One option is off the table

In an interview with the travelling journalists on his plane back to Oman yesterday, Dick Cheney indicated that there's one strategy he won't be pursuing to weaken Iran -- lower oil prices, which have been widely documented as putting severe pressure on the Iranian government. His statement occurred in the context of an inexplicably anonymous interview with "Senior Administration Official" even though, as the Wall Street Journal notes, it's clear from the start that it's Cheney. Anyway --

Q If I could change the subject to something that came up earlier in the trip. You've talked about Iran and the other threat the U.S. faces there, to what extent do you think your -- it's been described as hawkish, or you're keeping the military option on the table puts a level of risk into the equation that oil markets, for example, factor in and actually help the Iranian government because they're so reliant on oil? Is there a --

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I think that's a bit of a stretch. All I said is what we've said consistently for months, even years now, which is that all options are on the table. We haven't taken any option off the table.

Q If you took the military option off the table, markets around the world --

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: What do you think would happen?

Q I don't know what would happen. But people say oil prices go down 10 percent or 15 percent and that would start to hurt Ahmadinejad.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I don't buy it.

Since every part of the questioner's thesis is well documented (note inter alia the rise in oil prices since the latest round of sabre-rattling began), the only conclusion is that Cheney wants high oil prices.

The interview is also noteworthy for his repeating the claim that the US can't leave Iraq because it would be a bad signal to Afghanistan about its commitment there, when of course the US can always send a direct signal to Afghanistan by adding more troops, removing them from the Iraq quagmire. As Tony Blair has done. But for Cheney it's all about "signals" as opposed to constraints and actions.

[Note: much more from the invaluable Dan Froomkin on the interview, including its bizarre groundrules; the Iran-oil price discussion, perhaps the most interesting part of the interview, was initially omitted from the New York Times account]

Iran/Not Iran

Multinational Forces Iraq

In the above picture, Captain Clayton Combs of the 1st Cavalry Division holds an Explosively Formed Projectile, which is a flat cone that elongates when propelled by explosives, allowing it to penetrate armoured vehicles. The key sentence in the MNF-Iraq story accompanying this picture, referring to a raid in Baqubah is --

This was the first time Combs’s unit has found an EFP manufacturing plant.

Elements in the Pentagon had previously claimed that EFPs were too specialised to be manufactured in Iraq and so had to be coming from Iran. The MNF story makes no mention of an Iranian connection.

Funny/Not Funny?

[BBC] [Wales] First Minister Rhodri Morgan is under fire for making a joke about Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley. He made the quip at a dinner on the eve of the Welsh Labour conference in the presence of Wales and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain and PM Tony Blair.

He said Mr Paisley converted to Catholicism before dying because he thought it better to lose a Catholic than a Protestant.

Peter Hain doesn't quite say it's not funny but does say it's inappropriate and in poor taste. No comment from Blair. Ian Paisley's son thinks it is. The fact that Hain comes out against may mean that he expects to have his Nothern Ireland job a little bit longer.

For the annals of tempermental chef stories

The venue is Thornton's in the Fitzwilliam Hotel on St Stephens Green in Dublin. It has one Michelin star. There's a table of 7. A venison dish arrives for one customer and on account of being deemed "insubstantial" the diner requests a side order of French fries. Main courses are eaten and dessert menu presented. Still no fries. Diner attempts to cancel order whereupon furious eponymous chef appears --

"He said to Glenn in no uncertain terms: 'We don't have French fries on the menu. These were ordered for you. They were cooked specially for you, so you eat them, you d***head' and he threw them down on the table," Mr Murphy [another diner] claimed.

The Irish Times (subs. req'd) has all the details. The chef denies this version of events but admits using bad language and all sides agree that the seven customers were asked to leave. Now the fact that the fracas apparently took up a fair bit of time on the call-in show Liveline may say something about the priorities of Celtic Tiger Ireland, but the chef apparently did draw the support of other customers there the same night, at least as regards their own level of service.

Anyway, our own non-expert verdict: (1) A table of 7 is the outer limit of what's feasible in a premium restaurant, as it seriously stretches the order flow in the kitchen, so the sudden side order may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but (2) if the restaurant really didn't have fries, the waiter should have suggested a potato alternative when the initial request was made. However if the request came as an order for "chips", the chef was right to be furious.

It's like 2002 all over again

At National Review's The Corner, Byron York --

Regardless of what is being said on the Huffington Post, if, as is being reported today, the Taliban has attempted to assassinate the Vice President of the United States, isn't it time for a major American attack on Taliban facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Their China/Our China

From the Wall Street Journal markets roundup (subs. req'd) today --

Stocks declined sharply Tuesday, as weakness in Red China sent markets around the world into the red, durable-goods data disappointed and uncertainty increased about Iran and Afghanistan.

A term that many people will only know from reruns of You Only Live Twice.

UPDATE: The adjective "Red" was pulled.

It's like 2002 all over again

Why, exactly, does house blogger for The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, link in a "Heh Indeed" way to the Islamophobic Little Green Footballs and its post hypothesizing that the 3 French expats killed in Saudi Arabia were killed because they were infidels who took a "wrong turn" towards Mecca? Because the evidence doesn't indicate much other than this being an al Qaeda unit that was waiting for the first foreigners to come along in an area in the Saudi desert, but not particular close to Mecca or Medina, and not in an area where the road sign that LGF shows would be relevant. In fact, the incident appears to have happened much closer to the Iraqi border than Mecca, illustrating the true source of instability in the region.

UPDATE: News accounts differ on whether the tourists were on a Muslims-only road; the BBC says so, but the New York Times says not, as the road leads to a site recently opened to tourists. The Financial Times says that the tourists had been spotted by the terrorists at a campsite and then followed; more a sign of bad luck than a "wrong turn." [Notice the subtle word play in that phrase, by the way].

Incidentally, LGF proprietor Charles Johnson was the propagator of a never-confirmed claim that Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was killed because he was non-Muslim, when all evidence indicates that he was killed by extreme nationalists who targeted him for being Armenian.

One more thing: even the LGFers are wondering why Sully linked!

This time they've gone too far

The normally pro-whatever-the-markets-come-up-with Wall Street Journal editorial page (subs. req'd) finally finds something it doesn't like about private equity takeovers -- a nefarious conspiracy of environmentalists and ruthless profit-maximizing Wall Street investment bankers not to pollute the air with coal fired power plants. This is in the context of the biggest private equity deal yet, the KKR takeover of the Texas power company TXU, but even the Journal knows that they need a theory as to why the takeover specialists would profit from an alliance with the greens, so they link it to the opposition in Texas to TXU's plans to follow the exhortations of George W. Bush and use more coal --

As for TXU's current shareholders, the agitation of the greens may have helped bring down TXU's share price last year, so the environmentalists probably did KKR and partners a favor. There may even be a trend in the making here -- environmental protesters bring down a stock, making a private-equity transaction look more attractive, and in return, the equity firm and its management partners buy off the greens with this or that environmental promise. We're not suggesting any such quid pro quo here, but if we were TXU's mom-and-pop investors or Texas energy consumers we'd certainly be asking some pointed questions.

Geddit? Silly power company proposes more coal, environmentalists object, share price declines making it a cheaper takeover target, the company drops its plans and the share price goes back up -- cleaner air and fat profits for everyone. This all sounds like a fabulous conspiracy except for the complete absence of any theory explaining why the environmentalists, probably trying to scrape together the $3 for a latte at Starbucks, suddenly have the power to determine share prices at $35 billion companies.

Who knows where this line of reasoning could lead. If it turns out that rich people are disproportionately interested in Al Gore's Oscar winning film, could the Journal develop a sudden interest in progressive taxation?

Believe nothing

It seemed fishy at the time -- confusion about why exactly Dick Cheney's plane was stopping in Singapore; the Aussies thought it was an unscheduled stop but the spin from Cheney's office was that it was scheduled. Then the weird spin about a suddenly not very important bag that someone had left on the ground near the plane. But the media still decide to move along to another story. And now Cheney pops up on a SURPRISE! visit to Pakistan. Why do the hacks believe a word that Cheney's office says?

Irish protestors should note that the odds are now much higher that Cheney's plane will stop in Shannon, as the Atlantic route is now the more likely one home.

UPDATE 27 February: The Cheney curse continues. His security team apparently considering Pakistan so dangerous that his visit couldn't be announced in advance, he then flys to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, presumably because Kabul is considered too dangerous and then gets stuck there because of a snowstorm, in time to hear a Taliban suicide attack this morning. The incoherence of the war on terror -- tied down in Iraq while the Pakistan-Afghanistan situation spirals out of control -- crystallised.

Note also that news accounts on Monday had mentioned Cheney's presence in Bagram, so there was not necessarily a leak from inside the Pakistani or Afghan governments directly to the Taliban. Anyway, Cheney's last reported location was Muscat so the Shannon stopover is still a possibility.

[Dan Froomkin has a nice roundup of the late stages of Cheney's trip, including the news that he flew from Singapore to Muscat on his usual jet but then used a military plane ("The Spirit of Strom Thurmond") with a mobile home inside for the travels from there on].

FINAL UPDATE: Cheney's refuelling stop was in Britain.

America's favourite Irishman

George Bush at his dinner for the governors last night --

And so tonight is a night to -- a festive night. Our friend, Ronan Tynan, is going to entertain you. I'm looking forward to it. I hope you are, as well.

UPDATE: Here are the pictures.

FINAL UPDATE: Ronan's appearance was an apparent synergy with the declaration of Irish-American heritage month.

Nothing else to say

REUTERS/Kieran Doherty; caption

It's the quickest way through traffic in a real crisis

9/11 rerun rehearsal, via the Washington Post --

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Dozens of high-level officials joined in a White House drill yesterday to see how the government would respond if several cities were attacked simultaneously with bombs similar to those used against U.S. troops in Iraq.

White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend and the Homeland Security Council that she heads mapped out in advance a massive disaster involving improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The attack targeted 10 U.S. cities, both large and small, at the same time, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity ...

President Bush went on a bike ride yesterday morning and did not take part in the test.

Note in particular his insouciance about a drill for a bombing technique that has been perfected as a result of his botched invasion of Iraq.

DC/DC

(White House/David Bohrer; caption)

Another day of idiocy on Dick Cheney's visit to Australia. This time he's an equal partner with John Howard regarding David Hicks, the Gitmo detainee. Here's Howard --

And I have asked that within the constraints of the separation of powers in the United States system between the executive and the judicial process that the trial be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.

Thus showing that he has no understanding of the problem with Guantanamo -- that it's entirely an executive branch operation, with everyone held there at the discretion of George W. Bush and whatever procedures he establishes. The detainees have no virtually no access to the US judicial system, as reaffirmed by this week's US Appeals Court decision.

Cheney at least was a bit smarter about this issue --

Mr. Hicks is near the head of the queue, if I can put it in those terms. He has been charged. The question that happens now -- or the issue that arises now is under our procedures there is what's called a convening authority. This is a quasi-judicial function inside the Department of Defense -- a judge, in effect -- who will make the decision based on the charges that have been presented as to whether or not a commission should be convened for the purpose of trying this individual, in this case, Mr. Hicks. We cannot interfere with that process. It is a judicial process. And we're not allowed to call over and say when are you going to be through, or what are you going to decide. We can't influence it. That would be a violation of the procedures.

Thus what the Military Commissions Act established was a shadow "separation of powers" within the executive branch, but it's a fiction. For one thing, does anyone believe that Dick Cheney would hold off picking up the phone to a Pentagon official if he really wanted to? Anyone in the CIA's WMD division can answer that question. Anyway, Dick Cheney believes that the president as commander-in-chief has essentially unlimited powers in wartime, especially over military matters like these trials.

One more thing. The sole US concession to Howard is that Hicks can serve any sentence in an Australian jail, which would put Australia in the position of enforcing a penalty determined by a process that would not meet its own legal standards. Somewhat surprisingly, Cheney dealt with the other contingency --

And of course, if he were not found guilty, then he'd presumably be returned to Australia having been found innocent.

But wouldn't he still be an enemy combatant, as the previous Combatant Status Review Tribunal said he was? By the way, Australian Labor Party -- above is your first campaign poster. What is that bird over Cheney's head?

[2 additional notes: Attaturk visually elaborates on that bird, and why, exactly, does Cheney's plane really need to stop in Singapore?]

One leader, one victim

Another Dick Cheney interview in Australia, this time with The Australian, and now the claim that people criticise the USA's anti-terrorism policies only because they didn't have direct experience of 9/11 --

And we -- especially after 9/11 felt required to take action that not everybody agreed with. But then we had firsthand experience of the consequences of a failure to act. And so I think one of the results of that is some people who disagree with those actions or I think in some cases may hope that it's not necessary to be as aggressive as we've been take exception to the policies that we put in place. But I also like to remind them they weren't there in New York and Washington on 9/11 when we lost 3,000 one morning to 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters.

Cheney therefore implicitly claims that everyone who was in New York and Washington supports his policies, and that 9/11 is only terrorist event allowed to inform one's opinion of anti-terrorism policies. He also overlooks the fact that his boss was in neither city on 9/11.

Another cause hijacked

It's one of those things that we would occasionally see evidence of but never quite enough to cross the critical level to make note of, until today: there is a nascent campaign by the reactionary right to package George Bush's War on Iraq as analogous to the Abolition of Slavery. The specific vehicle for this is a sudden burst of endorsements from suspicious sources for the film Amazing Grace, the Michael Apted-directed biography-history of William Wilberforce and his abolitionist struggle against slavery and the slave trade. And by "suspicious sources" we mean the exultations about the film at National Review Online --

[Mark Steyn] But Wilberforce’s life reminds us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

[Rich Lowry] This month is the bicentennial of what was, to use contemporary argot, one of history’s most successful “faith-based initiatives.”

Someone driven by Christianity who has to fight hard in their own time to liberate millions of people from bondage but who history will see as a hero. Geddit?

As it turns out, this drivel rang a vague bell in terms of our own blogging and sure enough looking back at 2003, it was Amity Shlaes pioneering this line of argument in the pages of the Financial Times. That analysis speaks for itself, so let's just note the essential point from there -- the same Britain that set about abolishing slavery in the early 19th century still had the disasters of the Irish Famine and the dispossession of Africans in their native lands ahead of it. Abolition was a case where the country's conscience broke through and achieved progressive change, but it wasn't itself a transformation of the country's character.

But anyway, that's almost too serious a point for this latest rebranding of the War on Terror. Wilberforce and his allies were people with a sliver of power that they leveraged to the maximum extent. They worried about human dignity. Many of them, as Quakers, were pacifists. George W. Bush is president of the most powerful country in the world. He has never shown any personal concern for the welfare of Iraqi citizens, let alone War on Terror detainees (who are, after all, the ones being moved around the world in shackles). And of course Bush and Cheney would sneer at a Quaker foreign policy, indeed anything that falls short of all guns blazing, as weakness that invites further attack.

Still, the only obstacle that's probably giving Team Bush any pause about running with this analogy is its anchoring of the War on Terror in the Christian faith, which is the one thing that from the start they said they weren't doing.

[Note: interesting BBC R4 documentary about Wilberforce]

Suddenly not scary

Dick Cheney, perhaps affected by the thin air at "Altitude Restaurant" in Sydney, the site of his interview with ABC (US) News --

Q Is it getting harder for them, though? You see the latest spate of helicopter downings, the military says this seems to be a new strategy to take down helicopters. We've seen the use apparently of chemical bombs now in the last week in Iraq. Is it getting harder?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's just the terrorists doing what terrorists always do, adjusting and adapting their strategies. We can do the same obviously, adjust and adapt. The chemical weapons they're using aren't very sophisticated at this point. What they've done is apparently put some tanks with chlorine in them together with conventional explosives ...

Anyone care to speculate what the portrayal would have been if it was Saddam Hussein's army that was sticking explosives to a chlorine tank? Sort of like how weather balloons became a mobile weapons lab.

[The rest of the interview is broken into nice bite-size chunks by Dan Froomkin]

Indecent right

If Nick Cohen is serious about trying to understand why the war on terror has become so unpopular in Britain, as he claims to be to readers of Friday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd; alt. free link), he should spend less time looking for Dave Spart signs at Islamist rallies, and more time looking at who appears with him on the opinion pages in the same day's Journal (also subs. req'd): influential conservative lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey pushing the neologism "lawfare" to drive a critique of a supposed fusion of legal advocacy and terrorists as the latest central front in the war on terror.

Rivkin and Casey are particularly furious at the litigation generated by cases of people held or disposed of at the pleasure of one man -- George W. Bush -- and claim that

Lawfare designed to delegitimize the use of American military force, and the American way of war, certainly has the potential to undermine public support for the war effort, both at home and abroad.

It's another kind of lawfare -- the redefinition of torture and the dumping of traditional legal rights -- that has achieved this outcome, and not some supposed fifth column of lefties orphaned by the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

What exactly do they have in the White House basement?

George Bush today in a visit to an alternative fuels research centre in North Carolina --

THE PRESIDENT: So the enzyme begins to break down the raw materials in a particular raw material that will enable us to make more ethanol, is that what you're saying?

MR. NAGY: That is correct.

THE PRESIDENT: Now -- so, is this a -- is this like a huge distillery?

Linkage

(AP Photo/Nasser Nasser; caption)

The above is Osama Hassan Mustafa Nasr, aka Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric seized in Milan by Bourne-wannabe CIA agents and rendered to the tender mercies of the Egyptian detention system. [His case is another subject raised in the WSJ fulminations discussed in the post below].

Demonstrating if nothing else a considerable talent for public relations, Abu Omar popped up today at the trial of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman ("Kareem Amer"), sentenced to 4 years in prison for insulting al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak. Omar recounted his own abuse in an Egyptian prison and demanded to be returned to Italy, where he had been legally resident.

What he has therefore managed to exemplify is that rights are a messy business -- deciding who should get them and who won't is incredibly difficult to implement, and furthermore, if you're denying them to "bad people" (Abu Omar), you're probably denying them to "good people" as well (bloggers). So it would be nice if all the conservative bloggers who hitch their wagons to Abdel Kareem Soliman acknowledge that the character of the repression they denounce in his case is present in Abu Omar's case as well.

UPDATE: Cases where a conservative highlights the blogger case with no mention of the US willingness to dump Abu Omar into the same jails: Iain Dale; Cliff May, (tbc). And, to their credit, the reporters at the US State Department daily press briefing zeroed in very quickly on the contradictions in the US position: that Egyptian prisons are good enough for the subjects of the rendition policy, but not for the blogger.

Disobedient Old Europe

An amazingly weaselish editorial in Thursday's Wall Street Journal Europe (subs. req'd); the WSJ is unhappy that European countries are pursuing legal remedies against extraordinary renditions -- cases where their citizens or residents were plucked off the streets by US agents and moved to 3rd countries without any legal process. Notice the antiseptic language and insinuations --

In Germany as well, counterterrorism has been easily politicized. Back in 2003, Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent, was arrested at the Serbian-Macedonian border by Macedonian police. A terrorist suspect, he was handed over to the CIA agents, who moved him to Afghanistan. There he claims to have been interrogated also by a German intelligence agent. Berlin denies this allegations. A few months later, the Americans released him. The CIA hasn't commented on the case.

According to various leaked German intelligence reports, Mr. al-Masri had close contacts to radical Islamist groups. Since his return, he has made a career for himself on German TV shows as an innocent victim of American aggression.

The fact that al-Masri didn't meet even the CIA's flimsy criteria for getting dumped into Guantanamo Bay clearly cuts no ice with the Journal, which apparently knows a terrorist when it sees one (or at least sees his profile).

And there's the conclusion, an old standby of this crowd --

The Continent doesn't share America's perception of the threat from Islamic terrorism, nor its means of fighting it. We hope that Europeans don't soon find themselves missing these "CIA thugs."

One wonders what sense of "hope" is being used in that last sentence.

UPDATE 26 FEBRUARY: The WSJ returns to this topic in a Monday editorial (subs. req'd; alt. free link) --

It doesn't help that many Europeans embrace the preposterous legal notion of "universal jurisdiction," the idea that an ambitious prosecutor can indict and try anyone for an alleged crime committed anywhere in the world.

This is the climate in which, for example, a German court this month issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents allegedly involved in transferring a German-Lebanese terrorist suspect, Khaled al-Masri, to Afghanistan for questioning. It made no difference that Mr. al-Masri had been arrested in Macedonia.

For one thing, would American prosecutors be expected to ignore a crime committed against an American citizen in another country?

Nothing but a gangster party

(White House photo/David Bohrer; caption)

What's interesting about the above photo of a Dick Cheney breakfast meeting in Japan is who else is at the table: the VP's national security adviser John "Year of Iran" Hannah and David Addington, his chief of staff -- both of whom are neck-deep in the revelations from the Scooter Libby trial. Thus the entire team that helped land poor old Scooter in the dock will most likely be sitting a continent and an ocean away when the jury verdict comes in. Incidentally, the other American at the table is US Ambassador to Japan Tom Schieffer -- brother of CBS pundit Bob, and longtime baseball crony of George W. Bush.

Angry at numbers

From Dick Cheney, who is big in Japan, during his interview with ABC News (an interview which as a side effect has probably sunk John McCain's presidential campaign) --

You can't look at Iraq in isolation. You've got to look at it in terms of its impact, what we're doing in Afghanistan, what we're doing in Pakistan, what we're doing in Saudi Arabia. All those areas are part of the global battlefield, if you will, and you can't quit in one place and then persuade all your allies who are helping you in all those other theaters, if you will, to continue the fight.

Apparently the fact that quitting in Iraq would mean that more troops would be available for those other central fronts in the war on terror doesn't figure in Dick's strategic thinking.

A minor disturbance in the force

On the day when Tony Blair will announce a substantial reduction in forces in Iraq, the PM's website reports other serious business --

21 February 2007

We received a petition asking:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to recognise Jedi Knights as a religion on par with Christianity, Islam and other beliefs.

Details of petition:

"The belief of Jedi Knights in 'the Force' is no more irrational than any other religious belief - but with less bigotry."

Response

The Government has no overarching role in regulating or recognising personal belief or faith. The Government can only legislate for actions and not for belief. The Church of England, as the established church, puts its own measures before Parliament but the Government takes no view on them. All earlier legislation restricting freedom of worship or limiting the civic rights of members of particular faiths have long since been repealed.

The UK has a long held commitment to freedom of worship and belief, and our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights are incorporated into the Human Rights Act 1998. As such people are free to form religions and free to follow their own practices and beliefs provided they remain within the law.

UPDATE 22 FEBRUARY: Reader LR points out that the web page has changed since we first linked to it, and the government response now concludes --

May the Force be with you.

FINAL UPDATE: The government has also refused to ban Halloween (no word on any similar proposal for Guy Fawkes Day).

The new obscurantism

As even their carbon-based corporate patrons slowly bail out, new strategies are emerging from conservatives in their challenging of the evidence of human-induced global warming. Hence from within National Review's blogging empire, a new one called Planet Gore -- based on the highly scientific principle that one disputes evidence by taking issue with one of the people who cites such evidence. The blog provides no bios for any of its contributors, and its brief statement of purpose says --

[National Review Online] has gathered a team of experts to report and comment on the myriad scientific and economic issues surrounding the global warming debate. So check back regularly for informed news and views about climate change, alternative energy, environmental activism, and of course, Al Gore's carbon footprint.

So far one of the featured "experts" is Jay Richards, who (given the absence of bios) has to be Googled to reveal that --

Jay W. Richards is Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and theology (with honors) from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was formerly a Teaching Fellow.

That must be quite a meteorological program they have at the Princeton Theological Seminary. It's less clear what the scientific expertise of fellow contributor Kathryn Jean Lopez is. But it is clear that the blog will be yet another card in the constantly shuffled deck of "institutes" that counter the slow march of theory and evidence with screaming about Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi.

On retainer

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds comes up with spectacular logic to explain why a terrorism suspect would have given political donations to the Republican party --

ABC NEWS: Accused terrorist is big GOP donor. This is an embarrassment -- though if I were a terrorist I'd be a big GOP donor, too. It might help, and at the very least would ensure that prosecution would be an embarrassment.

The same type of insurance would presumably be available to Islamist terrorists who explicitly endorse the Republican party. Oh wait, they've already done that.

Word of the Day

Processology

As used by the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) today --

Asked for further information about any act of commemoration at Croke Park next weekend, the PMOS replied that clearly, the first match at Croke Park had been special in its own right. The second match, because of the teams involved, had also a significance around it. However, first and foremost, this was a game of rugby, and that was how both the IRFU and the GAA wanted to treat it, and that was entirely how it should be. What was entirely proper was that there should have been discussions about how we should handle it, but a consensus had been reached, and we fully supported that consensus. The PMOS said that he was not going to get into processology about the discussions, but they were normal discussions that took place around any event such as this one, and they were nothing out of the ordinary.

For a translation into English of this Yes, Minister worthy classic, here and here.

God wills it

At National Review's The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez has one example on top of her mind in discussing how candidate theology is off-limits from the pundits --

But when was the last time a Catholic (John Kerry? Ted Kennedy?) was asked by a mainstream reporter: "You believe you receive the body and blood of Christ during Communion. Do you consider yourself a cannibal?..." I don't think theology-related questions should be off limits (and how candidates respond to odd questions is always revealing, frankly...), but it's a curious thing to watch.

She later elaborates that it would be helpful to the man "who will have to continue this war" to have a belief in God. Yet one might have thought that in terms of its potential for creating policy disasters, transubstantiation would come down the list when there's a President who says --

I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That's what I believe. And that's been part of my foreign policy. In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty. And I can't tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march.

The unexplored issue of a president who claims to (1) know God's will and (2) be in the process of implementing it.

She's learned nothing

Condi's remarks during her "SURPRISE!" visit to the US Embassy in Baghdad --

But this mission, bringing a stable and secure Iraq, is also essential for the security of the United States of America. Because on September 11th when those 19 men drove our own airplanes into the Pentagon and into the World Trade Center and would have driven it into the Capitol in Washington, we realized that we were no longer isolated from danger and terror, that the great oceans that had protected us for almost 200 years were no barrier to fear and destruction on our own territory, and we recognized at that point that we were going to have to come to the source of the problem, that we were going to have to go on the offense, that no matter how well we tried to defend America with port security and airport security, we couldn't play defense because the terrorists only have to be right once and we have to be right 100 percent of the time.

And that's an unfair fight, and therefore we decided we had to go on the offense. And that meant coming to the source of the problem here in the Middle East and trying nothing more grand than trying to actually bring about a different kind of Middle East. And a different kind of Iraq, an Iraq freed of Saddam Hussein, an Iraq freed of the tyranny that was a part of this land for so long, that's the different kind of Iraq that can be a pillar of that different kind of Middle East.

I spent some time a couple of summers ago reading the biographies of the Founding Fathers. And I'm going to tell you something. By all rights, the United States of America should never have come into being. If you looked at fighting the greatest military power of the time, Great Britain; if you looked at trying to conquer this new land; if you looked at the squabbling between the Founding Fathers, they were wonderful, but boy, did they fight.

Note, inter alia, the description of Iraq as the "source" of 9/11, the supposed foreign policy conservative talking about a grand project to remake the Middle East, and yet again a botched historical analogy, as it is now the Iraqi insurgents who are taking on the "greatest military power of the time," which, like Britain in 1776 is handicapped by its long distance from the fight and the mischief-making of its rivals.

One other thing: a recurring symptom of the Bush administration's delusions is not that they don't read history, but they read the wrong kind of history. Amid all the biographies and histories drawing on the US and UK, have they ever read any books about, like, the Middle East?

That high-tech Quds Force

Press release from multinational forces Iraq --

DIYALA – An Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement patrol seized a weapons cacheand one suspect after they noticed a donkey loitering in an area about 10 km from the Iraq-Iran border Feb. 14.

The patrol moved in to locate the owner when they identified a cache beside the donkey consisting of more than 30 mortar rounds and three anti-tank mines.

The two individuals, who attempted to flee, were located hiding behind a berm. The patrol captured one of the suspects. The cache items were secured for disposal and the suspect was taken in for further questioning.

No word on the donkey.

Understatement

"George [Lucas] doesn't claim to be Ibsen" --

Ian "Emperor" McDiarmid valiantly making excuses for the abysmal dialogue in the Star Wars films, in the context of his appearance in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman. The interview was on BBC Radio 4's Front Row, Wednesday 14 February, and can be heard till next Wednesday here. McDiarmid is being generous. After Phantom Menace, Lucas should never have been let near a script again.