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The Hajj: Now With Free Internet Access!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:39:00 EST

Can't quite come up with the verse of the Koran you need for an argument? Wondering about the Prophet's views on proper attire for the hajj? Want to send mom a snap of you fulfilling your once-in-a-lifetime religious obligation?

For the next couple of weeks in Mecca, pilgrims coming for the hajj will be able to Wikipedia answers to those questions and send email in a flash thanks to a temporary Wi-Fi mesh network covering much of the holy city.

Hajjis, as the pilgrims are called, come to the city in Saudi Arabia from around the world for several days of religious rituals. More than 2 million gather each year. A network of about 70 meshed routers from Tropos Networks has been set up to provide free Internet connectivity, according to Denise Barton, director of marketing at Tropos. Users only have to register before using it. Barton believes it is the first public Wi-Fi network set up for the Hajj.

How awesome is the modern world that those first three sentences appear next to each other? To review: Practitioners of an ancient religion visit a chunk of black stone (possibly a meteorite) more ancient even than their own faith. After a few times around the old Kaaba, they can retire and check their email. Outstanding.

Via Julian Sanchez

Al-Qaeda's Forerunner

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:22:00 EDT

Not many people can tell you much about the November 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by Islamist militants. That's partly because the Saudi authorities, as is their way, kept a tight lid on information during that fateful two-week period when the regime's survival seemed, for the first time, in danger. Little changed afterward by way of transparency (even if the Saudis released a fascinating Arabic-language video on the event, pouring opprobrium on the militants). That is why Yaroslav Trofimov's just-published book The Siege of Mecca is so valuable a document, not only in describing the murky events surrounding the takeover almost 28 years ago, but also as a backgrounder on the depth of Salafist tendencies in Saudi Arabia and the later emergence of Al-Qaeda. Trofimov, an Asia-based reported for the Wall Street Journal, has written extensively on Islam and the Middle East. An earlier book, Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu, was selected as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post.

reason: What was the Grand Mosque siege all about and how long did it last?

Yaroslav Trofimov: The group that took over the mosque was led by Saudi preacher Juhayman Al-Utaybi, a former corporal in the Saudi National Guard, and consisted of several hundred gunmen from many countries. It had the apocalyptic vision of a global clash of civilizations that would lead to the triumph of true Islam and the end of the world as we know it. The group abhorred the Saudi state and other Arab regimes as infidel, and bitterly objected to any Western presence in the Arabian Peninsula. The battle for the Grand Mosque started on November 20, 1979—at the first dawn of Islam's year 1400—and lasted precisely two weeks.

reason: What was the casualty toll? The Saudis greatly underestimated the number of deaths, while Lawrence Wright, in his The Looming Tower, cites unofficial sources as saying some 4,000 people were killed.

Yaroslav Trofimov: In the first few days after the siege ended, Saudi Arabia's Interior Minister Prince Nayef announced that 60 Saudi soldiers, 117 rebels and 26 civilian pilgrims had been killed. In following weeks, he doubled the number of acknowledged military deaths, to 127, and never issued an update for the civilians or rebels. The total number of officially reported deaths, including the rebels killed either during the siege or beheaded in public thereafter, stands at about 330. But many diplomats posted in Saudi Arabia at the time, as well as Juhayman's supporters, believe that the true number of fatalities is significantly above 1,000.

reason: Before the attack, Juhayman had surprising support within the Saudi religious establishment. Can you explain that relationship?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Juhayman was very active in the Islamic outreach movement that had been started by Sheikh Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, the blind cleric who would later become Saudi Arabia's supreme Islamic authority. This movement sought to combat the spread of secular values, and to return Saudi youths to the teachings of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab—the ultra-puritan ideology nowadays usually known as Wahhabism. These activists viewed the existence of television, Western embassies, or portraits of the king as incompatible with Islam, and weren't shy about expressing such sentiments. This led to the arrest of many of them in 1978. However, thanks to Bin Baz's intervention, these militants were all quickly released, and proceeded to plot their invasion of the Grand Mosque the following year.

reason: Paradoxically, though Juhayman and his co-conspirators were executed, their ideas somehow triumphed. Can you explain why?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Indeed, as Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir province and son of King Faisal, put it a few years ago, "we have eliminated the individuals who committed the Juhayman crime, but we have overlooked the ideology that was behind the crime. We let it spread in the country as if it did not exist."

He said this because in order to secure religious assent from the clergy, or ulama—assent without which many Saudi troops refused to fight in the holy shrine—the royal family had to promise the clerics that it would reverse the slow modernization that had been occurring in the kingdom up until then. The royals fulfilled their promise. In the weeks after the siege ended, female newscasters were taken off television; the enforcement of the ban on alcohol became much more severe; and vast amounts of oil money started flowing into the clerics' Wahhabi proselytizing campaign around the world. And it's precisely this missionary effort all over the Muslim world that subsequently created a pool of eager recruits for Al-Qaeda.

reason: One widespread myth you puncture is that French commandos participated in the Saudi effort in the Grand Mosque to regain control of the Grand Mosque. What really happened, and why do you feel French participation is often assumed to be true?

Yaroslav Trofimov: France dispatched a team of three elite commandos to Saudi Arabia at the time, and they did play a very important role: they supplied the poison gas that was used to flush the rebels from the Grand Mosque's vast underground labyrinth. They also helped craft the attack plan. But they did all of this from the nearby city of Taef, without actually taking part in the battle in Mecca.

One of the commandos leaked a highly exaggerated version of the events to a French magazine in 1980. Then, the group's leader, Captain Paul Barril—at the time in the middle of serious legal trouble—wrote a book about his various combat exploits. Though the book itself doesn't discuss the Mecca affair, Barril made sure to mention it on the back cover—while putting on the front cover a picture of himself with a Saudi-style headdress and a desert background. Considering that the Saudi government proved to be a chronic liar during the siege, announcing almost every day throughout the crisis that the mosque had been liberated, its denials of French involvement weren't taken at face value.

reason: Saudi management of the Mecca affair was catastrophic, in part because the various princes all needed to maintain control over their particular security fiefdoms. Is that a fair statement?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Saudi management of the affair was frighteningly incompetent, and cost many lives. Prince Nayef famously said during the fighting that he didn't care about the casualties among his troops because anyone dying in battle for the Grand Mosque would be heading straight for paradise. Even though this really was a military operation that required the use of armor and artillery, initially Prince Nayef's Interior Ministry was in charge. Later, the three forces—the National Guard, commanded by Saudi Arabia's current King Abdullah, Prince Sultan's Army, and Prince Nayef's Interior Ministry troops—were thrown into battle together, even though they didn't even have inter-connected radios. A great many died from friendly fire.

reason: What was Osama bin Laden's reaction to the Grand Mosque takeover?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Osama bin Laden was deeply scarred by these events. He was not personally involved in Juhayman's movement—he belonged to a younger, more sophisticated generation that saw novelties like television or, today, the Internet, as potential weapons of jihad rather than the Devil's temptations. But he was upset with the way the Saudi government unleashed its military might on the shrine, damaging it in the process. In an audio message to the Muslim world released in 2004, Bin Laden spoke at length about how the Al-Saud had "defiled" the shrine. To him, Juhayman's gunmen may have made a mistake in occupying the Grand Mosque, but the Al-Saud committed an unforgivable crime by retaking the shrine by force.

reason: You go off on two important tangents in your book, events that took place as the mosque takeover was in progress. One of these is a series of attacks against U.S. embassies and facilities throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia; the second is a Shiite uprising in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. In what way were these events related, and what did they tell us about American vulnerabilities in the Middle East?

Yaroslav Trofimov: The uprising in Mecca began two weeks after the American embassy had been seized in Tehran, and so, naturally, the U.S. government assumed the Iranians were somehow implicated in the Mecca affair, too. The Iranians, of course, were as stunned as everyone else by the uprising in Mecca and were extremely annoyed by American statements accusing them of orchestrating that outrage. Ayatollah Khomeini's office immediately responded by describing the desecration of Mecca's shrine as an "American-Zionist conspiracy," a version widely believed in the Muslim world while the true identity of the gunmen still remained a mystery. Hours after Khomeini's statement, an enraged mob stormed the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing staff and burning down the building. Similar demonstrations erupted around the Islamic world; and in Turkey, one Mehmet Ali Agca escaped from jail, vowing to avenge the sacrilege in Mecca by killing Pope John Paul II.

At the time, one must remember, few people knew about who exactly occupied the mosque. In the Shiite heartland in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province on the Persian Gulf coast—home to most of the kingdom's oil—many young Shiites cheered Juhayman and began an uprising of their own, opening a second front. These Shiite protests, however, were crushed quickly and ruthlessly.

reason: Ultimately, who was the net loser in the Grand Mosque affair?

Yaroslav Trofimov: The net losers were the forces of secularism and liberalism within Saudi Arabia. In the wake of the Mecca affair, the Saudi government rolled back many of the reforms of previous years, and stifled what had been the gradual opening up of the kingdom's society.

reason: You argue that the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca was a precursor to Al-Qaeda. Why do you say this? After all, there were other Islamist groups in places such as Egypt that could easily make similar claims?

Yaroslav Trofimov: Al-Qaeda is really a global movement born out of a union between Saudi Wahhabi zeal, personified by Osama bin Laden, and the Egyptian jihadist tradition, personified by Ayman al-Zawahiri. These two currents came together in a joint operation for the first time in Mecca in 1979. Though Juhayman himself was a Saudi, the gunmen who followed him into the mosque came from dozens of countries—they even included converted African Americans. Most prominent among these foreigners were the Egyptians. They included personalities such as Mohammed Elias, a religious scholar who was one of the leaders of Egypt's Gamaat Islamiyya (Islamic Groups) and who had taught Islam to men like Zawahiri. There had been Islamic movements before, but this was the first transnational group carrying out an attack in modern times.

reason: How did the Grand Mosque takeover affect Saudi behavior when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan in December 1979?

Yaroslav Trofimov: The Saudis were all too happy to redirect the zeal of Juhayman's sympathizers toward a new enemy—the godless Russians. The U.S., whose embassies had been torched across the Muslim world just a few weeks earlier, was even more eager to seize the opportunity of using the jihadists against communism. After all, the CIA analysis of the Mecca uprising dismissed it at the time as a one-off, a throwback to the disappearing Bedouin past, and estimated that radical Islam posed no threat to the region or American interests.

reason: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, like the Mecca mosque takeover that had taken place shortly before, led the Carter administration to issue the so-called Carter Doctrine, whereby "any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region [would] be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America..." That doctrine endures to this day. How will affect a U.S. pullout from Iraq, if the net result is that it leads to Iran imposing its power on the Gulf?

Yaroslav Trofimov: It's hard to imagine the U.S. letting Iran control the Persian Gulf region. The U.S. is just too reliant on Gulf oil, and on the cooperation of Gulf monarchies. One must remember that President Jimmy Carter initially wanted nothing to do with the Gulf—after all, he watched and let the Shah's regime collapse in Iran, as if it didn't matter to America. But he was drawn back into the region by the simple fact that the Gulf's oil resources are indispensable. Any administration in the U.S. will have to deal with that reality.

reason: The message from the Mecca mosque takeover was that the Saudi system was surprisingly weak, even illegitimate in the eyes of a number of its citizens. Do you believe that's still the case today?

Yaroslav Trofimov: The loss of Islam's holiest shrine—even a loss that lasted two weeks—was highly embarrassing, and the Saudi system was shown to be weaker than everyone thought at the time. But it was strong enough to survive the crisis. I think one shouldn't underestimate the adaptability of the House of Saud, their ability to survive and maintain power.

reason: It must not have been easy to find sources for your book, given that the Grand Mosque takeover remains something of a taboo subject in Saudi Arabia. How did you manage to do it?

Yaroslav Trofimov: I had reported from Saudi Arabia before, for the Wall Street Journal, and so I had met many of the younger generation of Islamic dissidents, the so-called sahwa. Once I finally received my visa, I started out by visiting them all and asking whether they knew anyone who had been involved with Juhayman. At the same time, I asked other Saudi acquaintances to introduce me to worshippers and soldiers who were in the Grand Mosque during the siege. A few of the soldiers agreed to share their memories, including the chief of operations for the Interior Ministry's forces during the siege.

The hardest part was tracking down surviving gunmen. Almost all the adult ones were killed after the siege, either in public beheadings or secret executions. I found a few who were 15 or 16 years of age at the time of the uprising. Having survived long prison terms, many of them were too scared to talk. But some opened up, with one staying in my hotel room the entire night and recounting the horrors of the siege blow by blow as he emptied my minibar of its (strictly non-alcoholic) contents.

Towards the end of my research, I also met with Prince Turki, who was Saudi Arabia's head of intelligence during the uprising, and who explained some details of the crisis. I also interviewed all the French commandos who helped secure the mosque, and a number of American diplomats and spies. Crucially, through a Freedom of Information Act request, I obtained the declassification of hundreds of secret U.S. and United Kingdom government documents related to the siege, including the relevant part of the personal diary of the U.S. ambassador in Saudi Arabia, John C. West.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Mecca's Most Prestigious Retail Address

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:28:00 EDT

If the divine command for every Muslim to take a pilgrimage to Mecca isn't enough to get you moving, now there's another reason to go on the hajj: The shopping is fabulous!

Just "steps away from the holy mosque," says the promotional material for the Abraj Al Bait shopping center, "Makkah’s most prestigious retail address" offers "Spectacular view of the Ka’abah" and "Innovative space for a new shopping experience." The seven-spired complex is not yet completed, but when it is it will tower over the Great Mosque (see photo).

From First Things, this look at why many (most?) Muslims are untroubled by this juxtaposition of holiness and commerce:

To a Christian, all that seems like putting a Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, Bloomingdale’s, and the Chocolate Factory next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with extended hours during Holy Week. It looks to us like a desecration....
The hotel and shopping center, however, are not desecrations of their faith. Before he was a prophet, Muhammad was a businessman. And it is perfectly in keeping with honoring him that a market is set up next to the Great Mosque. In fact, there’s always been a market next to the mosque; this one is just going to be bigger, and air conditioned. And more than the Christian heaven (which is primarily characterized by the intimate and intelligible presence of God), the paradise of Islam is the perfection of sensual pleasures. And what better way to give a foretaste of these divine gifts than a mall and a first-rate hotel? And what better place for it than the center of the holy city?
But Islam is different. Commerce is celebrated. And there’s no embarrassment whatsoever about hawking the financial benefits of businesses, like these towers, that only exist because of the hajj. It really is an innovative shopping experience. And for the individual Muslim? Of course, if at all possible, go on hajj, circle the Ka’aba, throw the seven pebbles, perform the required sacrifice, and do it all with the greatest conviction, humility, and devotion. Then shop ’til you drop. Peace be upon you.

For more on the intersection of Islam and the free market, go here.

Much Ado About Shopping

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:40:00 EDT

Last year, a group of conservatives in Saudi Arabia filed a lawsuit against a book they declared to be "an outrage to the norms of Saudi society." The book was too controversial to be published in Arabia itself, but pirated copies were smuggled over the border from Lebanon or sold for hundreds of dollars online. The book's author received death threats and a petition circulated to strip her of her state scholarship to study in Chicago.

It's probably not a situation you'd associate with Bridget Jones, but the book in question is self-proclaimed "chick lit"—albeit with a very political bent. Rajaa Alsanea's first novel, Girls of Riyadh, was only released this month in English, but its 2005 debut in the Middle East sparked both a storm of controversy and a flurry of new literature in Arabia. For months after its publication, conservative Muslims condemned the novel as contravening Shariah law, calling for a government crackdown on its distribution. But the book's popularity continued to spread, even while some critics tried to dismiss its success as a product of Alsanea's feminine wiles: "Rajaa has the looks, and so even when the product, i.e. the novel, is bad it sells and is selling like hot cakes," one disgruntled man told Arab News.

Alsanea's looks don't explain the flurry of debate, news and editorializing it has provoked (reportedly over 250 articles): The Iranian organization Homan claimed that "al-Sanie's frank and sometimes shocking insight into the closed world of Saudi women is making waves," while London's Independent newspaper called it "revealing, hilarious and chilling in turn." It has even become the subject of litmus-test questions in job interviews, and Alsanea herself received a supportive call from the Saudi royal family.

Much ado about a book on the love lives, sex and shopping habits of four rich Saudi girls. A modern epistolary novel, it's written as a series of emails sent to a Yahoo! group list serve by a mysterious, lipstick-wearing Saudi woman. In another world, it would be a trivial lip gloss narrative of life as a desirable young woman in Riyadh. But such a story can't avoid being political—and it turns out that chick lit is a convenient vantage point from which to critique Saudi society. Alsanea explores Saudi values in all their mundane invasiveness; this is a world where possessing The Nutty Professor on DVD is a political act, inviting social disgrace. And beyond the picayune restrictions lies blatant hypocrisy: the Saudi elites enforce dressing conventions at home and happily change into chic Western attire on the plane out of Riyadh.

Details form the basis of Alsanea's careful criticism: In an atmosphere where every action is politicized, and where convention always trumps personal preference, human relations are reduced to envy and power play-which makes chick lit the ideal genre in which to discuss such problems. A friend's wedding is not just a celebration, but a political battleground. While one character, Sadeem, garners praise for her help in planning the party (a suitable wifely quality), the more liberal Michelle draws "sharp looks" for refusing to cover up when the men enter. In short, this feminine world is a one straight out of Mean Girls-backbiting gossip, jealousy and personal politics-only the stakes in Riyadh are higher. It's not a question of high school popularity, but marriage and lifelong prosperity. Yet the basic tools-handbags and husbands-are the same.

The prose stays mostly light, even gratingly so at times. Hushed-up nose jobs in Lebanon, makeup tips, modest robes tailored to show off curves and designer-label hijabs are all part of the bitchy game that decides a girl's future. And even once the thumbprint is on the marriage contract (women aren't allowed to sign), the woes aren't over: How long, for example, is it appropriate to make one's husband wait for sex? One night after the wedding? Seven? Which unspoken code of behavior might be governing his actions, and will he punish you if you're wrong? Navigating this maze of requirements could mean the different between divorce—and thereafter possible confinement to the house—and a tolerable lifestyle.

It's hardly surprising, then, that courtship often manifests as a materialist status race. Alsanea expects a lot of her guys: money, height, prestige, culture, Barry Manilow-singing teddy bears, diamonds on Valentines Day, affectionate notes stuck on the fridge, and so on. And from the weak-minded puppets of familial authority, to abusive cheaters and pathologically suspicious control-freaks, the guys always disappoint. Flirting, officially forbidden, struggles through a variety of tortured avenues-instant messaging, "numbering" girls through tinted windows (that is, publicly displaying one's cell number in the hopes of getting a call), and the occasional covert café meet-up.

Despite her criticisms, Alsanea is cautious, which is probably why her book has received much support as well as censure. None of the book's main characters ever truly defy their families; most instead find livable compromises. And Alsanea is a moderate when it comes to method; she says that change is unachievable without a degree of respect for tradition: "There are a lot of people who want change in Saudi Arabia but they're not succeeding," she told Newsweek, "because they're not going through the right channels, or they're not doing it gradually. They're just screaming, ‘We went this change and we want it now.'"

In that sense, Girls of Riyadh can seem disappointingly un-revolutionary. But it's a useful exposé of a social malaise—a community stranglehold so tight that it poisons individual relations and imbues personal decisions with intense social meaning. Which, to any Clueless fans, ("Why should I listen to you, anyway? You're a virgin who can't drive") makes chick lit a fitting place to start the discussion.

Juliet Samuel is reason's 2007 Burton Gray memorial intern.

Military Offsets

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:30:00 EDT

Foreign policy: It's a complex, multifactoral matter, often difficult for the layman to understand. From the AP:

The United States offered Israel an unprecedented $30 billion of military aid over 10 years on Thursday, bolstering its closest Mideast ally and ensuring the state's military edge over its neighbors long into the future. The package was meant in part to offset U.S. plans to offer Saudi Arabia advanced weapons and air systems that would greatly improve the Arab country's air force.

Link via Rational Review.

Bush's Gulf Gambit

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 15:25:00 EDT

The United States plans to sell Gulf countries at least $20 billion worth of military hardware in the coming years, and will sign 10-year military aid packages with Egypt and Israel, valued together at $43 billion. According to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Washington is "working with these states to give a chance to the forces of moderation and reform."

Oddly, on Friday the New York Times published a story roundly criticizing the Saudis for their "counterproductive" attitude in Iraq. Senior U.S. officials were quoted as saying that the kingdom had tried to discredit Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by handing American officials forged documents depicting Maliki as an agent of Iran and an ally of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Times revealed that "the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow." U.S. officials also noted that "the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi."

Why this story came out just before the announcement of the arms deals was unclear, though one could guess. By criticizing Riyadh publicly for the first time, and in such a blunt way, the Bush administration preempted, and therefore effectively neutralized, Saudi Arabia's critics in Washington who might seek to block the military transactions. But the Times article was also a warning to the Saudis that the U.S. was losing patience with the kingdom's behavior in Iraq, though the impact must have been dulled by revelations a day later that the Gulf states were central to the U.S. strategy of containing expanding Iranian power.

But perhaps most significantly, the leaks were designed to remind the Saudis that the Bush administration's failure in Iraq would only harm the kingdom itself, which might then find itself caught up in a regional sectarian conflagration devouring everyone. The subdued Saudi reaction to the American censure—the fact, too, that Riyadh knew the announcement of the arms deal was imminent—very likely meant the Saudis were expecting the administration's broadside beforehand.

The U.S. has dusted off an old template in the Persian Gulf, but with two twists. We're back to the days when the Gulf kingdoms and emirates were avid consumers of high-tech American weaponry, in the context of a broader quid pro quo where the U.S. took on the burden of security in the Gulf region in exchange for Saudi intervention to stabilize the oil markets. The two twists are that stable oil prices today can only really come by way of thwarting Iranian hegemony in the Gulf; and second, doing so means that the U.S. must replace Iraq as a regional counterweight to Iran.

Reverting to this policy is more astute than it looks. The U.S. approach to the Gulf throughout the Cold War years and up until 9/11 enjoyed bipartisan support. The large weapons contracts pleased members of Congress representing constituencies with defense-related industries; stable and low oil prices were good for everyone; and the American presence in the Persian Gulf was always an acceptable way of projecting U.S. power, without usually having to worry about casualties.

In reviving that general framework, one justified today through the containment of a threatening Iran, the administration is defining its military deployment in Iraq very differently. The priority is no longer promoting Iraqi and Middle Eastern democracy; it is ensuring that U.S. interests in the Middle East are preserved. We're back to the basics of foreign policy "realism." As Condoleezza Rice declared on Monday: "There isn't a doubt, I think, that Iran constitutes the single most important, single-country challenge to U.S. interests in the Middle East and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see."

If Iran is accepted as the arch enemy, then withdrawing from Iraq suddenly looks like a bad idea, particularly when influential critics of the conduct of the Iraq war like Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack are writing that the U.S. is "finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms." By anchoring Iraq policy in a consensus that previously existed vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, buttressing this with lucrative defense contracts, and gaining Israeli acquiescence for the sales, the administration has made it more difficult for Congress impose its will on President George W. Bush when it comes to the Iraqi conflict.

For the moment Congress is playing coy. Sen. Joseph Biden and Rep. Tom Lantos, who head the congressional committees that will consider the arms deals, are waiting for September to commit themselves. September also happens to be when Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker submit their report on the progress of the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq. Biden and Lantos may use debate over the weapons contracts as a bargaining chip with the administration to define future Iraq policy, depending on what Petraeus and Crocker conclude.

But you have to wonder if Bush has not already won that round. Congress has been unable to impose an alternative Iraq strategy, and now the administration is trying to take advantage of that void. If we are to believe the administration in its new approach, the U.S. military in Iraq is now part of a regional security architecture. By approving the defense packages, Congress would be endorsing this Bush vision for the region. Maybe the president is not quite as dead as his detractors think.

Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon and a contributing editor to reason.

Covering All The Bases in the Middle East

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:44:00 EDT

Via Jim Henley's Unqualified Offerings, this interesting summation of our current tactical vision in the Middle East:

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

Ah, well, what are you gonna do? Those people in the Middle East aren't going to be killing themselves! Well, maybe, but it's all a lot more efficient when the U.S. gets involved.

Roses Are Banned, Violets Are Blue

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:03:00 EST

Valentine's Day comes to Saudi Arabia in fits and starts. Stephen Schwartz and Irfan al-Alawi report:

This year's anti-Valentine offensive by the mutawwa was less draconian than usual. It included a stipulation: Non-Muslims in the kingdom--as much as 20 percent of the population (up to 6 million people) because of the immense influx of Western technicians and mostly Christian guest workers from east Asia--would not be molested by the mutawwa if they celebrated the holiday behind closed doors, although Muslims were cautioned against joining in foreign Valentine's Day events. The mutawwa are notorious for bursting into the residences of foreigners to check whether they are consuming liquor, so this Valentine's Day concession to foreigners was more significant than outsiders might think. The privacy of one's home is, after all, foundational to civilized societies.

And the less-than-brutal Valentine's crackdown--bans on the sale of roses notwithstanding--isn't the only optimistic sign:

On February 12, the same day the main warning against Valentines was issued, King Abdullah told foreign journalists that the issue of Saudi women driving cars--long banned, with the prohibition enforced by the mutawwa--is a social rather than a religious issue, to be determined as a matter of state policy instead of theology. If these words are followed up with action, and the matter of women driving is actually removed from clerical control, that will mark a turning point in the history of the kingdom.

Baby steps...

Check out Reason's trove of Saudi treasure here.

House of Saud, House of Assad

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:46:00 EDT

Last Monday, a Saudi newspaper, Okaz, published a story claiming that the latest United Nations report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri would directly implicate Syria. It suggested that Ghazi Kanaan, Syria's interior minister who supposedly committed suicide (or, as agnostics put it, "was suicided") last year, had recorded a conversation in which he detailed Syrian involvement in the crime. UN investigators would finger top officials in Damascus, the newspaper predicted, including President Bashar Assad's brother in law.

Two things were interesting in the allegation. First, it proved to be false. While Syria remains the leading culprit in the murder, the UN chief investigator, Serge Brammertz, played his cards close to his chest in his interim report, released on Monday, by failing to accuse anyone. Second, the possible existence of a Kanaan tape was first floated by a leading Syrian witness who had earlier given sworn testimony to the UN commission. The witness in question is believed to be close to the Saudis, even a Saudi tool in the investigation, whatever the veracity of his revelations. The parallels between his assertion and the Okaz article suggested that something was afoot.

The Saudis may also have known that Brammertz would not mention a Kanaan tape. In fact that's more than likely, since the UN investigator has for months imposed a near total blackout on information pertaining to the Hariri case. That's why it is reasonable to ask whether, in running the story, the Saudis were not really sending a different message: cautioning Assad that such a tape exists and could be used against him in the future.

Oddly enough, this splendidly Byzantine episode has implications for the United States. Saudi Arabia and Syria are reportedly near, if not beyond, the breaking point in their relations--largely because of Assad's close connection with Iran and his support for Hezbollah, which the Saudi monarchy and the Bush administration see as major threats. Given that the U.S. has few options when it comes to imposing "behavior change" in Syria--the administration's declared strategy--Saudi resentment creates new opportunities for it.

This was brought home to me last June, when I sat with an influential White House official and suggested that the behavior-change-rather-than regime-change mantra as applied to the Assad regime seemed not so much a policy as a bureaucratic compromise within the administration. Syria was not about to change its behavior, and the U.S. wasn't about to bounce Assad. To mask the deadlock, the U.S. had hit on the behavior-change formulation, which would broadly guide American action but probably lead nowhere.

The official disagreed, and underlined that he was waiting for the results of the UN investigation. This may not have been the most compelling of rebuttals, but it showed that some in Washington still saw the truth about Hariri's killing as Syria's Achilles heel.

Back to the Saudis. After Hariri's death in February 2005, the kingdom took a harsh line with Syria. Assad's decision to withdraw his forces from Lebanon followed a tense meeting with then-Crown Prince Abdullah, now the king, who handed the Syrian president an ultimatum. Subsequently, however, Saudi angst took over. With Syria out of Lebanon, Abdullah saw no advantage in destabilizing Assad's regime, as this might have destabilized the region. Riyadh's Syria policy throughout the early part of this year appeared to be run by the foreign minister, Saud Al-Faysal, a man universally recognized as a custodian of Arab immobility.

Though Assad should have been reassured, but he failed to reciprocate. Instead, he translated his growing confidence into closer ties with Iran. Last June, Syria and Iran signed a defense pact, a move that alarmed the Saudis, who fear Iran's hegemony over the Gulf, and its influence over the kingdom's Shiites, even more than they do democratic change. In July and August, Shiite-Sunni tension was on display as Lebanon fell into war. The Saudis publicly condemned Hezbollah for its cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers, accusing the party of "adventurism." They later helped engineer an Arab League foreign ministers' meeting in Beirut at which Syria's representative was isolated. The mainly Sunni states of the region saw the event as a means of containing Iran and clipping Hezbollah's wings in favor of the Lebanese government. Syria found itself on the wrong side of the Arab consensus.

The situation only got worse when Assad, in a fiery speech in August, called Arab leaders, without naming them, "half-men" for failing to support resistance against Israel.

The Saudi-Syrian estrangement, or divorce, came amid reports that Saudi decision-making on Syria had shifted away from Saud Al-Faysal to the head of the National Security Council, Bandar bin Sultan, previously the ambassador to the United States. From my conversations with Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, who keeps an open line to the Saudis, Bandar has advocated a tougher approach to Syria in their discussions than other royals. Assuming the change in attitude in the kingdom is being mainly driven by Bandar and his side of the ruling family, the U.S. might have more leverage in the near future to raise the heat on Damascus.

But one should never oversimplify with the Saudis. The ultimate decision-maker remains King Abdullah. If it's true that Ghazi Kanaan made an audio- or videotape implicating the Syrian regime, and that the Saudis have access to it, revealing this in Okaz was more likely a warning than a bid to push Assad out. Like the Americans, the Saudis want Syria to break with Iran and Hezbollah--behavior change; they do not want to bring about regime change that might boomerang against them, particularly if it means Iran comes to Assad's defense by playing hardball in the oil-rich provinces of the kingdom where there is a sizable Shiite population.

However, at some point the situation may slip away from everyone. Serge Brammertz is in nobody's pocket and his conclusions in the Hariri investigation could shake the foundations of the Syrian regime in ways the Saudis would feel uncomfortable with. If that came about, would they try working a smooth transition in Syria away from Assad, or would they seek to keep him in power in a much-weakened condition?

And how would the U.S. respond? The administration may now have a useful partner against Syria, but how the Saudis behave could overly determine America's own approach toward Iran's leading Arab ally. This might be better than the bureaucratic compromise to which the U.S. is sticking today, but it still wouldn't mean much latitude to effectively address a threatening Syria.

No Red Lines

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST

Lebanese Pierre Akel hosts the popular Web site Middle East Transparent, which receives 50,000-60,000 hits a day. While the Paris-based site is trilingual (Arabic, English, French), its particular value is that it has become a forum for Arab liberals who would otherwise have no outlet for their writings. Akel himself has written for Arabic newspapers in London and Paris. He moved to France in 1976, after studying economics at the American University of Beirut and philosophy at the Lebanese University. He also took history at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. He finances the site himself, and for the moment, only the enthusiasm of his readers and writers keeps him going.

�

reason: Describe your Web site, Metransparent.com.�

Pierre Akel: In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, it seemed to me that Arab liberals had to take a stand against the barbarian wave threatening to engulf the region. The danger was imminent. Only, no one could provide a comprehensive definition of Arab liberal currents. Americans tended to rely on English-speaking analysts, many of whom live in the United States and Europe. My friend Barry Rubin has written extensively on Arab liberals. However, Barry does not read Arabic and has what I call a "pro-Israel bias." He tends to shed a negative light on Arab liberals. I myself was much more familiar with the Islamic fundamentalist movement than with liberal currents. I had talked to the "Londonstan" leaders, read their writings and explored the many fundamentalist Web sites in Saudi Arabia.

�

Metransparent was an attempt to explore such liberal currents as exist inside the Middle East. I discovered the different strains of Arab liberalism along with my readers. An independent Web site was necessary in order to allow people to write what they really had in mind, not merely what they were allowed to write. It was also necessary as a forum for the diverse currents in the region.

�

To understand Arab liberalism, one has to understand not only what it now represents but where it emerged from: In Syria, it mostly comes from the remnants of the communist or Marxist left—just like the Eastern European dissidents of 30 years ago. In Saudi Arabia, it comes from the very heart of Islamic fundamentalist culture, but also from the orthodox Sunnis originating in the Hijaz, where the cities of Jeddah, Medina and Mecca are located. Hussein Shobokshi is a good example. It also comes from the Shiite minority in the oil producing Eastern Province. In Tunisia, it comes from the reformed Islamic university Al-Zaitouna. In Egypt, liberals are inspired by the great liberal tradition that was crushed by the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser. �

reason: What's your average day like when it comes to finding articles? Whose articles do you tend to run? �

Akel: We get our articles by email from practically every Arab country. Right now we have too many opinion pieces and are late in publishing what we receive. Most of the authors—we have more than 200—write exclusively for us; some send their articles to Arabic newspapers and to us, and we publish complete, uncensored versions. I believe we have something like 25 opinion articles from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates per week, a bit more from Egypt, and many more from Syria, which has a formidable civil society movement. Tunisians also contribute quite a bit, as well as Moroccans, especially Berber intellectuals, and Yemenis, Algerians, etc. �

I am especially proud to say that, soon, half of our writers shall be women. Usually, I receive letters from potential authors asking what "our conditions" are for accepting contributions. We answer back that we are a democratic and liberal Web site, with no censorship or red lines.

�

The Web site also has a reputation as a forum for liberal Shiites, both Saudi and Lebanese. But, most importantly, I believe we are the most daring site in advocating an Islamic Reformation, as represented by such writers as Gamal Banna [the brother of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna], Judge Said al-Ashmawy, and Sayyid al-Qimny, all from Egypt; and by many writers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Islamic reformers are part and parcel of the Arab liberal movement. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the two countries where calls for an Islamic Reformation are the most advanced.

�

reason: Is there room for Middle Eastern liberalism today, between dictatorships and Islamists? �

Akel: Remember the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, where people open the palace doors to discover that the dictator has been dead for a long time? This applied to the Soviet Union and now to Arab dictatorships as well. Dictatorships are dead; they lost the ideological and moral high ground years ago. The battle is between fundamentalists and liberals. Liberalism is the wave of the future. The Middle East is not like Afghanistan, if only because of oil, and cannot be allowed to turn into a Taliban-led region. Since 9/11 both Afghanistan and Iraq have been liberated. This is the trend. �

reason: Who do you feel are the liberal heroes in the region? Who do you find most interesting among political commentators? �

Akel: You can find liberals in unexpected places. Ahmad bin Baz, the son of the late mufti of Saudi Arabia, is certainly a liberal. He wrote stunning articles in Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, but then was shelved. He was probably "advised" by the religious scholars to stop writing. Mansour al-Nogaidan and the great Wajeeha al-Huweider, the best Arab feminist nowadays, are brilliant Saudi liberal examples. Ali Doumaini is another. In Egypt, I already mentioned a few names, and can add to them Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Abdel Moneim Said, Ali Salem, and others.

�

Of course, in Syria Riad Turk is a brilliant example of Arab liberalism. Though he spent some two decades in prison for his communist convictions, I talked to him for four hours and he never once mentioned Marx or Lenin. He even criticized the Lebanese Democratic Left Party, with which I am close, because for him being of the left is not necessary at this historical moment; a democratic movement, he told me, was enough and more adequate. �

The Tunisian Lafif Lakhdar is another radiant example. The Lebanese Shiite Sheikh Hani Fahs is a liberal writer. And of course the late Samir Kassir, whose assassination last June was a terrible blow to us all, both in Lebanon and in Syria. Kassir was the intellectual most aware of the organic relationship between the modern democratic movement in the contemporary Levant and the 19th-century Arab liberal renaissance known as Al-Nahda. �

reason: How has the Internet been able to affect political attitudes in the Middle East? Or has it? �

Akel: In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution. Arab culture has been decimated during the last 50 years. Arab newspapers are mainly under Saudi control. The book market is practically dead. Some of the best authors pay to have their books published in the order of 3,000 copies for a market of 150 million. This is ridiculous. Even when people write, they face censorship at every level—other than their own conscious or unconscious censorship. Meanwhile, professional journalism is rare.

�

In the future, I would like Metransparent to promote tens (or even hundreds) of blogs representing human rights and activists groups in many Arab cities. This has already started. � Just to clarify a point about the Arab cultural scene. Freedom House writes a yearly report about the Arab world. It never mentions books. I have published official Iraqi censorship documents for the 1990s. Emile Zola, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Alexander Dumas, and tens of 19th-century Western writers were banned by Saddam Hussein. The list even included Learn English in Five Days. The whole of classical literature was banned by the Baathists.

�

reason: In recent years the Middle Eastern satellite media has gained much prominence. How does the Internet compare to it, in your experience?

�

Akel: When it comes to satellite television in the region, Al-Jazeera is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, while many of the rest are under Saudi control. Al-Arabiya, for example, is owned by the Al-Ibrahim, the brothers-in-law of the late King Fahd. Even the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation cannot cross certain Saudi red lines. Yes, you can hear a liberal point of view here and there. But, to take one example, both Abdul Halim Khaddam, the former Syrian vice president who turned against the regime of President Bashar Assad, and Riad Turk, the Syrian dissident, have been under a Saudi ban from Al-Arabiya for the last month, because the Saudi leadership does not now want to annoy the Assad regime. For once, Al-Jazeera has also banned them, but for Qatari political reasons. Qatar is lobbying on behalf of the Syrian regime in Europe.

�

On the Internet, people can publish whatever they want: no red lines. They can use pen names if they want. People read, send comments, and they transmit information to their friends by email and fax, etc. The regimes' monopoly on information has been broken. Remember: Three months ago a Libyan writer was assassinated and his fingers cut for writing articles on an opposition Web site. The Internet is a historical opportunity for Arab liberalism. �

Of course, liberals cannot compete with Al-Jazeera. We do not have the financial means to start a liberal satellite channel. Hundreds of Arab millionaires are liberals. Only, they cannot stand up to their regimes. Arab capitalism is mostly state capitalism. If you are in opposition, you are not awarded contracts by states. So, for the near future, we do not expect much help from these quarters.

�

reason: How is Metransparent funded?

�

Akel: We are not funded and are surviving by personal means. I have been paying all the expenses, because promises from a number of Arab businessmen never materialized. On many occasions I have thought of calling it a day and ending Metransparent. The burden is getting heavier every day. We are trying to get financial support free of political conditions, but that is not easy. The advertisement market is smaller when you are mostly an Arabic-language Web site. What keeps the site alive is the amazing reaction from the readers. Metransparent has 50,000–60,000 hits per day, with no publicity and no mailing campaigns on our part. This means there is demand. Plus, I find it hard to disappoint all those generous writers who have been with us for two years. Some of the Syrian writers do not even own a computer. They have to beg friends to type and email their articles. We shall keep on as long as possible. There is, probably, a light at the end of the tunnel. Or, we will close down.

�

reason: Liberals have been among the most severe critics of the war in Iraq. However, one might say that for the first time the U.S. has rejected alliances with regional despots; that Iraq was a start; and that liberals have missed an opportunity by so vocally opposing the U.S.? How would you respond?

�

Akel: Most liberals, at least among our writers, favored the U.S. military intervention in Iraq. I myself have written articles in support, before and after the invasion. I didn't support it because of Iraqi WMD, however, but for democracy. We would have liked President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to say openly that they were invading to liberate the Iraqi people. Remember, even Riad Turk was not against the U.S. intervention. A Syrian, Abdul Razzaq Eid, who spent most of his life in the doctrinaire Syrian Communist Party of Khaled Bekdash, even wrote articles welcoming it.

�

Things changed with the disaster that was Paul Bremer. The U.S. should have turned things over to the Iraqis immediately after liberation. Former Pentagon official Richard Perle was absolutely right about this point. Most liberals still believe the U.S. is serious about democracy, for reasons explained by Bush in his second inaugural address. Democracy in the Middle East has become a vital American interest. It's either democracy or many future Osama bin Ladens striking against U.S. interests. �

I admit some liberals took longer to overcome the Arab-Islamic taboo against approving foreign intervention. This is increasingly behind us. Yet, what Iraq proved was that the U.S. could not do the job alone. Internal democratic forces had to be mobilized. We are part of this "internal" process. I should add that outside intervention should not only be military. Ideally, we would like something like the Helsinki Accords, where the international community's relations with the Arab world involve spreading democracy, defending Arab dissidents, human rights, women's rights and minority rights. Syrian dissidents have been calling for this for years. Last year, Metransparent circulated a petition asking the United Nations to create an International Court to judge the authors of fatwas condemning people to death. �

reason: If you had to cite in one sentence the major challenge for Arab liberals in the coming year, what would it be?

�

Akel: Managing relations with the Islamists. They are the liberals' adversaries but also, in certain cases, their necessary partners. To take an example from a completely different context: In the 1980s, French President François Mitterrand co-opted the French Communist Party and accelerated its implosion. Saad Eddine Ibrahim in Egypt and Riad Turk in Syria are wagering on a similar development in the Middle East. You bring Islamists into the open, encourage them to take part in the political life of a country, and they are bound to disintegrate into their various component elements. For example, the leader of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Sadruddin al-Bayanouni, recently opted for peaceful negotiations with Israel and even for a possible recognition of Israel. This would not go down well with other Syrian Islamists. Dissension shall occur over issues like this one and others. It is either this or the Assad and Mubarak regimes will last for a long time. The same applies tto Hamas. Co-opting Islamists is a risky proposal, of course. Where liberals should never make concessions is where Islamists tend to be harshest: the status of women. In that domain no concessions must be made. �

Vol. 9, No. 3

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

Reason Express

In this issue:

1. Follow the Majority Leader
2. Bush Defense: Clinton Did It
3. Bordering on Confusion in Pakistan
4. Quick Hits
5. New at Reason Online - Executive Assistant
6. News and Events

1. Follow the Majority Leader

Congressional intra-party leadership elections are usually significant only to the truly politically obsessed. Not so the three-way race to replace Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) as House Majority Leader. The outcome will give a clear indication of where the rank-and-file GOP members see themselves heading into this November's elections.

Acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) is the status quo, "everything is fine" candidate. Blunt has been part-and-parcel of the GOP spending binge. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) is the "yeah, we might have an ethics-perception problem with various lobbying scandals, and we need a new face" candidate. But he is no reformist. Boehner has cycled in and out of leadership ever since the GOP took the House in 1994.

That leaves Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) as the change agent in the race. Shadegg has at least raised questions about the pace of federal spending and invokes Ronald Reagan as something other than an applause line, which makes him a rarity in the current Congress. Should be interesting.

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007821

Reason Express is made possible by a grant from GlobalDrive, the world leader in globally-accessible data storage. Want to share files with co-workers or friends? Don't want to shlep your laptop to Europe? Worried about a safe place to store your computer's backups? Give GlobalDrive a try! Privacy. Protection. Security. Sharable. And from only $40/year.

2. Bush Defense: Clinton Did It

It took Al Gore jumping up and down over the Bush administration's domestic spying program, but the White House has finally deployed in force the argument you knew was lurking in the wings. Bush may have spied, but so did Bill Clinton. Nah-nah. This might be useful in deflecting partisan outrage but otherwise precisely misses the point.

The various excesses and assertions of executive power by the Clinton administration have always been a necessary condition of the expansion of the executive pushed by the Bush team. It is the extent of the Bush push that is breathtaking. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues that it is sufficient that the president's Justice Department's has vetted the necessity and propriety of the wiretapping, he is effectively claiming that judicial input is simply not relevant to any matter the president ropes off as involving "national security."

The potential for serious abuse of this standard should be obvious. If not, maybe Bush partisans should imagine Hillary Clinton wielding that power.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1512969

3. Bordering on Confusion in Pakistan

The CIA air strike on suspected al-Qaeda targets in a Pakistani village close to the Afghan border has lifted the veil on U.S. operations in the region. In addition to the CIA's Hellfire-equipped Predator drones, the U.S. is probably inserting teams across the border to monitor and "spotlight" ground-targets for further air strikes or perhaps long-range artillery barrages.

The government of Pakistan is walking a fine line. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in response to the strike that killed 18 local villagers along with a reported 4 or 5 al-Qaeda. But at least some of the local tribal structure appears to be eager to excise the al-Qaeda influence, either due to financial incentives offered by the U.S. or because the terrorist influence has simply become too much trouble.

For its part, the Bush administration would love to definitively bag a high-value al-Qaeda target as questions swirl in Washington about the focus and efficacy of its anti-terror efforts.

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/01/17/pakistanis_say_terrorists_died_in_strike?mode=PF

4. Quick Hits

Quote of the Week

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism—case closed. After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration." —Unnamed former F.B.I. official on the value of the information that the Bush administration's domestic wiretapping operation turned up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17spy.html?ei=5065&en=f88ca8cee42087fe&ex=1138165200&adxnnl=1&partner=MYWAY&adxnnlx=1137510098-jN3CKZIgYbMxsd6iDgr/bw&pagewanted=print

Heresy: Macs Running Windows

Just one fallout from Apple using Intel processors: The possibility that Macs could run Windows. The horror!

http://www.pcworld.com/resource/article/0,aid,124370,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp

Dick on the Move

Vice President Dick Cheney travels to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to meet with leaders and discuss the war effort in Iraq and the nuclear standoff with Iran.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1512669

Iranian Enrichment, in Russia

One possible compromise in the Iran nuclear matter has Iran conducting nuclear enrichment activities at a facility in neighboring Russia. The idea is that international inspectors would surely detect any attempt to make weapons-grade material that way.

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/17/iran.nuclear/

5. New at Reason Online

Executive Assistant
Alito flunks the most pressing test of today and tomorrow. Matt Welch

Katrina's Racial Paranoia
An equal-opportunity hurricane after all. Cathy Young

The One On the Right Was On the Left...
The political puzzle of country music. Jesse Walker

And much more!

6. News and Events

Get liberated with Ronald Bailey's brave new book for a brave new world!

In his new book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, Reason's Ronald Bailey examines the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding everything from stem cell research to therapeutic cloning to longer life spans to genetically modified food.

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Mr. Insurance Policy

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

At more or less the same instant the White House was lavishing praise on Iraq's historic parliamentary elections, powerful American lobbyists with impeccable Republican pedigrees were busy making the case that Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was a victim of those same fraudulent elections.

It is tempting to just chalk this dissonance up to the Bushies' failure to keep their propaganda straight. But that would miss a clear indicator of where the administration might be headed on Iraq and, more importantly, why.

The Bush administration is quite obviously reinforcing its Iraqi gambit with an if-all-else-fails fallback position. That position is the ever-ready Ahmed Chalabi, who coming out of the recent election, seems destined to be remembered as Iraq's own John Connally. Connally was the former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary who spent millions during the 1980 GOP presidential campaign and was left with exactly one delegate to show for it.

Chalabi's return on investment is thus far even worse. His Iraqi National Congress received about $40 million directly from the Pentagon for dubious pre-war "intelligence" and, by some accounts, up to $400 million in post-war rebuilding contracts are linked to Chalabi and his supporters.

For all that money, or perhaps because of it, Chalabi barely registered with Iraq's voters. Only 8,645 of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad opted for Chalabi. Nationally, his slate fared about as well even as other Shia-led parties swept to victory.

But no matter. That was merely Plan A for the Bush administration. With the overwhelming Shi'ite victory, Chalabi's complaints about vote fraud dilute and broaden the primarily Sunni complaint about the elections, which might help cool sectarian tempers. Plus, should the U.S. find the need to force the issue when and if the new government heads off the reservation, Chalabi still gives Don Rumseld and Dick Cheney a card to play in 2006. And card playing is what the post-Saddam Middle East is all about.

Contrary to assumptions that the rise of Iraqi Shi'ite power gives Iran an advantage, the neocon architects of Bush's foreign policy see this change as an opportunity. They want a new Arab Shi'ite power base to enter the realpolitik game, drawing power from and competing with Iran's Persian Shi'ite threat. A strong, unified, and democratic Iraq might be the first choice as a rival to Iran, but a largely autonomous Shi'ite region with Basra as is capital and with control of the holy city of Najaf is not a bad second prize in this worldview.

This idea has been in circulation so long as to qualify as an article of faith at this late date. Here's longtime Chalabi friend and ally James Woolsey appearing before Congress back in March 1999 to cite Cheney's Middle East point-man David Wurmser on the supposed weakness of Iranian-style Islamic rule:

Concerning the role of the Shia, both Iraqi and Iranian Shia have been unfairly tarred by the behavior of a powerful but small, and declining, faction within their division of Islam: those who support Khamenei and the rest of the Iranian wilayat al-faqih, often translated "rule of the jurisprudential", i.e. the theocratic and dictatorial portion of the Iranian government ... [Wurmser] outlines why the Iraqi Shia are far more a threat to Iran's wilayat than they are to Saudi Arabia. This was demonstrated in the spring of 1991, when the Iraqi Shia revolted, Saudi Arabia urged us to assist them (as then-Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has recently set forth), and Iran abandoned them. We, sadly, took a path parallel to Iran, with, to this point, eight years of tragic consequences. Wurmser concludes, I believe correctly, that a "free Iraqi Shi'ite community would be a nightmare to the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran."

The brains behind Bush's Middle East policy believe Iraq's Shia are just the instrument to bring down the terror-sponsoring, nuke-chasing regime in Iran. This remains the overarching foreign policy goal for the remainer of the Bush presidency. Iraq is merely a means to that end.

For that reason the odd extremist Shi'ite impulse in Iraq—a death-squad here or Islamic courts there—will be tolerated by the U.S. All-out civil war between Sunnis and Shi'ites will not, as that does not fit into the Arab vs. Persian playbook.

Ahmed Chalabi might still have a role to play in this nasty little endgame. He can serve as a familiar face for the American public and Congress to affix a white hat to while the intrigue and deadly politics swirl around the region. Maybe he can visit Cheney and Condi Rice again. All Chalabi has to do is wait—and he has proven surpassingly good at that.

Muslims and the Holocaust

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Boston Globe

Recently in England, four Muslim-staffed committees appointed to advise Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet on issues related to Islam have come up with a recommendation: Get rid of an official event viewed as offensive to Muslims. What event would that be? A celebration of the Crusades, perhaps? No, Holocaust Memorial Day. In the words of one committee member, "The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others."

That "one people," of course, are the Jews.

The committees aren't exactly proposing that the Holocaust commemoration be scrapped outright. They want it to be folded into a "Genocide Memorial Day" that will also include such crimes as the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the massacres of Bosnian Muslims by the Milosevic regime.

Unfortunately, even against the bloody backdrop of the 20th century, there are strong reasons to regard the Nazi extermination of the Jews as a unique atrocity. It was the first, and so far the only time that, as Cornell University historian Stephen Katz put it in his 1994 book The Holocaust in Historical Context, that "a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people."

But the problem with the proposal goes far deeper. The other "genocides" for which they want recognition include the Israeli killings of Palestinians.

Clearly, Palestinians have suffered under the occupation. Over 4,000 have been killed since the renewal of violence five years ago. Some of these dead were completely innocent victims; others were fighters, violent protesters, or suicide bombers. (Nearly 1,000 Israelis have died as well.) This death toll is tragic; but to call it "genocide" is to cheapen the word.

Any equation between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is absurd. The effect of such a parallel is not to promote "inclusiveness"—it is to erase and minimize the tragedy of the Jews as past victims of genocide by slanderously assigning them an equal role as its present-day perpetrators.

The committees are formally presenting their proposal (backed by the head of the Muslim Council of Britain) to the government later this week; the Home Office has already reportedly indicated that it does not plan to act on the recommendation. What's frightening, however, is that such a proposal could come from a group of people charged with the task of helping the government combat extremism.

Alas, this is not a unique case. The same issue of the London Daily Telegraph that reported the attack on Holocaust Day carried another remarkable story. Ahmad Thomson, deputy chairman of Britain's Association of Muslim Lawyers and occasional adviser to the prime minister, recently claimed that Blair had been pressured into entering the Iraq war by a sinister conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. In his 1994 book, The Next World Order, Thomson (a convert to Islam) claimed that the Holocaust is a "big lie" and that the presence of US soldiers in Saudi Arabia is especially outrageous because many of them are Jewish.

These two stories illustrate an uncomfortable truth: The infection of anti-Jewish bigotry is alarmingly widespread in the Muslim community today, not only in predominantly Muslim and Arab countries—where the media routinely circulate anti-Semitic libels and conspiracy theories while preachers and editorialists compare Jews to pigs and monkeys—but in Western democracies as well. Some apologists on the left blame this virulent hatred on the Israeli occupation of the territories. But is it plausible to believe that a state of Israel within its 1948 borders would be less hated by those who believe all of its land rightfully belongs to Muslims?

This is not to tar all or most Muslims with the same brush, or to deny that anti-Muslim bias and paranoia exists, too. (In the United States, some right-wing bloggers have been shrieking that the proposed memorial to the victims of 9/11's Flight 93 is shaped like a crescent.) Nor is it to say that Islam is inherently intolerant: All religions and ethnic groups have their bigots and haters. For a variety of reasons, the bigotry and hate in Islam are perilously close to the mainstream.

Liberal Thought in the Arab Age

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EDT

For the past 24 years Egyptians could have any president they wanted, as long as he was Hosni Mubarak. Every six years they were asked to vote for him, a single candidate, by referendum. However, on Wednesday, for the first time in its history, Egypt held a competitive presidential election, and sure enough, voters got more of Hosni Mubarak.

The Egyptian election raised interesting questions for Arab liberals, particularly those who insist that reform must be driven "from within," as opposed to being significantly advanced by a democratically aggressive West, in particular the United States. The pessimists argued that Mubarak's shameless manipulation of the election process, his government's decision to bar independent election monitors, his endeavor to use competitive voting to deny representation while winning the appearance of legitimacy, showed that Arab despots can be maliciously creative in exploiting and undermining democratic institutions.

The optimists responded that Mubarak, by opening up the electoral process, albeit selectively, also opened a democratic Pandora's Box that the regime won't be able to close in the long run. Institutionally, competitive presidential elections have become a reality, allowing candidates to emerge in the future more popular than the nine men who stood against Mubarak this time around, so that Egyptians will have a chance to challenge disliked incumbents. The Serbian model comes to mind, where Vojislav Kostunica managed to unseat Slobodan Milosevic after the autocratic Serbian president tried to deny him an election victory. In other words, while stilted election rules give an incumbent immense power, the regime has no antidote if an outraged public revolts.

There is truth in both arguments: Mubarak has indeed been a master of ersatz democracy, but had he been able to blithely continue with a referendum system, he probably would have done so. Yes, he won this election, but given that he will be 83 when his term ends (if he doesn't expire first), there is a higher probability that in a few years' time Egypt will have a fairer contest, wherein a regime candidate lacking the experience and clout to pull off an election swindle would be more vulnerable than Mubarak.

However, the larger question for reform-minded liberals in Egypt and throughout the Middle East is whether their efforts are not just a chronicle of a death foretold in arbitrary or nonexistent electoral climates—and whether they need to rethink their resistance to western efforts at regional democratic change.

Liberal skepticism is partly a function of the type and degree of intervention. Most people welcome, for example, international election monitors or sanctions directed against specific regime figures. However, beyond certain boundaries—for example imposing broad international sanctions (as occurred in Iraq during the 1990s), adopting assertive policies to isolate leaders, or using military force—liberals become uneasy with outside pressures, though these may be precisely what is needed for success.

There is little doubt that Mubarak agreed to a competitive presidential election at least partly because of the election in Iraq. He knew that domestic voters would wonder why, despite the daily violence, Iraqis were offered a choice, when Egyptians, who live in a more or less peaceful country, were not. Egyptian liberals have been among the most vociferous critics of the American occupation of Iraq. Yet if they benefit from the competitive election process, will they admit that this resulted to some extent from that occupation?

A major obstacle to their doing so is that Arab liberals, for example those in Egypt's bourgeois Wafd or Syria's National Bloc, have historically spearheaded anti-colonial struggles. The legacy of mistrust of Western intentions (often accompanied by near impossible demands for how Western states should resolve Arab problems) has not worn off, even as the world around the liberals has fundamentally changed. Opposition to the U.S. today is often spun as anti-colonialism, or anti-neocolonialism, but the colonial narrative is no longer as relevant as it once was.

A prominent book that tried to address the Western impact on the Arab world was first published in 1962 by an Oxford professor of Lebanese descent named Albert Hourani. In his classic Arab Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, Hourani examined the development of Arab ideas after the region's first modern-day encounter with the West: Napoleon's landing in Egypt at the end of the 18th century. Hourani's book is divided into three parts: The first, covering 1798–1870, examines how the West became a model of emulation for Arab thinkers keen to embrace "progress," ironically because they were on the losing side of Western progressivism; in the second part, Hourani describes how, during the last three decades of the 19th century, Arabs saw the West as both a reference point and adversary, as European imperial powers began occupying Arab territories; and finally, he looks at the period between 1900 and 1939, when Islam and secularism, which early reformers saw as compatible in the quest for modernity, grew apart, so that (moving beyond Hourani's narrative) nationalism and Islamism became bitter adversaries.

Implicit in Hourani's book is a notion that, for a long time, thinkers in the Arab world (or what preceded it under Ottoman rule) were relatively comfortable with Western ideas and institutions, and sought to square them with Arab and Islamic concepts of governance, jurisprudence, and more. While the osmosis was stunted by European imperialism, it never stopped, so that anti-imperialist leaders were also often Western-trained liberals. Hourani's book is generally positivist in its tone, though he is hardly a preacher for the superiority of Western values over Arab or Muslim ones. Hourani wrote about liberals like himself, persons personally or intellectually caught between two worlds, hoping for some kind of reconciliation. Ultimately he would fail, as Arab nationalist politics—increasingly defined by antipathy toward the West and, specifically, its political models—became radicalized in the post-Independence period.

One is tempted to describe those liberals like Hourani—the most pronounced victims of the Arab age of ideology—in the same way that Isaiah Berlin described Ivan Turgenev in his introduction to the novel Fathers and Sons: "It was his irony, his tolerant skepticism, his lack of passion, his 'velvet touch', above all his determination to avoid too definite a social or political commitment that, in the end, alienated both sides."

There is not much irony in Hourani's writings, but there is certainly among modern Arab liberals a discomfort with ideological absolutes, a tolerance for difference, that has made them palatable neither to Islamists nor to nationalist radicals. Accused by both sides of being lackeys of the West, Arab liberals have vainly sought to counter this charge by reaffirming their hostility to foreign hegemony. Yet this has earned them few new friends at home, even as it has prevented them from exploiting outside pressures that could be to their advantage. Liberals have generally been bludgeoned into silence by a combination of regime brutality and their own hang-ups, displayed by an incessant recitation of the colonialist narrative.

American mismanagement in Iraq has surely not helped. In Syria today, for example, it's fair to say that most of the population would be delighted to see the Assad regime disappear, but only if they could be assured that the aftermath wouldn't be a new Iraq. Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh summed up the attitude well in a Reason interview: "Outside diplomatic and public pressure can be very useful, especially when it is multilateral—American, European and Arab. Change through invasion, as in Iraq, is destructive and counterproductive."

It is certainly destructive and counterproductive if the U.S. fails to stabilize a country after booting its regime out, but nothing short of war was ever going to remove Saddam Hussein, nor make him more amenable to the nudges of domestic reformers. Yet the liberals' natural dislike of force, their coyness when dealing with most forms of outside interference (despite a taste for usually ineffective aid provided to non-governmental organizations, around which many liberals gravitate), their ability to address the West on its own terms while simultaneously criticizing it, and their penchant for cultural ecumenism, which makes them, in the name of tolerance, sometimes overlook their societies' worst abuses—all these factors help ensure that liberals are often the worst prepared to take advantage of Western actions in their midst.

The use of force should always be a last resort, but even imposed democracy in one Arab society, no matter how imperfect, can be contagious, forcing other regimes to make choices they would prefer not to make. Mubarak had to react to Iraq's election, but it's also true that Kurdish fortunes in Iraq are why the Syrian government has promised its own Kurds it will address their long-neglected rights. The U.S. military presence on Syria's eastern border was an important reason among others why the Lebanese felt emboldened to demand that the Syrians leave their country after Rafik Hariri's murder. And that's only the beginning; if Iraqis agree to a federal structure dividing their country along sectarian and ethnic lines, for all the potential problems in that system, it will prompt other minorities in the region (for example Shiites in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) to demand their rights.

All that will be the result of an American military venture. Iraq may have been flawed, its aftermath was surely mismanaged, and many Americans now want out; but even if one admits to the difficulties, the Middle East has been deeply changed nonetheless, and it's no thanks to its insecure liberals.

Saudi Censors

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

When Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia paid a visit to President George Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch last April, he refused to take questions from reporters and limited his public interaction to a hand-in-hand stroll with Bush. Though this broke with custom--even China's Jiang Zemin and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak held press conferences at the ranch--the prince's silence was perfectly consistent with the House of Saud's miserable free press record.

Days after Abdullah's visit, Freedom House, a 60-year-old global watchdog group with close ties to official Washington, released its 26th annual Press Freedom Survey of the world. Out of 194 countries, Saudi Arabia placed a desultory 173rd. For the fourth year running, the country described by Bush as a "good friend" to America scored an 80 out of the survey's possible 100 negative points. (The United States scored 13.) At a time when U.S. diplomats are eagerly trying to convince the world that--in the words of David Oberwetter, our ambassador to Riyadh--"Saudi Arabia has turned the corner," a series of annual reports from nongovernmental organizations are telling a different story.

Reporters Without Borders recently labeled Saudi Arabia "one the world's 10 harshest countries towards press freedom." Human Rights Watch found that "many basic rights are not protected under Saudi law, political parties are not allowed, and freedom of expression remains extremely limited."

Among the flurry of annual reports condemning the House of Saud was one from the American government itself. On May 11 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom named Saudi Arabia one of 11 "most egregious violators of religious freedom" and tweaked Washington's Saudi-coddling diplomats along the way: "Despite the State Department's contention in its 2004 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom that there were slight improvements in Saudi government efforts to foster religious tolerance in Saudi society, the report again concluded that freedom of religion 'does not exist.'"

Capturing Tom Friedman

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

On May 11, Thomas Friedman, America's most influential foreign affairs columnist, began his twice-weekly New York Times op-ed this way:

"In his book 'The Ideas That Conquered the World,' Michael Mandelbaum tells a story about a young girl who is eating dinner at a friend's house and her friend's mother asks her if she likes brussels sprouts. 'Yes, of course,' the girl says. 'I like brussels sprouts.' After dinner, though, the mother notices that the girl hasn't eaten a single sprout. 'I thought you liked brussels sprouts,' the mother said. 'I do,' answered the girl, 'but not enough to actually eat them.' "

What on earth does this third-hand domestic anecdote have to do with development of nuclear weapons by North Korea and Iran, the ostensible subject of Friedman's column? A bit further down, he reveals all: " 'Like that girl with the brussels sprouts,' Mr. Mandelbaum said, 'the Chinese and the Europeans are all for combating nuclear proliferation--just not enough actually to do something about it.' "

This piece--and Friedman's newest book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century--epitomize everything that is initially captivating yet ultimately disappointing about his Pulitzer-winning punditry. The man has fashioned a career out of locating or inventing a crude symbolic shorthand to explain and even popularize complex international phenomena while relying on a small cast of elites from politics, academia, and business to agree with his global clich�s. But what started out as a clever decoding device has, in Friedman's 10th year on the country's most coveted op-ed real estate, become the crutch of a self-caricaturing hack.

In his 1989 book From Beirut to Jerusalem, which synthesized a decade's worth of reporting from the two capitals, Friedman used his metaphor-hunting skill to cut a bewilderingly complex region into digestible chunks. "Hama Rules," the name he gave to the mind-set behind then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad's February 1982 massacre of more than 10,000 Sunnis in the town of Hama, became his shorthand for all tribal displays of retributive authoritarian brutality, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Yemen. And he was memorably shrewd in observing that Israel's purportedly divided Labor and Likud parties had actually forged an unacknowledged consensus to maintain the status quo regarding settlements.

As a foreign correspondent drilling down into the political substrata of two countries and then extrapolating to the immediate surroundings, Friedman did enough reporting and learned enough local history to give his flip descriptions the weight of authenticity (at least to an outsider). And with so much heartbreaking news and murderous drama to cover, you barely noticed his curious top-down approach, whereby the truth of a country was discovered almost exclusively by interviewing its leading intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen, preferably over a round or three of golf.

But now that Friedman has been given the entire globe as his beat and removed from the constraints of straight news gathering, his metaphors have become increasingly abstracted from reality, while his sources--the ones he actually talks to, as opposed to inventing imaginary dialogues for--often appear to be chosen not for their specialized local knowledge but for their simpatico worldview and Friedmanesque gift of glib gab.

Take the aforementioned Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies who cut his academic teeth studying superpower relations during the Cold War. Mandelbaum has appeared in 40 of Friedman's columns during the last decade, two of his books, and at least 25 other Friedman pieces dating back to 1989.

At first he was used in a logical enough way--to comment on the sudden collapse of communism, which he treated with the typical Sovietologist mix of cautious optimism and fear of the new. But Mandelbaum, usually described as "the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert," quickly became Friedman's go-to metaphor dispenser, issuing pithy and grammatically flawless bon mots on an impressively broad range of topics, including Saudi Wahhabism ("Either we get rid of our minivans or Saudi Arabia gets rid of its textbooks"), China's entry into the World Trade Organization ("Some things are in the national interest even though the Chamber of Commerce believes them"), Iraq's insurgents ("the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age"), Jacques Chirac ("France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order"), and American energy independence ("This is not just a win-win, this is a win-win-win-win-win"). His quips became Friedman's headlines, from "Brussels Sprouts" to "Club NATO" to "Gulf of Tonkin II."

The last headline referred to Mandelbaum's description of expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a project that he and Friedman opposed with everything at their disposal, including fantasies. "The main reason the Clintonites chose Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic," Friedman wrote in June 1997 with a certainty matched only by his ignorance of Central Europe, "is because each has a strong ethnic voting bloc in the U.S." (This non sequitur was so appealing to him that he repeated it in six more columns.) When illogic failed, Friedman brought out the crazy metaphors--Porgy and Bess, Whitewater, Ben & Jerry's (don't ask)--and quoted the nonagenarian foreign policy eminence George Kennan as making the hideously inaccurate statement that "Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia."

As anyone who has worked in journalism abroad can tell you, it's damned hard to get a grasp of a country, let alone a region or the entire planet. Think for a moment how difficult it is to pin down the United States. Now add 193 countries with myriad languages, subcultures, and historical experiences.

When I worked for newspapers in Prague and Budapest, we used to laugh at the hoary clich�s regurgitated by correspondents who lived nearby, in never-communist cities such as Vienna, let alone parachute artists from New York and Los Angeles. Even within the individual countries, it made a huge difference whether a foreign correspondent learned about, say, Czechoslovakia before communism or after. Many reporters and diplomats who did heroic work in the stifling 1970s and '80s were lost at sea in the go-go '90s; they asked to change assignments rather than go on pretending.

Friedman clearly has no desire to change assignment from what he has called "the best job in the world." But if The World Is Flat is anything to go by, he needs to change his approach before being laughed out of the public debate. Fifteen years after he took his shtick global, the hunt for clich� itself has become the main point of his journalism. In the book's introduction, after describing how a software executive in Bangalore, India, told him "the playing field is being leveled," Friedman indulges in an embarrassing reverie of self-discovery.

"I kept chewing on that phrase," he writes. "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened...Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!...In the back of that van, I scribbled down four words in my notebook: 'The World is Flat.'...So I picked up the phone and called my wife, Ann, and told her, 'I am going to write a book called The World Is Flat.' "

The world is in fact so uneven and varied that few mainstream columnists have ever dared try to explain it all on a full-time basis, and even those who do tend to gravitate toward narrower fields of expertise. The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum is strongest when writing from her Central Europe experience. The International Herald Tribune's William Pfaff cranks out sour assessments of American power from the paper's sour Paris headquarters. Even Newsweek International's Fareed Zakaria has carved out the specific if broad niche of probing the intersection between U.S. influence and the developing world.

The world isn't flat; it's fat, with niches and nooks and distributed expertise. Friedman had better find one to hang onto, or he might fall off the edge.