Chris At Home

Because I need to go drink beer with the guys.

• The Belmont Club provides a summary of the current situation in Iraq:
  

  The internally organized insurgency (al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni insurgency) is decline. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is hurt and perhaps dying; the Sunnis are looking to throw in the towel.
  
  Criminal gangs and ethnic militias are the rising threat. But Casey does not appear all that worried. "And if you look at where the sectarian violence is occurring, it's occurring within about a 30-mile -- 90 percent of it is occurring in about a 30- mile radius around Baghdad"
  
  Something happened "since the December elections and in the aftermath of the Samarra bombing" that made the security situation "more complex". And that something appears to be the increasing role of Iran using the Lebanese Hezbollah and Qods to direct and support "a wide variety of groups across southern Iraq".

  
  
• Muslims in Belgian arrested for inciting hatred against Jews. These hate laws could shut down Islamists, if they were used consistently.
  
  
• Amnesty will be offered to Iraqi terrorists in return for laying down their arms. Read a long post on the offer.
  
  
• Peace-loving, legitimate Hamas sends love to the West:
  

  "We will rule the nations, by Allah's will, the USA will be conquered, Israel will be conquered, Rome and Britain will be conquered … The Jihad for Allah... is the way of Truth and the way for Salvation and the way which will lead us to crush the Jews and expel them from our country Palestine. Just as the Jews ran from Gaza, the Americans will run from Iraq and Afghanistan and the Russians will run from Chechnya, and the Indian will run from Kashmir, and our children will be released from Guantanamo. The prisoners will be released by Allah's will, not by peaceful means and not by agreements, but they will be released by the sword, they will be released by the gun".

  
  
• News media critic James Pinkerton read the report on the symbiosis between terrorists and the media and doesn't offer a solution, just relativism. Lame.
  

  The Washington Post summed up Frey and Rohner's argument: "Coverage caused more attacks, and attacks caused more coverage - a mutually beneficial spiral of death that they say has increased because of a heightened interest in terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001." Perhaps the relationship could be stated as an even simpler equation: More media equal more terrorism.
  
  To put it mildly, this equation, if true, poses a threat to traditional notions of an unfettered press, free to compete and to put forth the most compelling images and stories. As a partial solution, Frey and Rohner suggest not naming the terrorists, as a way of denying them their "glory." But of course, not everyone agrees on who should be defined as a terrorist, as opposed to a hero. So while almost all Americans were appalled by the beheading "performance art" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, plenty of Arabs, watching through Al-Jazeera eyes, were cheering him and his horrific media stunts onward.

  
  
• The NY Times strikes again, giving details of a secret program that monitors terrorist financing. Here is their justification for outing the program:
  

  Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said: "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration. We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

  
  Translation: we decide what should be secret, not the government.
  From NRO:
  

  According to the NYT's own reporting, the program is legal. The program is helping us catch terrorists. The administration has briefed the appropriate members of Congress. The program has built-in safeguards to prevent abuse. And yet, with nothing more than a vague appeal to the "public interest" (which apparently is not outweighed in this case by the public's interest in apprehending terrorists), the NYT disregards all that and publishes intimate, classified details about the program. Keller and his team really do believe they are above the law. When it comes to national security, it isn't the government that should decide when secrecy is essential to a program's effectiveness. It is the New York Times.
  
  National security be damned. There are Pulitzers to be won.

  
  

The Sandmonkey is starting to scare me.


Update: Analysis of the Iraqi amnesty plan here.

Update: Why the WMD finds were not announced before.

If the United States were to have announced WMD finds right away, it could have told terrorists (including those from al-Qaeda) where to look to locate chemical weapons. This would have placed troops at risk – for a marginal gain in public relations.