If We Fail.Been there, done that.

If We Fail…Been there, done that.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Read it all:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODk0NDc4ODYyOGM1YzA0MTc3YjgwMjY5Mjg4OGY5MmE=

 

3,000 Christians added daily in China

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53808

3,000 Christians added daily in China
Faithful undefeated by beatings, arrests, confiscations and destruction of churches

osted: January 18, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Worship services are being broken up by baton-wielding police officers, participants arrested, Bibles confiscated and Christian church buildings demolished. But still, an estimated 3,000 people every day come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ in China.

The report comes from Voice of the Martyrs, a U.S.-based Christian group that works specifically to help those members of the persecuted Christian church worldwide.

The most recent arrests happened just a few days ago, when a house church meeting in Henan province was broken up and 11 people arrested, the organization said.

(Story continues below)

"Police from Yongfeng township police station in Xiuwu county, Henan province, raided a Christian meeting in a home in Chencun village. Eleven Christians were arrested, two were released the next day and nine remain in jail," the report said.

"Police broke in and proclaimed the gathering a cultic and illegal activity," the report said.

Legal and financial help is being provided to those people during their detention.

However, VOM said that a more than 50-year campaign to eradicate Christianity from China has left that nation with the equivalent of a new mega-church being added each day.

"Chairman Mao Zedong declared the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 and quickly sought to purge society of anything religious, causing China's people to endure great hardship ever since," a VOM analysis of the nation said. "Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late '50s and the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s left millions of his countrymen dead or victimized.

"Today, with its policies of forced abortion and sterilization, China's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Authorities reportedly sell the organs of executed prisoners to meet the demand for transplants. It system of 're-education through labor' detains hundreds of thousands each year in work camps without even a court hearing. China's 'strike-hard' policy, presented as a crackdown on criminals, is hardest on Christians, putting more believers in prison or under detention than in any other country. The confiscation of church property and Bibles continues – even Bibles officially printed by the government," the report said.

"Yet the church grows: an estimated 3,000 Chinese come to Christ each day. China's house church movement, which comprises approximately 90 percent of China's Christians, endures unimaginable persecution, yet stands on its commitment to preach the gospel no matter the cost."

Two of the people in the latest raid by police were released a day later, but nine remained in jail, according to VOM and China Aid Association, which also reported on the arrests.

Among those still being held in detention for worshiping in the home were Ju Xiang, 48; Liu Xiaoduo, 42; Wang Shegin, 40; Fu Juyi, 36; Hong Xia, 37; Xue Xianghuo, 49; and Xue Xiaona, 34, officials said.

VOM said the persecution is having little effect on the desire to know more about Christ. "In the past year, we received more requests for Bibles and Christian books from Chinese believers because they wanted to share the gospel with others," a VOM source within the restrictive nation said. "The Communist government of China does not see Christ as the most important person in an individual's life. Christians count it a privilege to believe in and suffer for Jesus Christ."

The contact said Christians simply adjust to the persecution at hand – including arrests, demolished buildings and confiscated materials.

VOM currently is supplying Bibles and copies of other Christian books, including "Tortured for Christ" by VOM founder Richard Wurmbrand, to Christians in China.

"American Christians have also mailed more than 107,310 New Testaments to China through Bibles Unbound (www.BiblesUnbound.com)," VOM said. "Pray God will protect believers in China and give them strength and courage to continue their faith in him."

VOM is a non-profit, interdenominational ministry working worldwide to help Christians who are persecuted for their faith, and to educate the world about that persecution. Its headquarters are in Bartlesville, Okla., and it has 30 affiliated international offices.

It was launched by the late Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, who started smuggling Russian Gospels into Russia in 1947, just months before Richard was abducted and imprisoned in Romania where he was tortured for his refusal to recant Christianity.

He eventually was released in 1964 and the next year he testified about the persecution of Christians before the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee, stripping to the waist to show the deep torture wound scars on his body.

The group that later was renamed The Voice of the Martyrs was organized in 1967, when his book, "Tortured for Christ," was released.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The secret for which Sandy risked his all

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53812

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel "Sandy" Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now-storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

True to form, the major media refuse to even ask the most fundamental question: Just what secrets would justify so much personal exposure? Having read the report on Berger by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, I am more confident than ever that I know the answer.

As the House report makes clear, Berger did not exactly welcome this assignment. This confirms my suspicions. The archivists told the committee, in fact, that Berger "indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review."

Apparently, he did not have much choice in the matter. Former President Bill Clinton had, according to the report, "designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents." Berger was Clinton's go-to inside guy.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security adviser, not because of Berger's foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of national security adviser in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

As we now know, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

As we now know too, he stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents during these four visits. "The full extent of Berger's document removal," reports the House committee, "is not known and never can be known."

As the report clarifies, "Archives staff would have no way to know" if any part of a given National Security Council document was removed. Further, had Berger removed papers from a Staff Member Office File – these more loosely enumerated than the NSC documents – "It would be almost impossible for the Archives staff to know."

Among his more flagrant acts of criminal mischief, Berger purloined some highly classified documents and stashed them "at a construction site where they could have been found by anyone." This behavior does not exactly classify as "inadvertent," the media's original characterization of Berger's motivation.

As the House report also establishes, the FBI never questioned Berger about those first two visits nor submitted him to a polygraph about any of the visits as his plea deal required. The Department of Justice's only source of information about possible theft during Berger's first two visits was the man himself, and Berger has proved almost comically unreliable.

In fact, Berger has changed his story about the documents as often as his boss did about Monica, in both cases to adapt to the emerging evidence. Berger even refused to be interviewed by the House committee, the one honest enterprise in the whole investigation.

We know too that on his first visit, according to Archives staff, "Berger was especially interested in White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke's personal office files." Again, this confirms my suspicions. According to the committee, "Had Berger seen 'a smoking gun' or other documents he did not want brought to an investigatory panel's attention, he could have removed it on this visit."

The much-discussed Millennium After Action Review was hardly the gun that smoked. In fact, the DOJ saw the Millennium Review as "beneficial to the Clinton administration" in that it made them look "engaged" in the war on terrorism.

The Millennium Review made the news only because it was the first document Berger got caught swiping, then on his third visit. The benign nature of this review led the DOJ to conclude that Berger took the documents for his "personal convenience," and the media predictably played right along.

To understand what that "smoking gun" might have been and how it involved Clarke and Berger, let us turn to the fateful summer of 1996. At that time, Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high-security assignments. One morning in "late-summer," Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."

As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The president's handwritten comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef's uncle.

Understandably, the 9/11 Commission was very concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was asked on her first real question: "Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?"

Rice said no. She was likely telling the truth. Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony. He admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old, "5 years, 6 years old." He asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

Before the summer Olympics of 1996, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of Islamic terrorists hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam's National Liberation day, with the U.S Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban missile crisis, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island.

The fact that the president was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 makes the versions of those plans with his handwritten notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, they would, at the very least, acknowledge that the Clinton administration had a keen interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before Sept. 11.

That interest obviously died, and Clarke served as chief assassin. Among other roles, it fell upon this Clinton sycophant to devise the "exit strategy" that transformed a seeming aeronautical assault on TWA Flight 800 into a "mechanical failure." In his book "Against All Enemies," he takes full credit for this bit of aviation alchemy.

Clarke was likely also responsible for getting the CIA and FBI to breach the storied "wall" and work together on the creation of the notorious "zoom-climb" animation. This animation showed a nose-less 747 rocketing vertically 3,200 feet into space and confusing onlookers. The FBI used it to discredit all 270 of its eyewitnesses to an apparent missile strike.

The media swallowed the zoom-climb as uncritically as they had the "mechanical failure." The New York Times did not bother to interview any of the 270 relevant eyewitnesses. Say what you will about former Timesman Jayson Blair, but he at least would have made one up.

Berger played a key role in the TWA Flight 800 sleight-of-mind as well. On the night of July 17, 1996, Berger was among the scores of staff summoned to the White House for an emergency meeting – a first for a domestic airplane crash. Col. Patterson was there as well but was kept fully out of the loop. When I asked Patterson if anyone was holed up in the family quarters with the president, he could tentatively identify only one person. And that person was Sandy Berger, then just the deputy national security adviser. Berger's boss, the less "reliable" Tony Lake, was relegated to his own office.

A logical deduction from existing evidence is that Clarke put the "planes-as-bombs" talk on hold for the five or six years after the TWA Flight 800 disaster lest such talk evoke unanswered questions about that fateful crash. Berger's task, I surmise, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with handwritten notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke and Clinton.

On Friday April 1, 2005, the Department of Justice announced its embarrassingly lenient plea deal with Berger. The timing was more than fortuitous. On March 31, Terri Schiavo had died. On April 2, Pope John Paul II would die. DOJ could not have chosen a day better calculated to give a casually indifferent media an excuse for ignoring a bombshell of a story.

"It remains unclear," asked the Washington Post about the Berger story line as it existed in April 2005, "why he destroyed three versions of a document, but left two other versions intact."

As I responded at the time, the answer to this question was too obvious to ask –handwritten notes on a document make one version entirely more dangerous than an identical document without those notes.

The Wall Street Journal, among other media, did not take kindly to ruminations like mine above. I will flatter myself that its editors had me at least somewhere in mind when they opined April 8, 2005, "Some people won't let a bad conspiracy theory go."

The Journal continued in full hauteur, "We're referring to those who loudly assert that former NSC adviser Sandy Berger was trying to protect the Clinton administration when he illegally removed copies of sensitive documents from the National Archives in late 2003."

The Journal cited chief of DOJ's Public Integrity Section, Noel Hillman, who claimed that "no original documents were destroyed, and that the contents of all five at issue still exist and were made available to the 9/11 Commission."

According to the Journal, the "confusion" stemmed from the "mistaken idea" that Berger destroyed handwritten notes by various Clinton administration officials in the margins of these documents. This, said Hillman, was simply an "urban myth."

As we know now, the only urban myth in play was that presumed Republicans like Hillman were, as Berger claimed, trying "to assassinate his character to pursue their own ends." In fact, they were covering for him. "Nothing was lost to the public or the process," said Hillman of Berger's theft in April 2005. This was transparently false.

The House Committee found the DOJ to be "unacceptably incurious" about investigating Berger's time in the Archives, especially his first two visits. Although Hillman would publicly claim that Berger "did not have an intent to hide any of contents of the documents or conceal facts from the [9/11] commission," Hillman had been told on at least four prior occasions that the opposite was true.

According to the House report, "The 9/11 Commission was specifically interested in the office files of White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, and never was told that Berger had access to Clarke's original office files on May 30, 2002, and July 18, 2003."

If not exactly apologizing to us humble conspiracists, the Journal has at least admitted its error. Hillman was indeed dissembling, Journal editors acknowledged last week: "Mr. Berger was in a position to remove documents from Mr. Clarke's files, and thanks to lax security, breaches of protocol and undue deference on the part of Archives staff, we may never know whether Mr. Berger took documents other than the five he's admitted to removing."

The media will assuredly "never know" for one good reason: They refuse to look. If they do, they will discover a rat's nest of conspiracy that will make Watergate seem as consequential as a Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction.

Why the Leakers haven't been punished

[It's disturbing how many traitors we have working for us in key positions-if only we could catch one.  Why stop leaking, there is never any consequence]

Leak Probes Stymied, FBI Memos Show
BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 10, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/46407
A lack of cooperation from one or more intelligence agencies led the FBI to abandon several recent criminal investigations into leaks of classified information to the press, records obtained by The New York Sun indicate.

In January 2005, a top FBI official asked the Justice Department to close three pending leak inquiries because the "victim agency" repeatedly refused to assist the probes. The FBI's contact at the agency "has been uncooperative with the investigating field office and on numerous occasions failed to return phone calls or provide the case agent with requested documents pertinent to the investigation," the memo said, adding that the agency "cancelled personnel interviews, security briefings and meetings at the last minute and failed to reschedule for another time."

"None of the cases can proceed without the cooperation of the substantive unit at the victim agency, therefore the FBI considers all logical leads covered," the FBI official wrote. Within days or weeks, the cases were closed.

The memo, which was among more than 300 pages of leak investigation files released to the Sun this week under the Freedom of Information Act, was heavily redacted by the FBI, which removed the name of the writer, the identity of the intelligence agency involved, and nearly all details about the alleged leaks.

The documents provide a rare window into the Bush administration's effort to combat leaks of classified information that the administration has said are damaging national security in wartime. "At some point in time, it would be helpful if we can find somebody inside our government who is leaking materials, clearly against the law, that they be held to account," the president said at a press conference last month. "Perhaps the best way to make sure people don't leak classified documents is that there be a consequence for doing so."

However the records suggest that reticence on the part of intelligence agencies sometimes contributes to the futility of leak probes, and that, at least when it comes to leak investigations, the much-vaunted full cooperation between the FBI and other intelligence agencies after September 11 has yet to come to fruition. "It turns out you never can find the leaker," Mr. Bush lamented.

In an exchange of e-mails in September 2005, FBI agents handling a leak investigation codenamed "May Apple," complained about difficulties in getting basic information about who saw classified documents key to the case. A meeting was planned with agency lawyers to discuss requests that were pending for a year. "So close it if they stonewall him tomorrow and/or we learn the distribution list is too great, right? I bet the latter will at least point us to closing even if they are totally cooperative," one agent wrote.

A few weeks later, the head of the FBI's leak-sleuthing section, Michael Donner, wrote to the Justice Department's counterespionage chief, John Dion, asking to close the probe. The FBI's Washington field office "concluded that the investigation had languished due to repeated requests for information…that have not been fulfilled in a timely manner," Mr. Donner wrote. "Due to noncompliance from the victim agency and wide dissemination of the classified information, the FBI was unable to determine the source of the leak." In all of the released records, the FBI deleted the name of the agency or agencies about which the investigators complained. However, a former Justice Department official said the vast majority of leak probes originate at the CIA. In the "May Apple" case, references in the files to top-secret cables and to an Office of General Counsel also point to Langley, as the government's other main user of cables, the State Department, does not have a general counsel's post.

A CIA spokeswoman, Michele Neff, flatly denied that her agency has resisted the FBI's efforts to hunt down leakers. "That's simply not the case," she said yesterday. "Why would we not want to get to the bottom of the leaks? The Office of General Counsel works closely with the Department of Justice on investigations regarding unauthorized disclosures."

Ms. Neff pointed to a November interview in which the current CIA director, General Michael Hayden, said recent leaking has caused serious harm to his agency's effectiveness and to individuals. "When that takes place our ability to protect both the security and the freedom of the nation is reduced," General Hayden told WTOP radio. "I can say as a matter of first principle that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information has actually led to the deaths of individuals."

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said it is uncommon for leak investigators to encounter resistance from their counterparts in the intelligence community. "Generally, we feel we receive excellent cooperation from the intelligence agencies and other victimized agencies in leak investigations," he said.

Ms. Neff and Mr. Boyd said they could not comment on specific cases, such as the ones where the agents reported a lack of cooperation. Mr. Dion, the Justice Department official who received the memos detailing the difficulties, and the current head of the CIA's Office of General Counsel, John Rizzo, declined requests to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Donner, the FBI official who oversaw some of the probes described in the memos, retired last year. In an interview yesterday, he also declined to discuss specific cases, but acknowledged some instances where agencies were not enthusiastic about helping the FBI. "They know if they do not give us more information or refuse to, the case will not push forward. They'd rather have it go away or have it dropped," the former agent said. Many of the leak cases are initiated by the CIA, which sends the Justice Department a standard, 11-item questionnaire. Asked why an agency would refer a leak for investigation and then decline to provide necessary information, Mr. Donner said, "They have a disclosure potentially of a violation of federal law. They're obliged to provide it or refer it to the FBI." He said resistance may sometimes be because of legitimate concerns about further dissemination of sensitive data.

According to the records, the main reason for dropping leak investigations is that the classified information in question was so widely distributed that it is difficult to focus in on suspects. Mr. Donner said the current drive to share intelligence information made his job even harder. "I'm an old-school guy. A lot of people don't ‘need-to-know,'" he said.

Mr. Donner, who helped crack some high-profile spy cases, such as that of Aldrich Ames, said the leak chasing was frustrating. "I wish we had better success in this area," he said. "This stuff is a wilderness of mirrors."

The friction apparent in the records obtained by the Sun calls into question assurances by senior government officials that law enforcement and the intelligence community are working hand-inglove to ferret out leaks. In an unusual op-ed piece published in the New York Times in February 2006, the-then director of the CIA, Porter Goss, decried illegal leaks and promised that close coordination to eradicate them was underway. The Justice Department "is committed to working with us to investigate these cases aggressively," Mr. Goss wrote. "In addition, I have instituted measures within the agency to further safeguard the integrity of classified data."

Mr. Goss took over in September 2004, months before the FBI's moves to abandon the probes. However, it is unclear how much control he was able to establish over the agency. The former congressman and his staff clashed repeatedly with veteran CIA officials, some of whom quit. A top aide to Mr. Goss, Patrick Murray, who once oversaw an anti-leak task force for the Justice Department, reportedly crusaded against leaks at Langley. In May 2006, Mr. Goss abruptly resigned, offering no public reason for his departure. A former prosecutor who has accused career CIA officials of waging a leak campaign to undermine President Bush, Joseph diGenova, said yesterday that he suspected the resistance to the investigations was part of that effort. He also questioned why the leak cases were dropped.

"Stopping a leak investigation, assuming it's a serious leak, just because the victim agency won't cooperate is the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life," Mr. diGenova said. "A grand jury subpoena should issue….It seems to me there should be some sort of Congressional investigation of those instances."

The disclosed records also suggest that many investigations into leaks of top-secret data are abandoned without pursuing some obvious, if intrusive, investigative techniques, such as seeking testimony or phone records from members of the press. Other components of the Justice Department have recently used those tactics in less sensitive cases, such as leaks about planned federal raids of Islamic charities and about a grand jury investigating steroid use in baseball.

"There is a stunning lack of balance in the way all these cases are approached," Mr. diGenova said. The FBI files were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought in July by this reporter. In November, a federal judge in San Francisco, citing the intense public interest in leak investigations, ordered the government to answer the requests within 30 days. The judge, Maxine Chesney, recently extended the deadline to April for some of the agencies involved.

Last month, the FBI told Judge Chesney that 22 of 94 files believed to relate to recent press leaks were missing with no indication of who had removed them.

Read the documents here.

THE BEAR GOES WALKABOUT

http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=24

THE BEAR GOES WALKABOUT
You gotta love these alternative theories for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the late “Russian dissident” (and there’s a phrase one hadn’t expected to make a comeback quite so soon). Relax, say the Kremlinologists (and there’s another), it wasn’t Putin who had the guy whacked. It was rogue elements within the state apparatus who gained access to supposedly secure facilities and then contaminated five international jets and dozens of joints all over London in order to pull off the world’s first radiological assassination.
Oh, well, that’s okay then. Nothing to worry about.
The late Mr Litvinenko, on the other hand, added to the story some last-minute wrinkles of his own. On his deathbed, the former KGB agent converted to Islam and asked that one day his corpse be reburied in a peaceful and independent Chechnya.
Now what’s that about? Well, like many in Russian political and media circles – including his fellow murder victim Anna Politkovskaya – Litvinenko had become intrigued by the 1999 Moscow apartment-house attacks that killed 300 people and provided the pretext for the Second Chechen War: Were they, in fact, a set-up intended to advance the career of Vladimir Putin? In other words, his entire presidency is founded on a lie. One can understand why a belief in such a conspiracy might destroy one’s faith in one’s country, and even that it might lead one to embrace Chechen separatist leaders, as Litvinenko did. But it doesn’t entirely explain the Muslim conversion business.
I say somewhere or other in my new book that, just as the export of Russia’s ideology was the biggest destabilizing factor in the last century, so the implosion of that ideology could be one of the biggest in this century. That’s to say, what’s left of the Soviet Union has hit the apocalyptic jackpot: the Middle East has Islamists, Africa has Aids and North Korea has nukes, but only Russia has the lot – a disease-riddled Slav population and a fast growing Muslim population jostling atop a colossal nuclear arsenal. The Litvinenko murder is only the first of many stories in which Islam, nuclear materials and Russian decline will intersect in novel ways.
There are ten million people in Moscow. Do you know how many of them are Muslim? Two and a half million. Or about a quarter of the population. The ethnic Russians are older; the Muslims are younger. The ethnic Russians are already in net population decline; the Muslim population in the country has increased by 40% in the last 15 years. Seven out of ten Russian pregnancies (according to some surveys) are aborted; in some Muslim communities, the fertility rate is ten babies per woman. Russian men have record rates of heart disease, liver disease, drug addiction and Aids; Muslims are the only guys in the country who aren’t face down in the vodka.
Faced with these trends, most experts extrapolate: thus, it’s generally accepted that by mid-century the Russian Federation will be majority Muslim. But you don’t really need to extrapolate when the future’s already checking in at reception. The Toronto Star (which is Canada’s biggest-selling newspaper and impeccably liberal) recently noted that by 2015 Muslims will make up a majority of Russia’s army.
Hmm. That’ll add an interesting dimension to the Chechen campaign. Say what you like about Russia but it doesn’t want for plot twists. It is, in that sense, a textbook example of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”: a thing we know we don’t know. What will happen in Russia? A remorseless evolution into a majority Muslim state? Bosnian-style civil war? The secession of a dozen or so of Russia’s 89 federal regions? A Muslim military coup? Or a panicky attempt to arrest decline by selling off your few remaining assets, including national resources to the Chinese and nukes to anyone who wants them? None of us knows, but we should know enough to know we don’t know. The Russia of 15 years ago is already ancient history.
Which brings me, alas, to the Iraq Study Group. This silly shallow report, of which James Baker, Lee Hamilton and the rest should be ashamed, betrays no understanding of how fast events are moving. It falls back on the usual multilateral mood music. It wants Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel and everything else to be mediated by the transnational jet set – the Big Five at the UN, the EU, the Arab League. Just for starters, look at the permanent members of the Security Council: America, Britain, France, Russia, China. What’s the old line on those fellows? The World War Two victory parade preserved in aspic? If only. By 2050, Russia will be the umpteenth Muslim nuclear power, but the first with a permanent seat on the UNSC. Or maybe the second, if France gets there first. And, judging from London literary offerings like George Walden’s Time To Emigrate?, Britain might not be far behind. But, as I said above, forget the extrapolations: already, domestic Muslim constituencies are an important factor in the foreign policy thinking of three out of the big five. Are Baker and Hamilton even aware of that?
As I always say, there is no “stability”. We thought we’d “contained” Soviet Communism. Instead, the social pathologies that took hold during the Russian people’s half-century of “containment” will have profound consequences for us and the rest of the world long after the last Commie is dead and buried.National Review, December 18th 2006
NEW YEAR RESOLUTION
My New Year's resolution is not to make any New Year predictions. I called last year pretty badly -- readers may remember my confident assertions every week or two that the Republicans would hold the House and Senate. War is a tough sell in a democracy, particularly the kind of war we face today. On the other hand, one should never underestimate the seductiveness of complacency. If you happened to catch John Edwards, the hair-today-gone-tomorrow pretty boy of the 2004 campaign, re-emerging in the artfully positioned debris of New Orleans last week, it was hard not to be impressed: An empty suit had somehow managed to get emptier. He's running for president on five big priorities: 'guaranteeing health care,' 'leading the fight against global warming,' 'strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty,' and by then my fingers were too comatose to write down the fifth theme but, if memory serves, it was guaranteeing to lead the fight to strengthen ending the shame of platitudinous campaign rhetoric.

Baby Mullet