Your Children 2: SCOTUS

Regarding the SCOTUS decision banning the death penalty for child rapist, i think this is just another rather misguided judgement from our Supreme Court. I shudder to think what their decision will be today regarding the DC ban against gun ownership.

Your Children 1: Political Ads

in response to the MoveOn add.

Silly Seals

Seems like something for high school wannabees.

Jihadists and AL Qaeda

Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalized by Qaddafi, had known bin Laden from their days fighting the Afghan communist government in the early '90s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

The night of Benotman's arrival, bin Laden threw a lavish banquet in the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the frugal Al Qaeda leader. As bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some 200 jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. "It was one big reunification," Benotman recalls. "The leaders of most of the jihadist groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody within Al Qaeda."

Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global jihad he had announced against the United States in 1998. Over the next five days, bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman Al Zawahiri, met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. They sat on the floor in a circle with large cushions arrayed around them to discuss the future of their movement. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past twenty years."

Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilized the people," recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the '90s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told bin Laden that the Al Qaeda leader's decision to target the United States would only sabotage attempts by groups like Benotman's to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it."

* * * * *

Unsurprisingly, Al Qaeda's leaders have been thrown on the defensive. In December, bin Laden released a tape that stressed that "the Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders ... are not the intended targets." Bin Laden warned the former mujahedin now turning on Al Qaeda that, whatever their track records as jihadists, they had now committed one of the "nullifiers of Islam," which is helping the "infidels against the Muslims."

Kamal El Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who helped bring in moderates at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, believes that Al Qaeda's days may be numbered: "No government, no police force, is achieving what these [religious] scholars are achieving. To defeat terrorism, to convince the radicals ... you have to persuade them that theirs is not the path to paradise."

Read it all!

The more things change ...

the more things stay the same:

Want more George W. Bush foreign policy? Elect John McCain – or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Regardless of who wins in November, the current foreign policy will live on in the next White House.

None of the main candidates has disavowed the war on terror. Each has called Mr. Bush tactically deficient. But the debate over the war on terror is over how, where and when. The candidates have all argued that they would do a better job of fighting it.

Administrations bequeath foreign policies to their successors that are then tweaked, but rarely transformed. The seeds of Ronald Reagan's Cold War strategy were sown in the defense buildup of the later Jimmy Carter years. President Bush's purported "obsession" with Baghdad began in the hawkish statecraft of Vice President Al Gore. In 1998, Bill Clinton made regime change official U.S. policy, and in 2003 Mr. Bush made it a reality.

The last great liberal hope to win the White House – Bill Clinton – committed more troops to more parts of the globe than any president since World War II. Since the end of the Cold War, America has undertaken at least nine military interventions overseas, under three presidents of both parties in two distinct historical eras (pre- and post-9/11). This history suggests that the next great liberal hope – Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton – would probably continue the trend.

Furthermore, the departure of Mr. Bush will hardly leave the nation's foreign relationships in tatters. Despite much American introspection, Euro-liberal sniping and Latin American leftist fantasizing, the quantity and quality of America's formal friendships have endured, if not actually increased, since 2001. Eighty-four governments, out of a world total of some 192, are formally allied with the U.S.

Foreign leaders such as France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel clearly see that their true interest resides in maintaining and renewing their relationships with the U.S. Few governments have prospered by severing such bonds. In Asia as well, nations are looking to strengthen their ties to America. China needs the U.S. market. India is moving toward America, not away.