The solid waste side of coal is being overlooked as environmentalists focus their attention on air pollution and as government agencies and coal companies push "clean" coal technologies. "Cleaner" coal technologies actually produce more toxic coal ash in the resulting solid wase than "dirty" coal technologies, says Jeff Stant of the Clean Air Task Force. These technologies pulverize low-grade fuels in a way that releases fewer pollutants into the air. But those pollutants have to go somewhere, and they end up as ash.

Sniff' Boy, got a rep

All them germs wanna test

Nose running, oil slick

Just bought some Mucinex

THROW SOME SNEEZE ON IT -- ON IT!

And that DayQuil shit

THROW SOME SNEEZE ON IT -- ON IT!

God damn, I'm so sick

Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent, tell the tale. In Baghdad, improvised-explosive device (IED) detonations explosions in Baghdad have ticked up slightly to 131 in January from 129 in December—and the last week of January is not included in these latest figures. Countrywide, there was an increase in IED explosions to 2,291 in December from 1,394 in November, followed by a dip to 1,270 in the first three weeks of January. But the week ending on January 25 saw seven suicide explosions Iraq-wide, the most since the week ending Dec. 21, 2007.

It is too early to conclude that the security gains of the surge are unwinding. But they’re being put under stress in a manner not seen since the so-called "Surge of Operations" began in mid-June. Some speculate that the insurgency, knocked on its heels by the changing tactics of U.S. forces in mid-2007, is beginning to adjust, a few months before the surge draws to a close. "I think there’s some credibility to that argument," said Brian Katulis, a national-security expert at the liberal Center for American Progress. "It all begs the question of what’s the grand endgame."

Instead, Wurmser argued that the Bush administration believed there were significant geopolitical reasons for going to war and offered a fanciful explanation that broke totally new ground. Wurmser said that Cheney, Feith, and Bolton were convinced that U.S. containment of Saddam Hussein was failing and that the controls to keeping Saddam Hussein from expanding his regional influence were “dying.” As a result, the Iraqi leader was in position to exploit the rising anti-Americanism in the region and to “break out” from the sanctions strategy and the no-fly zones to lead a “rogue coalition of nations to expel the United States from the region” and even “to wage war against the United States.”

Update: Kerry just alerted me to this photo, which I've included. I bask in her refracted glory.

Now we just need Tim Marchman to explain how this all went down. Lucky us!

It’s obvious to any observer that America and its teenage president are going through a deteriorating situation on all levels. It’s common practice for U.S. presidents to review the Palestinian problem, in the last minutes of their tenure, to add new touches to the problem that would serve the Jews. Little Bush is making his last visit to offer the [same] support his predecessor extended to Israel. On the other hand, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan are playgrounds for America to settle its accounts with its foes.

Scott Pelley: Among the most important questions for U.S. intelligence was whether Saddam had been supporting al-Qaeda, as had been claimed by some the Bush administration. What was his opinion of Osama bin Laden?

Piro: He considered him to be a fanatic, and as such was very wary of him. He told me you couldn't trust fanatics.

Pelley: Didn't think of bin Laden as an ally in his effort against the United States, in this war against the United States?

Piro: He didn't want to be seen with bin Laden. And didn't want to associate with bin Laden.

Pelley: Did he think that bin Laden was a threat to him and his regime?

Piro: Yes.

Aha! See, all Piro said was Saddam didn't want to be seen with bin Laden! Of course Saddam wouldn't! This clearly means that behind the scenes they were conspiring against the U.S.! Bush was right! Steve Hayes was right! The right was right! You were right! We were right!

Update: Parody is sometimes impossible.

And not only did we launch today, but we launched with something I'm extremely proud of. It's a reported piece about the origins, development and persistence of brutality in CIA interrogations in the war on terrorism, and how, despite everything the Bush administration has told us about the "enhanced interrogation" program's value, interrogations remain in a state of disrepair. A taste:

Those with intimate knowledge of the program say that in many cases, U.S. interrogators haven’t even been able to learn the basics about many of those they hold or have held, to say nothing of whatever crucial information they possess. "How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There’s no fingerprints, no DNA," said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA’s interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. "You don’t know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man."

The Jan. 9 meetings, the first visit with Mr. Musharraf by senior administration officials since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, also included the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the director of Pakistan’s leading military intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj. American officials said the visit was prompted by an increasing sense of urgency at the highest levels of the United States government that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts to destabilize the Pakistani government.

Numerous assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf have failed. So, in true asymmetric-war fashion, why not go after the softer target? Killing Bhutto helps destabilize Pakistan. As an ex-U.S. intelligence official told me yesterday, everyone in Pakistan already believes Musharraf had a hand in her death. So Musharraf suffers a crisis of legitimacy matched with a crisis of security. He has to deal with the already-ensuing riots, thereby diverting his security resources away from whatever not-particularly-successful-anyway counterterrorism efforts they're engaged in. That's a terrorist two-fer.

The C.I.A. operatives in Afghanistan and the covert Special Operations forces there have made little secret of their desire to move into the tribal areas with or without Mr. Musharraf’s explicit approval. In the administration, there has been discussion of whether Mr. Bush should give orders to allow them more latitude. Mr. Musharraf has explicitly rejected that, and within days after Mr. McConnell and General Hayden’s departure, he told a Singapore newspaper that any unilateral action by the United States would be regarded as an invasion. In Davos, he dismissed the idea that Americans could be effective in the tribal areas.

President Bush signed a directive this month that expands the intelligence community's role in monitoring Internet traffic to protect against a rising number of attacks on federal agencies' computer systems.

The directive, whose content is classified, authorizes the intelligence agencies, in particular the National Security Agency, to monitor the computer networks of all federal agencies -- including ones they have not previously monitored.

Until now, the government's efforts to protect itself from cyber-attacks -- which run the gamut from hackers to organized crime to foreign governments trying to steal sensitive data -- have been piecemeal. Under the new initiative, a task force headed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will coordinate efforts to identify the source of cyber-attacks against government computer systems. As part of that effort, the Department of Homeland Security will work to protect the systems and the Pentagon will devise strategies for counterattacks against the intruders.

Stumping in Fort Myers on Saturday, McCain went on the attack first, linking Romney with Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.): "If we surrender and wave a white flag, like Senator Clinton wants to do, and withdraw, as Governor Romney wanted to do, then there will be chaos, genocide, and the cost of American blood and treasure would be dramatically higher."

He added to reporters that "one of my opponents wanted to set a date for withdrawal that would have meant disaster."

Romney, who said in April that the military should consider a "private timetable" but not public deadlines, shot back: "That's dishonest, to say that I have a specific date. That's simply wrong. . . . I know he's trying desperately to change the topic from the economy and trying to get back to Iraq, but to say something that's not accurate is simply wrong, and he knows better."

Former Indonesian President Suharto, the U.S. Cold War ally who led one of the 20th century's most brutal dictatorships over 32 years that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday. He was 86.

Officials in Iraq's mostly Sunni Muslim Anbar province are refusing to raise Iraq's new national flag, which the parliament approved earlier this week.

"The new flag is done for a foreign agenda and we won't raise it," said Ali Hatem al Suleiman, a leading member of the U.S.-backed Anbar Awakening Council, "If they want to force us to raise it, we will leave the yard for them to fight al Qaida."

I trust Hillary Clinton in my kishkes.

In one sense, Kriston is right. We are indeed in a two-bear contest. After all, the koala is not a bear, as sensible people worldwide understand. Considering the koala to be a bear is a strange vestige of an outmoded era. The panda and polar bears are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The koala is Mike Gravel.

But let's not win dirty. Consider the charges the Independent presents.

Knut close up is disconcerting to say the least: he is not white but mired a filthy brownish grey colour by the mud and dirty pools of water in his enclosure. At a year old, and weighing more than 17 stone he is bigger than a man when standing on his hind legs.

While some insist that bears born in zoos have a right to human intervention to save and secure their lives, others such as the German animal rights activist, Frank Albrecht argue that they become so dependent on man that they end up divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks.

"Knut is a problem bear who has become addicted to human beings," he said.

The German zoologist Peter Arras has described Knut as a "psychopath".

A few points. First, notice that there is no evidence presented for the proposition that there's anything wrong with Knut. If you click through the article, you see that the whole thing is predicated on the Nuremberg Zoo's fear that other polar bears raised in captivity might attack one another -- which itself is an evidence-free claim. You can see what a shoddy piece of journalism this is.

Second, there's also no evidence justifying the headline that Knut won't mate. Just none. Only one context-free quote from some animal-rights activist and another from a zoologist. And finally, explain how an "addiction" to human beings is anything but a virtue. Knut, like a good bear, wants to warm our hearts with his winning personality. He maybe wouldn't mind if we hugged him. Only a fool would consider this a character flaw.

Last thing. I notice on an email thread that when Kriston said polar bears are now out of the best-bear contest, his own special lady replied "are you kidding?" So he's put himself in the position of saying she doesn't know what she's talking about, bear-wise. What a terrible, unforced blunder. But such are the wages of dissing polar bears.

Another Ben Craw banger. In case you didn't know, TPMtv is produced by Ben, a psychotic with a mohawk who you do not want to fuck with.

Rambo combines an unapologetic return to the grand action-movie tradition of blowing shit up (one explosion is so big, it leaves behind its own miniature mushroom cloud) with a Saw-era interest in close-ups of human viscera. The problem is that the moral meaning of the gore keeps changing. The airborne organs of a helpless Karen villager are supposed to make us scream, "Rambo, right this injustice!" while the splattered guts of a Burmese army officer are meant to evoke a reaction along the lines of, "Aw yeah."

Update: Maybe I didn't understand Ezra's point about fabulism because I misread Ezhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifra. What he actually says is that fabulism is orthogonal to the decline of newspapering -- it can happen at contracting papers, but also at The New York Times and The New Republic and The Washington Post -- and so to graft the fabulism point onto the venal-management point (even though this apparently happened at the Baltimore Sun when Simon was there) is cheap.

Late Update: One of Ezra's commenters, Pesto, spits hot fire:

McNulty found some kind of peace in giving up on detective work for the more mundane work as a uniformed cop. He kicked his habit(s). But then he was lured back in by promises of a real commitment to Major Crimes by the higher-ups, and found out that it was all a big lie -- as he now feels he should have known. He hates the higher-ups, of course, but hates himself more for his relapse, and he's taking it out on everyone around him. Bubbles, who's an addict-detective (to McNulty's detective-addict) is going to go through something similar, I think.

Absolutely Final Update: My friend and Baltimorean Rich Byrne, who wrote before the season-four hype, adds a lot of value at the Guardian's website.

Instead, Obama offered "the politics of fear." And, worse, we got a continuation of front-runner Hillary Clinton's politics of militarism. Throughout the campaign, there's been little consideration of the lessons future politicians will take if they see that having backed a Republican president in launching a war of choice that proved the most catastrophic foreign-policy mistake of the past 25 years didn't even cost Clinton the Democratic Party's nomination. Are the next crop of senators and representatives asked to endorse a preventive war on flimsy evidence going to think twice, or are they going to do what John Kerry and John Edwards did in 2002 and listen to political consultants who remind them that blind support for military adventures is crucial to one's presidential ambitions?

There are two reasons why Broun’s career is worth examining closely. The first is Broun himself. He compares himself happily to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the anti-war libertarian presidential candidate: Both men are physicians who carry pocket Constitutions and often find themselves on the losing side of congressional votes. (Broun likes Paul, but he doesn’t share Paul’s views on Iraq and won’t make a presidential endorsement.) The day he was sworn in, Broun joined just 13 other Republicans (and 150 Democrats) in supporting a bill to call off raids by the Drug Enforcement Administration on medical marijuana distributors. He was one of only four congressmen to oppose the Drug Endangered Children Act, which allocated $20 million to take care of children living among drugs and drug dealers, and one of three to vote against establishing a new registry to keep track of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”). ...

And that leads us to the second reason Broun’s career deserves our attention. His victory kicked off a season of angry voting.

And here's Chris, reporting from last week's Nevada caucus:

Three precincts were supposed to be caucusing in the cafeteria, but instead there was chaos. Confused crowds surrounded several large tables strewn with registration sheets and preference cards. A black woman named Violet Dorn sat at the middle table, festooned with Hillary stickers and lording over the official registration papers. Across the table, a black man in a white-collared shirt and suit with an Obama button stood berating her. "Stop telling people this table is only for Hillary!" he shouted. "You cannot do that!" A small wrestling match commenced over the paperwork. Then a white man approached. "What kind of politics is this?" he yelled. "Is this the politics of change?" His shirt featured a picture of Obama and the words He's Black and I'm Proud.

Meanwhile, the caucus attendees circled and paced, looking for some sign of order and finding none. Hobbling behind a walker, one woman explained that she'd come with fellow residents of a nearby senior citizen center looking to vote, but their names hadn't been on the rolls. (That shouldn't have stopped her, since the caucuses offered same-day registration.) Eventually she was allowed to caucus. Some people left; others just watched and steamed, frustrated and powerless. The confusion stretched on, twenty minutes, half an hour...

Plus Chris is from the Bronx. So I think you should refer to him as Chris Hayes, Chris-Chris Hayes.

* OK, "political journalist" gets on my nerves. Doesn't that mean a journalist who is political, rather than one who covers politics? Shouldn't the term be "politics journalist"? Sigh.

The Iraqi government took steps Wednesday to limit information about the building blast, according to Iraqi military officials in Mosul. An order from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's office and the Defense Ministry prohibited Iraqi officers from discussing the incident with reporters, the officials said. The attack also took down cellphone towers, making communications difficult within the city.

Not that they just played into the insurgents' hands or anything. In March, Col. Steph Twitty, commander of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division in the city, told me one of the reasons Mosul was relatively calm was because of the excellence of Ninewah Province's two excellent Iraqi Army divisions and the city's excellent police force. Now the insurgency has killed that force's commander. And it appears the U.S. response, at least in part, is denial:

Other U.S. officers, however, dispute the notion that Mosul is becoming overrun by fighters of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. Maj. Gary Dangerfield, spokesman for the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Nineveh province, said it would be a "major misnomer" to call Mosul a hotbed for insurgents.

"It has its share of attacks," he said. "We remain pretty confident in the Iraqi security forces' ability to handle the attacks that do occur. If Iraq was safe, we wouldn't be here, but Mosul is not falling, as some would say it is."

We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA . . . I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities. We do not with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what's it's about and what it means. And talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists. They're doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas.

Uh, yeah. First, let's just note that Rumsfeld has always preferred the idea of technology to actually, you know, learning about technology. "Pods are there"? Does he mean iPods? Podcasts? And to mention "talk radio" in the same breath as e-mail or these mysterious pods -- what in the world is this septuagenarian talking about? Rumsfeld probably just learned how to program his VCR.

Second, when Rumsfeld tried a version of this in miniature in Iraq, his actual fix was comically stupid. The Pentagon hired the Lincoln Group to pull off a propaganda campaign designed at discrediting the insurgency. It amounted to planting fake news stories in the Iraqi press written by soldiers that said things like the insurgents "crawled on their bellies like dogs in the mud." For this, the Pentagon spent more than $25 million and arguably broke the law.

Finally, Rumsfeld managed to be the first secretary of defense in history not just to botch two wars, but to botch two wars simultaneously. For that, no one should ever listen to this man ever again. Whatever he says is discredited by the sheer fact that he's the one saying it. He should be legally obligated to end of all his sentences with, "...but, on the other hand, I'm a total jackass."

More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.

Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists -- primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi -- toward the Shiite-led government.

Yet U.S. officials and even legislators who voted for the measure, which still requires approval by Iraq's presidency council, acknowledge that its impact is hard to assess from its text and will depend on how it is implemented. Some say the law's primary aim is not to return ex-Baathists to work, but to recognize and compensate those harmed by the party. Of the law's eight stated justifications, none mentions reinstating ex-Baathists to their jobs.

"The law is about as clear as mud," said one U.S. senior diplomat.

Once again, the law itself allows for a seven-member commission to determine how exactly to implement its measures. That commission is picked by the sectarian Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki and confirmed by the Shiite-dominated parliament. If there's one thing the de-Baathification commission experience instructs, it's that discretion built into a law in a country with no rule of law and fratricidal sectarianism is a designed-in guarantee of corruption.

And it might even be worse than that. A former Saddam-era Iraqi military officer believes that if he exercises his options under the law, he'll be marking himself for street justice from a Shiite death squad.

Kareem, who was a senior Baath Party member, said the new law does grant him the right to a pension, which would greatly benefit his family. He has not had a steady salary in five years, and has been living off the charity of friends and relatives, but said he would not attempt to claim the pension.

"This law is bait," he said. "I have to go back to Basra and apply for the pension through several measures. If I get killed, nobody will know who did it."

It's worth remembering that the men who will kill Kareem are the same people that U.S. troops are dying in Iraq to keep in power.

The project’s interview and verification committees are just getting started. But glimpses of the expected testimony are beginning to emerge. One of the early interviewees, a medic, told IVAW about treating a two-year old shot in the thigh by U.S. soldiers, and witnessing “the mutilation of the dead,” according to Jose Vasquez, 33, a former Army sergeant who heads Winter Soldier’s verification team. The public should expect to hear about “unnecessary killing of noncombatants on the battlefield,” said Vasquez, an anthropology graduate student at the City University of New York. (Vasquez himself filed as a conscientious objector after finding himself unable to participate in the Iraq war.) Indeed, a frequent theme among group members in interviews has been the intensity of manning checkpoints, where Iraqi civilians can die for simply not approaching a checkpoint slowly enough to reassure an apprehensive soldier who doesn’t speak their language.

Yet the organizers of Winter Soldier will consider the event a failure if it appears to blame soldiers and Marines for the war. “Imagine you’re out on a convoy and you get hit by an IED,” Millard said. “And the SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] is you fire in that direction of that fire that came in. That’s indiscriminate. Civilians get killed in that. It’s not the soldier’s fault. It’s not the civilian’s fault. It’s the occupation’s fault.” Millard, a recently-discharged Army National Guardsman from upstate New York, served in Iraq as a general’s assistant in Tikrit from October 2004 to October 2005. His job involved briefing senior officers on daily violent incidents and it led Millard to renounce the war as beneath the dignity of his comrades. “The common U.S. soldier is not a bloodthirsty animal,” he said. “The problem is the occupation of Iraq itself.”

A quick word about The Washington Independent. I'll say more about us later, in time for our hard launch on January 28. TWI is an attempt to fight a disturbing journalistic trend: the decline of investigative reporting in newspapers and magazines. I'm the national-security & foreign-policy correspondent. While we've been in soft-launch mode this month, I also wrote this piece about changes in security-clearance procedures at the State Department and how they've perversely sidelined qualified diplomats.

The idea behind the Independent is to maximize the internet's potential for thorough, no-bullshit journalism. Our blog, which we're going to call The Streak, will be part of a seamless continuum in the development of reported narrative -- in other words, we're going to build a story through long pieces (like the one above), continuing through blog posts and back again. In my opinion, it's a much more rational model for investigative journalism than what's on display in any medium right now. This is the most exciting thing I've done so far in journalism. The squad of reporters we've put together is bananas, as I keep learning at every editorial meeting and seeing in every new piece we publish. I hope you'll check us out and agree that we're going to be the realest to run it.

The rationale for a Petraeus candidacy depends on the GOP coalition fracturing under the weight of the war -- something that hasn't happened yet. In the event of a Republican loss in November, the party will have to come to terms with the legacy of the war. The most politically advantageous way of doing that will be to draft a symbol of the Iraq war as it might have been: engineered and executed not by the hidebound ideologues and incompetents of the Bush administration, but by a nimble, dexterous warrior-scholar. It's true that John McCain has made the surgenik critique of the war for a long time. But it's a whole new political world when articulated by the man responsible -- in the media's imagination, at least -- with the war's belated redemption.

The piece also tries to game out how a Democratic president could either upset a Petraeus bid's groundwork or blunder into its inevitability. Due credit goes to Yglesias, since I got the idea to write this after a conversation we had about Petraeus's ambitions. He bears no responsibility if the piece sucks.

And no whinging about how early this is! Let's have some fun.

Many list their occupations at home, whether plumber, laborer, policeman, lawyer, soldier or teacher. There is a "massage specialist," a "weapons merchant," a few "unemployed" and many students. [My emphasis]

Also, that NYT piece I linked to said the recent Arab Jabour aerial bombardment involved 100,000 lbs of bombs, not the 40,000 initially reported. That must mean the surge is 60 percent more successful. (Or, to step on my own kicker, whatever the math works out to. It's late and I'm tired.)

Update: Hey, look, we made the New York Times.

Meanwhile, this, via Kissing Suzy Kolber, is the greatest thing currently on the Internet:

Iraq's new de-Baathification bill, which awaits only expected approval by the presidency council before becoming law, is good news. During Saddam Hussein's day, if you wanted a professional job in Iraq, you basically had to join the Baath Party. For most of the 1 million-plus who did so, this hardly implied involvement or even complicity in crimes of the state. Hussein was so paranoid that only his very inner circles were entrusted with information or influence. The Shiite-led government now seems willing to recognize as much. Coupled with the pension law passed in late fall, this legislation means that many former Baathists will have a real stake in post-Hussein Iraq.

So surgeniks cheer the de-Baathification law. Actual Sunni Iraqis say it's "a sword on the neck of the people." The law is written in such a way as to allow the purge of more Sunnis from government service. Neither Crocker nor Petraeus has embraced the de-Baathification law for that reason. The surgeniks are lying to you, and they hope you're not noticing. The spin gets desperate:

[T]here has been real progress on other important matters, including Baghdad's sharing of oil revenue with the provinces, even without a hydrocarbon law; the hiring of Sunni volunteers into the security forces and the civilian arms of government; and improvements in the legal system, such as more trained judges and fewer indefinite detentions of prisoners. Iraq's political glass remains more empty than full, but trends are clearly in the right direction.

And it's worth remembering why they do so. The surge represents two interrelated things for its advocates. First, it's an attempt to show that when the limits of American power display themselves, the answer is more American power. Second, and more fundamentally, it's an intellectual rehabilitation project -- a way of salvaging the reputations of men whose purported wisdom got the U.S. mired in a quagmire. Dishonesty is unavoidable in a strategy of such naked, callous vanity.

Now you’re up late, can’t get no sleep, I’m outside/ Cruisin down 5th ave., makin love in your ride/ You want that baby, but I’m out here thinkin maybe/ What if you flip - but it’s ok when you’re on my tip/ Take off your shoes, don’t spread my business news/ Reachin for the rubber tips it’s time to pay your dues/ Two girls in the back, bring your friend, make it three/ It’s the big thing honey, that’s the policy/ I got to pull down and bring the steel home for you/ Break the headboards and tell your girlfriends come over too/ Put my motorcycle helmet on and feel the power/ Rock and lift the boots, spank the lips for a hour/ The mack is back, doin good and lookin fly (2x)

Update: Speaking of sitting up on it, the Corner's Kathleen Parker says McCain's "best moment" is his use of the line "We are the captains of our fate." That's a misquotation of a line from William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus", which, it's worth noting, was Timothy McVeigh's final fuck-you to America.

On Friday, a spokesman for Sadr warned that the cleric might not extend a six-month cease-fire by his Mahdi Army militia, which U.S. officials say has contributed to the reduction in violence in Iraq. In a statement, Salah al Obeidi charged that rival Shiite militias have infiltrated Iraq's security forces and that some senior security officials remain in their jobs although they've been charged with human rights offenses.

"This will force us to reconsider the decision to extend the cease-fire despite repeated public statements in the past that we will," Obeidi said.

Update: Whoa, Obama actually won more delegates than Clinton in Nevada, despite losing the vote percentage? So says Marc Ambinder. I'd say that means... Obama won. No? Chris, help me understand! I have to film a BloggingHeads episode on all this shit tomorrow morning!

Late Update: Here's Chris.

But, as for the fact that Obama actually won more delegates, which is causing some confusion, here’s my understanding. (This is based on an hour-long chat with the man who actually invented the current Iowa caucus model back in 1972 and who was in Vegas this week to share his vast knowledge with the Nevada state party organizers. I’ll have more on that later)

The short answer to this question is that the weighting of the ratio of registered voters to state convention delegates favors rural counties over urban counties: 100 registered rural voters choose more delegates to the state convention than 100 registered voters in urban areas. This was done so as to try to force candidates to campaign all over the state, and since Obama won everywhere in the state except for the urbanized Clark County around Vegas, he can (we still don’t actually know) end up with more national convention delegates.

But, more complicatedly, I should lay out what happened today. Each one of the 1,754 precincts in the state of Nevada had a caucus, along with nine at-large precincts on the strip, for a total of 1,763 caucus sites. At each of those caucuses the assembled people elected delegates to their local county convention. County conventions will be held in a few months (I think!) and at the county conventions, the delegates there assembled will elect delegates to the state party convention. At the state party convention the assembled delegates will elect the delegates to send to the national party convention. At the national party convention these Nevada delegates will cast their vote for the nominee. In other words, it’s representative democracy four times removed.

Israel's most basic strategic interest is a peace agreement and a withdrawal. Avoiding a situation in which the only way out is a one-state solution is also a U.S. interest. Right now, Israel is the one country in the Mideast that can be depended on to stay pro-American. This would not be true of a single state with an inevitable Palestinian majority and a built-in communal conflict. Acting much more energetically to reach a two-state agreement is therefore both pro-Israel and an expression of U.S. self-interest.

Further, a pro-Israel policy requires using both incentives and pressures to get to an agreement. As one Israeli ex-general pointed out to me recently, sometimes U.S. pressure serves an Israeli government that needs to make a change in course. Right now, he pointed out, Israel needs economic growth in the West Bank, which would help the pro-agreement Fatah government there. Growth requires removing roadblocks, a move that involves a certain security risk and makes the army brass unhappy. The counterweight of U.S. pressure would make it easier for the government to move. The government needs to take down illegal settlement outposts, but fears paying the domestic price of confrontation with thousands of rightist youth. U.S. pressure would actually help the government, showing the public that inaction has its own price. Right now the Israeli public has no idea what the settlement budget is. American insistence on financial transparency as a condition for current aid levels would serve Israeli democracy and boost domestic support for a pullback. On the incentive side, an offer of U.S. funding for relocating settlers inside Israel could also increase political support. (Irritating as it may be to pay Israel to correct its mistakes, the policy goal of a peace agreement is more important.)

Imagine it: a world in which Israeli interests, American interests, Arab interests, and the glorious prerogatives of human rights are mutually supportive. As a wise man once said, if you will it, it is no dream. First, though, Israel's frenemies must be exposed and refuted.

The current political framework is based on a pluralistic democratic vision that, while admirable, is entirely unsuited to resolving this three-way divide. [ie, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds.] It ignores underlying issues and expects that a consensus will emerge simply by enacting a liberal constitutional legal order.

Resolution can be achieved only through a system that incorporates regional federalism, with clear, mutually acceptable distributions of power between the regions and the central government.[snip]

The shape of a reconstructed, federal Iraq could vary, but it should permit the assignment of nearly all domestic powers to the regions, to be funded out of a percentage of oil revenue distributed on the basis of population. The federal government should be responsible only for essential central functions such as foreign policy (including interregional affairs), defense, fiscal and monetary policy, and banking. Regional parliaments and executives would govern their areas. A federal parliament with a new upper house could manage governance at the national level. A regional political structure would allow for the development of religious, cultural and educational policies more suited to areas’ populations than a central government could create. A regional framework for economic policy would also fit better with traditional trade patterns and markets.

As expected the response from John Stewart on air was a lot less warm than the response from him in the green room. Maybe I've got a platonic Brokeback Mountain thing going in that I just can't quit liking the guy, no matter how shabbily the edit job turned out to be (or how silly the interview itself was).

No homo! You know, the Nazis were repressed homosexuals, too, so playing by Liberal Fascism rules...

A woman wearing a vest lined with explosives blew herself up near Shiite worshippers in turbulent Diyala province north of the capital Wednesday, killing nine of them — the latest in a growing number of female suicide attacks.

This is what people like to call "industrial policy," and what Jonah Goldberg likes to call liberal fascism - big business and big government working hand-in-glove for the purposes of economic nationalism.

This makes National Review, which endorsed Romney, objectively pro-liberal fascism. The horror! Clearly, when liberal fascism comes to America, it will come wearing a bow tie and freighted with repressed homosexuality.

Update: Also worth mentioning, since I missed it when it happened, is that Col. Pete Mansoor, another COIN luminary and close Petraeus advisor, will be heading to "the" Ohio State University's military-history program in September. Thanks to THFTNR friend PC for pointing this out.

Late Update: For a colloquy on every conceivable issue Nagl's retirement raises, you have to read Abu Muqawama. Then read Charlie's follow-up. If you didn't already have an inferiority complex, note that Nagl reviewed a book of war poetry by writing a poem, and a moving one at that. Rumor has it that for breakfast Nagl whips up omelets that cure AIDS.

Q: Is there the potential that this deployment could also affect the seven-month tours down the road in Iraq?

MR. MORRELL: For these deploying forces?

Q: For future deployments of Marine forces into Iraq.

MR. MORRELL: My understanding is that there may -- that these deployments may require a brief additional period of boots on the ground, but not -- but not much. Or we may be breaking a little -- we may be cutting down a little bit of dwell time. Let me get you the firm answer on that. I think it will require either us to have forces deployed slightly earlier, although not an unreasonably amount earlier -- an unreasonable amount earlier, but I -- I'm going to correct myself -- I do not believe they'll have to deploy any longer. These are seven-month, as I mentioned, deployments.

Maybe Charlie can correct me, but I don't think that Marines have ever faced tours longer than seven months during either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. What's more, it's a dedicated priority of General James Conway, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, to boost dwell time to a 1:2 ratio -- that is, eight months at home/station for every four deployed. What will the effect of a short dwell time be on the 3,200 Marines heading to Afghanistan?

Nor does this appear to be a very auspicious development. From later in the briefing:

Q: You have mentioned that some Marines may have to -- (word inaudible) -- dwell. Is it possible to find out how many Marines you're talking about and which unit?

MR. MORRELL: We've ended this conversation, so we don't take anymore questions on that topic, I apologize.

Iraqi Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani fired back at his Arab opponents who argued that Kirkuk -- a home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens -- is no longer subject to an article in the Iraqi Constitution calling for a general referendum on disputed territories to be held by the end of 2007.

"There is no turning back," Barzani said in Irbil. "The referendum must be conducted in the next six months."

Earlier this month, the Kurdish-dominated provincial council in Kirkuk declared that if the referendum doesn't happen by June 1, the Kurds have the right to take the city by force.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole translates reports from the Arabic press saying that Arab political parties in Baghdad have formed what the Kurds see as an anti-Kurdish alliance to deny them Kirkuk. It says a lot about Iraq that the only cross-sectarian coalitions to emerge are threatening to other sectarian interests.

Update: More examples of the Re-Up.

The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018.

Those comments from the minister, Abdul Qadir, were among the most specific public projections of a timeline for the American commitment in Iraq by officials in either Washington or Baghdad. And they suggested a longer commitment than either government had previously indicated.

Pentagon officials expressed no surprise at Mr. Qadir’s projections, which were even less optimistic than those he made last year.

Update: Swopa seems to think this guy is on our payroll, doesn't have much juice in Baghdad, or both.

The measure, known as the Justice and Accountability Law, is meant to open government jobs to former members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein — the bureaucrats, engineers, city workers, teachers, soldiers and police officers who made the government work until they were barred from office after the American invasion in 2003.

But the legislation is at once confusing and controversial, a document riddled with loopholes and caveats to the point that some Sunni and Shiite officials say it could actually exclude more former Baathists than it lets back in, particularly in the crucial security ministries.

Welcome back to the world of fake reconciliation. At long last, the Shiite/Kurdish government finally passes a de-Baathification law, only the law is phony. The Sunnis are outraged: one Sunni parliamentarian calls the law "a sword on the neck of the people." But the Shiites throw their hands up and say What do you want from us? It took us over a year of arduous compromise to get to this point. That's as far as we can go! Or, for what they actually said:

One particular improvement, [a Maliki adviser] said, was that de-Baathification cases would now be subject to judicial review, whereas the old de-Baathification committee’s decisions were final. And the Council of Ministers would have the right to make exceptions to the law in order to serve the public interest. “Before, we dealt with Baath Party members as a group,” he said. “Now, being a Baath Party member is not a crime by itself. If someone has committed a crime in the old regime, that accusation should be made in court. And all of the members can get a pension.”

Say again? Is the Commandant trying to tell us that the Marine Corps doesn't have a history of patrolling? Of non-kinetic activity? Of occupation? Jesus H. Christ! Then perhaps Gen. Conway can tell this blogger if he's ever read this book. You know, the little red one that Marines used to wave in the face of anyone who challenged their assertion that they were the small wars force of choice? For the record, the Marines spent the better part of a decade "occupying" Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and when they were done, they wrote a brilliant manual telling everyone else how to do it! They made use of that Small Wars Manual when they established the Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam, one of the Corps' finest hours.

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists. ...

Kristol refused to talk with me about this issue, or an earlier statement that The Times was “irredeemable,” or the reaction to his appointment — an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.

Rosenthal said Kristol’s comment about prosecution bothered him. It was, Rosenthal said, “a heavy accusation that put him in a category other than a journalist.” But he said that Op-Ed columnists are not necessarily traditional journalists, and he did not think that “holding one opinion” should be the basis for selecting or rejecting a columnist.

The great mystery of George W. Bush’s presidency is why he ever jumped into bed with neoconservatives in the first place. During the presidential primaries in 2000, The Weekly Standard, by then neoconservatism’s pre-eminent publication, had preferred John McCain. Bush had no great fondness for intellectuals, and a disinclination to engage in nation-building. And before 9/11, even Wolfowitz had predicted that the big foreign-policy challenge would not be Iraq, but China. What brought about this unlikely alliance?

This is a mystery? The neocons got power. Bush got a rationale for his militaristic impulses. Then he got high on his own supply and the distinctions between the two blurred. And not just for Bush: the Republicans got a grand narrative that fused the bellicose and the evangelical constituencies within the party, as demonstrated by Bush's second inaugural address, penned not by a neocon but by a right-wing Christian. In two important elections, that narrative contributed mightily to electoral success. Hence the reluctance on the part of the party to abandon the formula, even as the potion starts to wear off on the public. (The rise of John McCain will be an important test case here.) This is perfectly explicable by the old-time-religion of power-hunger.

Probably the most significant factor was the presence of Vice President Dick Cheney, who helped Wolfowitz secure his berth with Rumsfeld, which in turn allowed Wolfowitz to install Feith. What transformed Cheney from a mild skeptic about Iraq intervention when he was defense secretary in the early 1990s (one “former colleague” informs Heilbrunn that in those days Cheney was “not in thrall” to Wolfowitz) to the unappeasable hawk he revealed himself to be after 9/11?

There was once a piece in The New Republic by Frank Foer and myself -- we made a good team, once -- that looked back through Cheney's career and found him to be startlingly consistent. A more sympathetic account (to understate matters) from Cheney's biographer, Steve Hayes, came to much the same conclusion. Cheney didn't change, but the opportunities he was presented with did -- from the objective constraints of being in the Congressional minority and then out of step with the Bush I administration to the license to truly be Cheney in the aftermath of 9/11.The press, and most of Washington, has misunderstood Cheney significantly, much as it's misunderstood neoconservatism.

The nation's intelligence chief says that waterboarding "would be torture" if used against him, or if someone under interrogation was taking water into his lungs.

But Mike McConnell declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture.

"If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," the director of national intelligence told the New Yorker in this week's issue, released today.

Hence the primary reason why that determination is not soon in coming. There's a secondary reason as well. The administration that determines waterboarding is torture, with the legal ramifications that would follow, severely damages its relationship with the CIA. Waterboarding was not something that officers in the Directorate of Operations were itching to do. It was something that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Ashcroft and John Yoo gave them the legal authority to do, with George Tenet's concurrence. A significant cohort with CIA understood that the Bush administration -- like administrations past and future -- would sell them out if public outrage over interrogation/detention/rendition boiled over. It should be said that the administration hasn't, but some in CIA reply: just you wait.

Once waterboarding is torture and the investigations open, CIA officers will be demoralized, fearful and unsure about what other stuff they've been told to do will be rewarded by indictments. They will watch their colleagues face jail time, as Jose Rodriguez might, while John Yoo leisurely strolls the Boalt Hall campus. And they will harbor a deep resentment toward both the administration that got them into this mess and the administration that pulled the trigger on prosecution. The consequences, at a minimum, are a traumatized and (sorry to use this cliche) risk-averse CIA.

If you're the attorney general, and you have the option of not deciding that waterboarding is torture while also not affirming that it isn't -- and thereby avoiding this whole nightmare -- that option looks mighty attractive. And if you're that attorney general's successor, and you have the option of not reversing his finding, that option looks mighty attractive, too. I write this not as an endorsement of any of the above reasoning, but merely to lay out where things stand.

R--Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band via kwout

Noah and I hereby announce the formation of our national-security blogger supergroup, Error: 404. We intend to win this contract. As Noah points out, the Army is looking for celebrities. When defining an "excellent" candidate, the contract stipulates, "The Proposed Group contains at least one member who is a recognizable celebrity nationally or internationally." Not very punk rock, but not to fear, as we're internet celebrities. What's more, IRL, he's a bass player of renown. While it's not for me to disclose what well-known NYC band he played with, I can tell you that I saw them several times in high school. (An "adequate" candidate contains one member "who may be recognizable within a certain metropolitan community.") It's a privilege to be his drummer.

But here's the thing: We need a guitarist and a singer. Maybe a keyboardist. Do you manipulate an effects pedal as easily as you use Moveable Type? Do you have a burning desire to tour on a C-17? Do you have the balls to cover Anti-Cimex's "Victims of A Bomb Raid" at Ali al-Salem? Error: 404 wants you. Serious inquiries only. Let's get this money.

The targets were near the town of Arab Jabour, a Sunni Muslim-dominated district on Baghdad's outskirts that American officials recently held up as a security success and an example of how local Sunni tribesmen known as "concerned local citizens" had turned against al Qaida in Iraq.

But Thursday's air attack indicated that the area still has a considerable Sunni militant presence. The statement said that more than 40 targets in three large areas were hit during two passes by two supersonic B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets. A U.S. military official in the area said the targets were al Qaida in Iraq weapons caches and bomb-making materials.

The blitz dropped 38 bombs in its first 10 minutes, the statement said.

Forty thousand pounds of bombs. It's counterinsurgency-rific! And goddamn it, why can't Gumbrecht and Youssef acknowledge that the surge succeeded????//

How do you feel about the reaction to your book so far, especially from the liberal blogosphere?

I think most of them should be ashamed. I think it's been fairly idiotic; you look at -- Who's that weirdo, the guy with the "Too Hot for TNR" blog? Spencer Ackerman. That's absurd, and it's childish. Type my name into Daily Kos. As hilarious as some people might think it is to call me a "Doughy Pantload," at some point if that is the crux of your objection to a 500-page book that Tom Wolfe says is the best and most important revisionist history in a very long time, that says a lot more about those people than it does about me.

Whoa, seriously? I'm "childish" and a "weirdo," but the trouble with the Kossacks is that they call Jonah names? Did I read that right? Instant replay!

Who's that weirdo, the guy with the "Too Hot for TNR" blog? Spencer Ackerman. That's absurd, and it's childish. Type my name into Daily Kos. As hilarious as some people might think it is to call me a "Doughy Pantload," at some point if that is the crux of your objection to a 500-page book that Tom Wolfe says is the best and most important revisionist history in a very long time, that says a lot more about those people than it does about me.

According to Mardini, the alliance involves ceding almost all of the province -- home to roughly 2.5 million people, about 1.7 million of whom reside in the multiethnic city of Mosul -- to the Kurds in the upcoming referendum:

According to sources cited by the Sunni Haq News Agency, the agreement between Hashimi and the Kurdish parties stipulates that two-thirds of Ninawa province will be under Kurdish authority in any future federal region (Haq News Agency, December 29, 2007). The Federal Regions Law, passed by the Council of Representatives in October 2006, specifies that Iraq’s 18 provinces may begin to unite and form federal regions beginning in April 2008. The Sunni-Kurdish MoU is also said to completely discard the insertion of Mosul in any newly formed region and rather suggests that two-thirds of the city’s administration will be given to the Kurds, while the remaining one-third will go to Arabs and other ethnic groups (Haq News Agency, December 29, 2007). Though publicly reported, many of the aspects of the MoU, such as those indicated above, are said to be part of an “unpublished” portion of the agreement. If this is the case, [Iraqi Vice President and IIP leader Tariq] Hashimi certainly had good reason to keep such information secret since public knowledge of the vice president’s compromises might create a political backlash from ordinary Sunnis, especially in Ninawa province. If accurate, the sensitivity of these compromises explains Hashimi’s passive rhetoric when describing the MoU with the Kurds: “We don’t want to send the wrong message that this [agreement] is aimed against any specific sides, but is [instead designed] to activate national reconciliation” (al-Sabah, December 26, 2007).

If I'm reading that correctly, it means that two-thirds of the province will now be under the administration of the Kurdistan Regional Government, but the city of Mosul itself will be (hang in there) under Baghdad's control but still run by the Kurds. I think. Either I'm thick or Mardini isn't clear (though both could be true), but it seems that the actual modalities of control over Mosul are governed by the agreement's secret annex.

In any event, the question becomes: what in the world is in it for Hashemi? He just sold Ninewa's Sunni Arabs right out. That's his constituency. How can this agreement possibly be in his interest? Mardini:

The IIP leader’s reasons for improving relations with the Kurdish parties are essentially two-fold: 1, Hashimi strengthens the Sunni position against the Maliki government through the new alliance, and 2, Hashimi legitimizes his status as a Sunni leader against the rising power of the tribal council in al-Anbar.

Huh? I can see that Hashemi might be seeking a Sunni-Kurdish alliance in order to fuck over Maliki and the Shiites, and the parliamentary math puts a Sunni-Kurdish bloc in striking distance of toppling Maliki. But. If the Kurdish price is to control Ninewa, Hashemi's position is simply untenable: the Sunnis will not stand for the loss of the province to the Kurds. The IIP's Mosul representatives -- Hashemi's IIP -- told me in March that they were ready to tool up against the Kurds. So if Hashemi is trying an end run around around the rising power of the Awakening Councils, he just miscalculated. All of a sudden the Awakening Councils have the Betrayal of Ninewa to tie around Hashemi's neck.

This makes my head hurt. But let's take it a step further. Assume that the Sunni tribals are going to challenge Hashemi's self-proclaimed leadership of the Sunnis. Maybe Hashemi sees that as such an extreme threat to his power that he's willing to sell out Ninewa to the Kurds. But how would Hashemi's Sunni rivals knock him out of power? Why, through the next round of provincial elections. Perhaps the "secret annex" of the deal contains a provision that the law establishing the provincial elections never passes. Crisis averted, from Hashemi's perspective. The Kurds lose nothing under that bargain, and gain a ton of territory.

Now, that's admittedly a convoluted explanation, and one that relies on evidence I simply don't have. And the Sunnis -- from the Awakening Councils to al-Qaeda in Iraq -- could always, y'know, murder Hashemi. But I really can't think of any other way this arrangement makes sense for him. An official Marvel Comics-style No-Prize for anyone who comes up with something simpler or more compelling.

The Pentagon said yesterday that the apparent radio threat to bomb U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf last weekend may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them -- and may not even have been intended against U.S. targets.

The communication Sunday was made on radio channel 16, a common marine frequency used by ships and others in the region. "It could have been a threat aimed at some other nation or a myriad of other things," said Rear Adm. Frank Thorp IV, a spokesman for the Navy.

The other night at the bar, some friends and I got to talking about the Straits near-conflict. I said I wouldn't be surprised if the Iranian boats really did come after the USS Port Royal, since it's in Ahmedinejad's interest to provoke the U.S. into an attack, thereby rallying Iran around a weakened, demagogic leader. That calculation still seems compelling. But rather like Tonkin, the facts of this or any other particular circumstance should never be taken for granted, particularly when they emanate from an administration that lies about national security as routinely as you and I breathe.

More importantly, with Iran, there's an effort to portray anything the Iranians do as a threat, simply because... Iran is a threat, so QED. So they don't have an active nuclear weapons program? No worries, that just "clarifies the threat," says the president. So they didn't threaten the Port Royal? No worries, says the Pentagon:

"No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats. But when they hear it simultaneously to the behavior of those boats, it only adds to the tension," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. "If this verbal threat emanated from something or someone unrelated to the five boats, it would not lessen the threat from those boats."

Good on Robin Wright for not letting Morrell get away with that. ("Yet the Pentagon had consistently given the impression that the threat was linked to the Iranian boats.") We'll see what Bush says in the Gulf today.

Update: Paul has more. The radio transmission might have been... a prank. Pwnage!

The distress call rang out over the radio. In the midst of one of the largest current military operations in Iraq, Capt. Mike Stinchfield recognized this was, so far, his most urgent mission of the day.

A captured insurgent? A fallen comrade? Not quite. A local woman had gone into labor, and within minutes about 18 U.S. soldiers endeavored to help....

"I'm sitting here eating Cheez Whiz and Cheez-Its, which I realize might seem weird," Stinchfield said. "But I'd rather be doing things like delivering a baby than shooting people."

Update: Thanks to Mike in comments, this headline has been corrected.

But it isn't. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, resigned after it turned out he relied heavily on an uncredited stringer for a series with an Apalachicola, Florida dateline. That was the honorable thing to do when faced with such a misrepresentation. But Dowd's is worse. At least Bragg, in the words of the paper, "indeed visited Apalachicola briefly" for "his" piece. Dowd was half a world away from events she claimed to witness firsthand.

How can it be that four and a half years after Blair/Bragg, the NYT still lets its writers play fast and loose with datelines? Datelines aren't frivolous things. They exist -- and writers covet them -- because they bequeath an implicit authority to journalists. That authority is based on the simple concept of due diligence. Readers trust an on-the-ground report far more than they trust a 7,000-mile-distant vantage. That's why high-budget glossy magazines spend thousands of dollars to shuttle high-profile reporters around, say, the Middle East, even when they're working on thinkpieces that don't require exotic stamps on passports. Somehow, the NYT believes that casual manipulation of readers' trust is acceptable. It raises questions about what other toe-touching is going on at the paper. And we wonder why people don't trust our profession.

But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — [McCain's] not one of us.

But remember, liberals are the fascists.

Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.

The faulty bookkeeping is part of what the audit, by the Justice Department's inspector general, described as the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

Update: A friend in the Foreign Service e-mails to correct an error of mine. All three dudes are, in fact, career FSOs. Sorry for the mistake. DipSet!

No one who understands counterinsurgency would ever write this sentence --

Political progress has been slow.

Until we know with certainty that we can keep al Qaeda on the run with 15 brigades, it would be a mistake to commit ourselves preemptively to a drawdown below that number.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a debater's point?

Recent terrorist attacks on Iraqi concerned citizens groups indicate al Qaeda in Iraq’s increasing desperation.

There is nothing like politics and politicians employing songs as a force for musical atrophy. Even though politicians might inspire some great tunes (imagine 1980's hardcore without Reagan or recent Springsteen, Steve Earle, or Arcade Fire albums minus Bush II et al as inspiration), they are less successful at marrying music with their own image or agenda. It's a tricky process indeed. We're not talking about a benign Celebrity Playlist on i-Tunes, wherein people can admire the esoteric tastes of Nicholas Cage, or confirm their instinct that they and Michael Cera were meant for each other based on a mutual fondness for The Microphones. And it is more serious than the song one chooses as a cell phone ring, that 15 second personal ad broadcasted a few times a day. Instead, a candidate' theme song is a little bit more like a tattoo; some people won't care or even notice it at all, others will think it really sums up who they are and what they stand for, and the final category of people will be slightly offended by their lack of taste.

Marry me, Carrie. Or at least let me drum for your next band. Or at the very least, blog more.

At Wednesday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, antiwar Senators were confronted with a question: can they concede that recent military operations in Vietnam have worked? All of them vehemently opposed Operation Attleboro -- both Attleboro I and Attleboro II -- last year, despite its apparent success. Then they opposed Operation Cedar Falls, which has pacified the Iron Triangle. A reasonable response to these facts might involve an acknowledgment of the remarkable military progress, coupled with a reminder that the final goal of the operations set out by President Johnson -- the bolstering of Saigon's control over South Vietnam -- has not been reached. What Mr. Fulbright, Mr. Morse, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Gore instead offered was an exclusive focus on the Vietnamese political failures -- coupled with a blizzard of assertions about the war that were at best unfounded and in several cases simply false.

One day last month, Hadi's men were stationed at nearly every intersection. They checked vehicles at the entrances to the neighborhood [Adhamiya], which was protected by tall blast walls. Elsewhere the fighters were much less visible. "Under Saddam Hussein, there was no army in the streets. He used intelligence men, his Baathists, he was controlling everything, like what we are doing now," Hadi said.

Salvation: a return to Baathist subtlety. Now that's an awakening.

Too bad Hadi's bluntness doesn't translate to The Washington Post. To say Adhamiya is "protected by tall blast walls" is rather anodyne. Another way of putting it is that Adhimiya is walled off from the adjacent Shiite neighborhoods.

Update: And here's the writing on the wall:

Scrawled on a wall, near graffiti that hailed the "Adhamiyah Heroes," was an ominous sign of a future battle: "Death to the Mahdi Army."

Further Update: That euphemism crack shows what a jackass I am. This Post piece is fantastic. Seriously, check this out:

When asked about Abu Abed, Rasheed Jubair, a senior Anbar Awakening leader, said: "If he does something wrong, I will break his back. We don't accept anyone to go beyond the law."

INT: I just wanted to ask who is financing and arming the awakening troops? Is it the Iraqi troops or the American troops? Who’s supporting them? Thank you.

BRIG. GEN. CARDON:Okay. As I stated earlier, we do not arm or provide ammunition to any of these groups in our area. For payment, that is done with monies from coalition forces at this time.

Captain David Underwood, The Washington Post, January 8, 2008:

Saad Mahami wanted more firepower. He didn't trust the Iraqi government to give him support, so inside Patrol Base Whiskey, at the edge of this village south of Baghdad, he told U.S. commanders that his 71 Sunni fighters needed additional weapons to fight the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

As he listened to Mahami's demand, Capt. David Underwood reminded his superiors that Mahami's men -- all members of a U.S.-backed Sunni paramilitary movement called Sahwa, or "Awakening" -- were already buying arms with U.S. reward money for finding enemy ammunition dumps. "And as we confiscate weapons, we hand them to Saad Mahami," Underwood told Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top commander in the region, during their meeting with the Iraqi.

Al Qaeda in Iraq has targeted the Awakening Councils on a near-daily basis. Over the past week, six high-profile attacks against Awakening forces occurred in Baghdad, Diyala, Anbar, and Babil provinces.

So here's the question. AQI messed up by trying to rule Sunni Iraq through fear. That's why there was an Awakening in the first place. Is AQI going to do the same thing again? Or is this latest round of killing a demonstration effect, to be followed by/supplemented with outreach to key Sunni anti-AQI leaders? Is this already happening, beyond the notice of the press? All that speaks to the broader mystery of AQI, the mystery that has implications for al-Qaeda v. 3.0 beyond Iraq: how strategically does New Model al-Qaeda think?

Q: Admiral, it's Andrew Gray from Reuters.

Can you characterize how serious this incident was from your point of view?

Following off of Bob's question, have you known an incident as serious as this since you took command here?

ADM. COSGRIFF: Well, this particular body of water, no; this is more serious because of the aggregate of the actions, the coordinated movement of the ships, the boats, the aggressive maneuvering, the more or less simultaneous radio communication, the dropping of objects. So these are -- in my unnecessarily provocative -- in international waters incidental to a routine transit of a(n) internationally recognized strait. So yes, it's more serious than we have seen, but to put it in context, we do interact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and their navy regularly. For the most part, those interactions are correct. We are familiar with their presence, they're familiar with ours. So I think in the time I've been here I've seen things that are a concern, and then there's periods of time -- long periods of time where there's not as much going on.

We will assess this now. This is a situation that the Iranians have developed, and we will assess this in the fullness of time as we continue our routine operations contributing to the security and stability of the maritime region in this part of the world.

Obviously, this needs to be watched closely to determine what really happened and what the appropriate response should be.

But earlier today I was talking to a conservative friend who referenced Iranian acts of war against the United States -- namely Iranian attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. Now, stipulate for a moment that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps really has attacked U.S. troops. That's an unambiguous act of war. The U.S. would be justified in retaliating militarily. But that doesn't mean the U.S. would be wise to do so.

The question is whose interests would be better served by a U.S.-Iranian conflict -- the U.S.'s, or Iran's. And there the calculus really favors Iran. A U.S. bombing campaign will increase America's diplomatic distance from the rest of the world; will leave the Iranian regime in place to say that it survived an attack from the Great Satan, as Hezbollah did in 2006 from the Little Satan; will make the Arab states think the U.S. doesn't care about the consequences of such an attack for them, causing all sort of intransigence on other U.S. regional priorities; will result in an escalation of Iranian-sponsored violence against U.S. forces in Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan as well; will accelerate the exhaustion of U.S. military assets in the region; will cause oil prices around the world to skyrocket, resulting in significant economic disruption. And that's if the U.S. doesn't invade. If we do, then we're stuck with a third bloody, protracted, expensive occupation of a Muslim country in eight years.

Luckily, there's an alternative: diplomacy. According to U.S. officials, the Iranians are scaling back whatever anti-U.S. activities in Iraq they've been engaged in. That proves that they're not beyond the pale of reason and recognize that provoking the U.S. has consequences. All that should be factored into the mix of what advances our interests and what makes us feel like we've got thicker, heavier ones than the Iranians do.

Vengeance is mine, sayeth Amanda. Why I Hate DC should know the feeling is mutual.

But there are nonetheless two problems with Mr. Obama's Iraq views that call into doubt his ability to build a truly inclusive American political movement. First, he seems contemptuous of the motivations of those who supported the war. While showing proper respect for the heroic efforts of our troops, he displays little regard for the views of those many Americans who saw the case for war in the first place -- even as he has called for a more civil and respectful political debate. ...

Mr. Obama's second Iraq problem is his insistence that, whatever happens there during 2008, he would withdraw all our main combat forces in the first 16 months of his presidency. Such a message may resonate with Americans, and particularly Democrats, right now. However, it is unlikely that centrist voters will support such a policy once they fully consider its likely implications for Iraqi -- and American -- national security. Given Iraq's fragile institutions, and the fresh wounds among its Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, it is doubtful that Iraq can avoid renewed civil warfare after a rapid U.S. withdrawal.

Read the whole thing. What's notable on the surface is how little effort O'Hanlon spends trying to debunk Obama's substantive views about Iraq, preferring to prognosticate about how it's all going to play politically. But that's nowhere near the real curiosity here. It's hard to understand why O'Hanlon is coming out so strongly against Obama right at the time Obama is looking like the favorite for the nomination. Can O'Hanlon actually be saying what he believes here, or is he running some kind of game?

It's a cliche now. In spring 2002, Vice President Cheney travelled to the Middle East to sell the coming Iraq war to regional allies. In mid-2006, Cheney reprised his Expedia itinerary, only this time to sell an Iran war. Now, President Bush is making his first trip to the region, ostensibly concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also to pitch the enduring wisdom of an Iran wa-- er, strategy aimed at containment.

Tons of foreign-policy writers have written that the NIE, which described a shuttered Iranian nuclear program, ended the possibility of an attack on Iran. But the president doesn't see it that way. "The [National Intelligence Estimate] in no way lessens that threat, but in fact clarifies the threat," he told Yedioth Ahronot. The Bush administration: same as it ever was.

But here's the really interesting part:

In an interview yesterday, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa cited recent overtures between Iran and Arab countries and said Arab nations are exercising a prerogative to set their own course on Iran. "As long as they have no nuclear program . . . why should we isolate Iran? Why punish Iran, now?" he asked.

Good question. Maybe Amr Moussa is speaking from a parochial Egyptian perspective, and doesn't feel the same panic than the Gulf Cooperation Council states do. But according to Marc Lynch, the Gulf thinks war would be worse than an uptick in Iranian regional power, and increasingly prefers rapproachment. Bush's strongest argument for a policy of confrontation with Iran is that the Iranians are a destabilizing force in the region. If the region doesn't think so, pffft. All that's left in an anti-Iran coalition is the U.S. and Israel, and that's not a place the U.S. wants to be.

Here's another interesting bit. The Arabs are having trouble making sense of the NIE's publication. "No Arab regime understands why the United States would publish an intelligence estimate," an anonymous Arab official told The Washington Post. Rightly so. Authoritarian countries have a hard time understanding fractious or dissonant voices inside officialdom. Bush, however, is very familiar: he issues edicts, he prizes secrecy, he values loyalty, and he governs singularly. He's said he wants to make Egypt more like the U.S., and under that pretext, he's made the U.S. more like Egypt. To release an intelligence report so contradicting the clear intentions of the administration, and particularly this administration, makes it difficult for a client to know what exactly the boss wants.

Seeing the chuchman Williams stunting in his rings and his gold chains as an old man is worth the price of admission alone. But when he starts to talk about his rules of the game -- "All strangers are the police. All phones are tapped. No weapon should ever be at the time the package is delivered. Fourth and last is that the package should never be tampered with until it's clear that what you're supposed to have is what you got." -- god damn. At the pleading of Baltimore politicians, Melvin stopped the 1968 riots with a few well-chosen words, and still the police sent Melvin to jail after planting drugs on him. Decades out of hustling, he sticks to the G-code, speaking in cautious, cryptic terms when describing his heroin connections in New York:

I was directed to be some place in a part of the planet. And I went there. And I was the only guy there that looked like me. Everyone else was of some foreign descent and they had alligator boots and things that made it clear to me that these people were prominent and who they claimed to be. If they were supposed to be gangsters, that's who they looked like. Know this -- that in the drug business of the day, you couldn't buy narcotics. All you had to do was to have the kind of character and demeanor that says, 'I can protect this. I can sell this. And I will never remember anybody if I get apprehended.' The only thing I remember is that 40 packages showed up and the game began.

Update: I should have also mentioned that two of Williams' lieutenants were named Nathan Barksdale and Roland Bell.

I saw There Will Be Blood last night. It's great. So great that its moments of imperfection hurt. Chris Orr says the final scene comes thisclose to ruining the movie, and Matt Yglesias says Chris is wrong. I can't decide. During the walk to Solly's, my friends and I puzzled through the scene and didn't come to any solid conclusions. So I turn to MZS. He's more skeptical of Blood than I am, but he's got major elements of the film -- and its director, Paul Thomas Anderson -- all figured out.

Daniel has human potential, but it can't be tapped because his drive is so intense and his emotional armor so thick. You can see it in the way that Daniel dotes on H.W. in during [sic] their initial train ride together in the 1902 sequence. Even though he's probably already thinking of ways he can amortize this profound emotional investment -- sure enough, in the 1911 section H.W. accompanies Daniel on business meetings, enabling Daniel to declare, "I'm a family man" before he commences screwing whoever he's dealing with -- from the start, the connection between boy and man seems intuitive, elemental, real.

Yeah, that's perfect. So is MZS's take on the most interesting and complex character in the film, the charlatan pastor Eli Sunday. I also didn't catch that Daniel's father is named Ernest, a magnificent detail. But that's MZS for you. And to think I had the privilege of factchecking this man's copy at NYP when I was 19. Whatever depths to which the paper has descended, it bequeathed us more than its due share of enduring brilliance. 

Despite [Musharraf-imposed] limits, the Bush administration said British involvement gave the probe credibility. "We don't see the need for an investigation beyond that at this time," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday.

Bhutto was buried without an autopsy, so the likelihood of knowing, say, whether the bullet that (maybe) killed her came from an official-issue weapon, is minimal. But an international probe would be able to address whether the Musharraf government did all it could have to protect her; how the killers got so close to Bhutto; whether Bhutto asked for and received foreign protection, as her close friends say; and other unanswered questions. And that's exactly why it won't happen. If only Bhutto had been murdered by Ahmedinejad.

Elana reports that at this very moment, she's in a car with Omar. She forgot that there's rules to this here game and didn't bring a camera. This post will have to serve as documentation.

Update: So this is what happened. Elana, Keisha -- here's them with Bill Clinton -- and a friend of theirs I don't know were at the release party for The Wire soundtrack somewhere in Manhattan. Cast members arrived and abruptly left. Unfamiliar-friend asked a car-commandeering stranger if the three ladies could get a ride to an afterparty where some cast members would be. The stranger agreed. His car turned out to be the vehicle of choice for Omar and Bodie. All involved went to "some shitty club in the Meatpacking district" where Elana quickly filed the basis for this dispatch. Before losing contact, she reported that the club started to play Soulja Boy and so she needed to see if Bodie and Omar would be Cranking Dat. More TK.

Late Update: First reports and all that. Bodie was at the club, but not in the car. The club where the afterparty was turns out to be better-than-average for the Meatpacking district, Elana the sophisticated clubgoer judges. Omar expressed his disappointment that no Wire cast members are featured on the soundtrack, since several of them are talented rappers, "as he went on to very ably demonstrate in the car," she reports. Unfortunately, the world outside the club may never know if Omar and Bodie Cranked Dat, since Elana wasn't able to find them during the song.

Michael Gerson, accusing other people of living in denial.

And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- who declared that the surge had "failed" even before it was fully implemented -- now contends that "the surge hasn't accomplished its goals.

Yeah, fancy that. On the latest Street Wars mixtape, 50 Cent compares himself to Martin Luther King, and it's not as absurd as Gerson's column.

Ron Radosh, writing in a right-wing fanzine, gets points for unintentionally faint praise:

Mr. Goldberg has, unlike the leftists who yell the term [fascism], made the strongest possible case that Americans today living in a soft form of fascism, a statist liberal society whose citizens are unaware of the roots of ideas they hold. [My emphasis]

Radosh, who I understand was once on the left, also shows in the review that he doesn't understand the irreducible difference between liberalism and socialism.

Just in time for the de-surge, the bill for northern Iraq is coming due. Subscription-only IraqSlogger translates an Aswat al-Iraq report from Kirkuk, one of the (deep breath) oil-rich, multi-ethnic and fiercely contested northern Iraqi cities controlled by Baghdad and coveted by Erbil. The Kurdish-dominated provincial council of Kirkuk/Tammim (Kirkuk Province if you're a Kurd, Tammim Province if you're an Arab) has declared that unless a referendum on who controls the province goes forward "before the end of the fifth month of 2008," the "original residents" of Kirkuk (read: Kurds)

will have the right to decide the administrative future of their areas according to the mechanisms that they find appropriate.

In other words, by June 1 (my birthday!), one of two things happen. Either the Kurds will control Kirkuk through a referendum they've spent five years ensuring they'll win, or they will declare war, and fight until they get the city back. The Kurdish-Arab war won't just be for Kirkuk, but for other cities, like violence-heavy Mosul, as well. Lucky for us we've already won the war.

Crank Dat Moira Whelan on that permanent occupation:

Q: "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years --" (cut off by McCain)

McCain: "Make it a hundred."

Chris Hayes from the Bronx:

The most notable recipient of Swift Boat largesse is John McCain, erstwhile front-runner and Stand Up Guy. When the Swift Boat ads were first unleashed, McCain was alone among his Republican colleagues to condemn them. A fellow Vietnam veteran, a good friend of Kerry's and a former target of smears about his own service, McCain called the ads "dishonest and dishonorable," a "cheap stunt," and he urged Bush to condemn them. But in pursuit of the GOP nomination, McCain ditched the mantle of maverick for that of hack, and his once-floundering, possibly rejuvenated campaign has been aided along the way by $61,650 from Swift Boat donors and their associates. "There is such a thing as dirty money," said Senator Kerry in a statement, after The Nation informed him of McCain's FEC records. "I'm surprised that the John McCain I knew who was smeared in 2000 and thought so-called Swift Boating was wrong in 2004 would feel comfortable taking their money after seeing the way it was used to hurt the veterans I know he loves." (McCain's office did not return calls for comment.)

The fact that the bombings are in the two of the three provinces where U.S. troops have taken the most away from al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency suggest that they're designed to make a statement about resiliency, regrouping, re-upping. Watch whether there's a suicide bombing in Anbar, the third such province, in the coming days/weeks. Not quite a month ago, the U.S. commander in Anbar, Major General Walter E. Gaskin, said al-Qaeda's losses in the province were "permanent," a term that all other men with stars on their shoulders had scrupulously avoided.

Over the past several months, surgenik euphoria has gotten out of control. War supporters all but declared victory as soon as 2007 ended. "We are now winning the war," writes new NYT columnist Bill Kristol in the current Weekly Standard. "We at the Weekly Standard thought the chances of success were better than 50-50 -- but that it remained a difficult proposition. Petraeus pulled it off." Leave aside for a moment the question of Kristol's cynicism and presume his sincerity. What this account neglects (as an understatement) is that every single time U.S. forces have shifted their tactics and pushed the insurgencies back -- the capture of Fallujah, the death of Zarqawi, the capture and the execution of Saddam Hussein, Operation Together Forward I, Operation Together Forward II, etc. -- the insurgency and al-Qaeda have watched, adjusted, adapted, and responded. Every company commander in Iraq knows this. Every NCO in Iraq knows this. Every soldier, Marine, airman, sailor, coastguardsman and civilian (maybe not all) in Iraq knows this.

To get jargony, what happened this year is that Petraeus got all up in their OODA loop, which makes him the first U.S. commander to have done so. But there was never any reason to believe that would be permanent -- hence the reason why Gaskin is the only general ever to have used that word in public. The suicide bombings are an indication that the insurgent groups and al-Qaeda in Iraq are shifting their loop up. Now it becomes a question of U.S. counterresponse, shaped by available capabilities. But we've passed the high-water mark of U.S. capabilities: the surge brigades will be gone by the spring-summer, owing to the unyielding reality of military overstretch, and Secretary Gates has spoken of bringing 40,000 troops total home by July. Continuing the current strategy will require doing way more with significantly less. For an example of what happens when troops are asked to do that, read this.

Now combine that with the continued recalcitrance, sectarianism and incompetence of the Maliki government; the creation of over 70,000 Sunni militiamen on the U.S. payroll; the blossoming of Moqtada al-Sadr's Islamic credentials; the coming struggle for Mosul/Kirkuk/disputed Arab-Kurdish territory in the north; and reminisce for the halcyon days of 2007. The last-best-chance is over.

Update: Make sure you read the Doctor about the failure of the press to stick with covering the surge, and the war, after the basic narrative was established.

Yay! It's that time of year! The new National Counterterrorism Center calendar is finally here! Packed with all sorts of useful stuff about terrorism! Like this informative section on what motivates the terrorists!

Radicalization: Myth and Reality via kwout

What Matt said about my boy Eli's piece on Rudy's electoral 'mongering strategy. But as eager as I am to see which Commentary piece on the perfidy of the Arabs forms the basis of a Giuliani War of Ideas, my eyes are drawn to this proposal instead:

On Homeland Security, Mr. Giuliani is going to emphasize the importance of turning "first responders," firemen, police officers and other local officials called on to respond to crisis, into "first preventers." Mr. Hill said this would mean encouraging local police departments to have a closer relationship with the Department of Homeland Security than just a national data base of terror alerts. "Law enforcement and homeland security should be talking to each other more, they should be interwired," Mr. Hill said.

Oh, cool, a federally-coordinated emphasis on pre-crime. Conservatives are going to love that in the hands of a Democratic president. Anyway, what you need to remember is that liberals are the real American fascists.

Apropos of Barney Rubin's insight, here's something worth noting from the Afgh-Pak border, via Josh:

[T]he Pakistani military has removed a small number of troops from a border post between the two nations to tend to problems elsewhere, said Col. Martin Schweitzer, a U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan.

There's not any analytic consensus yet about who murdered Bhutto -- let alone provable fact -- but the Pakistani redeployment strengthens the idea that it was al-Qaeda or an affiliate, attempting to enact a strategy I speculated about last week. There's massive unrest in Pakistan, yielding the predictable military crackdown. The military is more concerned with regime preservation (or, euphemistically, "internal stability") than it is with harassing al-Qaeda's buddies. Now those buddies have an easier time exfiltrating to Afghanistan, with the predictable consequences that will have for Afghanistan's stability.  Same hustle, but the hustle now flows, as they say.

Bonus Fun Fact: Ever wonder who puts AP stories under those super-awesome TPM banners? Why, that's the super-awesome Rachel Weiner!

What does the American Legion make of Jonah Goldberg's claim that it was "founded as an essentially fascist organization"? I asked communications director John Raughter.

"The statement, as you said, is just laughable," Raughter said. "The American Legion -- more than any other organization, our members bled to fight fascism as legionnaires in World War II. It's just a ridiculously slanderous statement." He seemed not to understand that Jonah's slander of the American Legion is merely part of a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.

Strangely, the slanderous aspect of Goldberg's attack on a veteran's organization didn't make it into David Oshinsky's puffy NYT review. Maybe when the book is published next week the Legion will take the matter up with Goldberg's publishers.

The savvier among our Very Serious People talk about skillful manipulation of various and sundry fissures in Regime X, between Nations Y and Z or (these days) among Tribes A through F. And on the surface, the importance of the effort in question often gives reason to believe that exploiting such divisions is a sensible course of action. This is high-stakes geopolitics, after all, with direct consequences for economic prosperity and national security. "What, we're going to do nothing?" asks the Very Serious Person, and soon enough her interlocutor has the same question in the back of his mind, stifling his nascent objections.

Rarely factored into the calculation is the idea that the U.S.'s chosen vehicles for such-and-such strategy of division -- our proxies -- are playing us. That they know us better than we know them. And that they're more than adept at exploiting our desire to see Something Happen to advance their divergent agenda. Barnett Rubin, in what's already a contender for blog post of the year, doesn't quite use this prism to explain the circumstances leading up to the murder of Benazir Bhutto, but it's embedded within his insight:

The leaders of the Pakistan[i] military, of which Musharraf is a typical example, do not see themselves primarily as "pro-American moderates" battling with "anti-American extremists." They see themselves as responsible for building a powerful militarized state in Pakistan representing the heritage of Islamic empires in South and Central Asia against the threat from India and the selfish maneuvers of politicians (not necessarily in that order.) In the course of doing so, they have enriched themselves and gained control of much of the economy and civilian administration. The military has always aspired to control the judiciary as well, and Musharraf has now restored to that institution the supine illegitimacy that it possessed under General Zia. This means of course that the use of institutional power for private gain by the military is legal (as the judiciary has no power over the military), while similar use of institutional power by civilians is "corruption."

The military allies with the U.S. because that is the only way to get the weapons and money for their national security project and to prevent the U.S. from aligning with India. It has nothing to do with "moderation." The "pro-American moderate" Pakistan military has used the "anti-American extremist" jihadis for its national security project.

Sometimes we really don't have any choice except to intervene in unfamiliar disputes, from internecine politics of Country X to tribal wars in Failed State Y. What we can't afford to do is fool ourselves into thinking that we're not walking into a hustle, or that we know more about a hustler's corner than he does, or that the hustler is motivated by the goodness of his heart or the wisdom of our arguments.