With less than three years on the clock . . .

. . . how close to a police state can George Bush's America get?

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.

Actually, the quote comes from an article which is largely speculative - the administration is asserting new powers left and right, and a quick and dirty extrapolation of some of the principles cited in the prosecution of AIPAC lobbyists shows that they could just as easily be turned on the press. Voices on the loony (now also quasi-mainstream) right are shrieking for exactly that - prosecution of Times reporters for Pulitzer Prize-winning articles, in fact - but so far actual state action against the press, though very weird and more than a little bit scary, falls short of dragging anyone into court on espionage charges.

So, feel free to take this as something between a warning flare and a panic attack from the Times. Still, I'd recommend you don't completely disregard it: there's at least one former prosecutor on the record here as wanting to see journalists prosecuted for revealing the story of the administration's illegal, dumb-ass wiretaps, and I'm sure Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department has guys who're downright passionate on the matter. After all, if every illegal, dumb-ass move the administration might make runs the risk of being exposed - with no personal consequence to the people doing the exposing - why, the government's ability to do illegal, dumb-ass moves might be severely inhibited! And then where would America be?

The IranWatch continues.

Okay, if anyone's taken offense that I've spent more time worrying about our leaders than theirs, then this post is for you: the rhetoric that's been coming out of the upper reaches of Tehran over the past couple of days has gotten scarily aggressive. They're talking about bowing out of the IAEA, they're talking about exporting their nuclear technology, and they're talking about "strikes at US interests." Worse still, the nebulous "they" I cite isn't just limited to Mr. Ahmadinejad and his loyalists; Ayatollah Khameini has also joined in, and the word of the ulama is a hell of a lot harder to get around than the word of a politician. In a better, less Bushed-up world, we might be able to ask Ayatollah Sistani to speak out on behalf of moderation - officially, he has no role in the Iranian state, but it's my understanding that his theological credentials and reputation in the Shi'ite community are actually considerably stronger than those of Mr. Khameini - but at this point I don't think we enjoy enough of the man's trust to be able to expect much.

Chris Nelson says a lot of clever things (excerpts care of Laura Rozen), but I think the easiest synopsis goes something like this: Mr. Ahmadinejad is more intested in scoring political points than in negotiating, and that leaves us without a lot of options.

I wish I could be a little more upbeat here.

Three months of peace.

Nepal gets to catch a breath. Maybe the Nepalese will get really lucky, and King Gyanendra will take this opportunity to stop making the Maoists look good . . . .

Once again, the public interest takes it in the teeth!

Net Neutrality legislation: shot down in the House.

Barring an act of courage from the Senate that survives conference, here's hoping Congress is forced to respond in a hurry to constituent outrage once the abuses start coming in . . . .

Zbigniew Brzezinski on the Iranian question.

It is true, however, that an eventual Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would heighten tensions in the region and perhaps prompt imitation by such countries as Saudi Arabia or Egypt. Israel, despite its large nuclear arsenal, would feel less secure. Preventing Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons is, therefore, justified, but in seeking that goal, the U.S. must bear in mind longer-run prospects for Iran's political and social development.

Iran has the objective preconditions in terms of education, the place of women in social affairs, and in social aspirations (especially of the youth) to emulate in the foreseeable future the evolution of Turkey. The mullahs are Iran's past, not its future; it is not in our interest to engage in acts that help to reverse that sequence.

Serious negotiations require not only a patient engagement but also a constructive atmosphere. Artificial deadlines, propounded most often by those who do not wish the U.S. to negotiate in earnest, are counterproductive. Name-calling and saber rattling, as well as a refusal to even consider the other side's security concerns, can be useful tactics only if the goal is to derail the negotiating process.

The United States should join Britain, France and Germany, as well as perhaps Russia and China (both veto-casting U.N. Security Council members), in direct negotiations with Iran, using the model of the concurrent multilateral talks with North Korea. As it does with North Korea, the U.S. also should simultaneously engage in bilateral talks with Iran about security and financial issues of mutual concern.

It follows that the U.S. should be a signatory party to any quid pro quo arrangements in the event of a satisfactory resolution of the Iranian nuclear program and of regional security issues. At some point, such talks could lead to a regional agreement for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East — especially after the conclusion of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement — endorsed also by all the Arab states of the region. At this stage, however, it would be premature to inject that complicated issue into the negotiating process with Iran.

For now, our choice is either to be stampeded into a reckless adventure profoundly damaging to long-term U.S. national interests or to become serious about giving negotiations with Iran a genuine chance. The mullahs were on the skids several years ago but were given a new burst of life by the intensifying confrontation with the United States. Our strategic goal, pursued by real negotiations and not by posturing, should be to separate Iranian nationalism from religious fundamentalism.

Treating Iran with respect and within a historical perspective would help to advance that objective. American policy should not be swayed by the current contrived atmosphere of urgency ominously reminiscent of what preceded the misguided intervention in Iraq.

From the LA Times.

The obvious problem with Mr. Brzezinski's approach is that it pretty well ignores the fact that Mr. Ahmadinejad has himself got a stake in keeping shit well stirred, precisely because history isn't on his side. Bringing China and Russia along as chaperones might keep him and his faction from bringing their most abrasive rhetoric along to the negotiating table, but it's still naive to think that he's going to be in a hurry to calm things down; he benefits too much from the impression that Iran is under siege.

Which is exactly why it's in our interests to make that impression harder to sustain.

Still, just because it's worth doing doesn't mean it's going to be easy - particularly with the lunatics in the White House arguing that we're once again way closer to armageddon than the people who know what they're talking about would have us believe.

Should've seen this comin'.

Turns out the great American libertarian internet nightmare - at least this decade - isn't going to be government censorship; it's going to be meddling from the verdammt Baby Bells. Congress is on the verge of turning "the broadband pipes" (and I'm obliquely referring there to a quote from Edward Whiteacre, the Wall's Abrasive Oligarch of the Week) over to the telecoms without a whole lot of legislative guarantees that the current system of uniform site access will be allowed to continue.

From Rep. Ed Markey's overview:

The Internet has historically been protected by rules which embodied a policy of "network neutrality." In other words, telephone companies such as AT&T or Verizon could not discriminate against unaffiliated content providers on the Net, but rather had to stay neutral with regard to the content flowing through their networks. Moreover, the phone companies could not charge access fees to certain companies in exchange for faster content distribution to high bandwidth customers or to provide enhanced quality of service assurances. In addition, these rules protected consumer freedom to use their choice of gadgets with their broadband connection, from computer modems and VOIP phones, to wi-fi routers and other whiz-bang gizmos just over the horizon.

Yet these historic rules which protected the Internet were thrown out by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last August. As a result, the phone companies are now legally permitted to tinker with the nondiscriminatory nature of the Internet and to charge new bottleneck taxes on web-based businesses. It did not take long for the phone companies to react. We know from the public statements of industry executives, such as AT&T's Ed Whitacre, that they see abandoning net neutrality as simply another way to squeeze out a few extra dollars in revenue:

[I]n a Nov. 7 interview with BusinessWeek Online, AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. declared: "What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that." Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth.

In short, the Ed Whitacres of the world want to start charging web-based businesses and entrepreneurs for the right to unduly prioritize how information is transmitted over the Internet (and don't forget that they already charge users for Internet access; this would simply allow them to make money on both ends of the exchange). Equal access to information and all users has been a fundamental principle of the Internet since its inception. Yet the prospect now looms that the "World Wide Web" could instead become "What Whitacre Wants" - a broadband bastion for the corporate whims of bottleneck providers. This would jeopardize the Internet's role as the engine of economic growth, innovation, and job creation which it is today. These big telecom companies had nothing to do with creating the Internet and making it such a special, open platform for innovation, yet now they're acting like they own it, just because they think they can. But we must stop their effort before it is too late.

The Joe Barton (R-TX) sponsored telecommunications bill that is moving through the Energy & Commerce Committee in the House would fundamentally change the way the Internet works. Typically, Congress gives the FCC the power to promulgate rules to enforce, yet under the Barton bill the FCC is handcuffed and explicitly told it has no power to restore rules to protect the Internet. Instead, the bill merely permits the FCC to enforce imprecise, broadly-worded "principles" of net neutrality - principles that, as written, completely ignore the principle of nondiscrimination. In short, the Barton bill opens the door for the Bells and other ISPs to throw out a key principle of net neutrality and enact a new era of telecom taxes and tolls, roadblocks that would shut down the avenues of innovation that have allowed the Internet to become what it is today.

What would be some of the consequences of discarding the principle of net neutrality? For one, startup firms will be forced to compete at a disadvantage against major content providers who are paying massive sums to the phone companies for prioritized content delivery. Would Google have become the company it is today if its search engine worked slower than its competitors, not because the technology was less effective, but simply because they couldn't afford to pay the toll? Would Wikipedia have earned its current prominence if it had to compete against a commercial alternative with inferior content, but that users could access faster? Would eBay have achieved its current popularity if users could not be sure they could access the site as a bid was coming to a close, simply because eBay hadn't paid its monthly "quality of service" fee to AT&T? Will any future Googles, Yahoos, Amazons, or eBays even have the opportunity to innovate their way to success if they are forced to compete with existing companies who are free to favor their own content, simply because they own the pipes into consumer homes and businesses?

And what will happen to the Internet as a vehicle for expressing our First Amendment freedoms? Certainly religious organizations, non-profits, civic organizations, or ordinary citizens cannot or will not pay the excessive new bottleneck taxes the broadband barons want to charge.

The official telecom script seems to be that expedited service will be made available for those entities willing to pay for it, while pre-existing connectivity will remain as it has always been, but in practice Mr. Whiteacre sounds an awful lot like he's describing a protection racket (and it's worth noting that there are already a few North American examples of telecom interference in `net traffic, just in case anyone's inclined to extend reflexively the benefit of the doubt). Honestly, though, even the purely value-added approach seems destructive; the current system, where the success of a site is as close to meritocratic as one can get (given the extent to which search engines can be played), has proven to work remarkably well, and I don't see any great plus to the consumer for suddenly allowing access differentiation by wealth. To offend the hard-core capitalists, what's under discussion here is pure regulation of a market medium - and, to tweak those of us on the left, the hypothetical regulators are constituted with no inherent responsibility to the public good. It's a scary scene, and it shouldn't be entered into lightly.

Public Knowledge and Save the Internet are both following the issue (and hearty thanks go to Josh Marshall for the links) - and anyone who wants to go directly to badgering his or her congressman can start by heading here.

If the big guns of the press start covering this, I'll post any links I find - but I'm not optimistic. I'm afraid I expect media silence until people start complaining about the changes . . . .

Meanwhile, the biggest asshole on the planet makes a new appearance.

Yes, Osama bin Laden has crawled out of his cave to try to wrap himself up in Palestinian nationalism, and – just to be the best cynical fuckwad he can possibly be – he’s trying to make an Islamic cause out of blocking multinational intervention in the Sudanese genocide.

This guy needs to be caught, demythologized, and plonked down in chains in front of a truth commission on al-Jazeera today. After that, shoot him, hang him, load him in a trebuchet and fling him to the moon - whatever. Just make sure his sick, nihilistic cult dies first.

UPDATE: Though I'm stubbornly keeping the time at which I tried to post this one in the relevant field, it's coming up more than twelve hours late (with another Blogger outage scheduled in minutes, if anybody's keeping track). In the intervening time, I've read responses way more insightful than mine - by all means take a look.

We're only as good as our word.

Now the Washington Post tells us our word isn't very good.

Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found 173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further abuse, the U.S. military reported.

Since then, there have been at least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers, most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry. Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of the detention centers.

But U.S. troops have not responded by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the rest where they were.

This practice of leaving the detainees in place has raised concerns that detainees now face additional threats. It has also prompted fresh questions from the inspectors about whether the United States has honored a pledge by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that U.S. troops would attempt to stop inhumane treatment if they saw it.

Unfortunately, the abuse itself isn't a big surprise; Shi'ite militia groups have become way too closely associated with formal Iraqi security services over the past couple of years, particularly during the period when Mahmoud al-Jaafari was nominally running the show. What is alarming - beyond the American inaction itself - is the sense that the mistreatment of detainees is seen as being closely enough linked to the main Shi'ite players that shutting it down would have political ramifications severe enough to cause problems. I'm sure we'd all like to believe that things will be better under the upcoming government, but the fact is the new PM, Jawad al-Maliki, is a Dawa man - another member of the hardcore Shi'ite establishment. The militias represent part of his political base; he's not going to have a huge incentive to rein them in unless we give him one.

And damned if I can think what that would be.

Still, we have to do something - beyond the moral imperative to keep people from being tortured, cold, clear realpolitik pretty well demands that the Sunni community be given every reassurance that the political process and the anatomy of government will reward participation with . . . well, I'd love to say security, but I think for now I'd settle for equality under the law and benign neglect in practice. Something other than tax dollars going toward Shi'ite-run torture farms, at any rate.

If we're not in a position where we can constructively advocate the rule of law, then, honestly, what's the point of staying?

Not quite sure what's going on in Iraq.

The latest word I've seen is that current PM Ibrahim al-Jaafari has dropped out of the running, and the Shi'ites have settled on Dawa man Jawad al-Maliki to take his place. Mr. Maliki wasn't the preferred compromise candidate - that would have been the more moderate Ali al-Adeeb - but both the Times and the BBC confirm that the key Kurdish and (more surprisingly) Sunni players are willing to support the guy. They may regret it in three months, but we'll deal with that as it happens.

For now, whatever his faults, the idea that he might bring with him something resembling a functioning Iraqi government is almost enough to make me giddy; the soft anarchy of the last few months has made things even worse than they had to be.

Putting 2000 in perspective.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi kept up his struggle against the election he lost, saying today that he would demand more scrutiny of the results despite a high court decision awarding victory to his center-left challenger, Romano Prodi.

"I have not and will not make any telephone call because why should I give them good wishes," Mr. Berlusconi said in a visit to the northeastern city of Trieste. "That would be against the country's interests."

But Italy, exhausted by its national elections and its razor-thin verdict, seemed to be moving beyond Mr. Berlusconi's continuing refusal to concede defeat. Attention instead began to turn to what may be a new — and possibly serious — crisis: the fight among Mr. Prodi's fractious allies over the highest positions in a new government.

God - and I say this with real affection - Italian politics suck.

It's not clear whether Mr. Berlusconi is just out to hasten the collapse of Mr. Prodi's (not yet formed) government, or whether he's really so arrogant and/or desperate to avoid the risk of prosecution and proper regulatory intervention in his media empire that he's prepared to go all out to try to secure a win against both Italian law and the rulings of pretty much every relevant Italian political institution - but, either way, he's kicking the hell out of his country for his own personal gain.

Now and then.

Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

From a very nice article in Rolling Stone (of all places) by Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton.

There's another Bush administration overview, of a different kind, up at Vanity Fair - care of Carl Bernstein. That one's actually a call for a Senate investigation, along with a comparison between this gang and the Nixon White House. Team Bush actually manages to come out the worse, impressively enough.

Matt Yglesias thinks war with Iran is a stupid idea.

He's right.

The only thing I'll add at the moment is that Iranian head thug Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really does seem to be a pre-millennial apocalyptic nutcase who's doing his best to dismantle non-nutcasey groups in the Iranian policy-making infrastructure and elevating his own vigilante hoodlums to positions of . . . well, I was going to say power, and that's true as far as it goes, but the real point is that he's putting them in a position where they can better terrorize the Iranian people (thanks to Billmon for the link). The thing is, he's using all this saber-rattling to buttress his own political standing; without enemies in the west, all he's got going for him is an economic program that isn't delivering the turnaround he promised in his campaign. It should be possible to undermine him to the point where domestic forces neuter him - even just dialing down the rhetoric is a start.

In the meantime, I'm going to hammer on one point: yes, Mr. Ahmadinejad is very bad news. There are signs that he really is an old-school fascist with an Islamic veneer, and given what I can perceive of his agenda for Iran (to say nothing of his role in sending children out into minefields for Allah) there's a crazy idealist side to my own head that argues for snipers and blind hope. Still, there's nothing to indicate that he wants to export his lunacy; where Adolph Hitler was mythologizing a greater Aryan empire, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems primarily caught up in terrifying his own little corner of the globe into a state of readiness for the return of the Mahdi. He's not launching massive industrialization, he's not setting up a Basij Youth - he's not doing anything to indicate an expansionist intent. The worst case scenario at the moment is that he's trying to assemble a nuclear program in order to destroy Israel, with the understanding that the entire Iranian nation would then die a giant martyr's death - but it's worth noting that he himself (to say nothing of Ayatollah Khamenei and the other clerics in the Iranian upper atmosphere) didn't walk out onto a minefield for the glory of the faith. I think it's much more likely that he's just out to burnish his credentials as a kind of nationalist strongman - and that would make him a manageable kind of scumbag, rather than an urgent threat.

OMG! Big shake-up at the White House!

Only, not really so much. Karl Rove hasn't left the building, after all, and he's still the political coordinator going into the mid-terms; the long-memoried among us might recall that that was more or less the position he was in back in the first administration (i.e., when Bush escapee John DiIulio first told the public that this White House in fact has no policy-generating apparatus that's distinct from the political flack team). Basically, there's no reason to believe anything substantial has changed - if anything, moving Mr. Rove to round-the-clock image manipulation probably means there's a PR war brewing, rather than a shift in administrative tone. I think we can reasonably expect that we're not suddenly going to see decisions made for reasons other than cold cynicism and dumb reflex - particularly given certain hints from the pedigree of the new "policy czar."

I would, of course, be delighted to be proved wrong.

I'm oddly inclined to wish Scott McClellan well, incidentally. We never got an awful lot of truth out of him, but at least he never came across as being as passionate about misrepresenting the truth as Ari Fleischer had been.

This isn't helpful.

Look, even if by some chance the president isn't stupid enough to really consider using nukes in Iran - even if this is all a big game of diplomatic chicken - this current spate of leaks and threats isn't doing anyone any good.

Big picture time: outside of the occasional growl from Douglas MacArthur, American policy for the last sixty years has portrayed nuclear weaponry as a tool of last possible resort. Why? Well, in no small part because it minimizes the tools foreign governments have with which to whip their populations into a panic.

If we start acting like we might use nuclear weapons on states which have committed no acts of war against us, then suddenly an awful lot of the world is going to stop looking at the acquisition of nukes as less a matter of national prestige and more a matter of defense. We become the nation that needs to be deterred.

Do we really want Indonesia to start asking Pakistan for radioactive favors? Saudi Arabia?

Just refusing to disavow attacking Iran in the short term is reckless enough; escalating the rhetoric enough to jeopardize the foundations of the geopolitical balance that generations of statesmen way the fuck smarter than these guys bequeathed us is disgraceful. And if this administration actually means to make us the first country in the history of the world to let the genie out of the bottle in an act of aggression, then I can only hope that the people responsible can be made to fear war crimes courts (they don't seem too concerned with the verdict of history) before they do anything that can't be undone.

Guess what else we're not allowed to know!

For one thing, who exactly works in the Office of the Vice President. How they work is a little better documented, though; the short description would be, "Way too effectively, all things considered."

Kids, don't do this at home!

I'm gonna be bad, and reproduce a TimesSelect piece in its entirety - though I promise here and now to take it down if the Times complains.

Anyway, it's the latest from Nick Kristof, and it's on Chad and Sudan. The title's "The Slaughter Spreads."

Last month villagers along Chad's border with Sudan told me how brutal militias were attacking their towns, murdering their babies, raping their daughters and burning their huts, while shouting racial slurs against blacks. Now those impoverished Chadians may find themselves not only attacked by genocidal marauders but also ruled by them.

Over the past week, Sudan has sponsored a full-scale invasion of Chad, seeking to oust Chad's president and replace him with the warlord who has overseen the murder, rape and pillage in those border areas.

Sudan seems determined to extend its genocide to Chad, and the upshot is that the catastrophe of Darfur may now be multiplied manyfold.

One of the towns I stayed in during my visit to Chad last month was Adré, which by some accounts — denied by the government — has now been seized by this Sudanese proxy force known for throwing babies into bonfires. So I wonder what happened to the children I met in the Adré hospital, like Fatima Juma, a 13-year-old girl who would have been unable to flee because she had been shot in the chest and arm while fetching water.

That the fighting has spread to Chad underscores that our policy in Darfur has not only been morally bankrupt, but also catastrophic in a practical sense. Appeasing Sudan has allowed the situation to worsen, because our policy has essentially consisted, after every outrage, of making the Darfuris turn the other cheek.

Chad's president, Idriss Déby, is a corrupt dictator. But he at least had the gumption to show some discontent at the genocide next door, and Sudan is taking aim at him precisely for that reason. If we let Sudan get away with ousting him for refusing to applaud a mass slaughter, we will have compounded our own shameful record.

It's not that President Déby was even very active against the genocide. Worried about offending Sudan, his government threatened to arrest me if I again sneaked into Darfur illegally from Chad to cover the genocide. But Mr. Déby did have the guts to grant Darfur refugees a safe haven in Chad, saving their lives — although now, disgracefully, he has threatened to expel them if the Darfur conflict is not resolved by June.

The fighting in Chad, including a battle in the capital, Ndjamena, that reportedly killed 350 people on Thursday, is nominally between the government and rebels. But make no mistake: those "rebels" are simply a proxy force of Sudan, made up in part by the Sudanese janjaweed militias that orchestrated the killing of several black African tribes in Darfur.

The Chadian rebels operate from a base that journalists have visited in Sudan. The rebels' guns, vehicles and uniforms come from the Sudanese government.

Their leader, Mohamed Nour, was handpicked by Sudan to lead this invading force. Sudan's vice president, Ali Osman Taha, has visited Mr. Nour at his base. And the "rebels" often drop by the town of Geneina, where everybody sees that they include some Chadians but also many Sudanese janjaweed fighters.

"Even a kid of 5 years old in Geneina knows that the Sudanese government is organizing the militias," said Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a heroic Sudanese who leads an independent human rights group active in Darfur.

The danger now is threefold.

First, Chad may collapse into civil war, chaos and banditry, like Darfur itself but on a much larger scale.

Second, the 200,000 refugees who fled Darfur and are living in U.N.-run camps in Chad may be specifically targeted for mass slaughter.

Third, the unrest may force international aid workers to pull out of Chad. Then the refugees will starve to death more gradually.

The U.S. has called on "all parties ... to reduce those levels of violence" — which is a bit like suggesting in 1943 that Nazis and Jews alike cease hostilities. The U.S. and other major powers need to be much more forceful in shoring up Chad against the invaders.

France has a major military base in eastern Chad and should start strafing the invaders. The U.S. should back France, send a top envoy to Chad to show support, and provide intelligence to Chad and France about the invaders' whereabouts.

President Bush and millions of Americans today will celebrate Easter and the end of Holy Week. But where is the piety in reading the Bible while averting one's eyes from genocide? Mr. Bush, how about showing your faith by doing something a bit more meaningful — like standing up to the butchers?

Ah, crap.

Action? Rebels in Chad, possibly backed by the Janjaweed, launch an attack on the capital.

Reaction? Chad's president threatens to send 200,000 Sudanese refugees away - presumably back to Darfur, where the Janjaweed can rape and murder them even more easily.

This would be a really, really good time for the international community to pull its collective head out of its collective ass.

Antonin Scalia has strange priorities.

During an appearance in Connecticut today, Antonin Scalia said his "proudest" moment on the Supreme Court came when he refused to recuse himself from a case involving his hunting buddy, Dick Cheney.

We're not making this up.

Scalia's comments came in response to a question from a University of Connecticut law student who apparently asked the associate justice about his decision not to recuse himself from the 2004 case involving Cheney's energy task force. The Sierra Club had asked Scalia to step aside from hearing the case, arguing that his hunting trip with the vice president created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. Scalia rejected the argument then with an unprecedented 21-page opinion and a bizarre two-word response.

Calling his decision "the proudest thing I have done on the bench," Scalia said today that people ought to have more faith in his impartiality. "For Pete's sake," he said, "if you can't trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life."

Can we get a new Supreme Court justice instead?

[From Salon's War Room.]

Bad news, good news.

I'm not talking about the usual subjects, either! I've just started reviewing the day's news, and if Team Bush has done anything to further damage world peace, American international standing, or the state of our own little polity, I haven't caught up to it yet.

Always nice to have something to look forward to, though!

In the meantime, I thought I'd grab a couple of headlines from the BBC to shore up my internationalist credentials. The bad news of the moment is that the situation in Sudan is becoming more of a situation outside Sudan. [The Sudanese mess is one I used to cover more, I know, and I'm sorry to have been slacking when it's really still so dire - particularly given that it's getting almost no play in American papers. Nick Kristof is still regularly beating the drum, and he deserves all kinds of credit for doing so - but column is behind the wall of TimesSelect, where links are wasted and casual traffic is light. Still, sites like Democracy Arsenal are still pushing for responsible action, and deserve more of my attention than they've been getting.]

Anyway, the new deal is that Chad - Sudan's neighbor to the west - is not having a good day. Rebels (presumably backed by the Darfur-based Janjaweed) have moved from the eastern border all the way west to Ndjamena, the capital; they seem to have been repulsed after their most recent attack, but it's not at all clear that the triumphal statements of Chad's sitting president, Idriss Déby, can be taken completely at face value. He's a former insurrectionist himself, currently in the late days of a campaign for a third term in office (he had the constitution changed to permit it), and I'm sure he considers it in his best interests to put up the most towering facade of strength he can manage - particularly since the rebels are largely defectees from his own rather restive army. You can find some details here and here, if you're so inclined.

The good news comes from Asia, and is considerably more low-key than the bad: how do you balance out fears of transnational campaigns of genocide and warlordism, after all? Still, it seems to me it is genuinely good: China is staging a "World Buddhist Forum," and hosting delegates from more than thirty countries.

The Chinese government isn't being totally reasonable, of course; they've insisted on trotting out the poor kid they claim to be the Panchen Lama (because no one is better equipped to identify a reincarnated Tibetan bodhisattva than a bunch of Beijing atheists), to the considerable disdain of the wider Buddhist community. Still, it's a pleasantly unambiguous signal that the quasi-communists in power are being forced to let in just a little bit more normality. Is it for the sake of their own domestic politics? For a whiff of international legitimacy? I don't know. But it apparently coincides with a real diplomatic effort to mend fences with the Vatican, and that makes it seem like more than just an isolated bit of propaganda. There may really be something good in the air!

That said, I wouldn't recommend that anyone start thinking China has suddenly become a nation where its citizens can feel too free.

But we had to lie! The truth was classified!

Josh Marshall sends us a postcard from Orwell country.

I'm still worried about Iran, and what we might do there.

Sorry if I haven't been giving that impression lately - I've been trying to direct my writing time toward other projects over the last few days, and the Wall has been denied its regular messages of outrage and despair.

Anyway, the things I'd like to bring to your attention today are these:

First, and probably most important, is a new article in the New York Times; though there are some that want Americans to believe that Iran is just a step away from being able to build nuclear warheads in sixteen day jags, most experts seem to believe that that's years away. Keeping the current cascade going is going to be a technical challenge for the Iranians, and launching thousands of new reactors - given limited resources - isn't really a near-term concern.

Over in the comments section of a Democracy Arsenal piece on the distinctions between the current Iranian tensions and the Cuban missile crisis, a gentleman named Dan Kervick had the following to say:

Eevn [sic] if Iran should develop a limited nuclear force in five years time, they are nowhere remotely near developing the kind of force that would give them a winnable first strike capability. And they are not at this time part of a larger enemy nuclear bloc that could defend them. So, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, we only need to state very clearly to them that any nuclear missile assault on Isreal - or on the United States via terrorist proxies - would be met with an overwhelming retaliatory nuclear response from the US. That response is very credible, and should be sufficient to deter Iran.

The argument that this sort of deterrance would not work is based on the caricature of the "Mad Mullahs" - the notion that Iran is run by a cult of deranged suicide bombers who would comdemn their entire country to nuclear doom if that were the cost of launching a single glancing blow against the Great Satan. I think this perception of the Iranian state is far-fetched, to say the least.

The "slow motion" aspect of this problem is also very relevant here. These alleged Iranian threats are still a long way off, according to the experts. Iran sends frequent signals that it is looking for a grand deal on regional security issues; and making such a deal would probably be in our interest. We don't face a pressing crisis in which Iranians are about arm an arsenal of nuclear weapons and deploy them. There is ample time for pre-emption later, even if it should ever be required.

There's more to his response, and it's worth reading - particularly the bits about Russia's role in the next few cycles of diplomacy - but I think this bit suffices to underline the lack of a need for panic.

William Arkin is arguing that, in fact, there probably is no panic - that contingency plans are being updated, but that there isn't much evidence of serious preparatory work for military incursions being done, and that the articles being written these days are light on specifics for exactly that reason. Alas, he then decides that he's being just a bit too reassuring, and that realism demands he toss in a caveat.

A war with Iran started purposefully or by accident, will be a mess. What is happening now though is not just an administration prudently preparing for the unfortunate against an aggressive and crazed state, it is also aggressive and crazed, driven by groupthink and a closed circle of bears.

The public needs to know first, that this planning includes preemptive plans that the President could approve and implement with 12 hours notice. Congress should take notice of the fact that there is a real war plan -- CONPLAN 8022 -- and it could be implemented tomorrow.

Second, the public needs to know that the train has left the station on bigger war planning, that a ground war -- despite the Post claim yesterday that a land invasion "is not contemplated" -- is also being prepared. It is a real war plan; I've heard CONPLAN 1025.

Great.

There are a couple of explanations for this flood of Iran-attack chatter out in prominent places (and thanks go to Laura Rozen for providing links and extended quotes). The Times has run an article suggesting that the Bush administration is playing a bit of a spin game - not just for the benefit of the Iranians, but also for their traditional diplomatic allies.

"Is it a good thing for the Iranians to think there are occasions where the U.S. would use force? Sure," said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who directed the Air Force's definitive study of the first war against Iraq. "But I don't get a sense that people in the administration are champing at the bit to launch another war in the Persian Gulf."

Others suggest that the vague drumbeat of talk about military action may be less aimed at Tehran than at China and Russia — two countries that have said they oppose even the threat of economic sanctions against Iran, much less threats to set back the Iranian program by obliterating its facilities.

"In Tehran, the threat of military action is double-edged," said Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard security expert who worked on nuclear issues in the Clinton administration. "It may scare the leadership, but it could also cause people to rally around the leadership. Where it's most effective is showing the Russians and the Chinese that we are serious about stopping this program."

The question is how serious, and on that question the administration seems happy to create a strategic fog. Officials at the Pentagon say military planners are examining and updating a variety of contingencies for possible military action against Iran. But they quickly add that such updates are routine.

Chris Nelson, of the Nelson Report, thinks there's another level to it:

Every paper and magazine of national stature has pieces with increasingly anxious quotes from past and present US officials, increasingly frank about their fears for the future.

Step back, and think about what we are really hearing from the US intelligence and military community: on one level, sure, there is a big psy-war operation being conducted by both Washington and Teheran (see today’s Washington Post) as each seeks to influence the sanctions debate at the United Nations, and whatever comes next.

But if you look at the pattern of stories in recent weeks, examine the details of both anonymous and on-the-record quotes, you see that there’s another game underway, and our sources say it’s called “pre-empting Bush” by laying out contingency plans, including the most bizarre, such as using tactical nuclear weapons on the Natanz reactor complex.

The rising drum beat of revelations, our sources argue, can have only one serious meaning: US military leaders want to force a public debate which makes it difficult for the President to talk himself into ordering a military solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. [...]

What terrifies serious US military, intelligence, and diplomatic players is how this Administration can turn a tactical military victory into strategic catastrophe.

Hit Natanz...then what? That’s the big question our sources are asking. After any US air strikes, does Iran meekly fold its nuclear tent and bow to the all-mighty will of George Bush? Or does Iran escalate its intervention in Iraq against US troops and interests...then Jordan...then Turkey...and, always, Israel...not to mention the Asian and European oil lifelines in the Gulf?

I've got no direct link - I'm not cool enough to be a Nelson recipient - but Ms. Rozen was kind enough to toss it up.

There's no internal inconsistency in the idea that outside experts might overreact to an administration psy-op/diplomatic positioning gambit, of course, but my own feeling is that Seymour Hersh is very unlikely to have been completely played, given his considerable experience - and, anyway, the administration does have a history of making geopolitical calls that can best be described as "barking mad."

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has reminded me that James Fallows and the Atlantic pulled together a group of experts and gamed out potential American-Iranian confrontations back in 2004, as a bleak kind of thought experiment. A big hunk of the concluding page follows.

About Iran's intentions there is no disagreement. Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, and unless its policy is changed by the incentives it is offered or the warnings it receives, it will succeed.

About America's military options there is almost as clear a view. In circumstances of all-out war the United States could mount an invasion of Iran if it had to. If sufficiently provoked—by evidence that Iran was involved in a terrorist incident, for example, or that it was fomenting violence in Iraq—the United States could probably be effective with a punitive bomb-and-missile attack on Revolutionary Guard units.

But for the purposes most likely to interest the next American President—that is, as a tool to slow or stop Iran's progress toward nuclear weaponry—the available military options are likely to fail in the long term. A full-scale "regime change" operation has both obvious and hidden risks. The obvious ones are that the United States lacks enough manpower and equipment to take on Iran while still tied down in Iraq, and that domestic and international objections would be enormous. The most important hidden problem, exposed in the war-game discussions, was that a full assault would require such drawn-out preparations that the Iranian government would know months in advance what was coming. Its leaders would have every incentive to strike pre-emptively in their own defense. Unlike Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a threatened Iran would have many ways to harm America and its interests. Apart from cross-border disruptions in Iraq, it might form an outright alliance with al-Qaeda to support major new attacks within the United States. It could work with other oil producers to punish America economically. It could, as Hammes warned, apply the logic of "asymmetric," or "fourth-generation," warfare, in which a superficially weak adversary avoids a direct challenge to U.S. military power and instead strikes the most vulnerable points in American civilian society, as al-Qaeda did on 9/11. If it thought that the U.S. goal was to install a wholly new regime rather than to change the current regime's behavior, it would have no incentive for restraint.

What about a pre-emptive strike of our own, like the Osirak raid? The problem is that Iran's nuclear program is now much more advanced than Iraq's was at the time of the raid. Already the U.S. government has no way of knowing exactly how many sites Iran has, or how many it would be able to destroy, or how much time it would buy in doing so. Worse, it would have no way of predicting the long-term strategic impact of such a strike. A strike might delay by three years Iran's attainment of its goal—but at the cost of further embittering the regime and its people. Iran's intentions when it did get the bomb would be all the more hostile.

Here the United States faces what the military refers to as a "branches and sequels" decision—that is, an assessment of best and second-best outcomes. It would prefer that Iran never obtain nuclear weapons. But if Iran does, America would like Iran to see itself more or less as India does—as a regional power whose nuclear status symbolizes its strength relative to regional rivals, but whose very attainment of this position makes it more committed to defending the status quo. The United States would prefer, of course, that Iran not reach a new level of power with a vendetta against America. One of our panelists thought that a strike would help the United States, simply by buying time. The rest disagreed. Iran would rebuild after a strike, and from that point on it would be much more reluctant to be talked or bargained out of pursuing its goals—and it would have far more reason, once armed, to use nuclear weapons to America's detriment.

Just for the record.

By the way, about that war we're fighting?

There's a significant story in Monday's Post.

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

It's an interesting article, and I can't even say that the program it describes is completely stupid; some people are apparently at least partially attributing Iraqi rejection of foreign jihadists in Anbar to these efforts, and - though it may not make much difference in terms of the larger conflict - it's probably a good thing if it lasts.

Still, it's also clear that there's a domestic aspect to this policy as well - not just the inevitable blowback from an increasingly integrated global press, but specific instances of American reporters being tweaked to tell a story that exaggerates al-Qaeda's role in the Iraqi insurgency. It's not the greatest offense this administration has perpetrated against the American people, but it's not something to be proud of.

A pretty good day for Italy (tentatively).

Italy's centre-left opposition has won a narrow victory in the lower house of parliament, official results say.

It won 49.8% of the vote against 49.7% for the centre-right, according to interior ministry figures.

The head of the centre-left coalition, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, told cheering supporters in Rome: "Victory has arrived".

But the claim has been contested by the ruling centre-right coalition of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

[From the BBC.]

Now, as a man who remembers the Florida recount, I'm quite prepared to extend some worry on the Italians' behalf - ambivalence in elections sucks, and I'm not at all confident that people in high office are going to resist the temptation to game this to their own benefit.

Still, I'm gonna hope for the best; Romano Prodi may be less than an inspirational figure, but at least he presumably wouldn't be taking office to keep himself out of jail.

The scariest damn thing I've read all year.

I'm just not being cute, either - Seymour Hersh has a piece out in the New Yorker on the state of American intentions toward Iran, and it includes passages like the following:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.”

If this is true, then these are the dumbest fucking people on the planet, and they need to be contained before they really break the world. You'd think that they would've rung the nationalism bell enough within the US to understand how the system works, but - hey, for emphasis! - unprovoked attacks on unpopular regimes makes them more popular. This isn't rocket science! You can't use reverse psychology while bombing! When a state's dignity is under attack, particularly if lives are being lost, the first people in a position to benefit are members of the sitting government. They can demonstrate empathy, they can promise revenge, and they can blame all their screwups on the emergency caused by outsiders - for God's sake, it's the Bush administration's post-9/11 playbook thrown back at us!

Seems to me that the only way you can use direct aggression to destroy the legitimacy of a sitting government is to reduce the entire nation to absolute incoherence. I'm talking at least tens of thousands of deaths, collapsed infrastructure, and the total annihilation of personal security. And I hope to God that's not what these idiots have in mind.

"Saving Iran is going to be his legacy." Could he really be that stupid?

Legal, but slimy.

But legal.

I'm talking about the revelations from camp Fitzgerald, of course - the latest big news-grabber in the Scooter Libby file is that Mr. Libby asserts (and the White House doesn't deny) that he fed Judy Miller theretofore classified information at the behest of the president and the vice president. This wasn't anything directly to do with Valerie Plame, I should stress; Mr. Libby's still out in the wilderness on his own on that front. It was just a selective sampling of US intelligence meant to make the Bush administration's comments on Iraqi WMD look reasonable.

As far as I can tell, the weight of blogospheric opinion (even among my fellow lefty travelers) rests on the following point: the president, as the head of the executive branch, is the ultimate arbiter of what's classified and what's not. The most recent executive order on the matter came out in 2003, if you're curious. Yes, there are almost certainly procedural steps that the Bush-Cheney-Libby operation simply ignored, but that's the president's prerogative - if only because nobody with the standing to oppose these actions could ever get a case to a courtroom.

That said, let's stress what seems to have happened. The president selectively declassified the parts of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that supported his case (a case we now know to have been false), while maintaining the classification of the bits that now seem to have been more in accord with reality. His agents then tried to peddle the stuff off anonymously, in the hopes that Judy Miller would present the appropriate details as the result of unbiased journalistic diligence, rather than crass manipulation. It was dishonest, and disrespectful of the American people, and I just thank God the White House is catching some blowback from it.

Let me toss in one other bit, from Greg Sargent at Tapped:

Let's state this as clearly as we can: Wass [sic] says there is a piece of paper out there which constitutes hard evidence that Bush withheld critical info from the American public as he made the most critical decision a president can make -- the decision whether to go to war. Jaded DC hands will say, "Old news -- everyone knew there was dissent within the bureaucracy." Fine. But Wass's story says more than that -- he says there's proof of the extent to which Bush knew of that dissent, that he deliberately concealed it from the public, and that Rove thought this fact could "severely damage" Bush's reelection prospects if it surfaced.

The latest Libby revelations suggest, yet again, just how spooked Bush and his advisers were about the possibility that the truth about the runup to the war would come out. They suggest, yet again, that there's a great deal we don't know about the biggest story of this presidency.

True enough.

You might take a minute to look at Section 1.7 of that executive order, by the way.

(a) In no case shall information be classified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;

(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;

(3) restrain competition; or

(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

Call me cynical, but I think history is going to judge that this administration's classification policy pretty much craps all over those bits.

Nothing to do with anything . . .

But, starting here, Andrew Sullivan has a string of ruminations on his blog about the state of contemporary Islam, and its potential compatibility with modern, Western civil rights and participatory government.

I don't have anything to say to it directly, but it reminds me of one of the great hopes of my twenties - one whose fruition has been unhappily postponed over the last few years. Quick and dirty: it's probably the Muslim communities in Europe that are best positioned to produce the scholarship and the political/theological traditions that'll one day happily supplant Wahhabiism as Sunni Islam's movement on the rise. It's a longer haul than I'd originally dreamed - friction with nativist trends in European countries is radicalizing European Islam more than anyone on my side of the ideological lines would want, and it may well be that the internet and the rise of easy international communication is stunting the development of independent regional authorities in the Western periphery of the Muslim world.

Still, it's in Europe where Muslim population density and wealth combine with a modernist landscape - and where large pools of educated people are best positioned to weigh the merits of multiple traditions, and to pick and choose what they want for themselves on the basis of some kind of direct experience. It may be forty or fifty years off, or worse, but I really do bet that that's where the Muslim renaissance is going to start.

Just a thought.

Huh. More good news from Israel and Palestine?

This isn't much more than calculated leak, but at least it's the kind of leak that isn't designed to do any harm.

Israel is considering limited contact with the Hamas-led Palestinian government as part of efforts to prevent a humanitarian crisis in the territories, senior government officials in Jerusalem said Wednesday.

The sources spoke ahead of a special discussion on Israeli-Palestinian Authority relations to be chaired next week by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

[From the English-language edition of Ha'aretz.]

The only thing I can think to say - that would fit into a paragraph, anyway - is that this falls under the category of "necessary but not sufficient." Restricting Hamas's ability to use the finances and the structure of the Palestinian rump state to kill Israelis is all well and good, but starving Palestinians as part of a pre-emptive strategy is both immoral and likely to result in less safety later on. Now all we need is some creative application of pressure on the Russians, so that they carrot-and-stick Hamas along toward something like a formal cease-fire, and we're all set!

. . .

It's possible, anyway.

If you're a creationist, please skip to the next post.

There's a better than even chance I'll insult someone you admire in it!

This time around, it's all for the amateur fossilheads:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

In the fishes' forward fins, the scientists found evidence of limbs in the making. There are the beginnings of digits, proto-wrists, elbows and shoulders. The fish also had a flat skull resembling a crocodile's, a neck, ribs and other parts that were similar to four-legged land animals known as tetrapods.

Coooooool.

The gang that couldn't shoot straight strikes again!

Which is to say, the word out of Britain is that we're on the verge of once again trying to make the world a safer place through flailing wildly on unstable ground.

The United States government is hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little international support. British military chiefs believe an attack would be limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants - a land assault is not being considered at the moment.

For the record, I'll happy admit that Iran having nuclear weapons would be a very, very bad outcome. That's not even under discussion.

The salient question here is instead "Can the Bush administration (along with the Blair administration) successfully anticipate and manage the consequences of acts of violence inside Iran?" - and there's absolutely nothing on the record to make me think they can. The failed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq calls into question their capacity to choose appropriate targets in Iran. The Iraqi civil war calls into question their ability to respond to political blowback in the Muslim world for launching unprovoked attacks in a sovereign nation. The current state of our diplomatic relations with basically everyone else on the planet calls into question their ability to get this past the international community with even tatters of prestige intact.

The fact is, military action in Iran - particularly now, and particularly as conducted by these people - is way more likely to do us (to say nothing of the Iranians themselves) harm than good.

One other thing, for the record: if these attacks just happen to coincide with the mid-term congressional elections, at just the right moment for Republicans to shout that they're tougher on national security than Democrats, then it stops being merely stupid and rises to the level of actual evil. I mention this just so I'll be able to say it was seen coming.

The Supreme Court just let us down.

Looks like the powers the executive branch has arrogated get to stay uncontested for the foreseeable future. I actually can respect the argument behind the deferral, that the wrong has already been redressed - even though I strongly suspect that certain members of the court are using that as a fig leaf over their hairy partisan agendas - but, really, the principles of governance that came into play with Jose Padilla's detention are still in play today, and they go pretty directly to the heart of our constitutional system. If the Supreme Court isn't going to lunge for the first opportunity to clarify matters, then what the hell is it there for?