Oil hit $144 a barrel today, making good on a threat reportedly issued by Osama bin Ladin back in the good old days. Back then, of course, it was some over-inflated bogeyman intended to represent the extremity of evil he was capable of.

Now, we call it, “the results of a short-sighted energy policy.”

”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.

Gasp. The horror. The article from October, 2001 went on to predict things would be stable, but one never knows what Middle East instability might lead to. Best not rock the boat!

…Most Western politicians and oil industry experts say they believe assurances from the Middle East that oil supplies will stay stable as the American-led attacks on terrorist groups continue. But in such a profoundly changed world, they concede, anything is possible. [Ed. Note: Emphasis mine.]

“Anything,” such as, I don’t know, an enormous war in the Middle East that cost more than Vietnam from ‘65 to ‘73 and a soaring debt devaluing the currency oil is valued in.

Do not be fooled, dear reader - your pump-side woes are not due to lack of supply! If we drill in ANWR, offshore and Dinosaur National Park, we’ll still only affect the oil market marginally and get a touch more crude out of the bargain. And the people selling your local Gas-O their petrol have plenty of crude. Supply is not the problem behind the prices.

The problem is two-fold. One part is explained easily enough: Nations with booming industrial growth - remember, all those jobs we shipped overseas? - like India and China are willing and able to out-buy us.

Second is also clear, but a bitter pill for many proud Americans to swallow: Yes, the corporations are screwing you on the price.

Soaring oil prices lifted Chevron Corp.’s annual profit to $18.7 billion in 2007, the fourth consecutive year that the San Ramon company made record amounts of money.

Exxon Mobil, the country’s largest oil company, reported on Friday that its 2007 profit hit $40.6 billion, a 3 percent increase from 2006, while sales passed $404 billion. No American business has ever scored a higher profit. [Ed. Note: Again, emphasis me.]

So does this mean Osama won? Did he use some strange ray to influence the oil companies to raise the prices, or secretly connive with the Chinese to take all the blue-collar jobs and use the money they generated to buy up American debt?

No, actually, that was America that did it to itself.

On the latter point, just about everybody in the political establishment this side of John Edwards beats the “free trade” drum. And on the former, I’m sorry, but you elect an oil man and his Vice-oil man, and you’ll get a government by and for oil men. It’s a simple matter of who you’re accountable to, and after spending his life surrounded by, supported by, loved by people in the oil and oil-related industry, I doubt the guy’s going to do other than pour money into their pockets.

I would love to be proved to the contrary, but nothing in our energy and fiscal policy I’ve found will do that.

So yet another of bin Ladin’s fiery doomsaying has befallen us thanks to our democratic will - or duping, depending on your outlook on the American on the whole. We chalk that up along with being bogged down in Afghanistan and unable to solve a single major foreign policy crisis - North Korea, Darfur, Iraq, Palestine - since 9/11.

Compared to Osama’s fatwas, Karl Rove and his charts just don’t even rate.

I return to work to find the happy holidays abruptly over. Benazir Bhutto has been killed by a suicidal assassin in Pakistan.

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday by an attacker who shot her after a campaign rally and then blew himself up. Her death stoked new chaos across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

At least 20 others were killed in the attack on the rally for Jan. 8 parliamentary elections where the 54-year-old former prime minister had just spoken.

Everything since has just been chaos and commentary. The chaos is that the Pakistani people are, understandably, distraught. They’re also understandably suspicious of each other - the liberals of the hardliners under Musharraf, and everyone of the militants. The combination of both those things has been rioting.

I’m not sure if most in the West appreciate how grim this is. It makes the capture of Saddam look like Anna Nicole Smith’s demise by comparison. Understanding the gravity of this requires understanding some things about Pakistan. It should become clear that Pakistan is not just “our important ally in the War on Terror”. It is one of the potentially scariest places on earth. And bear in mind as we review this list of qualities and qualms that when I say ‘Pakistan’, I mean the regime in charge - the real power in Pakistan, despite what the ballot boxes suggest, the Pakistani secret services, the ISI.

Pakistan was the father and the cradle of the Taliban. Pakistan has large stretches of its country that it doesn’t directly control, run by warlords. Pakistan is currently in a hot war with India over a little place called Kashmir that few people know anything about beyond that it’s the title of a really, really great Led Zeppelin tune, but that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Pakistan has a very liberal media, when it’s not being shut down or commandeered by the military junta that runs Pakistan. Pakistan has a very large military, that the US given over $5 billion of military aid and much more other aid to, only to have much of it spent on weapons to fight India or simply stolen. Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Pakistan has sold those nuclear weapons to our good friends Iran and North Korea, through its “rogue” scientist - and national hero - A. Q. Khan. Pakistan also has most of its 80 to 120 nuclear weapons aimed at India, and whereas the USA and the USSR had about fifteen minutes to confirm the other had fired a nuclear first strike against them, Pakistan has only about thirty seconds - in short, the two nations are rather jumpy. Pakistan has a right to be jumpy in other regards: It borders Afghanistan (a war zone), Western China (a war zone), India (on a war zone) and Iran (not a war zone, but kind of scary).

So Pakistan could use a western-looking leader. Today, she was killed. This practically ensures that the fellow who seized power by military coup a decade ago, has bilked us out of billions and is cozy with all manner of the militants we’re fighting in the GWOT will stay in power.

Happy New Year.

It’s not the helm that decides the course of our lives, but the sea, wind and wood. We lose sight of this sometimes, as effort and routine struggle to establish some semblance of identity. In the end result though, our lives are not in our control. We decide our actions, but it’s fate, chaos, divinity or sheer weirdness that determines the result.

The result is a flawed program, at least by ordered, human standards. And any aggregate of action - any organization, any cause, any strategem - is, therefore, only an aggregate of flaws.

A rather brilliant episode of “This American Life“, a weekly radio show broadcast on NPR and hosted online, brought this into acute clarity for me.

“The Arms Trader” deals with one of the few prominent federal terror investigations during the War on Terror. It’s a diagram for deception, disaster and, above all, dumb old human frailty. It is not, however, the kind of story of that sort you’d expect.

9/11 was, for many, a reminder that rules can be broken at any time. A time of prosperous doldrums can become a time of immediate, alarming global conflict. The invincible can be made into the most vulnerable. Box cutters, sleepy security and airplanes can be mixed into weapons of mass destruction.

But in the subsequent months, the government was resolute in trying to project an opposite image - to cast a projection of order, right and absolute action onto the smoke and madness the world had been revealed to be. There was good, it insisted, and evil. Good would, through strength, prevail, and evil would be held to task. And our strength would be clear, mighty and unrelenting.

Things did not quite turn out that way. The reason why transcends the mere trope that any martial conflict is a managed disaster. The reason why is because the vulnerability, fragility, confusion of September 11th is the reality - not some apocalyptic, incidental reality, but the consistent, moment-by-moment reality of our lives. For, on a personal level, a world does not require 19 men, four planes, years of malicious planning to destroy. A car crash can destroy a world. A cancer. A call for help unheard.

We inhabit a universe not of promises and justice, but of embolisms and Sudden Infant Death syndrome. Our entire existence balances on an axis that may, at any time, for any reason, snap. And the cosmos of human relations, for all its lofty achievements and vast, solar-system stretching expansion, is never more solid than that brittle foundation.

“The Arms Trader” reminds us of this. I strong suggest any who have an interest in global affairs, military affairs - or even just human affairs - give it a listen.

How often have you been exhorted to “Remember 9/11″ , or told you live in a “Post-9/11 world”? Usually this statement is used to inspire resolve in the aggressive actions we have undertaken in the Global War on Terror, and to remind us that the caution in violence shown during the Clinton years is undue. Who doesn’t bristle a little when they hear of times when Osama bin Ladin was in CIA crosshairs - under Clinton or Bush - and prudence let him slip away?

The reason why we bristle is because it is an incident of a clear enemy, whose elimination would mean much, escaping because the world’s sole superpower held itself back. This, and because we suspect that no matter what the benefits of our prudence, the result of having such an enemy still alive and busy out there is far worse.

We are faced with a similar decision in Kurdistan today. The PKK, a party of no small power within the nation of our long-time ethnic allies - the Kurds - have been launching attacks from Kurdish land in Iraq against our definite ally, Turkey. As much as we like the Kurds, I assure you that we would strongly dislike a Turkish invasion inspired by fringe extremists in their ranks.

The response contemplated by the US Administration has been the one that many an American would love to see translated from an action film on the silver screen into reality: The idea of sending in United States Special Forces to eliminate the PKK leadership and surgically excise their mechanism of terror against Turkey. Bad guys dead, Turkey appeased, no one need know about it.

But of course we do know about it, given that I’m talking of it, since columnist Robert Novak - he of the Valerie Plame expose’ - decided to channel his latest White House leak into a story about it. Novak clearly disagrees with the plan. No doubt that played a part in his exposing it so that the Kurds and Iraqis of whose nation the Kurds are a part can be properly offended and on the look out for our troops.

Novak’s galling actions aside, the revelation of the plan has made us face the tough question behind “post-9/11″ logic. Do we go so far to fight terror as to disrespect other nation’s sovereignty when actionable intelligence demands immediate action?

Let me put it another way: If we had bin Ladin on a drone plane’s camera in Afghanistan, should we send in the Tomahawk missile or Special Forces soldiers to kill him? How about if he was in Saudi Arabia? How about Pakistan? How about Britain?

It seems that, as much as many sigh and shake their head at Clinton and Bush passing up supposed “sure things” to hit bin Ladin, there is a line they are loath to cross: The kind of “turn him over or die” mentality that inspired the whole invasion of Afghanistan simply doesn’t apply to nations we’re supposed to like.

Why this is can only be due to people either not knowing the situation or not thinking things through. Do people who cry outrage or inexperience when Barack Obama talks of acting on actionable intelligence about al-Qaeda if Pakistan will not act, realize that his is the exact mentality that they criticize Clinton for not having?

And yet Clinton did have such a mentality - in Sudan, in Afghanistan, and in numerous other cases of violence, anti-terror intervention against states we were not at war at. And what happened? We are not at war with Sudan or with Liberia or with the Comoros. It’s funny - nations seem to be reluctant to consider our acts of limited, armed intervention aimed at covertly or surgically eliminating terrorists within their borders to be acts of war, even though, technically, they are. It’s like they don’t want to fight or something.

We are at war in Afghanistan, which Clinton bombed. Not because Clinton bombed them, though. We are at war in Afghanistan still because we had utterly shattered the Taliban and al-Qaeda in late 2001, but as soon as their bits and pieces bounced over the Pakistani border - likely with help from the Pakistani intelligence services who are closely tied with them - we did nothing to pursue them.

Let me emphasize this: We did nothing. We sent not one bomb into Pakistan, nor any troops. Oh, we fought the Taliban and al-Qaeda plenty whenever they were done with their time out, came across the border to Afghanistan, butchered several villages, attacked us, but then they just went across the border again and we let them have a little “me time” to recover unmolested. And, yes, we invaded Iraq, and now have to prevent al-Qaeda from ripping that country apart.

As much a statement of demogoguery “Remember 9/11″ may be and as vague its applicability to policy, we would do well to remember this much about it: Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. Not the Taliban. Not Iraq. Al-Qaeda. And yet, though we scattered the Taliban and toppled Iraq, al-Qaeda has turned both of those locations into a crucible while still managing to carry out attacks in the West. And for nearly seven years we have let the perpetrators of 9/11 sit on the other side of the Pakistani border, amassing strength, while we relied on Pakistan - the original incubator and financier of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and a government loath to intervene in the dangerous tribal areas of its country - to do something.

And what did they do - with our billions of aid and apparently inexhaustible patience? Technically, fought. In reality? A lot more nothing.

Such power was not at al-Qaeda’s disposal before hand.

Do you remember the world then? Al-Qaeda was not easy to find in the news. They blew up the USS Cole, the Nairobi embassy; surely they were dangerous, but did people worry about them much? No.

And how far they have come! They now are an enormous threat in Afghanistan, where nervous NATO nations are stamping their feet and queueing up to leave that quagmire. They are described as “the greatest threat” in Iraq today by the US Administration. Yearly we hear of multiple plots involving al-Qaeda in the US, UK, and European nations. How many people had al-Qaeda killed before 9/11? Around 300. They killed 142 people in Iraq on August 1st alone.

Bush recently called the notion that US actions inspire terrorism to be “flawed logic”, when someone recently pointed out that all evidence was that al-Qaeda was not killing people in Iraq before we invaded. Well then what the Hell has happened? How did we go from “around 300″ to thousands of Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, hundreds of Saudis, thousands of Americans, and the situation in the place we first went to strike them, Afghanistan, going down the tubes, by way of the 3,000 on 9/11?

Two words:

Pakistanti border.

Consider whether risking not offending Musharraf - who doesn’t seem to be willing to do much to fight the foreign al-Qaeda presence, let alone declare war on us - is a good enough excuse for all the above.

There’s no doubt that Iraq is a significant conflict affecting the global war on terror, but it’s now time to take the temperature of the war that started of the now-disheartening “GWOT” - especially since it seems its starting all over again.

To quickly review the status of things in that nation - to be realistic about how politics actually work there, “borderless region of warring tribes” - we’ll look at each of the players and how they’re doing.

NATO
NATO is suffering some fierce casualties at a greater rate than ever before, tangling with both Taliban and local warlords who think they’re getting a little bit too interested in the opium fields that sprang up overnight when the country fell in ‘02. Many NATO nations contributing forces to the effort there are seriously considering withdrawal - most of them European nations with little to prove. Former Warsaw Pact nations have shown no sign of flagging support.

Taliban and al-Qaeda
While somewhat inappropriate to lump these two together, they nevertheless have developed such a tight operational bond during the GWOT that they may as well be treated as a single entity for the purposes of discussing Afghanistan. And both are doing much better there, thank you for asking, as their regrowth since fleeing the Safed Koh nearly six years ago has been practically unmolested. This is as much due to US complancency as anything - the kind of attitude exemplified by President Bush’s comments on the report linked above, saying that al-Qaeda is not as strong as before 9/11 when, in fact, that is precisely what the report says - but Pakistan helped too. But just as it is Pakistan’s protection and quiet support of the Taliban and al-Qaeda that has aided them, it is difference of opinion over what to do with the fickle, duplicitous military junta that has al-Qaeda reportedly undergoing an ideological split.

Pakistan
Yes, nobody really knows what to do with Pakistan these days, though growing public awareness of this in the US due to the report on al-Qaeda prompted the White House to state that “no options were off the table”, including invasion. Not that this is untrue, but it is a poorly timed statement. Firstly, I doubt it was as reassuring to Americans already wringing their hands over a ghastly, insoluble war and wondering whether their overstretched military will ever get out a country less than a fifth the size of Pakistan as it was disturbing to the people of Pakistan. It may come as a shock, but people generally react badly to when you say you’re seriously considering invading them. This is especially the case when President Musharraf and the army of Pakistan had been enjoying a surge in popularity as regards his policies of opposing Islamic militants with open force since the Red Mosque siege. But America has a right to be doubtful, what with Pakistan’s ISI being a long time supporter of Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups it seeks to use as its foreign strong arm of plausible deniability. It surely makes policymakers in Washington eye some very long odds, and ponder whether to go all in on a bet that might be less of a sure thing than the support of Afghanistan’s people.

Afghanistan
Ah, yes. The people of Afghanistan are somewhat of a factor too. How’re they doing? They’re still locking their women up. They’re breaking records for opium cultivation, now providing 92% of the world’s heroin. And they’re getting a touch disgruntled over the increasing amounts of civilian casualties we’re inflicting on them. But by and large, they are the same “rustic” guys as ever, and as likely to side with whoever’s standing beside them at the moment as shoot him in the back when he looks away.

Of all the nations in the history of the world, Afghanistan is the one classically notorious for grinding armies down into dust with malaise, confusion and the stubborn unpredictability of the people. It happened to the Aryans, to Alexander the Great, and on and on, up to Russia and Britain playing their “Great Game” and both losing to the dusty house dealer, and, now, to us. This is not to say we should withdraw from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda leadership is a tempting - albeit perpetually regenerating - target. Bagging bin Ladin would be a solid blow and some good PR for the GWOT. It would hardly slay the hydra and doesn’t even scrape the skin of curing Afghanistan’s ills, but it would be a mark of pride.

It is time, however, for the US to consider how expensive pride can be, and how many great empires found South Asia to be the collector of that tally.

At this moment, as we consider our relations with Pakistan and our stance against al-Qaeda, we might take another page from the books of Alexander and the British, and remember that getting the natives to do your fighting for you always ends up more cost-effective in the end.

A co-worker recently asked my opinion on the bloody outcome to the Red Mosque siege in Pakistan.

I noted I hadn’t commented on it because it lacked the kind of qualities that would drive American debate asunder on the issue. Democrats and Republicans alike would be resolved that the storming of a mosque that abducted citizens for “re-education” would be a good thing. But after a minute’s discussion, I realized it would be worthwhile to post something about how the West would do well to recognize it as not too good a thing.

Many might see the storming of the mosque as a sign that Pakistan’s President Musharraf is making a new effort to eradicate extremism in his country. It is not. It is a case of Musharraf and his handlers in the Pakistani intelligence network - the ISI, which has essentially brokered power in the country for the last three decades - protecting themselves. The Red Mosque was not a problem because it was an extreme religious voice, or a nexus of terrorist support, or a de facto theocracy in a major urban center.

It became a problem when it bit the hand that fed it. The ISI and the Red Mosque had collaborated on a number of matters and, as a result, the Mosque received a blind eye when it came to many of its misdeeds. But when some of its over-exuberant students burned down a government ministry and then sparked violence with the government pickets set up around the Mosque in response, things turned extreme. At that point, the Pakistani government surely wrote off the Mosque as more harm than good, and took a bold move in eradicating its influence in Islamabad.

This does not change the matters that Americans most care about: It does not jeopardize the resurgent, centralized leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan’s frontier provinces - a process the ISI at least abetted, if not entirely facilitated. It does not mean Pakistan’s power is shifting towards the Democratic. It is, in essence, little more than good vintage for bloody watercooler talk.

We noted in last post that as far as foreign entanglements go, Iraq is a thicket of razor wire. We’re doing a good job driving the main insurgent activity into Diyala and out of Baghdad’s immediate environs, but this only serves to give the political factions in the capital the latitude to improve the infrastructure there, and those factions are doing no more than fighting over how best to be factious. Even that latitude is jeopardized by insufficiencies in the Iraqi led and comprised security forces committed to protecting the Green Zone, as an attack this last hour suggests.

So we are investing critical billions - is there any other kind? - into creating a fragile shell for power players who use it as an arena. And why should they do otherwise? The Shia expect Civil War to be an inevitability if they wait long enough, just as they consider their victory in it to be similarly inevitable. The Sunni expect no less from the Shia, and spend their time waving for help with one hand while hoarding weaponry with the other - those that aren’t already formal or informal members of the insurgency. And the Kurds realize they’re running their own show. They profit from the current situation because it means the other two factions are ignoring them. But meanwhile, their house of cards risks tipping into the quagmire as the Turkish Army, some 140,000 strong, stomps their feet and prepares to invade in order to prevent terror cells from striking them from within Iraq’s borders.

That - more so than the July 15th assessment, from which we can only expect more tongue-clucking - is the real Sword of Damocles in this scenario. If the Turks invade Iraq, it will effectively bring a whole different level of conflict to the ailing state, with not a simple two but three major parties involved. It forces the Coalition of the Willing to either defend Iraq from the Turks, defend the Turks from Iraq, or somehow work out an accomodation.

And yet, we have heard nothing from the White House but a bland statement of “concern” from Tony Snow. Not exactly hard words that demand action, nor give the potential crisis it’s due priority - just like the factional disputes in Iraq are shrugged off as someone else’s responsibility. It has to be realized that it’s not a matter of whether the Iraqis can or cannot “stand up” on their own - it is that they have very little incentive to do so. US withdrawal is not a stick that the Shia militias - Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party included - are especially concerned about. They have to be made to care, one way or another, otherwise we are acting inadequately and in vain.

So why do we continue to fight? Why sacrifice for a cause that is not only not our own, but directed by people uninterested in having us?

The answer is succinctly put by Colin Powell: “You break it, you buy it.”

This is our mess, whether we want to lay down lives on it or not. When we wrested control of Iraq from the Hussein government, we had to have the means to control the country ourselves. We didn’t. But the necessity still has not gone away, and abandoning Iraq because it’s unstable only means we enable that instability - enable it and will have to suffer the consequences when it afflicts neighbors we won’t so readily abandon, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel.

I’m not echoing the line about the terrorists following us home. It is not a matter of “fight them there or fight them here”. That’s not the way terrorists operate. Iraq has been a financial sinkhole for al-Qaeda in many ways, but it doesn’t prevent international terrorism from striking directly at the nations of the West. If anything, our presence in Iraq increases the recruitment of organizations like al-Qaeda by making membership in its ranks seem to Muslims like valid forms of resistance against an occupier. Remove us from Iraq and the conflict becomes one between Mesopotamian nations, not between a Muslim resistor and a non-Muslim occupier. Even if resentment against American doesn’t decline, the actual motivating factor of the ongoing resistance will be removed. Internationally, membership in al-Qaeda will suffer.

No, al-Qaeda will do as it always has - strike us however best it can. But, as the war’s detractors have long insisted, Iraq is not about al-Qaeda. The consequences of abandoning it aren’t either.

They are about Turkey, invading to protect itself from a lawless neighborhood harboring terrorists, now without the protection of the US. They are about Iran fostering the rise of a Shia puppet state and stirring the pot of ethnic conflict. They are about Saudi Arabia quietly financing Sunni nationalists to counter Iran. In sum, they are about complete regional upheaval. Doomsday scenarios of an enormous caliphate under Iran’s control are unlikely. More likely are skyrocketing gas prices, a spike in regional terrorist attacks, and a dire risk to American allies.

They are about having to go back, under yet worse circumstances, for yet more unclear objectives.

The political solution does not readily present itself. So far, surprisingly, we have been far more readily disposed to scrap our relatively-successful military operations than we are to scrapping the far more flawed, more important political exercise of the Iraqi government. This seems absurd. We are talking about dismantling the military authority in Iraq avidly enough, when what /really/ is the issue is that political authority needs to be built up - even if it’s from the ground up.

British Raj style of governance may be unappealing. But we need to consider if failure to save Iraq and its surrounding nations from a catastrophe we caused and the likelihood of having to return is even less appealing.

Even though HAMAS’ dominance of its immediate political realm is a substantial improvement for peace, it is a symptom of a horrible tragedy. HAMAS is unmistakably an Islamist, propagandistic and ruthless organization. It unrepentantly foments hate against Israel. This is no more alarmingly evident than in the “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” TV show that has enjoyed a mercifully short life on the HAMAS sponsored “Al Aqsa TV”.

Video of the show, available through The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), is so butchered in its editing that one suspects they could have “proven” President Bush advocated armed resistance against Israel using the same technique. But the facts remain: It is a kid’s show, it at least periodically infuses the audience with chauvanistic rhetoric about world domination and Israel’s misdeeds, and it does, indeed, speak of armed resistance, suicide attacks and the glory of death.

Its most notorious aspect is the swollen charicature of Mickey Mouse they have walking around and squeaking some of the most atrocious lines, “Farfour”. Farfour seems alternately an object of ridicule and of adoration, and so I couldn’t help but wonder if some of the hatred he naively - as he often comes off as a naif - preaches is not condemned by virtue of him saying it. The wondering didn’t last long. Clearly he speaks the spirit of the show, as the majority of what he says is backed up by his grim little co-host, Sanaa, a young girl with a hidjab and an undertaker’s manner.

Farfour calls on resistance against Bush and Israel. He talks about building the “cornerstone” of a global Islamic Empire. Ultimately, just this last week, he was beaten to death by an Israeli official for not selling his grandfather’s land in Tel Aviv. As Sanaa put it, “he died a martyr”.

The rhetoric is shocking in and of itself. Taking a step back then, and trying to remember where such calls for resistance and talk of national supremacy might also have been heard, does little to diminish the vileness of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”. Yes, I am certain there are fundamentalist Christian videos in America that gleefully tell kids come Judgment Day, the sinners will get what’s coming to them and the saved will be exalted. And yes, films like RAMBO Part Three and Red Dawn are just a few famous examples in propaganda against an actual nation of human beings. Even that “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” merges these two aspects, tying them nicely under a ribbon of death-glorification and proffering it to the young, is not the most horrid part of the show.

The most horrid part is that the kids who absorb its hatred and hubris are in a position to actually act on it. They won’t just watch Soviets torn apart and then go to play with their GI Joes with no more worry than the next day’s homework. They won’t watch their family rise out of the reach of a lake of fire into the arms of white and smiling Jesus, and have to merely pray for the Rapture to come swiftly. They will actually go out to tear people apart. Their Rapture could be any day of the week. They are stuck between the pressures of Israeli guns and radical preachings aimed at their heads, of explosive belts and air strikes, of arbitrary, unlawful detentions and arbitrary, unlawful resistance.

That kind of horror has inspired an understandable reaction. Observers have shaken their heads and wanted to banish “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” to the ash-bin. Fatah condemned it. It was removed from television entirely until HAMAS took back Gaza. But this does not remove that most disquieting aspect of the story of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”:

It does not remove those children from that universe of harm and hate. Silence Farfour’s squeaking, and you still have incensed imams, Israeli tanks, crumbling houses, wailing poverty, soldier’s boots in their houses, families dragged away, and missiles - built and paid-for by America - that can shred whole tenements telling them how the world is. And always there is the Quran, taught by the extremists not as the tome of tolerance and inclusion it was meant to be, but as the tool for transcending their worldly misery through most glorious sacrificial fire.

I recently visited the home of Farfour’s cousin, Mickey - Disneyland. For the first time in ages I subjected myself to a trip on “It’s A Small World”. This was not out of a masochistic compulsion - though, yes, the song is still stuck in my head - but out of a genuine desire to be closer to that sentiment of peace and international cooperation. It is that kind of sentiment and cause that the desperate children of the world most need to hear.

We can hope that, somehow, that message reaches them; that we simply don’t know of it because it’s not as lurid as the rabid screechings of the anti-Mickey. We can hope this, but even if it is true, it only does so much. The children of Palestine can watch as much polynational hand holding as TV cares to pour on them. They can be taught to dream all they want of a better future.

But the reality is that they were born for dying in the Unhappiest Place On Earth.

HAMAS recently achieved something that Arab governments from Iraq to Jordan, Egypt to Pakistan, seem either unable or unwilling to do - they freed a Western hostage in the custody of an extremist gang. This should not be regarded as an act of little consequence or of cheap pandering for Western assistance. It sets them apart not only as what the West wants but of what it needs. They are a force of substance, true sovereigns within their domain.

Many despair of HAMAS’ takeover of Gaza. This is the wrong attitude. It is true that HAMAS has the destruction of Israel as a cornerstone of its platform. It is true that they take - or took - aggressive military action against Israel. But it is a mistake to consider these tenets and actions as critical to their political survival and power just because they are characteristic of their doctrine.

HAMAS’ true power emerged not as an instrument of terror against Israel but as hope for the Palestinian people. It is their public works, not their pugilistic demeanor, that won them such support as allowed them to sweep the elections in 2006. They capitalized not so much on the anger against Israel as the disillusionment the people had with the Fatah government. The proof of this is plain to see for the observer who looks beyond the rhetoric and into the actions of the Palestinian movements.

Fatah held power over the Palestinian destiny since its inception in the late 50s, and truly took the reigns after the Six-Day War. They embodied a unified resistance against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands that was both academic and populist, aggressive but scholarly. But rapidly, through the mercenary nature of professional terrorism that knows integrity of cause but not of function, their aims shifted from using their power to simply maintaining and expanding it. Their purpose became less resistance against Israel and more dominance of their people’s future. By the time Yassir Arafat became accepted by the world community as a broker of Palestinian power in the late 1980s, this was evident. Arafat did little to consolidate Palestinian leaders into a functional framework and instead focused on exploiting their loose alliance by offering himself as a source of foreign attention and aid. This led to the formation of an ironically-named “Palestinian Authority” that would sponge up UN and other forms of aid while making none of the internal sacrifices necessary to create an actual authority over the chaos of Palestine. He had all the trappings of a government and none of its coherence.

At Oslo, and later at Camp David, Arafat refused to move the peace process ahead any more than would give him legitimacy as a broker. He remained in power by showing up at the table, but did nothing to actually achieve the aims of peace that brought him there. Where it came to getting more aid and more recognition as a government, he would pursue these ends. But when it came to making the sacrifices necessary to work out a plan with Israel for an actual division of land, he balked.

And why shouldn’t he? He had no real control over the Palestinians, including those, like the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, that nominally swore allegiance to his Fatah party. He could no more make the basic concessions in the peace process than he could make sure that the concessions Israel made would go rewarded and not punished. He, like his sucessor, Abbas, ruled only in name and in numbers of aid dollars.

HAMAS, meanwhile, was as much a resistance to this kind of torpid corruption as it was to Israel. It used organic materials to help Palestinian agriculture while Fatah allowed it to languish. It circumvented Israeli restrictions on access to medical care by establishing community clinics. It found people work and formed unofficial governments in neighborhood communities Fatah only taxed, restricted and left to rot. In short, it did something. It did more than just suck up aid money and drizzle it out at a whim like Arafat did.

It is hard to remember now, but the world community - the Jewish community abroad as well - had high hopes for President Abbas when Arafat died. The feeling was that Arafat had become bloated and indolent, had proved himself unable to run his own security forces or enforce any peace, and had proved to be incapable of running anything more than a self-serving funnel for foreign aid and interests. Abbas, seen as more dynamic, could change this. Whether he could or couldn’t, he didn’t. He has been identical to Arafat in his ineffectiveness to realize the peace vision of the West or the freedom vision of his people.

HAMAS does have control of the people in Gaza, and they got it the hard way - having to work as an outsider, and build from the ground up. As grim and bloody and intolerant as their mission and terrorist actions have cast them, they at least have a foundation of power in the Palestinian realm that Fatah did not. Since their seizure of Gaza, they have proved it.

With the exception of an Israeli attack into Gaza intended to weed out rocket attacks, things have been relatively peaceful from HAMAS. Peaceful, that is, unless you are a terrorist group within their borders. For while HAMAS has little incentive to halt the rocket attacks on Israel that have become its hallmark assault, it has shown it will not do what Fatah and many other Arab states have, for years and at ghastly cost, done. It will not tolerate rival armed bands disrupting order in its territory.

BBC Journalist Alan Johnston, abducted on March 12, was held for 114 days. He had been investigating the HAMAS-Fatah conflict that was, at the time, brewing in the Gaza Strip. The source of the conflict was chiefly over HAMAS being refused the ability to join the defense forces of the Palestinian Authority, even though it could control all of Gaza and had the political legitimacy to do so. During the period of that conflict, diplomatic and violent, Johnston languished. Dozens of protests were held. Fatah talked often about doing things to get him free, and did nothing.

Then, as soon as Gaza was no longer ridden with strife between HAMAS and Fatah, HAMAS acted to free Johnston. First they tried swift negotiation, then threat of violence, and - after being deterred from direct action by Johnston’s Army of Islam captors placing an explosive belt on him - then took more innovative measures. They abducted Army of Islam members and affected, in essence, a hostage swap. It worked. It was not clean but, unlike under Fatah’s security tenure, it was quick and effective. Again, let me emphasize: It worked.

And that is what Israel needs - a Palestinian security force that works. For, whether that force is directed against Israel or against criminals like Johnston’s abductors, it is, unlike Fatah, directed. Fatah cannot control its supposed “allies”, most notably the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has consistently broken cease-fires Fatah put in place and committed numerous atrocities. Israeli and Western politicians may not like HAMAS, but they must recognize that as atrocious as their deeds have been and are, they are better than Fatah spouting pretty words while proving utterly unreliable. A force that is directed, can be directed away. A force that cannot be directed is, at best, an irrelevant bargaining partner and, at worse as the Palestinian Authority’s track record has shown, dangerous.

Many condemn HAMAS summarily on the basis that they call for the destruction of Israel. But did Egypt do any different until Camp David? Did Arafat, before he was given a chance to accumulate more power for himself while never having to actually achieve the peace he was given that power to achieve? The direction leaders wield power in often changes, but their integrity in wielding it rarely does.

This much has become apparent: HAMAS has more in common than Sadat, a man who even worked with the Nazis, than it does with Fatah. Abbas has more in common with his predecessor, who feathered his own nest at the cost of prolonging his people’s agony, than he does with the HAMAS leaders who truly took “all measures necessary” to free Johnston.

And now Israel and its supporters must discern which is the better partner to broker peace with - the one that promises war and acts on it with total authority, or the one that promises peace and exploits its lack of authority to continue a war.

And for those who still see HAMAS as intractable, I would clarify two important qualities of peace making.

First, all peace talks have to be born of the brutality war.

And second, achieving peace takes more than just word.

_________________________________________________

I found this Op-Ed piece by an Israeli scholar to be a brilliant observation of how HAMAS reflects the realities Israel must deal with in the peace process, not the agonizing fantasies that the policies of the West and Fatah indefinitely promote.

Across the world, crucial political scenes are being smeared by sensationalist pot-stirrings and opportunistic spin. Fun as this sounds, these factious foamings do no one any good except for the media and small, petty parties doing the stirring. They endanger the fate of the entire world just so that someone can sell advertising space or keep their campaign chest stuffed.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the proverbial slings and arrows were recently real bullets. But as damaging as the takeover of Gaza by the militant HAMAS party’s militias was in real terms, it’s the subsequent dialogue that does the worst long-term harm. President Mahmoud Abbas of HAMAS’ rival, the entrenched and corrupt Fatah organization made by Yasser Arafat’s grasping hands, was quick to trumpet all allegations of HAMAS brutality in the takeover. They’ve as much as promised a state of siege against Gaza, doling out enough cash to win what little favor it can from the common Palestinians while standing tough against any real cooperation or talk of reforming a unity government with HAMAS.

Outside observers might wonder why Abbas is stalling, when his nascent country is literally divided. The reason is that no sooner than HAMAS cut the lands run by the Palestinian Authority government - though occupied at leisure by the Israeli military - in half, foreign aid from all the western nations that had been cut off since HAMAS was elected began rolling in. Now Abbas doesn’t have any real control over his own militias; he has shown no capacity for actual improvement of Palestinians’ lives or substantial moves towards statehood through negotiation with Israel; he doesn’t, as the conflict two weeks ago showed, even have the capacity to run or defend his government. But he will be a favorite of the cameras now that he’s free to call his former colleagues in the Palestinian government “murderous terrorists”. He will be championed as the lone rational voice in the wilderness of occupied Palestine. And, most importantly for him, he will be able to indefinitely bilk the West of aid money to keep he and his Fatah pals rolling in dough and clinging to power.

This doesn’t give HAMAS a pass either. They’ve been as hardline as ever, but only if you buy into the spin of Abbas and the West do they sound as unreasonable as HAMAS - who has as a party platform the destruction of Israel - customarily sounds. Take note of some of the above points. First, they were denied foreign aid entirely. For those of you unaware, the Palestinian territories essentially subsist solely on aid and slave wages from Israel. Second, HAMAS was elected. Like it or not, the democratic elections chose HAMAS to lead the country - to staff ministries, lead the parliament, and fill all functions except for the highest executive powers that Abbas is now all too happy to exploit, like dissolving the government, enforcing martial law “state of emergency”, and sopping up aid money.

Which brings us to why HAMAS fought to seize Gaza in the first place. The reason is because Abbas and Fatah, such as they are, refused to let any of HAMAS’ people into the Palestinian law-enforcement and military forces which they had exclusive control over. Take a hard look at that, reader. Both sides of our esteemed aisle got their blood up when allegations of vandalism by the outgoing Clinton Administration officials against the White House hit the air waves. Imagine now if the Democrats had controlled not just the White House, but all of the armed forces and police, and refused to let any Republicans serve.

HAMAS first responded by entreaties. Then by negotiations. Finally, after Fatah militias began trading fire with them in the streets of Gaza, they took over. Again, this is not to say that HAMAS is the very soul of logic, but it entirely dispels the notion that Abbas, as he would like to claim, is playing fair. In fact, the last major incursion against the Israelis in Gaza, detailed in an earlier post on this weblog, was not by HAMAS but by one of Abbas’ own Fatah militias!

The chain’s links are easy to follow - HAMAS wins the popularity contest and the government because of Fatah recklessness, corruption and mismanagement. Fatah and the west shut HAMAS out. HAMAS seethes for the better part of a year and then, responding to provocation, takes over. Now they, and not the equally murderous and far more uncontrollable Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade of Fatah, are the “murderous terrorists”. And now Abbas, safe in his West Bank isolation, can play the satrap of the West with the whole of the Palestinian Authority living on his till and the whole of the West casting him as the great white hope.

Meanwhile, a similar slugfest is spiraling around the American airwaves. Yesterday Elizabeth Edwards called into Hardball with Chris Matthews to rake Ann Coulter over the coals for saying:

“If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot,”

A stiff glance at that quote will detect the inference that it requires a larger context. In fact, Coulter was talking about how her earlier comment about Edwards - the notorious “faggot” remark - was itself taken out of context. When she voiced the nasty jab at Edwards, it was in discussing how certain terms were unallowable under the social standards of political correctness. Well, she certainly proved her own point. It is unallowable. Except if, like Ann Coulter, your livelihood thrives on that kind of scandal and divisiveness. “Commentators” - and I use the term very lightly - like Coulter depend on attacks on her to get the media buzzing, get the blog posts up - yes, like this one - and get the TV appearances rolling in.

Her point about Edwards being killed was, in fact, a criticism of the media finding Bill Maher’s comment allowable whereas her remark employing ‘faggot’ was not. In that criticism, she cited Maher as wishing Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. Thus, she reasoned to Good Morning America’s viewership, she would in the future refrain from using the term ‘faggot’ against an adversary, and simply wish they were killed in a terrorist attack.

But Maher did not say that at all. His discussion was, like Coulter’s, about what kind of political speech was allowable. Though pressed into a certain sympathy for the opinion that Cheney’s demise would bring about an end to the military adventurism for which the Vice-President is credited, he was ultimately asking whether or not people posting on the internet - not commentators, nor politicians, nor even bloggers, but respondents to blogs - had the right to say they wished Cheney dead.

All of this is lost in the discourse. And Elizabeth Edwards’ remarks of censure against Coulter, urging her to tone down the rhetoric, were not the end of the pot-stirring either. As is always the case, it cast more attention on Coulter’s inflammatory comments, thus giving her more incentive to voice them. And as for the Edwards side, they immediately posted the comments on their campaign website, got to talking to the press about it, and are profitting vastly as well.

Here we see another chain of spin’s links strangling us: Radical opinions on a website are discussed by Bill Maher. Maher is pressed into stating a position, which is then radicalized by his opponents. Coulter plays off of Maher’s comment, making it sound radical and using it as an excuse to make herself seem more radical. And finally, Elizabeth Edwards and the ailing Edwards campaign raises a loud cry against radicalism that they have exploited to leap to the fore of the election coverage.

Compare us with the Palestinians. Are the stakes as high? Is it, because we have a functioning system of government and they do not, just entertainment? Is it life and death for them, but just good prime time and watercooler talk for us?

It is life and death for everyone.

This kind of twisting of fact, exploitation of distortion and relentless divisiveness is not just throttling the desperate Occupied Territories. Our own government suffers. Budget battles loom, our Iraq legislation is as much a quagmire as that of the Iraqi parliament itself, and domestic initiatives bog down. And this is not only important because it is our country that suffers - it is important because when the world’s superpower languishes, order in the world languishes. Global credibility of America’s leadership is at an all time low. Aid is dysfunctional. Strategic power is diluted and fettered.

Not all this is the problem of George Bush. Remember who voted to give him his war powers and what powers were voted for. In the case of so many of the Executive’s blunders, we now hear his deriders claiming, “We supported him because we did not know”. That is nonsense. The information was out there. The reason we did not hear it then is the same reason as we do not hear now:

The clamor is deafening.

At the core of America’s global woes, we have its ventures in the Middle East. At the core of the Middle East conflict, inspiring and uniting generations of Islamist radicals and anti-American nationalists, we have the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. And at the core of that crisis, the complexities we need to unravel to solve it are being drown by a power elite exploiting the spin. To defeat the disease known as The War On Terror, the cancer of the Palestine crisis must be conquered.

And where is America’s political will - its voting public - in this?

Too busy debating what their favorite soapbox crier - Coulter or Maher - did or did not say.

——————–

Care to see what they did say? See here:

Coulter

Maher

Edwards

But for an even better read, check out how the HAMAS/Fatah feud is already deepening the battle lines of The War On Terror:

Helping Abbas Hurts Real Peace Negotiations

It Also Foments Further Division In The Arab World, Making Them Either Martyrs For Islam Or Traitors

We have never learned the real lessons of 9/11.

We never struck back at the real enemy.

Everyone must bear this burden - Democrats and Republicans alike - that when the ‘world changed’ for so many unaware of the threat of global Islamofascism, key players refused to change to address that threat’s source. Those players are our leaders, chief among them the Bush administration.

We were attacked. Unlike ever before. And by an enemy that, while not a rival state, had clear allegiances, supporters and centers of power. That enemy, al-Qaeda, spanned the globe, but all of its major resources are and were in one place: Saudi Arabia.

15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda’s funding is based in Saudi Arabia. Its extremist sects of faith - the Wahhabist (Salafist) sects of Islam - dominate in the Saudi government and the high levels of society.

This is not ‘guilt by association’. More of al-Qaeda’s top membership is from Egypt than anywhere else. It is that the foremost funder of Sunni extremist groups like al-Qaeda is the Saudi oligarchy. Not necessarily the monarch himself - though his intelligence services do supply al-Qaeda connected groups with funding and direction - but certainly the nobles around him without whose support he cannot rule.

And now, as Iraq enters a critical phase, we find the administration still unable to combat the enemy. Our belligerence is direct towards Iran, even though the vast majority of American deaths in Iraq have been at the hands of Sunni extremists (500 in Shia areas, 2841 in Sunni as of 4.11.07). Almost daily we hear of Iran funding and training fighters of Iraq’s Mahdi Army, but we seldom hear of Saudi Arabia’s training of the Sunnis who are killing us and provoking the Shia far, far more often.

The true threat to any semblance of progressive global stability is Sunni extremism. They are the ones that literally want to blast the entire world back into the dark ages. This is not Mahmoud Ahmedinajad playing to his base by threatening Israel. This is a cadre of real, active, proven martyrs-to-be who intend the devastation of the modern world. And they are led from one place above all - the kingdom of Saud.

There are many hotbeds of Sunni extremism. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya among them. Even the Philippines still has significant al-Qaeda presence. But the crucible in which this inferno of Islamofascism is generated is Saudi Arabia - it is funded, trained and directed from there. Yet though we’ve sent troops and intelligence operatives around the globe, we have never demanded authority over operations in Saudi Arabia. To the contrary, Bush reduced the assets in Saudi Arabia.

I do not argue for war. I do not argue for sanctions. I do, however, argue for all means necessary to destroying our true enemy to be employed.

We have too long attacked the friend of our enemy, while letting our enemy think us their friend. Now, with CIA funding going to al-Qaeda connected groups in order to check Iran’s intelligence operations, we are truly losing sight of our goal.

We must have the courage and conviction to challenge our friends, lest we prove ourselves to all to be lacking in strategic integrity.

The weird “kid-glove” approach the US has been taking on this Iran-hostage situation seems clearer now that an odd coincidence of events has been brought to light.

Looking at the facts only helps a little at understanding what might’ve really gone down.

Facts are one thing. Anybody can accept facts. It’s the conclusions drawn from them - the patterns - that require belief. Faith.

It’s for this reason that people of different political alignments, different cultures or different religions can’t see eye to eye on some things. They can look at the same sets of facts and come away with radically different conclusions.

Look at these events and see if you see a pattern or a coincidence::

Iranian diplomat abducted on February 4 by elite Iraqi Army unit:
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBLA62176420070206

British sailors abducted on March 23:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070323/ts_nm/iraq_iran_britain_dc_14

Iranian diplomat released on April 4:
http://www.nysun.com/article/51853

British Sailors released on April 5:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070405/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_britain_141

And now Sharafi’s making noise about being tortured by proxies of the CIA. The pattern is there for those who want to see it: It looks clear that a Commando unit that works with the US snatched their guy, Iran schemed and snatched the sailors, and the whole mess was quietly resolved over the last week by under-the-table deals and plausible deniability.

Here’s the thing - it doesn’t make much sense. Why would we let the guy go when it only makes us look weaker? Even if the public won’t buy the story of the Iranians, the Iranians would still see us as open to negotiating. Not just negotiating - negotiating for troops that /aren’t even ours/.

Sorting out the facts of a counter-intelligence operation just stands to make the public confused. Feeling the results is the way to judge whether it went down or not.

Before deciding whether America traded favors for hostages - and it can happen, remember the Algiers Accords - decide whether the release of a hostage few people in the world knew about for hostages that were turning the world against Iran would be worthwhile to the US.

“Fight fire with fire” never made too much sense to me as a proverb, and it makes absolutely no sense when it comes to solving gross mismanagement.

Congress just went on a break without sending the emergency war funding bill to Bush. This is not a good thing.

I get that Congress doesn’t want a ‘blank check’ war, but, sorry, folks, you signed it back in 2003. Now is not the time to back out by denying him funding.

This is especially true since the gripe by /everyone/ in the know - grunts, Generals, any strategic mind that’s not a neo-Con - is that the primary problem with the war from the beginning has been that Bush didn’t send enough troops or material for an occupation.

Now he’s /finally/ got the message and /this/ is the moment they cut him off at the knees?

“Bush under supplied the troops and got us into this mess. Now let’s cut off their funding altogether when they have a better plan than ever.” Not good thinking.

Oh, but worry not - the Democrats say that it’s not /so/ much of an emergency:

Unless he can sign a bill by mid-April, he said, the Army will be forced to consider cutting back on training and equipment repair. The problem will grow even more dire if Congress does not send him a bill he supports by mid-May, Bush said.

Democratic leaders, while eager to show backing for the troops, say Bush is overstating the consequences of missing those deadlines. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says the Army has enough bookkeeping flexibility to pay for operations in Iraq well into July.

“Into July” - what a comfort. Now the useless political wrangling can go on for months instead of weeks.

As for the length of the war…well, there’s no telling, considering that what gains the Surge Plan has secured might dry up while Congress is flashing its muscle, teasing our troops with turning off the tap.