Clive Davis

THEIR NEW, HIGH-TECH JIGSAW PUZZLE

The W.M.D. analyst I spoke to regularly reads the blog of Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor known for omnivorous linking to, and acerbic analysis of, news from the Middle East. "He’s not someone spies would normally pay attention to, but now he’s out there — and he’s a subject-matter expert, right?"

Via Nourishing Obscurity’s latest blogfocus, I discovered Dizzy’s link to a very long but intriguing NY Times magazine article on the way blogs and wikis are changing the art of data-gathering in America’s post-9/11 intelligence agencies. The old days of hermetically sealed departments, each intent on keeping its information to itself, appear to be numbered:

Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

MEMRI'S MAN

Q- There are so many Muslims in Europe. How many of them are really involved in extremism?

A - There is no collective "they." The majority actually does acclimate [sic] and adjust...

Via Mick Hartley, a thought-provoking Jerusalem Post interview with Yigal Carmon, founder of the Middle East monitoring organisation, MEMRI. I mentioned recently that I was uneasy about having MEMRI ads channeled onto this blog. That didn't mean I disapproved of its work, just that I felt slightly compromised. Reading the article -  which, aside from the Palestinian issue, also has instructivel and undogmatic things to say about Islam in Europe - has set my mind at ease somewhat.

RECANTING?

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' " -- Richard Perle.

That Vanity Fair survey of neo-con opinion on Iraq doesn't exactly make cheerful reading [hat-tip: Larry]. Meanwhile Belgravia Dispatch is underwhelmed with Joshua Muravchik's AEI mea culpa. Does all mean that neo-conservatism - or at least the foreign policy version of it - is finished? It's certainly at a low ebb, although I notice that Robert Kagan's new book receives a glowing review from diplomat Robert Cooper. Charles Moore, for his part, thinks the settling of scores is getting out of hand:

Today, everyone blames the neoconservatives. It reminds me of a remark by Daniel Defoe in the early 18th century that the apprentice boys of London have very little idea of what a Papist is, but thousands of them are more than happy to go out and break his windows. Who in Britain knows that neocons are a phenomenon of the Left and that neither George W. Bush, nor Dick Cheney, nor Donald Rumsfeld has ever been one? Indeed, devilishly clever though neocons may be, they can't be very good at PR, for they were responsible for about five per cent of the action in Iraq and have attracted about 95 per cent of the blame.

True, up to a point. But as someone who still thinks neo-condom has good things going for it (I'm thinking, for instance, of James Q. Wilson on crime) it's fair to say, in hindsight, that the run-up to the Iraq war was marked by complacency about the effects on the region as a whole. No getting away from that.

UPDATE: In a NRO symposium, Perle and Co fire back at the Vanity Fair article:

I believed, and told Mr. Rose, that "if we had left Saddam in place, and he had shared nerve gas with al Qaeda, or some other terrorist organization, how would we compare what we’re experiencing now with that?"

Frank Gaffney sums up the sense of frustration with the White House:

I am persuaded that President Bush wants to do the right thing, just as he says he does. What is mystifying to me and to many of my colleagues is why, then, has he repeatedly allowed subordinates who do not want him successfully to act on his principles to continue to hold senior posts, and to get away with undermining him and his policies.

[Hat-tip: Kevin B.]

BITTER TRUTHS

In a lecture at Oxford, Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona considers how the media deals with the new realities of terrorism and the "long war":

...The underlying problem is not, in my view, something as simple as media bias, but rather a category mistake. The media has yet to learn the new language of a new conflict. It flounders like an English tourist abroad with a badly-written phrase-book.

As a hawk, he's equally disenchanted with the way the allies made the case for invading Iraq:

It is hard to think of a greater failure of public diplomacy in modern times than the presentation of this war. Indeed, the problem with the so-called "neocons" - Cheney, Rumsfeld et al - is that they are not "neo" at all. They have used old Cold War language to describe an utterly modern conflict. This war may well, for a start, be longer than the great struggle of the second half of the last century.

....The anti-war lobby has the slick movies of Michael Moore, brilliantly-crafted popcorn politics, militancy for the multiplexes. And what do we hawks have? The sickening images of Iraqi prisoners piled into a pyramid, that's what.

[Via Comment Central] File under the category of "sad but true".

MERCENARIES OR IMMIGRANTS?

A radical proposal from Max Boot and Michael O'Hanlon. Would this solve the US military's manpower shortage?

Now is the time to consider a new chapter in the annals of American immigration. By inviting foreigners to join the U.S. armed forces in exchange for a promise of citizenship after a four-year tour of duty, we could continue to attract some of the world's most enterprising, selfless and talented individuals. We could provide a new path toward assimilation for undocumented immigrants who are already here but lack the prerequisite for enlistment -- a green card. And we could solve the No. 1 problem facing the Army and Marine Corps: the fact that these services need to grow to meet current commitments yet cannot easily do so (absent a draft) given the current recruiting environment.

I can see the attraction, but it still smacks of desperation. And could you ever rely on the screening process?

NO SPIES ON CAMPUS

Snooping in the universities? A.C. Grayling says press stories about calls for surveillance of Islamists are simply overblown:

   So what is new about Ruth Kelly's remark that universities must inform the police if they responsibly suspect the commission or planning of crimes? Well, as it happens, there is indeed something new about it - namely, the way that media sensationalisation has translated the previous sentence into "universities have been told to spy on student extremists".

If Mrs Kelly or anyone else was really demanding that universities should spy - literally spy: that is, bug, open letters, snoop, keep surveillance upon - members of its student body, that would be a scandal.

RUSHDIE - TAKING SIDES

Salman Rushdie, interviewed by Johann Hari:

It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. As he says this, I blurt out a repellent question: was there a small part of him on September 11 that felt almost relieved - that thought: " Now they'll understand"? He pauses, a long pause, the only one in this interview. Have I offended him? But he answers with the same contemplative calm as before. "It wasn't, actually. What an awful thing to think. But... but I remember after 9/11 that a lot of people did finally get it, and I remember thinking - it's a shame that 3,000 people had to die for something pretty obvious to get through people's heads."

FIRING LINE

                     

Don't be surprised if Gerard Baker, Stephen Pollard and Melanie Phillips all turn up bearing rotten tomatoes.

A FRENCHMAN WHO ADMIRES AMERICA

Yes, definitely a rare specimen. And he mentions the N-word too... Bernard-Henri Lévy is interviewed in the Sunday Times:

BHL, unlike the traditional left, does not shy from hard thought or uncomfortable solutions. Better, he says, that America topples dictators than props them up. We complain whatever America does, and we complain loudest when America does nothing. And while Europeans sneer at President George Bush’s dumbness, many neocons have a grasp of ancient philosophy that would shame our politicians.

INTERROGATIVE

I'd forgotten that the Mark Bowden interview I linked to the other day is hidden behind a firewall. So here are some more of his observations on the subject of interrogation, taken from a symposium held last year:

Now, like most people, I'm repelled by the idea of torture. I have a hard time disciplining my teenage boys, a failing for which they punish me daily. I am a member of the ACLU, and have supported Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

But as I began researching and thinking about this topic, I could certainly conceive of certain situations where, I felt, coercing information from a suspect would be the right thing to do. And, as it happened, while I was working on this story, there was an article in The New York Times about a crime in Germany where a kidnapper had taken a 12-year old boy, and had buried him alive. He went to collect the ransom, and was caught. He was in custody, and refused to tell the police where he had buried the child. The police chief in this case threatened the kidnapper with torture, and he promptly told him where he buried the boy.

Now, in the same article, it said that Amnesty International was urging that this police chief be charged, or punished, for threatening torture. The same day that story came out, I happened to be on my way to an interview at Amnesty International in Washington. So I sat down with some of the folks there, and asked them whether in that circumstance, they really would object to the threat of torture. I said, "What if that was your own child? Wouldn't you do anything to find out where your child was buried?"

And, understandably, they stood behind their organization's principal mission. But not me. I side with the police chief in that instance. I think my only question about how to get information from the kidnapper would be, "What works?"

And I feel the same way, in all honesty, about someone like Kahlid Sheik Muhammad, who is a man who has spent his life plotting ever worsening acts of mass murder, and is someone who is the leader of an organization that presumably has other attacks in the works. I think that coercive interrogation is a vitally important tool in fighting a terrorist organization.

But, it's also dangerous and very slippery ground, as we've seen in the scandals in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I think that what the Bush Administration did with some of the things that it said, if not some of the policies or memoranda that it produced, was to loosen the standards just a little bit, and I think that what happens when you do that is that you invite a human rights disaster.

Bryan Appleyard has some provocative thoughts on the issue, and paraphrases philosopher John Gray:

Gray's argument is the most fundamental. His is not a moral observation about whether we should or shouldn't permit torture. He is simply saying that it is an illusion that such things can be banished from human affairs by human aspiration. Our reason, our moralities, our hopes can do nothing against the dark logic of our tribal natures. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, it would be nice if we really were the rational beings of which the Enlightenment thinkers dreamed, but we aren't, we are tribal carnivores.