Party of 1

Wednesday’s Washington Post brings news of a new assessment of the threat posed by the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The report carries implications for the ongoing debate over profiling of airline passengers.

At the grassroots, where it looks like “send ‘em all back” sentiment is to be found wherever you turn over a rock, there is a demand to profile anyone who looks “dark and swarthy.” That is understandable, but I am afraid that it will accomplish little, other than to hurt and antagonize a good many innocent people. There are one and one-half billion Muslims in the world. Of those, maybe a couple hundred million are receptive to radical “Islamist” teachings. But, no more than a few hundred, or maybe a couple of thousand, can ever actually have committed terrorist acts. To ferret out potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in haystack. That’s why the appropriate lesson to draw from the recent Christmas Day “underwear bombing” attempt is that absolute security is attainable. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that it looks obvious that the so-called “dots” should have been connected.

Wednesday’s report cites the threat posed by “a group of nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists, and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.” According to an unidentified US official, these converts are “blond-haired, blue-eyed types” who “fit a profile of Americans whom al-Qaeda has sought to recruit over the past several years.”

And why would Al Qaeda have sought to recruit them? Without a doubt, in order to defeat profiling….

“Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we’re fighting five different wars in Muslim countries — or, to use the [New York Times]’s jargon, ‘five fronts’ in the ‘Terror War’ (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, ‘we will continue to use every element of our national power’).” So wrote Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on Tuesday, in response to the suggestion (by Dick Cheney and others) that the Obama administration is insufficiently committed, rhetorically and otherwise, to war, in the aftermath of the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing.

There will be war, and you’d better learn to like it — according to Christopher Hitchens on Monday at Slate.com.  Hitch insists that everyone might as well reconcile themselves to what someone once called “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” “We can expect to take casualties. The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it. Those who don’t get the point prefer to whine about ‘endless war,’ accidentally speaking the truth about something of which the attempted Christmas bombing over Michigan was only a foretaste.”

So, as far as Hitch is concerned, we can never back down. Furthermore, he makes the enemy sound like a formidable one — although this enemy lacks conventional divisions or batalions, and it is unclear exactly where the battlefront is. “We had better get used to being the civilians who are under a relentless and planned assault from the pledged supporters of a wicked theocratic ideology. These people will kill themselves to attack hotels, weddings, buses, subways, cinemas, and trains. They consider Jews, Christians, Hindus, women, homosexuals, and dissident Muslims (to give only the main instances) to be divinely mandated slaughter victims. Our civil aviation is only the most psychologically frightening symbol of a plethora of potential targets. The future murderers will generally not be from refugee camps or slums (though they are being indoctrinated every day in our prisons); they will frequently be from educated backgrounds, and they will often not be from overseas at all. They are already in our suburbs and even in our military.”

Wicked the enemy may be — but Tunku Varadarajan at Daily Beast questioned on Monday how formidable he is. “And yet it is clear that with the Nigerian undie bomber, Abdulmutallab (and with the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, before him, and with the plot to bring on board liquid explosives that was foiled by the British), that al Qaeda is resorting to lower-level personnel, to men with less training and competence, perhaps even with less murderous nihilism, than the Mohammad Attas and Hani Hanjours of 9/11. If that is so—and the facts on their face indicate that it might be—we can derive some consolation. If Abdulmutallab is the best that al Qaeda can do, should one not wonder whether al Qaeda is still the potent transnational force of yore?”

According to Varadarajan, what is called for is an expanded “no-fly” list — as opposed to, i. e., a prohibition on passengers’ going to the lavatory during the last hour of a flight. “Abdulmutallab’s name was not on the terrorist ‘no-fly’ list, which has fewer than 4,000 names in total. It was, however, on a larger database of some 550,000 individuals, called TIDE (Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment)…. Why is anyone on this list allowed to board a plane to the United States? Why not convert TIDE into a ‘no-fly’ list? Let anyone on that list who believes his name is there erroneously, or undeservedly, appeal—through legal channels—for removal. If he has a case, it will surely be heard, and yield a just, airborne outcome.”

That might be difficult to administer.  The objection will be raised that if everybody is being watched, then nobody will be watched, practically speaking.  Nevertheless, as a means of addressing the matter at hand, this sound better to me than the invasion of another country….

Compare Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, with John Bolton on Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech….

Stephen Walt, who with his colleague John Mearsheimer wrote this controversial book, has addressed a sensitive question in an article posted on the Foreign Policy website Monday. Walt asks: “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims?” He states that he has attempted to make his estimates conservative, but he finds that the United States has inflicted more casualties than it has suffered, by a factor of about 30. To make his point, he cites the remark of a British journalist: “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world … it should stop killing Muslims.”

I get his point, but I wish he had addressed criticism along the following lines, with which he is surely familiar, from a critic who suggests that internecine violence among Muslims is the bigger issue: “There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too…. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact?”

“The talk in Israel, explicit and open … is about a war in the coming spring or summer…. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, will then have to decide if Israel can live with a nuclear Iran and rely on deterrence…. Obama will soon have to decide whether to give Israel a green light, and how brightly it will shine. And soon. For spring is fast approaching.” So writes Benny Morris of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University on the Guardian website….

“There will be the usual stuff this week, I expect, about how Ronald Reagan and his faithful ally Margaret Thatcher brought down the wall with their intransigent anti-communism. The most recently opened archives aren’t so kind to this view, either.”  So observes Christopher Hitchens in an article posted to online magazine Slate on Monday.

Hitchens refers to this article by Michael Binyon in the London Times a few weeks back. “Mrs Thatcher knew full well that her remarks would cause a row if revealed….”

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has spoken to Der Spiegel, in an interview occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

His views sound less illiberal than those of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.  On Putin’s description of the collapse of the USSR as a “catastrophe”: “… And it was really very dramatic: A people who had been united for decades — and in some cases for centuries — suddenly found itself in different countries again. Contacts with family and relatives were cut off…. [But] World War II was no less of a catastrophe. Tens of millions of people were killed. And wasn’t the Russian Revolution of 1917 also a catastrophe? It sparked a civil war where friends and relatives shot at each other. The collapse of the Soviet Union certainly ranks among the most dramatic events of the 20th century, but it didn’t have such bloody consequences.”

Nevertheless. Medvedev betrays annoyance in response to questions about NATO expansion, relations with Ukraine and Belarus, conflict with the former Soviet republic of Georgia, murders of human rights activists and investigative journalists, and the conduct of elections in his country.

Regarding Russian arms shipments, here is a statement that will calm and reassure everyone: “We will only deliver arms that serve defensive purposes, no offensive weapons.” (!)

“German unification occurred much earlier — by the will of the German people, not because Gorbachev or Kohl wanted it. Americans often recall President Ronald Reagan’s appeal: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!’ But could that be done by one man? All the more difficult, too, because others were saying, in effect, ‘Save the Wall.’” A commentary on Reagan and Gorbachev, by — Mikhail Gorbachev.

“… Iran experts say the very caustic, and very public, nature of the debate in Iran over the proposed nuclear deal suggests that the deep divisions cemented by the summer’s disputed presidential election have complicated, if not undermined, the ability to resolve such a major issue…. the problem appears, at least in part, to be politics — local politics.” So reports Michael Slackman in Tuesday’s New York Times. Prospects for any kind of agreement with the West may not be auspicious, because rivals of confrontational President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be trying to outbid him at vehemence.

See also Doyle McManus in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, citing Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations: “There’s been a breakdown in the country’s foreign policy machinery. Iran doesn’t have a foreign policy right now. It has domestic politics, and its foreign policies are just a sporadic expression of that. It’s not sinister; it’s not duplicitous; it’s just incompetent.”

David E. Sanger reports in the New York Times reports on the “state of play” between Iran and the West, as the inspection of the Qum nuclear enrichment site looms.  Excerpts:

“In Washington… even some of President Obama’s aides are wary that Iran is setting a trap, trying to turn the administration’s signature offer of engagement into a process of endless negotiations. They are acutely aware of the fact that the clock is ticking….”

“The rare public argument under way in Iran about how to deal with the demands suggests that Mr. Obama has already achieved one of the major objectives of his engagement strategy: to force out into the open the splits in the Iranian leadership…. President George W. Bush’s refusal to negotiate with Iran for eight years meant that the United States never forced the country’s ruling mullahs to justify their actions to their own people, who have suffered from sanctions and may be less interested in the nuclear program than in better relations with the world.”

“White House officials are extremely aware of their own political and practical vulnerabilities in dealing with Iran…. But few in the White House doubt how the narrative will be written if the Iranians actually gain a weapons ability on Mr. Obama’s watch.”

“Many people at the negotiating table expect Iran to try to drag out the process. Yet even if Iran took the deal, it would only buy time; it would not solve the nuclear standoff…. The Iranians say time is on their side in this dispute, and as long as their government holds together in the face of rising protests, they may be right.”