians in general would welcome invading Americans as liberators, and the Revolutionary Islamic Dictatorship would collapse upon receiving a single blow. Overthrowing the present Iranian regime may, in all likelihood, prove about as difficult as kicking to pieces a rotten pumpkin.