Abu Wabu

Abbas has done us a favor, although it certainly wasn't his intention. He showed yet again that engagement with the Hamas terrorists is an exercise in futility, even for other Palestinians. The Israelis have no partner for peace in the territories, and Abbas is nothing more than an empty suit at the moment. It will take a civil war among the Palestinians before responsible leadership can emerge that will have the mandate to reach a peaceful co-existence with Israel, and perhaps the best solution is to get out the way and let the Palestinians finally go to it.

Nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it’s time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to hate” Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn’t the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain’s chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them — simultaneously?

Maybe it’s a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders — not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values — are going to inspire regular violence, I don’t feel that it’s asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don’t see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

AI did not address the issue of an estimated 1,000 Lebanese civilians killed when Israel attacked Hezbollah fighting and command positions that had been established within populated villages, or the use of civilian vehicles, buildings and clothing by Hezbollah fighters, who also sometimes fought in Israeli uniforms. That is still the subject of investigation, and AI announced those issues, unlike the Hezbollah violations, are too complex for immediate comment. Readers will recall that perceived Israeli transgressions were what attracted the most attention and condemnation during the Lebanon conflict, and that those occurences were largely presented as Israel’s fault. It will be interesting to see if AI attempts to sort out how many of those 1,000 were actually Hezbollah guerrillas, and how many cases of "Israeli" attacks on civilian buildings and vehicles -- such as ambulances -- were staged Hezbollah propaganda events, and in some cases, if the dead were actually dead, or play-acting, or being recounted and shuffled around.

Thus is the McCain Amendment theme reprised: The way we treat Islamic terrorists will somehow impact the way our own soldiers are treated when captured. It’s hard to imagine a more preposterous premise on which to base policy.

Our enemies don’t give a damn about the Geneva Conventions or, frankly, about the inspiring life story of Senator McCain. The life story that animates them is Mohammed’s.

Thus do they invoke, for example, the Battle of Qurazya, in which the prophet is said to have ordered hundreds of captured prisoners decapitated and interred in mass graves (while women and children were condemned to slavery). Thus, too, do they cite scriptures which instruct, for example, that “when ye meet the Unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks” (Sura 47:4); that they must “slay [their enemies] wherever ye catch them” (Sura 2:191); and that “[t]he punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger … is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides …” (Sura 5:33).

Let’s not mince words here: Our soldiers, if captured by Islamic terrorists, will be tortured and killed. That’s what Islamic terrorists do. That’s why awed admiration is the only proper response to the bravery of our men and women in uniform. They fight for us despite knowing, as we should all by now know, that nothing we do affects the jihadists’ behavior.

On the other hand, if we were to fight another conventional war against the honorable combatants of a nation-state, that country’s forces — like our own — would be solemnly bound to (as well as self-interested in) compliance with their Geneva Convention obligations regarding prisoners of war. Again, how we deal with al Qaeda now is irrelevant to the treatment our forces will receive in any future conflict.

So, no, we don’t owe jihadists the same trial rights we owe any honorable combatants, much less our own troops. The very notion is an insult to those putting their lives on the line in our defense. That aside, though, the incentives these senators would create are perverse. It is an elementary rule of human nature that when behavior is rewarded, it begets more of the same. Rewarding terrorists with rights to which they have no legal entitlement can only encourage their methods — a cost McCain, Graham, and Warner would apparently have us bear despite the absence of any discernible benefit.

"Interconnectedness" is the word used by the late Edward Said, the New York-based Palestinian grievance-monger and eminent America-disparager: A couple of weeks after 9/11, the professor deplored the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into what he called "sealed-off entities," when in reality Western civilization and the Muslim world are so "intertwined" that it was impossible to "draw the line" between them. National Review's Rich Lowry was unimpressed. "The line seems pretty clear," he said. "Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea."

But beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, there is little merit to this posturing because there is little serious analysis in the Senate report: Far from providing the definitive word on Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, the report is almost worthless.

CONSIDER TWO BRIEF examples, chosen from many:

The committee's staff made little effort to determine whether or not the testimony of former Iraqi regime officials was truthful. In fact, Saddam Hussein and several of his top operatives--all of whom have an obvious incentive to lie--are cited or quoted without caveats of any sort. In Saddam's debriefing it was suggested that he may cooperate with al Qaeda because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." According to the report, "Saddam answered that the United States was not Iraq's enemy. He claimed that Iraq only opposed U.S. policies. He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China."

Anyone with even a partial recollection of the controversy surrounding Iraq in the 1990s will recall that Saddam made it a habit of cursing and threatening the United States. His annual January "Army Day" speeches were laced with threats and promises of retaliation against American assets. That is, when Saddam claimed that the United States was "not Iraq's enemy," he was quite obviously lying. But nowhere in the staff's report is it noted that Saddam's debriefing was substantially at odds with more than a decade of his rhetoric.

The testimony of another former senior Iraqi official is more starkly disturbing. One of Saddam's senior intelligence operatives, Faruq Hijazi, was questioned about his contacts with bin Laden and al Qaeda. There is a substantial body of reporting on Hijazi's ties to al Qaeda throughout the 1990s.

Hijazi admitted to meeting bin Laden once in 1995, but claimed that "this was his sole meeting with bin Ladin or a member of al Qaeda and he is not aware of any other individual following up on the initial contact."

This is not true. Hijazi's best known contact with bin Laden came in December 1998, days after the Clinton administration's Operation Desert Fox concluded. We know the meeting happened because the worldwide media reported it. The meeting took place on December 21, 1998. And just days later, Osama bin Laden warned, "The British and the American people loudly declared their support for their leaders decision to attack Iraq. It is the duty of Muslims to confront, fight, and kill them."

Reports of the alliance became so prevalent that in February 1998 Richard Clarke worried in an email to Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security adviser, that if bin Laden were flushed from Afghanistan he would probably just "boogie to Baghdad." Today, Clarke has made a habit of denying that Iraq and al Qaeda were at all connected.

There is a voluminous body of evidence surrounding this December 1998 meeting between Hijazi and bin Laden--yet there is not a single mention of it in the committee's report. THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked the staffers "Why not?" They replied that there was no evidence of the meeting in the intelligence or
documents they reviewed.

That's hard to believe. Newspapers such as Milan's Corriere Della Sera and London's Guardian, and the New York Post reported on it. Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, approvingly cited several of these accounts (before his own flip-flop on the issue) in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies Eyes. Scheuer wrote that Saddam made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors," including al Qaeda.

All of this obviously contradicts Hijazi's debriefing; none of it is cited in the committee's report.

Begala and many of the "cancel it" camp are pretending anger over the fact that Rush (and 899 others, including me) got "screeners" of the program. Begala asserts that this proves deep bias. What it proves is that Rush has an audience of 20 million, and many of the rest of us large audiences as well. I get screeners and books every day by producers/agents/promoters of every stripe trying to get some air time or mentions. Begala knows this, just as he also knows that the program was screened at the National Press Club for a large audience that included, among other Democratic partisans, Richard ben-Veniste. The dishonesty of the attack on the program as selectively previewed tips us to the dishonesty of the critics, and reminds us of the assault on Sinclair Broadcasting during Campaign 2004. (And of the silence that came from the left when Michael Moore peddled his lies, or earlier anti-Nixon programs such as television's 1989 "The Final Days," or Oliver Stone's Nixon.)

You are of course right in what you say about Richard Armitage, but there’s plenty of dishonor to go around in this matter — beginning with the grand-daddy of it all, which was Joseph Wilson’s op-ed in the New York Times that set the whole sorry business in motion. For someone who, however temporarily, was working for President Bush and his agents to take his disagreement with them public was a despicable act that could have had nothing but evil consequences for the war effort, then in the very beginning of its difficult and painful adjustment from conventional warfare to counter-insurgency, as well as for the president’s and the country’s standing in the world. Joe Wilson was not in a position to know everything, or even everything that the administration knew. His second-guessing could have been of little or no usefulness even if it had been done privately and disinterestedly. Given publicly and patently for his own self-advancement at the administration’s — and his country’s — expense, it should have resulted in his being shunned by all decent people rather than lionized in the media.

You want to call the majority of Americans "appeasers," as you did in your speech yesterday at the American Legion National Convention? Here are a couple names for you. You're a jingo. Worse, you're a fucking loser.

[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.