There’s a fascinating article in Spiegel Online (in English) on “Operation Orchard”, the operation in September 2007 in Syria in which the Israeli air force destroyed what many have termed a “nuclear plant”, what the article calls “Syria’s Al Kibar nuclear reactor”, and the Syrians have characterized as a conventional military facility. Spiegel has interviewed Syrian, Israeli, and American leaders as well as confidential Syrian and Israeli sources to compile a mosaic of espionage, intrigue, assassination, and general international shenanigans.

Was it a nuclear plant, in which scientists were on the verge of completing the bomb? Were North Korean, perhaps even Iranian experts, also working in this secret Syrian facility? When and how did the Israelis learn about the project, and why did they take such a great risk to conduct their clandestine operation? Was the destruction of the Al Kibar complex meant as a final warning to the Iranians, a trial run of sorts intended to show them what the Israelis plan to do if Tehran continues with its suspected nuclear weapons program?

In recent months, SPIEGEL has spoken with key politicians and experts about the mysterious incident in the Syrian desert, including Syrian President Bashar Assad, leading Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman, International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei and influential American nuclear expert David Albright. SPIEGEL has also talked with individuals involved in the operation, who have only now agreed to reveal, under conditions of anonymity, what they know.

These efforts have led to an account that, while not solving the mystery in its entirety, at least delivers many pieces of the puzzle. It also offers an assessment of an operation that changed the Middle East and generated shock waves that are still being felt today.

The article has enough suggestions, claims, and innuendos to give nearly anyone food for thought at the very least.

The picture above is a satellite image of the facility that was destroyed.

Ever since the Israeli attacks on Gaza began, some of the more hawkish elements among the punditry, such as Robert Kagan, have been claiming that Israel is not attacking Hamas so much as it is attacking Iran. Kagan states:

Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history—and in testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas—the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

I’m not terribly surprised that Egypt doesn’t hold much sway in the Palestinian territories, given the history of the region. However, I was interested to see exactly what evidence that Kagan offered to demonstrate that Iran and Hamas were collaborating on strategy and policy.

Of course, no such evidence was provided.

That’s because, as far as I can determine from researching online, no such collaboration appears to exist. The best I could come up with is that Iran does provide some funding for Hamas, but that funding level is at a paltry $3 million per year. Saudi Arabia and Syria are much bigger funders of Hamas, and some Hamas leaders operate out of Syria.

Even at that, though, it’s pretty clear that Hamas is pretty much a home-grown Palestinian organization. They may accept funding and support from other countries, but there’s not much evidence that they act as a “proxy” for any of them.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, former ambassador from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States Turk al-Faisal proposed an approach to achieving peace in the Middle East with five action items for the incoming Obama Administration:

• Call for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shebaa Farms in Lebanon.
• Work with the U.N. Security Council for a resolution guaranteeing Iraq’s territorial integrity.
• Encourage Israeli-Syrian negotiations for peace.
• Declare America’s intention to work for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella and other incentives for countries that sign up and a sanctions regime for those that don’t.

The first of these items is clearly intended to defuse the situation among Lebanon, Syria, and Israel and, particularly, to reduce the influence of Hezbollah by eliminating its claims that it’s fighting a war of national liberation. The second item is presumably intended to head off any move towards an independent Kurdistan forming in northern Iraq. The fourth item appears to be aimed most directly at both Israel and Iran.

I hope that my associate here John Burgess will weigh in to comment on this op-ed since he’s been involved directly in some of the negotiations over the years IIRC. As I recall he’s more sanguine about the prospects for a durable peace between the Israelis and Palestinians than I am.

Dave Schuler’s arguments and his responses to my cross-examination questions highlight three critical failings in his argument. These flaws are his preference for inertia over strategic assessment, overweighing ambiguous evidence that marginally supports his case while ignoring compelling evidence that refutes it, and a failure to account for what might be called “conditions on the ground.” I will address each in turn.

First, Dave’s insistence that the burden of proof ought to rest on me may be good debate technique, but it is poor policy analysis. As I argued in an earlier post, the burden of proof for making policy changes should not be determined by arcane rules of procedure, but rather by a fair-minded assessment of the current status of the policy. For instance, though I support gay marriage personally, I am cognizant of the fact that traditional marriage is a pretty successful policy, and that as a result gay marriage proponents bear some burden of proof to show that it will not damage the institution. In the Middle East, the reverse case obtains. America’s Middle East policy is a disaster. It cries out for change, and the burden of proof for the status quo rests firmly in those proponents of the status quo. But instead of debating the rules of the game, why not deal with reality? An argument is only as powerful as its ability to persuade.

Dave: Instead of appealing to imaginary judges applying obscure scoring rules, let’s let the readers decide. At the end of this debate, let’s poll the readers of OTB, who are, on the whole part of the best informed and most thoughtful blog community out there. Let’s ask them who they think won the debate.

Second, my claim about the burden of proof relies upon more than just positioning. Ultimately, I think this procedural debate reflects an underlying dispute about what the evidence of the case is. Dave argues the following:

I won’t deny that my motives are partly altruistic but that’s not the only reason we should want stability in the Middle East. Avoidance of oil price shocks doesn’t just benefit the United States but every country that buys oil whether they’re in South America, Africa, or Asia.

He also says,

From World War II to the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine and increased U. S. engagement with the Middle East, the countries of the region went to war with each other and European countries more than 15 times. The U. S. wasn’t a party to any of these conflicts. When the Carter Doctrine was promulgated Lebanon was engaged in a lengthy civil war, the Soviet were engaged in a war in Afghanistan, Iran had overthrown the Shah, invaded our embassy, and was holding our diplomats hostage, and relations between Iran and Iraq had already deteriorated. This deterioration culminated in the war between the two countries that took more than 800,000 lives. The entire region threatened to descend into chaos. That’s when we became involved.

Since our increased involvement there have been additional wars in the Middle East but their tempo and severity have decreased. Nothing has approached the level of tension evident in 1980 at least until the deterioration of the situation in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 following the U. S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 (don’t look to me to defend the invasion of Iraq—I opposed it).

I believe the evidence speaks clearly: the increased U. S. engagement in the region has overall been a stabilizing force.

In short, Dave believes that the Middle East is more stable now that the U.S. is more involved. He’s wrong. It isn’t. The price of oil is not more stable. And conflict has not particularly diminished.

Let’s talk about oil first. One measure of the volatility of the price of oil is to the take the standard deviation of the monthly price and divide it by the current price. There are other ways to measure how stable prices are, but they will show similar results. Between 1946 and 1972, the average monthly standard deviation in the price of oil as a percentage of the price of oil was 1.69%, demonstrating tremendous price stability. From 1973 to 1989, it was 9.41%. From 1990 to the present it is 11.07%. (spreadsheet available here)

As American involvement in the region has deepened, the price of oil has become progressively more volatile. Since the 1990-91 Gulf War prices are more volatile even than the period that cover the “oil shocks” of the 1970s. The consequences have been smaller because we are better now at hedging against volatility with reserves and future contracts, not because the price has stabilized. More American involvement correlates with increased volatility, not stability.

The same is mirrored in the security realm. Yes, there were over a dozen “wars” in the Middle East between World War II and 1980. Dave’s list includes:

1. 1948 Arab-Israeli War
2. 1956 Suez War
3. 1961-1991 Eritrean War of Independence
4. 1962-1970 North Yemen Civil War (Saudi, Egyptian regulars participated)
5. 1967 Six Day War
6. 1967 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
7. 1970 War of Attrition
8. 1970 PLO-Jordanian War (Syrian regulars participated)
9. 1973 Yom Kippur War
10. 1973 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
11. 1975-1990 Lebanon Civil War (Syrian regulars participated)
12. 1976 Iraq-Kuwait conflict
13. 1977 Libya-Egypt War
14. 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War

Several of those were pretty minor. The 1970 War of Attrition including involved no significant conventional ground forces but were instead extended artillery duels and quick, vicious air-combat operations. Three more of these “conflicts” were border spats between Iraq and Kuwait in 1967, 1973, and 1976. The 1970 PLO-Jordan War was not a sign of instability, but rather a counter-terrorism operation by the Jordanians. And in the case of the Iran-Iraq War, we quietly supported Iraq. I had never even heard of the 1977 Libya-Egypt War.

There have also been plenty of conflicts since 1980 – multiple Israeli interventions in Lebanon, insurgencies in Algeria, Egypt, and Yemen. Two Intifadas. The difference is not in the overall level of political violence, but rather in the number of large-scale, organized conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That’s where the perception comes from that the Middle East is now more peaceful.

But let’s be honest here, war has never been quite as endemic as Israeli apologists have tried to make it seem. Yes, there was conflict after decolonization in 1948. But the 1956 “war” was just a British-French-Israeli plot to seize the Suez Canal. True, from 1967 to 1973 was a period of essentially open warfare between Israel and a combination of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. But after 1973, three dynamics operated to quell that conflict. First, Israel essentially made clear its nuclear status. Second, politics in Syria and Egypt gradually transitioned from a post-colonization period of rule by populist demagogues into rule by entrenched elites with dynastic ambitions (and hence low risk tolerance). Third, the United States helped sponsor a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and solidified it with a multi-billion dollar annual aid package. From my perspective, that makes the lack of interstate wars between Israel and its neighbors over-determined. And at this juncture, peace between Israel, Egypt, and Syria is sustained by dynamics that operate independent of American actions.

So, the price of oil is more volatile, not less, and the reduction is warfare is mostly an illusion and can be ascribed to broader trends and developments moreso than to active American diplomacy.

One last point about ambiguous evidence: Sayyid Qutb. Without getting down in the weeds, Qutb was an Egyptian intellectual who helped develop the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt. He did influence al Qaeda in some ways, though the differences are more significant than the similarities from an American perspective. Qutb felt that the Muslim world was mired in poverty, weakness, and humiliation because Muslims had turned their backs on Islam. He further made a revolutionary argument that since Muslim leaders were complicit in this rejection of Islam and mainstream clerics were in the employ of these apostate leaders, it was up to righteous Muslims individually to fight for the creation of a new, pure Islamic state. Qutbism is a problem for Muslim rulers. What al Qaeda did was externalize the argument, saying that while local rulers were indeed a problem, no progress could be achieved without first defeating foreign countries that were supporting those apostate rulers – the “far enemy.”

Dave’s argument, which conflates Qutbism with bin Ladenism is at the root of the misguided nature of American foreign policy. The United States simply cannot be against Islamism as a general principle. If people want to be governed by religious law, it is none of our business. It becomes our business when their quest encourages them to attack American interest. Dave’s claims about Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood make my case, not his. There is a powerful populist movement in the Muslim world that ought to be primarily focused on domestic reform and is instead increasingly focused on anti-American violence because of our meddling. We have essentially transformed local grievances into international terrorism.

Finally, a few words about conditions on the ground. Dave would like more contact between Americans and Middle Easterners, rather than less. Let’s discuss the face of American power. The American presence in the Middle East is ominous and provocative. It is missile strikes and renditions. Our embassies are massive concrete structures, set back from the road, with triple rings of security barriers. Our businesses operate behind barbed wire and are protected by private security. Americans travel in armed convoys and stay in secluded hotels that also feature fortress-like precautions. The Lebanon hostage crises of the 1980s, attacks on tourists since 1992 in Egypt, and the 1998 Embassy bombings have combined to create a distance between Americans and ordinary citizens in many Arab countries. We simply cannot turn the clock back to an idealized day when broad-based, informal contact was the norm. Beyond that, there are just not that many great business opportunities. Throughout the region, corruption is rife, security a challenge, language barriers remain significant. The Middle East is just not going to be a particularly promising area for American involvement in the near future.

Engagement and disengagement are not binary values. My call is not for zero presence, but rather for a diminished visibility of our role in the region. I will provide some additional thoughts in final post, but at this juncture I think it should be clearly that the case for continued involvement – as ably laid out by Dave Schuler – is ultimately seriously flawed on procedural, logical, and empirical grounds.

On January 23, 1980 President Jimmy Carter enunciated what became known as the Carter Doctrine. He stated, “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To give this commitment meaning, the United States began a military buildup in the region that ultimately led to the creation of Central Command, which now has responsibility for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Carter Doctrine came about during the period of the “Big Red Arrow” Soviet threat. Readers of a certain age will remember seeing scary maps back then. A big red arrow originating in Soviet Central Asia, plunging through Afghanistan and toward Iran. A second red arrow originated in Ethiopia and shot up into South Yemen, aimed at Saudi Arabia. This was the context of the significant increase in American military presence in the Middle East.

This transformation was significant. Traditionally, the United States had been pretty hands off in the Middle East. Though the United States recognized Israel immediately after its founding, Israel received more aid from other countries for a generation. Massive financial aid to Israel and Egypt only began following the Camp David Accord during the Carter Administration. Otherwise, the United States had always been willing to remain at arm’s length from developments.

Nearly 30 years later, by a combination of inertia, mission creep, and ill-considered friendships, the United States now finds itself deeply enmeshed in politics throughout the Middle East and South Asia. It is time to reverse that trend. Fundamentally, we have made a key mistake in our relations with the Middle East — we have overstated the benefits of deep involvement and the costs of disengagement while systematically underestimating the risks associated with playing such a visible role in a politically unstable region. Challenging the Soviet threat was a credible basis for a greater role, the hodge-podge of half-considered issues we face today is not.

I have argued for a the United States to maintain a dramatically smaller “footprint” on the ground in the Middle East while actively seeking to reduce our “fingerprints” on policy developments in the region. The U.S. military is too active and too visible. American Embassies are too large. And in general, our role in region is too overwhelming. Poll after poll shows the same thing — The United States is blamed for many of the misfortunes of the region and is considered an aggressive, hostile, imperialist power. At this point, our active involvement is self-defeating.

If we were to limit our involvement, this would impact three issues directly: Radicalism, Oil, and Israel. Let me discuss each in turn.

The big issue for the United States today is the threat posed by radical and violent Islamist movements. I would argue that in this area we would reap the greatest benefits of a more detached policy. Simply put, during the Cold War we accepted a quid pro quo with “moderate” Arab rulers. In return for consistent anti-Communism we would allow them to scapegoat us for domestic repression largely aimed at Islamist groups. That policy worked all too well as over the past two decades the biggest change in the Islamist movement has been increased focus on the “far enemy” (i.e. the United States) and less on the “near enemy” (i.e. corrupt rulers at home). It was a bad bargain during the Cold War, and is an even worse one today. The United States simply can no longer allow hatred of us to serve a steam valve to reduce pressure on Middle Eastern rulers. If we are going to be closely associated with regimes in the region, we have to insist that they forthrightly and consistently defend that relationship with their own people. No more message segmenting. No more blame shifting.

On the reverse side, some argue that we cannot reduce our presence because that is what our enemies want. In short, they believe that to spite groups like al Qaeda we have to go against our own interests. As a matter of strategy, it is tremendously dangerous to allow your enemies to define your interests for you. If we allow al Qaeda to pick the time and place of our confrontations, we cede to them the initiative and choice of terrain. Just because AQ might consider Iraq or Afghanistan a central front does not mean we have to. Yes, they may indeed claim victory if we do retrench. But we cannot make American policy in response to AQ press releases. Reducing the visibility of the American role will reduce the viability of anti-American movements and do more to undermine groups like al Qaeda than anything else, even if it gives them the theme for a crowing video.

The second issue is oil. The U.S. presence in the Middle East does serve to reduce some of the risks associated with the Western world’s reliances on Middle Eastern oil. It does not lower the cost necessarily, but it may reduce some potential for volatility in supply. But the cost of this risk mitigation is tremendous. We pay for lowering the supply risk with increased risk of terrorist attacks, greater hostility from the Arab population, and the costs of men and materiel associated with military commitments. Are there other ways to reduce those risks? Of course there are. They include investments in alternative energy, oil exporation at home, better fuel efficiency from cars. Certainly those are costly measures in the short-run, but so is deep involvement in a volatile region. In the long-run, the calculus is easy. Energy independence is a strategic imperative.

The third issue is Israel. There are some in the United States who believe it is in America’s interests to play “whack-a-mole” against an ever-shifting set of potential enemies of Israel. Yesterday Iraq, today Iran, tomorrow Syria. Ultimately, though, Israel has nuclear weapons and is unlikely to be attacked by any state actor. Certainly, the United States has an interest — as does the entire international community — in preventing terrorist groups from acquiring nuclear weapons, but pursuing a non-proliferation agenda does not require unilateral commitment to the region. The other part of the Israel issue is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Here, I am more pessimistic than most. As long as the Israeli political system is fractured — there are 18 parties represented in the Knesset and the largest party has fewer than one quarter of the seats — and Palestinian political power is split between Fatah and Hamas and even factions within those movements — it is simply impossible to conceive of a lasting, broadly accepted peace. The more visible the American role in brokering such a broken peace, the more resentful enemies we are likely to see emerge. Israeli land-grabs will become American land-grabs in frustrated Palestinian perceptions. Palestinian corruption and violence become American corruption and violence in the minds of angry Israelis. Genuine peace is a fantasy, and before you can visualize hope, you need to recognize reality.

In short, the benefits we believe accrue from deep engagement are largely illusory, and the costs associated with retrenchment are smaller than most fear.

Image by Flickr user Stewf under Creative Commons license.

In my latest for New Atlanticist, “Preconditions, Preparations, and Posturing,” I argue that Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and perhaps even Nicholas Burns are misreading the now 16-month-old debate over Barack Obama’s pledge to meet “without precondition, during the first year of [his] administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.”

U. S. government sources have confirmed last week’s raid into Syrian territory by American special forces against terrorist havens across the Iraqi border:

A U.S. military official in Washington confirmed that special forces had conducted a raid in Syria that targeted the network of al Qaeda-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq.

The Syrian government said four U.S. military helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction shortly before sundown Sunday, killing eight people in the village of Sukkariyeh — about five miles inside the Syrian border.

“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official told the Associated Press Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, described the raid as an act of “criminal and terrorist aggression.”

The attack is another sign that the U.S. is aggressively launching military raids across the borders of Afghanistan and Iraq to destroy insurgent sanctuaries. In Pakistan, U.S. missile strikes have killed at least two senior al Qaeda operatives this year and ramped up the threat to groups suspected of plotting attacks on Western troops in Afghanistan and terror strikes in the West.

This highlights the problems in fighting groups that cross mostly unsecured national borders at will, something we’re facing in both Iraq and Afghanistan. A major difference between a raid into Syria and one into Pakistan is that the downside risk is lower: our supply line doesn’t pass through Syria and Syria isn’t nuclear-armed. If U. S. raids into Syria de-stabilized the present Syrian government I think we might consider it a good thing.

I understand the reasons for the raid but I still find it troubling. I continue to hold hopelessly to the old-fashioned outdated Westphalian notion: if we have a problem with Syria or Pakistan we should take it to the principals rather than just ignoring their borders and dealing with the situation.

UPDATE

Pat Lang is critical of the operation:

Whatever the cause, the result of ham fisted actions of this kind can be disastrous for the chance of making something better emerge from the situation that Bush/Cheney is leaving for President Obama and his team.

Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] is all but defeated, Marie Colvin reports for The Sunday Times.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.  Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects. The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

[...]

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.  Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

In a sidebar companion piece, Colvin explains how we got here:

The reversal of fortunes is attributed to the “surge” strategy of General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces, who targeted Al-Qaeda in Iraq above all else after securing an extra 30,000 troops last year. His officers exploited local resentment of the terrorists and promised to protect those who resisted them. Under Petraeus’s plan, they established awakening councils, or groups calling themselves concerned local citizens. These Sunni groups helped to drive Al-Qaeda from many of its bastions.

US and Iraqi forces were then able to retake large swathes of the country and complete the “clearing” of cities such as Ramadi and Falluja and large areas of Baghdad. The overall number of attacks in Iraq has fallen by 80% in the past year alone.

Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has gone on in recent months to reassert control over Basra in the south and Baghdad’s Sadr City, the two main strongholds of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army.

TigerHawk observes, “Notwithstanding the operation against the jihadis in Mosul, we have now gone nine consecutive days without an American KIA (which, if memory serves, is the longest stretch without a single KIA since [May 2003]). The implication is obvious: Iraqis, not Americans, are now at the tip of the spear. That is evidence of a successful counterinsurgency.”

Indeed it is.  It is not, however, sufficient evidence that the counterinsurgency is a success.

Most obviously, AQI and other foreign fighters have always constituted a tiny fraction of the anti-government forces.  Indeed, AQI barely existed when the insurgency started.  They were, however, the most violent and ruthless element.  Further, well-timed terrorist attacks such as the bombings of the Askariya shrine in Samarra escalated a relatively minor insurgency into a major sectarian conflict.

Even if AQI stays on the mat and the tide of replacements coming in from Syria and elsewhere remains stemmed, there’s still the domestic elements with which to contend.  Most significantly, does the Mahdi Army continue its cease fire?  If Muqtada al-Sadr and company decide to make another stand, violence could escalate dramatically.

Turning to US domestic politics, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays.  One could argue that this is good news for John McCain, one of the earliest and staunchest advocates of the Surge.  His argument that the war would have been far more successful if his calls for a larger force had been heeded years ago are buttressed. At the same time, however, Barack Obama can reasonably argue that, if AQI is defeated, the already tenuous relationship between the Iraq War and the global war on terrorism is ended.  These positive developments actually undermine the argument that his calls for rapid withdrawal amount to surrender to the terrorists and acceptance of American defeat.  If AQI is no more, then we’re left with a simple “nation building” operation.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan summarizes the “We’re winning, Vote Obama” position nicely:

[I]f someone had told me a year ago that fifteen of eighteen benchmarks had been reached, that all the parties were in negotiation over future politics, that al Qaeda was close to dead at the hands of the US and the Iraqis, and that oil contracts were being handed out amid four-year lows in violence, I wouldn’t have believed them.

Of course, this all makes Obama’s 16 month withdrawal timetable more and more feasible.

TigerHawk retorts, “If we are, as Andrew says, to judge the judgment of the two candidates, then the answer is clear. Eighteen months ago John McCain argued that the safest way out of Iraq was to win, then withdraw. Barack Obama, parroting the received wisdom of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, said that victory in any meaningful sense was not only unlikely, but that the presence of large numbers of American soldiers actually fed the insurgency and decreased the prospects for stability.”

Jim Hoft believes that this is “a huge blow to Democrats,” especially Obama, “Who was wrong about the surge, wrong about the US military, and wrong about turning Iraq over to its dangerous neighbors, and still flip-flopping like a wet noodle on where he stands.”

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: “If you have to go to The Belmont Club to find out how it’s going, then it’s a success. Failure, the NYT has no trouble covering.”

The news over the past 48 hours or so about movement in solving the nuclear arms standoff with North Korean has been stunning. Not only is President Bush taking the DPRK off the “state sponsors of terrorism” list but the Kim government has taken major steps to dismantle their program and provide with stringent verification regimes.

The administration fully admits that it is well short of achieving all its goals and that much more work needs to be done. Still, the world is a bit safer today and, more significantly, this shows the way for similar rapprochement with Iran.

The White House — which emphasized that the agreement could not have been reached without the help of its allies in the talks — said American officials would verify the North’s declaration over the next 45 days, a process that could eventually remove North Korea from the terrorism list and make the North eligible for American aid and for loans from international institutions like the World Bank, a goal long sought by the cash-starved country.

[...]

Thursday’s developments reflected the change in the Bush administration’s policy towards the North. After years of confronting the North — Mr. Bush famously said he “loathed” the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, and described him as a “pygmy” — Mr. Bush allowed Christopher R. Hill, an assistant secretary of state, to start engaging in full-fledged negotiations with Pyongyang in early 2007, under the guidance of Ms. Rice.

So, what happened? Phil Carter has an interesting thesis:

What I’m hearing through the grapevine is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required so much attention from senior decision makers that it allowed career diplomats and junior political appointees to do their work in East Asia. In essence, the six-party talks needed less attention to work well, so that diplomats and national leaders could get down to business without all of the posturing that goes along with highly public diplomacy. This may or may not be true, but it’s an interesting view of how diplomacy can work.

Steve Clemons agrees that Chris Hill deserves the lion’s share of the credit.

There are still a lot of questions ranging from the interesting issue of North Korea cooperation with Syria’s alleged nuclear facility that was destroyed by Israel and other issues — but when President Bush gave Colin Powell the positive nod in the first week of April 2003 to proceed with the Six Party Talks, Bush and Cheney ignored Iran’s offer of a structure for normalized US-Iran relations the very same week in 2003.

The contrast in circumstances between where America is today with North Korea and where we are with Iran is vital to note. We ‘engaged’ North Korea and blew it with Iran.

And, he notes, “for those who want to knock China around, they should know that this entire process was impossible without China’s impressive, collaborative diplomacy.” That’s certainly true. The key there is not Chinese altruism but rather the harnessing of common interests.

Clemons also asserts, “Barack Obama’s inclination towards engagement with problematic leaders around the world now is now buttressed by an experience of the George W. Bush administration.” But engagement with preconditions is what got us here. Bush steadfastly refused to relent to the DPRK’s demands for bilateral negotiations and insisted on a six-party process that included South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia.

But I agree that it looks as if we’ve blown it with Iran. My only caveat is that I am not privy to what’s happening behind the scenes. It may well be that the administration is much closer to a deal with Iran than we realize. Indeed, Condi Rice is currently overseeing a very similar process, involving China, Russia, the UK, and Germany in trying to simultaneously pressure Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions and allay its economic and security concerns. (See Richard Perle’s WaPo op-ed today and Rice’s statement from last month.)

Ambassador Hill, who has brilliantly overseen the negotiations with North Korea, spoke at the Atlantic Council three months ago and foreshadowed some of the recent news. In addition to emphasizing the work done by others, including his predecessor Nick Burns and the other partners in the six-party negotiations, he pointed out that there was a genuine spirit of reciprocity. One can’t expect a country to give up nuclear weapons, which confer all manner of advantages, without something substantial in return.

North Korea does not have a lot of fossil fuels at its command. Energy is a huge problem for North Korea, and we would be prepared, once they are out of the nuclear business and into the NPT and have established a record of no-proliferation, we would be prepared to talk to them about aspirations for a civil nuclear program. We are also prepared to work with them on retraining opportunities for their scientists. North Korea has many scientists who have been engaged in these nuclear programs over the years. We’d be prepared to sit down and see what can be done in terms of getting them out of these fields and into other scientific fields.

Finally, and this goes back to the first point I started with, we’re prepared to create a Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism, whether it looks like the OSCE, whether it looks like some other institution from some other part of the world, will depend on the participants, I would say. We at this point cannot say with any precision what it would look like, but North Korea could be one of the founding members of this Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism. So all of these elements would go on the table. And what North Korea needs to decide is does it want to keep its aspirations for nuclear weapons in lieu of all these other elements.

This, again, strikes me as the way ahead with Iran. We need to engage regional actors (who have an even greater interest than we do in wanting to forestall a nuclear Iran) on the basis of common interests and understand that Iran is a formidable regional actor with legitimate concerns and aspirations of its own. As Dave Schuler and I discussed on last evening’s episode of OTB Radio, finding the right combination of carrots and sticks will be difficult. One presumes, though, that security guarantees and a solution to Iran’s civil energy needs are a major part of the former.

Matt Yglesias and Charles Krauthammer don’t agree about much but they are in convergence over the origin of Barack Obama’s foreign policy: a gaffe at last August’s YouTube debates wherein he avowed that, if elected president, he would indeed meet, “without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.”

In an insightful piece in this month’s Atlantic, “The Accidental Foreign Policy,” Yglesias writes,

Few observers believed that Obama genuinely intended to break new ground with his response—his campaign had never articulated any such policy before, and seemed ill-prepared to defend it on the spot. The Clinton campaign dutifully pressed the attack the next day, calling Obama’s statement “irresponsible and frankly naive.” But then a funny thing happened. Obama’s team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, “clarify”) his remark, and no one said he misspoke. Instead, the campaign fought back, with memos to reporters and with a speech by the candidate himself, aimed squarely at the sort of “conventional wisdom” that had, in the words of his then-foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power, “led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”

[...]

This position really was a departure for Obama. Despite his stand against the war in 2002, he had since hewed closely to the party line on foreign affairs. The only substantive thing he had to say about Iraq policy during his famous 2004 convention speech was: “When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they are going; to care for their families while they’re gone; to tend to the soldiers upon their return; and to never, ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.” This merely echoed the bland competence-and-execution argument of mainstream party thinking. And as Clinton’s campaign has been at pains to point out, Obama’s Senate voting record on Iraq-related issues is nearly identical to hers. Before the YouTube debate, the higher Obama’s political ambitions had reached, the more cautious his foreign policy had become.

Krauthammer concurs wholeheartedly, albeit believing the accident was much less happy. In “The Absurdity of Meeting the Enemy,” he explains,

After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity.

Should the president ever meet with enemies? Sometimes, but only after minimal American objectives — i.e. preconditions — have been met. The Shanghai communique was largely written long before Richard Nixon ever touched down in China. Yet Obama thinks Nixon to China confirms the wisdom of his willingness to undertake a worldwide freshman-year tyrants tour.

Most of the time you don’t negotiate with enemy leaders because there is nothing to negotiate. Does Obama imagine that North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela are insufficiently informed about American requirements for improved relations?

There are always contacts through back channels or intermediaries. Iran, for example, has engaged in five years of talks with our closest European allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, to say nothing of the hundreds of official U.S. statements outlining exactly what we would give them in return for suspending uranium enrichment.

Obama pretends that while he is for such “engagement,” the cowboy Republicans oppose it. Another absurdity. No one is debating the need for contacts. The debate is over the stupidity of elevating rogue states and their tyrants, easing their isolation and increasing their leverage by granting them unconditional meetings with the president of the world’s superpower.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I agree with Krauthammer here so far as it goes. If the choice is unconditional presidential level summits with the world’s despots or saber rattling in public while holding backchannel meetings among the professional diplomatic corps, I’ll take the latter.

As I noted in Wednesday’s episode of OTB Radio, though, I think both Obama and McCain are merely posturing on this issue for the sake of carving out identities that are more distinct than their likely policies would be. Obama is trying to brand himself as a guy who engages the world and builds consensus. But would he really be so foolish as to show up for a meeting with the Iranian mullahs and lend them the prestige of his office without some reasonable assurance of accomplishing something substantial? I can’t imagine he would. Likewise, McCain is trying to further burnish his “tough guy” persona by making it appear that he would refuse to meet with the “bad guys” without their unconditional surrender as a prerequisite. In reality, I think, he’d essentially continue the current policy of talking tough while talk goes on behind the scenes.

Photo credit: U.S. News & World Report

As part of a retrospective commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens admits to having been right all along. He does, however, reject the premise of the question.

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger’s faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.

If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor in our nation’s capital at the precise moment when he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides to “engulf” his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam’s regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, “lied into war.” We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him.

This is all true, of course. History isn’t a series of discrete events but an interwoven tapestry of actions and reactions. At the same time, though, it’s rather silly to pretend that things didn’t change dramatically with the decision to invade in 2003.

Regardless, Hitchens argues that, while the reasons for war have been “overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself,” he nonetheless thinks the good has outweighed the bad.

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya’s (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region’s keystone dictatorship.

This is all right so far as it goes. And we can’t know what evils would have occurred had we not entered. But we’re at least partly to blame for those which have happened following our invasion. Tens of thousands of innocents have died. While large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists have been killed, so too have many been recruited; I’m not sure that anyone knows how the balance sheet has come out. And Iraq is in danger of becoming a failed state.

Reconciling this is difficult, as Hitchens admits:

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

That’s the question, really. Hitchens is a liberal interventionist rather than a neoconservative but their policy prescriptions amount to the same thing.

I’m very much in the Colin Powell “You broke it, you bought it” school. Given that we toppled Iraq’s regime and set out to create a model Mesopotamian democracy, we’ve got a responsibility to keep trying so long as there’s some hope of success. I disagree, however, that we have a responsibility to attempt to right every wrong that exists around the world.

While there’s no question that there was a humanitarian argument for going to war in Iraq and that it comprised a key element of President Bush’s speeches to the nation and the international community, that wasn’t the argument that carried the day. The nation simply wouldn’t have supported invasion absent the fears of Saddam building of weapons of mass destruction and using them against us or our friends or selling them to our enemies.

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the U. S.-led and mostly U. S.-conducted invasion of Iraq and removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein, there have been a number of articles in the New York Times and elsewhere that have an odd sort of synergy to them. For example, there’s this interview from the Times of London with a former military officer under Saddam Hussein who continued his fight against the Americans after the fall of Saddam’s government, but changed to fight alongside the Americans when he found Al Qaeda in Iraq to be the greater threat:

“I could not tolerate or accept how they were working [Ed. Al Qaeda in Iraq], so in the end I fled to Syria. I felt quite disappointed with the way that the resistance had become.” After only a week Mr Abdullah returned to Iraq and took his family to Baghdad, where he used his car to work as a taxi driver. Leaving al-Qaeda meant that his life was in constant danger. Twice gunmen tried to shoot him and he was forced to move house four times.

Still opposed to the US military and increasingly against the Shia-led Government of Iraq, Mr Abdullah dreamt of starting up a fresh resistance. But in late 2007 he was approached by two uncles and a cousin who had joined a new security movement, which was established by Sunni Arab tribes who had turned against al-Qaeda in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency. The concept – arming local people and charging them with security for their neighbourhood – appealed to Mr Abdullah even though the group’s members, which number at least 90,000, were under the payroll of the US military.

“I started to feel that the Americans were better than the Iraqi Government at that moment. I still look at them as occupiers. My feelings towards them have not changed. But my main concern is to stop the Iraqi people’s suffering,” he said.

Hat tip: Ed Morrissey

You can see a similar sort of thing only in reverse in the writings of Shi’ite Iraqi blogger, Hammorabi. Here’s part of a pretty typical post of his from early 2004:

Thanks to GWB the junior who liberated the Iraqis from Saddam regime and thanks to the Americans who supported that. The coalition soldiers who were killed in Iraq are Iraqi martyrs. This doesn’t mean that we accept occupation but we consider it as liberation and we hope there will be a system to give birth to full democracy, after which the coalition forces will go back to their homes and loved ones safe and with flowers and friendship forever. Iraq will need the American support even after that. We think what happened to Saddam regime is the will of God by the hands of the US and its allies. The new Iraq will be a member in this coalition.

That continued as long as the American forces were seen as the agency of Shi’ite hegemony. When Americans began going after Shi’ite militias as well as Sunni, his tone changed abruptly to what it is now:

In Iraq though the American direct genocide started in 1991 when the war-criminal George W Bush waged its war against Iraq the actual interferences were started many years before that and since the Iran Iraq war when the USA and the West supported that war. Indeed the American genocide is another kind of major Terrorism. Not to forget the genocide of the UN sanction which was lead by the USA which killed at least one million Iraqi children.

From the point of view of at least one American soldier serving in Iraq, the surge is working. Sgt. Anthony Diaz writes:

The efforts being carried out by Iraqis, the coalition and nongovernmental organizations focus on essential services, economic development and reconciliation. Restoring services such as electricity, a dependable sewage system, trash collection, and access to fuels and potable water are at the top of the agenda. Initiatives to bring all of these services to a satisfactory level have met with some success. The local economy has benefited from the lull in violence. Market areas that were once desolate are teeming with life, consumers are out and shops are open. Coalition initiatives to develop local market councils and provide micro-grants and micro-loans to small-business owners are providing a much-needed economic spark to Baghdad’s neighborhoods.

The troop surge has contributed more soldiers to this small but critical area of Baghdad. But the building of the Adhamiyah wall, coupled with the sea change in the population’s attitude toward the coalition, also contributed greatly to the decline in violence. And our squadron’s ability to capitalize on these changes has been equally powerful. Building a local security force has been a slow, painful process. The people’s change in attitude toward the coalition has led to more citizens providing soldiers with information on crime suspects and potential locations of roadside explosives and weapons caches. All these things have shaped the successes we are seeing daily.

[…]

Even the Iraqi army has taken a turn for the better here. Not long ago its troops were seen as an obstacle to reconciliation and were accused of arresting locals without evidence, only to request ransoms for their release. There are still occasional incidents of graft and abuse, but now Iraqi troops provide security and make efforts to build rapport with the populace.

Contrariwise, at Democrats,com Bob Fertik writes:

March 19 marks the 5th Anniversary of Bush’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq – yet there is no end in sight.

The costs so far are staggering: 4,000 young Americans killed, tens of thousands maimed… 1 million Iraqis killed, millions maimed… $562 billion in tax dollars stolen from our children… $3 trillion cost to our economy through veterans care, weapons replacement, higher oil prices, and the collapsing dollar. All that in just 5 years!

We elected a Democratic Congress in 2006 to bring our troops home, but they keep giving Bush blank checks. Incredibly, Congress will soon vote on another $102 billion blank check.

Yesterday the New York Times published a collection of reflections from nine notables, a number of whom were substantially involved in the decision-making that’s brought us to where we are now. They’re short and well worth reading. John Cole’s reaction to these short pieces was so intemperate I won’t quote it here. The finger-pointing self-pitying tone of many of the pieces got my Irish up (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!) and I summarized the entire collection as “Who Knew?” To his credit (and virtually alone in this respect) Anthony Cordesman accepts some of the blame for the poor analysis on the part of the experts on Iraq.

There’s a point that I think we really need to get our minds around: we’re going to have troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Sens. Clinton, McCain, and Obama are all running on that. Check the current deployment to Iraq. The current number of U. S. troops in Iraq is roughly 160,000 and it’s my understanding that includes about 20 combat brigades. President Bush has already announced plans to withdraw about a brigade per month (it’s what’s logistically required).

If Sen. Obama becomes president in 2009 and holds firm to his plan to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq (not necessarily what will happen as Samantha Power got in part of her hot water for noting), he’ll be following President Bush’s plan, showing the same talent for putting lipstick on a pig that President Clinton had, baptizing a policy that he’s opposed rhetorically, claiming it as his own, and announcing a transformative breakthrough. At the end of the withdrawals we’ll still have 60,000 to 80,000 troops in Iraq.

The Danish Muslim cartoons that sparked worldwide rioting, mayhem, and murder two years ago are back.

Newspapers across Europe Wednesday reprinted the controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that sparked worldwide protests two years ago.

The move came one day after Danish authorities arrested three people allegedly plotting a “terror-related assassination” of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist behind the drawing.

Berlingske Tidende, was one of the newspapers involved in the republication by newspapers in Denmark. It said: “We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper always will defend,” in comments reported by The Associated Press.

Newspapers in Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands also republished the drawing Wednesday as part of their coverage of Tuesday’s arrests.

The image, by Morgenavisen Jullands-Posten cartoonist Westergaard, was one of 12 cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed originally published in September 2005. Westergaard’s cartoon depicted the prophet wearing a bomb as a turban with a lit fuse.

Count me in:

Others: Michelle Malkin, Ed Morrissey, Howie@The Jawa Report, Fullosseous Flap, Y.A.C.R.W.B., PoliGazette, Andy Aplikowski, Pam@Right Voices, Laura@Pursuing Holiness, Kim Zigfeld, Susan Duclos, The World According To Carl

________

See these cartoons in full size here.

Related posts below the fold.

Al Qaeda Video: Sea of Blood in Denmark, Norway, France
Comedy Central Censored Mohammed “South Park”
Manifesto Against Islamist Totalitarianism
Jyllands-Posten Wins Prize for Defense of Free Expression
D.C. Denmark Rally Photos
D.C. Rally for Denmark at Noon (Updated)
D.C. Rally for Denmark on Friday
Cartoon Violence Pits Muslim Against Muslim
Censorship by the Muslim Mob
Nigerian Christians Riot, Kill Muslims in Retaliation
Iran Supports End to Cartoon Violence
Muslim Cartoon Rage Latest Example of Religious Virus
Why He Published Those Cartoons
Nigeria Cartoon Riot Kills at Least 15
Cleric Offers Million Dollar Bounty for Murder of Cartoonist
Bama Riots Over Bear Bryant Cartoons
The Islamists’ War on the Internet
Pakistan Rioters Burn KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s
Cartoons as Emotional Torture and Intellectual Terrorism (Leopold Stotch)
Moderate Muslims Speak Out (Leopold Stotch)
Danish Muslim Cartoons: Blogger Hypocrisy?
Egypt Published Danish Cartoons During Ramadan
Danish Cartoons & Abu Ghraib Photos (Leopold Stotch)
Hypocrites? (Steve Verdon)
Danish Muslim Cartoons: What Would Mohammad Do?
Iranian Paper Launches Holocaust Cartoon Competition
Danish Muslim Cartoon Protests Kill Six
Dutch Muslim Cartoon: Anne Frank and Hitler in Bed
Danish Muslim Cartoon Controversy in Context
Danish Embassy in Syria Torched over Muslim Cartoons
Danish Muslim Cartoons ‘Offensive,’ Says U.S. Government
Muslim Day of Anger to Respond to Cartoons
French Editor Fired Over Muhammad Drawings
French and German Papers Republish Danish Cartoons
Danish Newspaper Apologizes for Muslim Cartoons

Imad Mughniyeh, the man behind the the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut and the TWA Flight 847 hijacking, has been killed.

A senior Hezbollah commander suspected in some of the highest-profile international terrorist attacks of the last 25 years has died in an explosion in Syria, Hezbollah TV said Wednesday.

Imad Mughniyeh died Tuesday in an explosion in a residential section of the Syrian capital, Damascus, according to Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for Mughniyeh’s death, but Israeli officials denied they were involved. “Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident,” an Israeli government spokesman said.

Western intelligence agencies long suspected Mughniyeh in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 63 people, according to a 2001 CNN report. He also was suspected in the truck bombing that year of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, an attack that killed 241 people and preceded the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon.

The FBI listed Hezbollah’s Mughniyeh as one of its Most Wanted Terrorists, blaming him for his role in the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which gripped the attention of TV viewers in the United States and around the world for more than two weeks.

Hurray!

Practically speaking, this will have little impact. There’s always another guy and his “greatest hits” were during the Reagan administration. Still, it’s good to see him go. And it’s good to have these bastards looking over their shoulder wondering if they’re next.

Jim Henley and Mark Steyn, two of my favorite political columnists, have a set-to that, with an assist from Little Green Footballs, has clogged the former’s comment section with a swarm of repetitive and mostly inane comments.

The short version: Henley terms the arguments advanced by Steyn about the dangers of unassimilated Muslims into European and Canadian society “racist.” Steyn and his adherents take advantage of the serial nature of blogging and an unfortunate mistake on Henley’s part to retort that it is Henley who is racist.

While I haven’t read the book and thus do not endorse it in all its particulars, I’ve seen enough of Steyn’s columns on the matter to have a general sense of its argument and am sympathetic. At the same time, the rebuttal thus far offered to Henley is silly.

Henley mistakenly attributed a quote in Steyn’s book to Steyn and cited it as a chief example of Steyn’s bigotry. It turns out that the quote was actually from a Muslim cleric. Henley is embarrassed by his mistake but has no reason to be ashamed of it.

For one thing, Steyn was using the quote in question to advance his argument. While he doesn’t speak the words, they precisely reflect his thoughts on the matter in question. If the thoughts are “racist” (and I think they’re not) Henley’s error changes nothing. Moreover, the words in question are cited as “merely the most spectacular example” of a trend. Their misattribution may be embarrassing but that’s hardly disposative.

Henley is writing a blog, not a syndicated column. The nature of the enterprises are different. The rules of the former require an encapsulation of one’s argument in 800 words or so. The latter, by contrast, is an ongoing conversation with a reader; the blogger is not expected to rehash every though he has on the matter in a single post. For those who enter in medias res, there are archives. Often, as they are here, said archives are searchable. Since Steyn is a rather uncommon name, the extensive results for that term in Henley’s blog likely include few false positives.

In the most recent of those posts making a substantive argument, Henley observes,

Steyn alleges that the institutions of social democracy transformed the white, historically Christian, fecund peoples of Europe. But he doesn’t anticipate any change to the dusky, historically Muslim ones under the same institutions. Their birthrates will remain high; their alleged devotion to jihad undimmed. The European Muslim of 2007 will be the European Muslim of 2057 was the European Muslim of 927. “Institutions matter!” except for those people.

That, not some stupid quote, is the essence of Henley’s claim.

Now, it happens that I don’t find those ideas, even if they precisely reflect Steyn’s view (and I’m not sure they do) to be “racist.” For one thing, Islam is not a race but a diverse, multi-racial religion. For another, Steyn’s argument is about culture, not religion. That’s not simply my interpretation; he says so himself:

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I’m not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture — rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. — is preferable to Arab culture: that’s why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.

Mathematical sleight-of-hand notwithstanding (there are a hell of a lot more Muslims than Scandinavians) Steyn has a point. Islamic culture, as it exists in much of the world, has been remarkably resistant to modernization. It’s not unreasonable — or certainly racist — to argue that, because its teachings are anti-modern and exclusionary, that it might be uniquely resistant to change when exported.

There’s enough evidence, I should think, that the rapid influx of unassimilated Muslims has been harmful to Europe to see it as a serious public policy issue. The answer, though, is assimilation rather than exclusion.

Whether the European Muslim of 2007 will be the European Muslim of 2057 depends entirely on whether the modifier “European” refers to geography or culture. If Europe’s Muslims continue to remain largely outside European society, living in separate enclaves under the tutelage of Islamic clerics propagandizing them against Westernization and under governments that make it essentially impossible for them or even their children to become citizens, there’s no reason to expect that the passage of fifty years will substantially change anything.

Western society has managed to assimilate people from all races, cultures, religions, and creeds; there’s no reason the Muslims need to be an exception. It won’t happen automatically, however. Acculturation is a deliberate process. One can simultaneously welcome new people and be receptive to their ideas while demanding that they learn the language and adapt to the basic norms of society.

Image Source: Exploring US History