Islamist Internet Propaganda a Tough Battle

By David Morgan
October 28, 2006

The Bush administration is failing to counter Islamist online propaganda that could propel militancy into the next generation, experts say.

From the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Islamists have built an expansive Internet library of sophisticated texts on the ideology that underpins violence against the West and other enemies, analysts and intelligence officials said.

"It's a steady, stealthy indoctrination aimed at creating a whole new generation of jihadists. And scandalously, it is unopposed," said Stephen Ulph, who studies the Islamist Web for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank.

E-books and online pamphlets, with titles such as "39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad," encourage the growth of home-grown militant cells across the world, including in such Western countries as Canada and Britain, the experts believe.

U.S. intelligence is reluctant to mount an effective counteroffensive by recruiting Islamic experts from overseas to rebut and even ridicule Islamist authors, according to experts and U.S. officials.

"Anything exposing the West as a supporter would destroy Islamic opposition to the jihadis," one intelligence official on condition of anonymity. "We are completely out of luck with the Muslim world, across the board."

Several agencies including the CIA, FBI and the office of U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte are part of a closely guarded effort to monitor the content of Islamist Web sites, but the program is hampered by stringent security standards that make it hard for intelligence agencies to employ Islamist experts from the Arab world.

"Even if we think we understand elements of the religion, we certainly don't understand elements of their cultural communications," the intelligence official said.

Pop Jihad Propaganda
Others warned that U.S. policy-makers could be making a fatal error by ignoring doctrinal online texts that lay bare the substance of a violent Islamist mind-set.

"In order to be able to fight something, you have first of all to understand what is going on. And I don't think that at this stage they understand it well enough to fight it," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, which tracks and analyses international terrorism.

In a presentation this week, Ulph said doctrinal material accounts for 60 percent of Islamist Web content and most texts are in Arabic. But many have begun to reappear in English and other European languages in an apparent appeal to Muslims living in the West.

One of the most popular is the 1,600-page treatise, "Call to Global Islamic Resistance," a comprehensive guide to militant life by al Qaeda ideologue Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, who was captured in Pakistan a year ago.

The Islamist Web became a centre for al Qaeda operational planning, training and fund-raising after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Islamist Web sites have since sprouted, many appealing to disenfranchised Muslim youth with so-called Pop Jihad propaganda that can include films of beheadings and spectacular attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq.

But Ulph and others, including former intelligence officials, say the future of Islamist militancy depends on the more sophisticated doctrinal material, capable of guiding the life of the committed militant from childhood to martyrdom.

"The focus has been on how these guys use the Internet for fund-raising and operations," said Jarret Brachman of the Combating Terrorism Centre at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. "Only recently have we realised there are strategic implications."

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Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age

By Noah Feldman
October 29, 2006

I.
For nearly 50 years, worries about a nuclear Middle East centered on Israel. Arab leaders resented the fact that Israel was the only atomic power in the region, a resentment heightened by America’s tacit approval of the situation. But they were also pretty certain that Israel (which has never explicitly acknowledged having nuclear weapons) would not drop the bomb except as a very last resort. That is why Egypt and Syria were unafraid to attack Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. “Israel will not be the first country in the region to use nuclear weapons,” went the Israelis’ coy formula. “Nor will it be the second.”

Today the nuclear game in the region has changed. When the Arab League’s secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for “a Middle East free of nuclear weapons” this past May, it wasn’t Israel that prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching realization.

The anti-Israel statements of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, coupled with Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas, might lead you to think that the Arab states would welcome Iran’s nuclear program. After all, the call to wipe the Zionist regime from the map is a longstanding cliché of Arab nationalist rhetoric. But the interests of Shiite non-Arab Iran do not always coincide with those of Arab leaders. A nuclear Iran means, at the very least, a realignment of power dynamics in the Persian Gulf. It could potentially mean much more: a historic shift in the position of the long-subordinated Shiite minority relative to the power and prestige of the Sunni majority, which traditionally dominated the Muslim world. Many Arab Sunnis fear that the moment is ripe for a Shiite rise. Iraq’s Shiite majority has been asserting the right to govern, and the lesson has not been lost on the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the large minorities in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah of Jordan has warned of a “Shiite crescent” of power stretching from Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and (by proxy) Syria.

But geopolitics is not the only reason Sunni Arab leaders are rattled by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. They also seem to be worried that the Iranians might actually use nuclear weapons if they get them. A nuclear attack on Israel would engulf the whole region. But that is not the only danger: Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere fear that the Iranians might just use a nuclear bomb against them. Even as Iran’s defiance of the United States and Israel wins support among some Sunnis, extremist Sunnis have been engaging in the act of takfir, condemning all Shiites as infidels. On the ground in Iraq, Sunni takfiris are putting this theory into practice, aiming at Shiite civilians and killing them indiscriminately. Shiite militias have been responding in kind, and massacres of Sunni civilians are no longer isolated events.

Adding the nuclear ingredient to this volatile mix will certainly produce an arms race. If Iran is going to get the bomb, its neighbors will have no choice but to keep up. North Korea, now protected by its own bomb, has threatened proliferation — and in the Middle East it would find a number of willing buyers. Small principalities with huge U.S. Air Force bases, like Qatar, might choose to rely on an American protective umbrella. But Saudi Arabia, which has always seen Iran as a threatening competitor, will not be willing to place its nuclear security entirely in American hands. Once the Saudis are in the hunt, Egypt will need nuclear weapons to keep it from becoming irrelevant to the regional power balance — and sure enough, last month Gamal Mubarak, President Mubarak’s son and Egypt’s heir apparent, very publicly announced that Egypt should pursue a nuclear program.

Given the increasing instability of the Middle East, nuclear proliferation there is more worrisome than almost anywhere else on earth. As nuclear technology spreads, terrorists will enjoy increasing odds of getting their hands on nuclear weapons. States — including North Korea — might sell bombs or give them to favored proxy allies, the way Iran gave Hezbollah medium-range rockets that Hezbollah used this summer during its war with Israel. Bombing through an intermediary has its advantages: deniability is, after all, the name of the game for a government trying to avoid nuclear retaliation.

Proliferation could also happen in other ways. Imagine a succession crisis in which the Saudi government fragments and control over nuclear weapons, should the Saudis have acquired them, falls into the hands of Saudi elites who are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, or at least to his ideas. Or Al Qaeda itself could purchase ready-made bombs, a feat technically much less difficult than designing nuclear weapons from scratch. So far, there are few nuclear powers from whom such bombs can be directly bought: as of today, only nine nations in the world belong to the nuclear club. But as more countries get the bomb, tracing the seller will become harder and harder, and the incentive to make a sale will increase.

II.
The prospect of not just one Islamic bomb, but many, inevitably concentrates the mind on how Muslims — whether Shiite or Sunni — might use their nuclear weapons. In the mid-1980’s, when Pakistan became the first Islamic state to go nuclear, it was still possible to avoid asking the awkward question of whether there was something distinctive about Islamic belief or practice that made possession of nuclear technology especially worrisome. Most observers assumed that Islamic states could be deterred from using nuclear force just like other states: by the threat of massive retaliation.

During the last two decades, however, there has been a profound change in the way violence is discussed and deployed in the Muslim world. In particular, we have encountered the rise of suicide bombing. In historic terms, this development is new and unexpected. Suicide bombing has no traditional basis in Islam. As a technique, it was totally absent from the successful Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Although suicide bombing as a tool of stateless terrorists was dreamed up a hundred years ago by the European anarchists immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s “Secret Agent,” it became a tool of modern terrorist warfare only in 1983, when Shiite militants blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Since then, suicide bombing has spread through the Muslim world with astonishing speed and on a surprising course. The vocabulary of martyrdom and sacrifice, the formal videotaped preconfession of faith, the technological tinkering to increase deadliness — all are now instantly recognizable to every Muslim. And as suicide bombing has penetrated Islamic cultural consciousness, its list of targets has steadily expanded. First the targets were American soldiers, then mostly Israelis, including women and children. From Lebanon and Israel, the technique of suicide bombing moved to Iraq, where the targets have included mosques and shrines, and the intended victims have mostly been Shiite Iraqis. The newest testing ground is Afghanistan, where both the perpetrators and the targets are orthodox Sunni Muslims. Not long ago, a bombing in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, killed Muslims, including women, who were applying to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Overall, the trend is definitively in the direction of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. By a conservative accounting, more than three times as many Iraqis have been killed by suicide bombings in the last 3 years as have Israelis in the last 10. Suicide bombing has become the archetype of Muslim violence — not just to frightened Westerners but also to Muslims themselves.

What makes suicide bombing especially relevant to the nuclear question is that, by design, it unsettles the theory of deterrence. When the suicide bomber dies in an attack, he means to send the message “You cannot stop me, because I am already willing to die.” To make the challenge to deterrence even more stark, a suicide bomber who blows up a market or a funeral gathering in Iraq or Afghanistan is willing to kill innocent bystanders, including fellow Muslims. According to the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing, these victims are subjected to an involuntary martyrdom that is no less glorious for being unintentional.

So far, the nonstate actors who favor suicide bombing have limited their collateral damage to those standing in the way of their own bombs. But the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own wills could be extended to the national level. If an Islamic state or Islamic terrorists used nuclear weapons against Israel, the United States or other Western targets, like London or Madrid, the guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God’s grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad. No state in the Muslim world has openly embraced such a view. But after 9/11, we can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful.

Raising the question of Islamic belief and the bomb, however, is not a substitute for strategic analysis of the rational interests of Islamic governments. Like other states, Islamic states act on the basis of ordinary power politics as much as or more than on the basis of religious motivation. Pakistan, which tested a series of warheads in 1998, at the height of tensions with India, has not used its atomic power as a tool of the faithful in a global jihad. The proliferation operation spearheaded by the nuclear scientist — and sometime Pakistani national hero — Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan appears to have been based on a combination of national interest and greed, not on religious fervor. Khan found buyers in Iran and Libya, but also in decidedly non-Islamic North Korea. (In a twist much stranger than fiction, Saddam Hussein apparently turned down the offer.)

Some observers think that Iran, too, wants the bomb primarily to improve its regional position and protect itself against regime change — not to annihilate Israel. According to this view, Iran’s nuclear push reflects a drive to what is sometimes called national greatness and might more accurately be defined as the ability of a country to thumb its nose at the United States without fear of major repercussions. A televised pageant hastily arranged to celebrate Iran’s atomic program in April of this year featured traditional Persian dancing and colorful local garb intermixed with make-believe vials of enriched uranium. To an Iranian audience accustomed to decoding official symbols, these references were nationalist, not pan-Islamic. (They were also subtly subversive of the mullahs: singing and dancing are not favored forms of expression in the clerical enclave of Qom.)

But at the same time, Ahmadinejad has emphasized Iran’s pan-Islamic aspirations to act on behalf of Muslims everywhere. An emerging nuclear power needs friends. Right now Iran wants to reduce, not promote, division between Sunnis and Shiites — and promoting broader “Islamic” interests by going after Israel is one way to lessen Sunni fears about Iran’s rise. Ahmadinejad has put his money where his mouth is, providing Hezbollah with medium-range missiles — though apparently not chemical warheads — to use against Israel. The nationalist language he has sometimes used at home may be a cover for sincerely held pan-Islamic ends — a version of the old revolutionary strategy of making nationalist claims in order to attract the support of those fellow Iranians who do not respond well to Islamist ideology. That it is convenient for Iran to emphasize Islamic unity does not mean that at least some of its leaders do not believe in it as a motivating goal.+

It is common among foreign-policy realists to suppose that a country acting on nationalist motives is easier to deter than a country moved by religious ones. There is no especially strong evidence for this assumption — plenty of nationalist regimes have done crazy things when they logically should have been deterred — but the claim has a common-sense ring to it. Nationalists care about peoples and states, which need to be alive to prosper. It is a basic tenet of nationalism that there is nothing higher than the nation-state itself, the pinnacle of a people’s self-expression. Religious thinkers, on the other hand, believe almost by definition that there is something in heaven greater than government here on earth. Under the right circumstances, they might sacrifice lives — including their own — to serve the divine will as they interpret it.

III.
We urgently need to know, then, what Islam says about the bomb. Of course there is no single answer to this question. The world’s billion-plus Muslims differ regarding many aspects of their 1,400-year-old religious tradition. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are a relatively new technology, unforeseen by the Prophet and unmentioned in the Koran. Nevertheless, contemporary Muslims are engaged in interpreting their tradition to ascertain how and when nuclear power may be used. Their writings, contained in fatwas and treatises that can be found on the Web and in print, tell a fascinating and disturbing story.

The Islamic discussion of nuclear weapons is profoundly intertwined with a parallel discussion of suicide bombing that is also taking place in the Muslim world. Suicide bombing and nuclear weapons typically kill without discrimination, murdering soldiers or civilians, men or women or children. And using nuclear force against another nuclear power can be suicidal, in the broad sense that retaliation may destroy the nation that attacked first. Beyond these commonalities is the fact that the rise of suicide bombing is driving a historic reconsideration of what might be called the Islamic ethics of violence. To consider Islam and the bomb today must thus inevitably draw us into the complex legal and political thinking of those Muslim authorities who justify the use of force.

The story starts with traditional Islamic law. The Shariah never followed the Roman adage that in war the laws are silent. Because jihad is a pillar of Islam, and because in Islam God’s word takes legal form, the classical scholars devoted considerable care to identifying the laws of jihad. In common with the just-war doctrine developed in Christian Europe, the law of jihad governed when it was permissible to fight and what means could lawfully be adopted once warfare had begun. There were basic ground rules about who was fair game. “A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of God,” runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. “So the Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children.” This report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants, who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike. For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Such black-and-white rules were well suited to the hand-to-hand or horse-to-horse combat characteristic of limited medieval wars. A few quirky challenges did arise, and the Muslim lawyers had to deal with them. The great theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, who wrote in the 11th and 12th centuries and was widely noted for his revival of religious piety and his skepticism of secular philosophy, dealt with the problem of human shields. He ruled that if the enemy drove captured Muslims before him, the Muslim army could still fight back, even if it might mean killing some of those Muslims. The reason he gave was that “we know that the law intends minimizing killing.” There was also the catapult — precursor of artillery and air power — which was capable of sending a burning projectile into a populated city, where the resulting fire might kill women or children. Authorities differed on whether that tactic was permissible. Some disallowed the catapult when children or Muslim captives were in the city. In support, they cited a verse from the Koran that reads, “Had they been separated clearly, then We would have chastised the unbelievers among them with a painful chastisement.” According to this school of thought, the “separation” of permissible targets (i.e., non-Muslim men) from impermissible targets is the precondition for a general attack. Another school of thought, by contrast, permitted the use of the catapult regardless of collateral damage in order to serve the general interest of the Muslims.

No law can exist for a millennium without being broken, and there are scattered historical reports, mostly from Christian chroniclers, of Muslim forces acting outside the bounds of lawful jihad, without the authorization of the scholars. Men were always considered legitimate targets, and Muslim armies sometimes slaughtered them just as Muslims could be slaughtered by their enemies. Remarkably enough, though, the legal principles of jihad protecting women, children and fellow Muslims survived well into the modern era, when the secular regimes of the Muslim world began to fight according to secular ideas. The World War I Armenian genocide, which took place in the last, secularizing gasp of the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first really substantial systematic violation of the ban on killing women and children in recorded Islamic history. In the bloody 20th century, when mass exterminations took place in Europe, Africa and Asia, Muslim states had a relatively better record, marred of course by Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds. And there have been the genocidal killings in Darfur in this new century. Even these horrific events, however, were not dignified by the claim that they were permitted under the law of jihad.

IV.
The last two decades have seen a challenge to this Islamic tradition of warfare under law, a challenge driven mostly by the attempt to justify suicide bombing despite its evident inconsistency with Islamic tradition. On the subject of suicide, the Koran could hardly be clearer: “Do not kill yourselves; for surely God has been merciful to you.” Faced with this explicit text, the solution of the militant Islamist ideologues has been to avoid the category of suicide altogether and to treat the bomber as a martyr rather than as one who has taken his own life. This interpretation is not very convincing in historical terms: martyrdom classically meant that another person killed the Muslim warrior, not that he pushed the button himself. Nevertheless, many Muslims now seem to find the argument convincing. Even among rather secular Muslims, it has become standard to refer to suicide bombers as martyrs.

The killing of women, children and Muslim men, however, has proved harder to explain away as a permissible exercise of jihad. The reaction to 9/11, which has (so far) been the high-water mark of suicide bombing, illustrates the nature of the difficulty of reconciling suicide bombing with Islamic law. One problem concerns the offensive nature of the attack at a time when the United States was not at war with any Muslim entity. Offensive jihad requires the authorization of a legitimate Muslim leader, absent on 9/11. A more serious concern was the obvious reality that the 9/11 attacks were certain to kill — and did kill — women, children and Muslims, all in direct contravention of classical jihad principles. Since the whole point of 9/11 was to announce and embody jihad on the international stage, the attacks quickly became the centerpiece of a high-stakes debate about whether they did or did not qualify as legitimate acts of jihad.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was sometimes asserted in the West that there were no Muslim voices condemning the attacks. This was never true. Prominent Muslim scholars expressed their disapprobation in public arenas like television and the Internet. These included senior Sunni scholars like the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia and the head of Al-Azhar, in Egypt, nominally the flagship institution of Sunni higher learning — who gave a news conference. More popular figures, like Al Jazeera’s resident cleric, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, explained that Islam “considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin.” Shiite scholars also spoke out, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

The position of the Muslim scholars and observers who condemned the 9/11 attacks was simple and consistent across the Sunni-Shiite divide: this was not jihad but an unlawful use of violence. Offensive jihad was prohibited in the absence of formal authorization by a Muslim leader. But even if the attacks could somehow be construed as defensive, the perpetrators of 9/11 broke the rules with their willingness to kill women and children. In confident and insistent tones, these critics cited the classical scholars and insisted that nothing in Islamic law could justify the tactics used by Al Qaeda. Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the Lebanese cleric whose spiritual authority is recognized by Hezbollah, gave an interview to the Beirut newspaper Al Safir in which he asserted that given their impermissible choice of targets, the 9/11 bombers were not martyrs but “merely suicides.”

At the same time, it is important to note that in 2001 few prominent Muslim scholars — the Saudi grand mufti was the main exception — condemned the use of suicide bombings in all circumstances. Fadlallah approved the attack on the U.S. Marines in 1983 and, according to the United States, played a role in ordering it. Qaradawi, whose television presence gives him reason to stay within the Islamist mainstream, distinguished the 9/11 attacks from the permissible defensive jihad of the Palestinians. He was happy to praise a God who “through his infinite wisdom ... has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.” Qaradawi has also repeated the common view that the killing of Israeli women is justified on the grounds that all Israelis must serve in the military, and so no Israeli is a true noncombatant: “An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.”

The equivocation by Muslim scholars with respect to the technique of suicide bombing reflected the reality that throughout the Muslim world, Palestinian suicide bombers were by 2001 identified as martyrs dying in a just cause. This, in turn, was the natural outgrowth of the decades before suicide bombing, when Palestinian terrorists were applauded for killing Israeli civilians, including women and children. Given that embracing Palestinian suicide bombing had become a widespread social norm, it would have been essentially unthinkable for an important Muslim scholar to condemn the practice without losing his standing among Muslims worldwide. In the Islamic world, as in the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal authorities cannot get too far away from their public constituency without paying a price.

What happened, in other words, is that without the scholars paying too much attention to the question, the killing of Israeli women and children had become a kind of exception to the ordinary laws of jihad. Opportunists like bin Laden then began to widen the loophole to include new victims. With respect to the unauthorized nature of his offensive jihad, bin Laden asserted that in fact the attacks were defensive, since in his mind the U.S. was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia — just as Israel was occupying the Muslim land of Palestine. Once all of Saudi Arabia was placed on a par with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, traditionally closed to non-Muslims, the presence of American soldiers anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula (even if their presence was with the permission of the Saudi government) could be depicted as a profanation, a violation of the Prophet’s deathbed directive to “banish the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula.”

Bin Laden was embroidering on the theories of his onetime mentor Abdullah Azzam, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda. Azzam was a Palestinian Islamist who made his way to Afghanistan via Saudi Arabia and established the so-called Bureau of Services to channel Arab youth into the Afghan jihad. As Azzam trod his personal path from Palestinian militancy to universal pan-Islamic jihadism, he wrote an influential treatise called “Defense of Muslim Lands.” In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could ever be ceded to the enemy “because the land belongs to Allah and to Islam.” Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced — unconsciously, to be sure — by religious-Zionist claims about the holiness of the Land of Israel.

When it came to the killing of civilians, bin Laden’s thought developed more gradually. In early pronouncements, before 9/11, he spoke as if the killing of women and children was inherently an atrocity. “Nor should one forget,” he admonished an interviewer in 1996, “the deliberate, premeditated dropping of the H bombs [sic] on cities with their entire populations of children, elderly and women, as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” After 9/11, however, the argument changed. Now bin Laden began to suggest that American civilians were fair game. He could not argue that like Israelis, all Americans were subject to mandatory military service. Instead he proposed that because “the American people are the ones who choose their government by their own free will,” and because they “have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government,” attacks on American civilians were justified. Voting was now playing the role for Americans that military service played in the case of Israelis: the active step transforming civilians into fair game.

Such an appeal to collective responsibility was, however, pretty weak in Islamic legal terms. It might suffice for bin Laden’s videotaped self-justifications, and it might salve the consciences of potential jihadis hoping to join the rank and file of Al Qaeda. But it would never satisfy serious students of classical Islamic law, who found the 9/11 attacks problematic from an Islamic legal perspective.

In Saudi Arabia in particular, radical Muslim scholars with much more learning than bin Laden have sought to develop legally persuasive justifications for civilian killings. Probably the most sophisticated effort from a legal standpoint is a document titled “A Treatise on the Law of the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction Against the Unbelievers,” written in 2003 by a brilliant Saudi dissident named Sheik Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd. (Fahd, a theorist rather than an activist, is currently back in prison, as he has been off and on for almost a decade.) The treatise begins with the assumption that the world’s Muslims are under attack. But how are today’s Muslims supposed to defend themselves, given their military inferiority? Fahd’s response is that, if they have no other choice, they may use any means necessary — including methods that would otherwise violate the laws of jihad. “If the unbelievers can be repelled . . . only by using” weapons of mass destruction, then “their use is permissible, even if you kill them without exception.”

Lest his argument prove too much, Fahd tempers it by the claim that the Muslims fighting the jihad may not inflict disproportionately more harm on the enemy than the enemy has inflicted on them. That raises the question of the extent of American guilt. “Some Brothers have added up the number of Muslims killed directly or indirectly by [American] weapons and come up with a figure of nearly ten million,” the treatise states. This total, Fahd concludes, would authorize the use of weapons of mass destruction to kill 10 million Americans: indeed, “it would be permissible with no need for further [legal] argument.” (The number is never explained or analyzed, and you might assume that it was meant to correspond very roughly to the population of New York.)

Fahd’s arguments sit uneasily with the classical Islamic discussions of the laws of jihad. The classical Islamic law never explicitly says that women and children may be intentional targets if it is the only way to win the jihad. It does not allow violations of the law just because the enemy has broken the rules or killed many Muslims. So the treatise must fall back on whatever evidence it can muster from the classical sources that seems to modify the basic rules. The catapult rears its head and is cited as precedent for nonspecific killing. The right to fight even when Muslim hostages may be killed is brought out as proof of the permissibility of collateral damage when there is no other choice.

The legal arguments in use here are stronger than bin Laden’s makeweights, but they, too, would probably not be sufficient on their own to justify the deviation from the legal traditions of jihad wrought by today’s jihadis. The notion that it’s right because it’s necessary is doing the real work, and old-fashioned legal arguments are following along. It is no accident that the argument from necessity has been so prominent in modern Western writing about modern warfare in general and the nuclear bomb in particular. If the technology of mass destruction can be exported, why not the justification that comes with it?

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

V.
If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans; then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem that no one is out of bounds.

It is therefore now possible to imagine that the classical Islamic principles governing war would not be applied even by a self-consciously Islamic regime deciding when and if to detonate a nuclear device. The traditional ban on killing women, children and fellow Muslims would have gone a long way toward banning most potential uses of nuclear power by a sincerely Islamic state actor. As those prohibitions have eroded, the reassurance that might be afforded by a state’s Islamic commitments has waned.

This means that a nuclear Islamic state would be at least as willing to use its weapons as a comparable non-Islamic state. But would an Islamic state be prepared to take the jihad to the enemy even if it would result in what amounts to collective suicide through the destruction of the state and its citizens? If the leaders of Iran or some future leaders of a radicalized, nuclear Saudi Arabia shared the aspiration to martyrdom of so many young jihadis around the world, might they be prepared to attack Israel or the United States, even if the inevitable result were the martyrdom of their entire people?

The answer depends to a large degree on whether you consider Islam susceptible to the kind of apocalyptic, millennial thought that might lead whole peoples, rather than just individuals, into suicidal behavior. It is important to note that for all his talk of the war between civilizations, bin Laden has never spoken of the end of days. For him, the battle between the Muslims and the infidels is part of earthly human life, and has indeed been with us since the days of the Prophet himself. The war intensifies and lessens with time, but it is not something that occurs out of time or with the expectation that time itself will stop. Bin Laden and his sympathizers want to re-establish the caliphate and rule the Muslim world, but unlike some earlier revivalist movements within Sunni Islam, they do not declare their leader as the mahdi, or guided one, whose appearance will usher in a golden age of justice and peace to be followed by the Day of Judgment.

From this perspective, the utter destruction of civilization would be a mistake, not the fulfillment of the divine plan. Even the most radical Sunni theorists of jihad invoke a passage from the Koran according to which civilization itself — “the crops and the cattle” — must not and cannot be destroyed completely. Bin Laden might seem to have few qualms about killing millions of Americans or other Westerners. He might well use a nuclear device if he gambled that there would be no enemy for the United States to bomb in retaliation. But even he might not be prepared to unleash a global nuclear conflagration on the expectation that a better order would emerge once many millions of Muslims and infidels died. (Bin Laden has called for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons, and in the 1990’s reportedly tried to acquire them himself — but there is little hard evidence that he has made subsequent efforts in that direction.)

With respect to Shiite eschatology, there is greater reason for concern. Iran’s Shiism is of the “Twelver” variety, so called because the 12th imam in the line of succession from the Prophet disappeared into a state of occultation — or being hidden — from which he is expected to return as the mahdi. Ayatollah Khomeini played on the messianic overtones of this belief during the Iranian revolution, in which some of his followers went so far as to hint that he might be the returning imam. Moktada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia in Iraq is called Army of the Mahdi. Recently, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contributed to renewed focus on the mahdi, by saying publicly that the mission of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to pave the way for the mahdi’s return, and by visiting the mosque at Jamkaran, on the outskirts of Qom, where, according to one tradition, the vanished imam was last seen. Some reports suggest that youth religion in Iran in increasingly focused on veneration of the vanished imam.

Islam has a vision of the end of days, with wars between the faithful and the tribes of Gog and Magog (Yuj and Majuj in their Arabic incarnation). Twelver Shiism is, at its core, an eschatological faith, focused on the ultimate return of the imam-mahdi, who will restore the Shiites to their rightful place and redeem their generations of suffering. Since the vanished imam is by tradition a human who has never died, but remains in occultation, he is also believed to affect the course of events even from his hidden place. And Shiite tradition fills in the picture of the mahdi’s return with an elaborate account of signs that will herald the event, including advance messengers, earthquakes and bloodshed.

But belief in redemption — even accompanied by wars and death and the defeat of the infidels — need not translate into a present impulse to create a violent crisis that would precipitate the messianic situation. Like their Jewish counterparts, Shiite religious authorities have traditionally sought to resist speculation about the imminence of a messianic return. Shiite messianic thought is less focused than its messianic Christian counterpart on generating global crisis and letting God sort things out. Khomeini himself believed that the mahdi’s advent could be hastened — but by social justice, not by provoking war. This put him on the activist side of Shiite teaching about the mahdi, much as he was also an activist about the exercise of worldly power by the mullahs. A popular revolutionary slogan urged the imam’s coming but asserted that Khomeini would govern alongside him.

Other Shiite thinkers, by contrast, take a more fatalist stance, and prefer to believe that the mahdi’s coming cannot be hastened by human activity — a view that corresponds loosely to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s belief, with regard to Iraq and elsewhere, that the clerics should not themselves govern. One small, semi-secret Iranian organization, the Hojjatiya Society, was banned and persecuted by Khomeini’s government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi’s arrival could not be hastened.

Ahmadinejad is not the only or even the most important player in Iran’s nuclear game. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, still makes the ultimate decisions on armaments and other matters, and there are numerous factions in the country with opposed interests and ideology and goals. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad has in some respects succeeded in making the nuclear issue his own, and as a result his personal views about the end of days have been the subject of much speculation and innuendo, inside Iran and out. The Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, hinted darkly and without much evidence that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel for the Night of Power (this year it fell on Aug. 22), when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to the Furthest Mosque, associated in tradition with al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Rumors, possibly spread by Ahmadinejad’s enemies, have tied him to the outlawed Hojjatiya — a link mistakenly interpreted outside Iran as evidence that he might want to bring back the imam by violence, rather than that he might prefer to wait piously and prepare for the imam’s eventual return on his own schedule. It is of course impossible to gauge the man’s religious sensibilities perfectly. Yet the relative absence of a contemporary Shiite trend to messianic brinkmanship suggests that Ahmadinejad’s recent emphasis on the mahdi may be interpreted more in terms of an attempt to summon Khomeini’s legacy and Iran’s revolutionary moment than as a desperate willingness to bring the nation to the edge of war. When Ahmadinejad invoked the mahdi in his now-famous letter to George Bush, he seemed to be using the doctrine in ecumenical terms, emphasizing the Islamic tradition that Jesus — revered as a prophet, though not as the Son of God — will return alongside the mahdi and govern in tandem with him.

So although a renewed Shiite messianism does create some cause for concern about the potential uses of an Iranian bomb — in particular because it suggests that Ahmadinejad may be more a utopian than a realist — it is almost certainly a mistake to anticipate that Iran would use its nuclear power in a way that would provoke large-scale retaliation and assured self-destruction. Iranian leaders have been more than ready to sacrifice their own citizens in large numbers. During the Iran-Iraq war, major efforts went into recruiting young boys to the Basij militias, which were then sent to the front lines on what were essentially suicide missions. Religion played the central part in motivating the teenage soldiers, and it is reasonable to believe that religion helped salve the consciences of those who ordered these children into battle. Yet even this discounting of the value of human life — in a war started by Saddam Hussein, not by Iran — fell short of voluntarily putting an entire nation at risk. Ahmadinejad surely understands the consequences of using a nuclear bomb, and Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering collective suicide.

VI.
These worries about an Islamic bomb raise the question of why we trust any nation with the power that a nuclear capacity confers. Why, for instance, do we trust ourselves, given that we remain the only nation actually to have used nuclear weapons? The standard answer to why we keep our nuclear bombs — a response developed during the cold war — is that we must have the capability to deter anyone who might attack us first. The promise of mutually assured destruction was its own kind of collective suicide pact, albeit one supposed to scare both sides out of pushing the button. That is why, throughout the heyday of the unilateral disarmament movement, critics of this justification pointed out that our threat was only credible if we were, in fact, prepared to kill millions of civilians in a rapid act of retaliation. If this kind of killing was morally unjustified, went their argument, then the threat to use it was also immoral.

The truth is that we hold on to our nuclear capability not only as a matter of deterrence but also to maintain our own global strategic position. If we do not want Islamic states — or anyone else for that matter — to have a nuclear capability, it is not necessarily because we consider them especially likely to bring on their own destruction by using it. It is, rather, that we do not want to cede some substantial chunk of our own global power to them. This principle — if it is a principle — lies behind the general strategy that is embedded in the international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Everybody involved understands that if any government got a chance to acquire nuclear power before the other treaty members had a chance to notice and impose sanctions, it would jump at the opportunity.

So the nonproliferation regime is not and could never be based on some principle of international fairness. But it does not follow that the United States and its allies should simply accept the development of nuclear technology by just anyone. It should be relevant to our deliberations that a particular candidate is our enemy. When it comes to Islamic states, there is serious reason to worry that, both now and in the immediately foreseeable future, popular anti-American sentiment is especially likely to play an important role in the shaping of foreign policy. Over the next quarter-century, it is conceivable and certainly desirable that Islamism and anti-Americanism may be unlinked. But we must be honest and acknowledge that in the short term at least, the U.S. democratization strategy has done almost nothing to reduce Islamist anti-Americanism, whether Shiite or Sunni — this despite the fact that the same strategy has benefited Islamists across the region by allowing them to run for office and enter government.

Much of the reason for this close linkage between Islamism and anti-Americanism comes from Iran. As an enemy of the United States, which has worked consistently against American interests, Iran is in a category by itself, most nearly matched by North Korea, the other still-standing member of President Bush’s axis of evil. In this, Iran’s motives have been primarily Islamic-ideological, not pragmatic.

For many years under the shah, Iran was a natural American ally — precisely because it was Shiite and non-Arab, and uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union and its fantasy of a warm-water port. Even after the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, it is possible that the United States would have eventually reopened relations with an avowedly Islamic Iran had the government softened its anti-Americanism. The United States has never made secularism a condition of friendship. It has been fully prepared to support Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, and even used religion to cement the anti-Communist alliance during the cold war. The Iraqi Shiite Islamists have been willing to work alongside the Americans, and the United States has in return treated them as its allies, democratically chosen by the Iraqi electorate.

Islamist anti-Americanism is the direct legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini’s success in marrying Islamic faith to anti-imperialism — making “Death to America” into a religious chant, not just a political slogan. Of course the United States was hardly blameless. It did everything it could to open itself to the imperialist charge, including, in Iran, backing the famous 1953 countercoup that removed from power Iran’s first democratically legitimate prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Contemporary Islamists can also point to America’s continuing hypocritical support of regional authoritarian regimes.

Iranian-rooted Islamist anti-Americanism has worked far better than its designers might have imagined, spreading to Sunni Islamists who have little love to lose for Iran. The marriage of Islamism and anti-Americanism will probably be considered by history as the most significant consequence of the Iranian revolution. Anti-Americanism has become a staple of Islamist sermons and Web postings, an effective tool for drawing to the movement angry young people who might not naturally be drawn to religion. Bin Ladenism, in this sense, owes much to the Iranian revolution even though Al Qaeda was never Iran’s direct ally. United States support for Israel has always been an important part of the argument for Islamist anti-Americanism, but today it is by no means a necessary component. If U.S. support of Israel were to weaken, the American presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the gulf would easily substitute as a basis for hatred.

The United States therefore has strong reason to block its enemy Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — not simply because Iran will seek to become a greater regional power, as any nation might do, but because the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted is definitionally anti-American. There need not be a direct threat of Iranian first use against either the United States or Israel for this reason to weigh heavily. A nuclear Iran will be a stronger and more effective enemy in pursuing anti-American policies under the banner of Islam. That will not change until the Iranian state abandons either its Islamic identity or its association between Islam and anti-Americanism. Iran’s eagerness to acquire nuclear capacity need not be a result of a particularly Islamic motivation, but if and when Iran does have the bomb, its enhanced power and prestige will certainly be lent to policies that it conceives as promoting the Islamic interest.

Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important question. It turns on many uncertain facts, like the true progress of Iran’s nuclear program and how much it can be affected by air attack; Iran’s capacity and will to retaliate against an attack; whether there is any chance Iran would respond to negotiations; and the ability of the United States to withstand any retaliation while 150,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. As we have recently learned in Iraq, it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war — you must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral costs of things going horribly wrong. Any choice, though, must be made against the backdrop of the reality that the Islamic government of Iran is not only unlikely to collapse soon — it is also very unlikely to become less anti-American in the near future.

The same, unfortunately, is true of the world’s Islamist movements, for whom anti-Americanism remains a rallying cry and a principle of belief. Perhaps the promotion of democracy in the region, pursued consistently by the United States over the long term, might someday allow the rise of leaders whose Islamism is tempered by the need to satisfy their constituents’ domestic needs — and who eschew anti-Americanism as wasteful and misguided. Iraq was the test case of whether this change could occur in the short term. But we failed to make the experiment work and gave Iraq’s Islamist politicians, Shiite and Sunni alike, ample grounds to continue the anti-American rhetoric that comes so easily to them. In the wake of our tragic mismanagement of Iraq, we are certainly a generation or more from any such unlinking of Islamism and anti-Americanism, if it is to occur at all. And Islamism itself shows no signs of being on the wane as a social or political force.

That means that the best we can hope for in nuclear Islamic states in the near term is a rational dictator like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who sees his bread buttered on the side of an alliance with the West. Such rulers can be very strong and can bring stability, but we also know that their rule (or reign) promotes Islamist opposition, with its often violent overtones. When such rulers die or otherwise fall from power, the Islamists will be poised to use the international power conferred by nuclear weapons to pursue their own ends — ends for now overwhelmingly likely to be anti-American.

None of this is inherent in the structure of Islam itself. Islam contains a rich and multivocal set of traditions and ideas, susceptible to being used for good or ill, for restraint or destruction. This interpretive flexibility — equally characteristic of the other great world religions — does not rob Islam of its distinctiveness. An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to which they put their faith and their capabilities. In confronting the possibility of the Islamic bomb, we — Muslims and non-Muslims alike — need to remember that Islam exists both as an ideal system of morals and values and as a force that motivates actual people living today, with all the frailties and imperfections that make us human.

---

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The Year Of Playing DirtierNegative Ads Get Positively Surreal

By Michael Grunwald
October 27, 2006

Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!

Well, that's what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with "XXX" stamped across Kind's face.

It turns out that Kind -- along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House -- opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies. According to Nelson's ads, the Democrat also wants to "let illegal aliens burn the American flag" and "allow convicted child molesters to enter this country."

To Nelson, that doesn't even qualify as negative campaigning.

"Negative campaigning is vicious personal attacks," he said in an interview. "This isn't personal at all."

By 2006 standards, maybe it isn't.

On the brink of what could be a power-shifting election, it is kitchen-sink time: Desperate candidates are throwing everything. While negative campaigning is a tradition in American politics, this year's version in many races has an eccentric shade, filled with allegations of moral bankruptcy and sexual perversion.

At the same time, the growth of "independent expenditures" by national parties and other groups has allowed candidates to distance themselves from distasteful attacks on their opponents, while blogs and YouTube have provided free distribution networks for eye-catching hatchet jobs.

"When the news is bad, the ads tend to be negative," said Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford professor who studies political advertising. "And the more negative the ad, the more likely it is to get free media coverage. So there's a big incentive to go to the extremes."

The result has been a carnival of ugly, especially on the GOP side, where operatives are trying to counter what polls show is a hostile political environment by casting opponents as fatally flawed characters. The National Republican Campaign Committee is spending more than 90 percent of its advertising budget on negative ads, according to GOP operatives, and the rest of the party seems to be following suit. A few examples of the "character issues" taking center stage two weeks before Election Day:

· In New York, the NRCC ran an ad accusing Democratic House candidate Michael A. Arcuri, a district attorney, of using taxpayer dollars for phone sex. "Hi, sexy," a dancing woman purrs. "You've reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line." It turns out that one of Arcuri's aides had tried to call the state Division of Criminal Justice, which had a number that was almost identical to that of a porn line. The misdial cost taxpayers $1.25.

· In Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, trailing by more than 20 points in polls, has accused front-running Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland of protecting a former aide who was convicted in 1994 on a misdemeanor indecency charge. Blackwell's campaign is also warning voters through suggestive "push polls" that Strickland failed to support a resolution condemning sex between adults and children. Strickland, a psychiatrist, objected to a line suggesting that sexually abused children cannot have healthy relationships when they grow up.

· The Republican Party of Wisconsin distributed a mailing linking Democratic House candidate Steve Kagen to a convicted serial killer and child rapist. The supposed connection: The "bloodthirsty" attorney for the killer had also done legal work for Kagen.

· In two dozen congressional districts, a political action committee supported by a white Indianapolis businessman, J. Patrick Rooney, is running ads saying Democrats want to abort black babies. A voice says, "If you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you'll want to dispose of that problem tout de suite, no questions asked."

· In the most controversial recent ad, the Republican National Committee slammed Rep. Harold E. Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) for attending a Playboy-sponsored Super Bowl party. In the ad, a scantily clad white actress winks as she reminisces about good times with Ford, who is black. That ad has been pulled, but the RNC has a new one saying Ford "wants to give the abortion pill to schoolchildren."

Some Democrats are playing rough, too. House candidate Chris Carney is running ads slamming the "family values" of Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.), whose former mistress accused him of choking her. And House candidate Kirsten Gillibrand has an ad online ridiculing Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) for attending a late-night fraternity party. "What's a 50-year-old man doing at a frat party anyway?" one young woman asks, as a faux Sweeney boogies behind her to the Beastie Boys. "Totally creeping me out!" another responds.

But most harsh Democratic attacks have focused on the policies and performance of the GOP majority, trying to link Republicans to Bush, the unpopular war in Iraq and the scandals involving former representative Mark Foley and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. That is not surprising, given that polls show two-thirds of the electorate thinks the country is going in the wrong direction. And studies show that negative ads can reduce turnout; Democrats hope a constant drumbeat of scandal, Iraq and "stay the course" will persuade conservatives to stay home on Nov. 7.

It is harder for Republicans to blame out-of-power Democrats for the current state of Washington, but they are equally eager to depress Democratic turnout and fire up their conservative base. One GOP strategy has been raising the specter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal, becoming speaker; for example, Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-Ind.) is airing radio ads warning that a Democratic victory would allow Pelosi to "put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda." Then again, Hostettler's opponent, Democrat Brad Ellsworth, has accused him of promoting the sale of guns to criminals, "including child-rapists."

Some of this year's negative ads are more substantive, reprising a successful Republican strategy from 2002 and 2004: portraying Democrats as soft on terrorism. For example, Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.) has an ad lambasting her opponent for opposing Bush's efforts to conduct wiretaps without search warrants. A host of Democrats have been accused of trying to "cut and run" in Iraq -- including House candidate Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who lost both legs in Iraq.

The RNC has raised eyebrows with an ad consisting almost entirely of al-Qaeda videos starring Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. There is no sound except the ticking of a bomb before the final warning: "These are the stakes. Vote November 7th." John G. Geer, a Vanderbilt professor who has written a book defending negative political ads, said he told a well-connected Republican friend in Washington that the ticking-bomb ploy seemed like a desperation move. The friend e-mailed back: "John, we're desperate!"

"Look, the electorate is polarized, the stakes are large, and neither party has much to run on right now," Geer said. "You can expect to see some pretty outlandish ads."

The "pays for sex" ad against Kind in Wisconsin -- along with a similar one aired against Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) -- may be the most extreme. It says Kind spent tax dollars to study "the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes" and "the masturbation habits of old men" and "to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia." Cue the punch line: "Ron Kind pays for sex, but not for soldiers." The Wisconsin Republican Party denounced the ad, and several TV stations refused to air it, but that only got it more attention. It is the centerpiece of Nelson's Web site: "This ad is so powerful, a sitting U.S. Congressman threatened TV stations with legal action if they dared to play it."

Kind joked in an interview that he has been paying for sex ever since he said "I do." But on a more serious note, he said Nelson's attack ad is typical of modern politics, in which desperate candidates can attract media coverage and rally their base with distortion. He opposed the amendment in question -- as did many Republicans -- because he does not think Congress should interfere in peer-reviewed NIH studies, not because of any interest in teenage genitalia. That particular study, incidentally, had nothing to do with teenagers.

"Man, it's a crazy system, and it's getting worse every year," Kind said. "We rip each other to shreds, and then we're all supposed to come back to Washington and try to work together. It's a hell of a way to elect representatives."

At least it is clear who is responsible for Nelson's ad: Nelson. The Playboy ad bashing Ford, on the other hand, is a typical product of the attack politics of 2006. Its beneficiary, GOP Senate candidate Bob Corker, called it "tacky" but said he cannot do anything about an RNC ad. Even RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman said he is powerless to stop it; it is an "independent expenditure" of the RNC, out of the committee's control. He doesn't seem too upset about it, though. Corker has been rising in the polls since it started airing.

Experts say that in the past, negative ads were usually more accurate, better documented and more informative than positive ads; there was a higher burden of proof. Stanford's Iyengar thinks that is still true for candidate-funded messages, which now require candidates to say they approved them. But it is not true when the messages are produced by political parties, shadowy independent groups or partisans posting on YouTube.

"You're going to see more of this sensational, off-the-wall stuff," Iyengar said. "If you get people disgusted, they might withdraw from politics, and that's the real goal these days."

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Iraqis More Upbeat Than Californians

By Debra J. Saunders
October 26, 2006

Senator Dianne Feinstein told The Chronicle editorial board Monday that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign and that the United States should set a timetable for withdrawing its troops from Iraq. Polls, she said, show that Iraqis want Americans to leave. Perhaps President Bush could replace Rumsfeld with John Zogby or some other pollster as Washington's alleged leadership argues that public opinion should dictate what America does in Iraq.

When Americans supported sending forces to Iraq, Feinstein voted in favor of the resolution authorizing force in Iraq. Now polls show that Americans have soured on the war -- certainly Californians oppose it -- and Feinstein, who is running for re-election, was happy to point out that she regretted that vote.

Now she wants a timetable. As the senator put it, "I think it may even be productive positively to say, 'look we're going to aim to have all our people out by the end of '07.' " Feinstein added that all the polls show that Iraqis want U.S. troops to leave.

I am in favor of withdrawing according to any timetable approved by democratically elected Iraqi lawmakers. But unlike Feinstein, I think it makes more sense to let Iraqi leaders ask for U.S. troops to leave when they feel secure enough to do so -- rather than rely on polls. Right now, Iraqi leaders want U.S. boots on the ground.

It's important to read beyond the headlines on Iraq polls, especially the poll released in September by the Program on International Policy Attitudes -- as anti-war types point to it as proof that Iraqis want U.S. troops out.

The Washington Post reported that the PIPA poll found that "71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to depart within a year." Well, actually, make that two years. The PIPA poll found that 35 percent of Iraqis answered that they want their government to ask U.S.-led forces to withdraw within six months, 35 percent want their government to ask for a gradual withdrawal over two years and 29 percent want U.S. troops to be reduced "as the security situation improves in Iraq." You could say that 64 percent of Iraqis want U.S.-led forces to stay for two years or more.

Other interesting tidbits from the PIPA poll: 64 percent of Iraqis think their country is headed in the right direction. Compare that to a recent poll that found that 44 percent of Californians say the state is headed in the right direction and 46 percent say it is headed in the wrong direction.

The PIPA poll asked, "Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the U.S.-Britain invasion, do you personally think ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?" The answer for 77 percent: yes, it was worth it.

News on the Iraq war is bound to be bad when the media fail to report news that does not reinforce the media view of this war as unwinnable. It took less than two weeks after the war in Iraq began for The Chronicle to run the first opinion piece that called the war a "quagmire."

I shudder to think what would happen in Afghanistan if the defeat crowd wins an early retreat from Iraq.

Feinstein echoed the argument made by Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., that U.S. presence in Iraq has lasted longer than U.S. participation in World Wars I and II. As Feinstein put it, "After a war that's gone on as long just about as World War II, the people and the Congress are entitled to a timetable."

Well, U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan longer than in Iraq. Still, Feinstein said that she supports keeping troops in Afghanistan because, "The Afghanis want the NATO forces there. Iraqis want us out. We have become an occupying force."

How long do you think that support will last if jihadis around the world decide to camp out in Afghanistan? How long will it take before polls show American support for U.S. troops in Afghanistan falling? How long then will it be before Feinstein wants an Afghanistan timetable?

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Iraq Facing Bleak Future Without US

The New Zealand Herald
October 27, 2006

Civil war always ranked high among the possibilities after the dethroning of Saddam Hussein by American-led forces. Two important conditions had to be met if a stable, thriving democracy, rather than factional conflict, was to be the face of the new Iraq. First, the the country's antipathetic ethnic and religious groupings had to be persuaded that compromise and consensus were in their interests. Secondly, the new Iraqi Administration had to demonstrate that it could govern strongly and effectively, and do so without the crutch of the United States. Neither prerequisite has been met, and the turmoil convulsing Iraq is an inevitable consequence.

The daily slaughter takes two forms. Deadliest is the violence between Shiite and Sunni militias in what is effectively a low-level civil war. But there is also the insurgency against the foreign forces. This month is shaping up to be the costliest for American troops in almost two years. In part, that reflects the failure of a joint US-Iraqi drive to quell the violence in Baghdad.

This increase in conflict appears to have befuddled the White House. President George W. Bush has made the cardinal error of talking of a similarity between events in Iraq and those in Vietnam 40 years ago. Drawing such a parallel is hardly helpful for the Republican Party, which faces heavy losses in the congressional elections on November 7. In an attempt to lessen the damage, the White House has now taken to talking of "flexibility" in Iraq, and military chiefs are speaking of a substantial pull-out of US troops within 12 to 18 months.

All this merely confirms the irrevocability of the course of events in Iraq. Many Iraqis have provided their own commentary by escaping abroad or fleeing to areas where their own ethnic or religious groupings hold sway. About 1.5 million Iraqis are refugees in their own country. These people are saying, in effect, that they see no prospect of reconciliation between the Shiites, who are 60 per cent of the population, the Sunnis, who ruled the country for most of the past century, and the Kurds.

The prospect of an inclusive government flickered briefly during the national election last December. But Sunni disappointment at the outcome has fed the al Qaeda-backed insurgency, as has Sunni realisation that they can reclaim power only through armed resistance. The Shiites, for their part, have demonstrated an increasing willingness to confront, and initiate, sectarian aggression.

The constitution of the new Iraq envisaged high degrees of autonomy for the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. There, again, the Sunnis saw themselves losing out, especially in revenue from new oil developments. Now, the bitterness enveloping the country makes even a federal Iraq seem a remote possibility. More likely in the immediate future is a full-scale civil war leading to a Shiite-dominated clerical state, or, perhaps most likely, the break-up of Iraq. The only element preventing this at the moment is the presence of the American-led forces.

President Bush is under intensifying pressure, even from his own party, to accept the abject failure of his Iraqi initiative and detail plans to end it. If the congressional election ends 12 years of Republican rule, the change would lead to newly empowered calls for an accelerated troop withdrawal. If this were to happen, US policy would come increasingly to resemble the disengagement from Vietnam. There, however, the parallels would end. For Iraq, the short-term consequences are likely to be far more dire.

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Danish Court Protects Free Expression-Muslims Go Haywire-

Cartoons Lawsuit Rejected
Sky News
October 26, 2006

A Danish court has dismissed a legal action against the newspaper that published 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, triggering huge protests around the world. Furious Muslims took to the streets claiming the drawings were blasphemous and insulting.

Some of the demonstrations turned violent, with protesters killed in Libya and Afghanistan. In Beirut, the Danish Embassy was set on fire. Elsewhere, the Danish flag was burnt.

The City Court in Aarhus said it accepted some Muslims had been offended by the drawings, printed last September in Jyllands-Posten, but it added there was no reason to assume the cartoons were meant to "belittle Muslims".

The paper said it had published the cartoons to challenge the view artists imposed self-censorship when depicting Islam for fear of causing offence. The caricatures were reprinted in European papers in January and February, fuelling angry protests in the Islamic world and Europe.

Islamic law forbids any depiction of the prophet, even positive ones, to prevent idolatry.

The seven Muslim groups filed the defamation lawsuit against the paper in March, after Denmark's top prosecutor decided not to press criminal charges. He said the drawings did not violate the country's laws against racism or blasphemy.

The plaintiffs, who claimed to have the backing of 20 more Islamic organisations in Denmark, had sought damages of 100,000 kroner (about US$17,000). The lawsuit said the cartoons depict Mohammed as "belligerent, oppressing women, criminal, crazy and unintelligent".

It also claimed "a connection is made between the Prophet and war and terror".

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What's the UNSC vote really about?

By Francisco at Caracas Chronicles
October 20, 2006

Those of us focused on Venezuelan affairs will tend to examine the UN Security Council election this week for clues about Chavez's international standing. Probably, though, the vote tells us more about the way the world's governments feel about US hegemony. In a way Venezuela has done the world a service this week by giving states a chance to vote on the overarching strategic issue of the day:

Is international peace and security advanced if you counter the power of the United States at every turn, or does it make more sense to work pragmatically with the hegemonic power, at least sometimes? Is US power a purely negative force in the world? Or is the US, at least on some matters, a benevolent hegemon, one able to work constructively towards international peace and security?

These were the questions states were answering when they chose between Venezuela and Guatemala this week, and the answer has been clear: about 80 countries want a voice in the UN Security Council that will oppose the US on everything, always, and about 105 countries do not.

Certainly that such a lot of countries stand ready to back a policy as radical as Chavez's gives a strong indication of how badly the Bush administration has damaged the US brand in world affairs. A bigger group of countries, though, feels less threatened by the US than by the forces the US is trying to contain. Which is why they prefer a functioning UN Security Council to one bogged down by rhetorical grandstanding by a rotating member.

When you elevate "anti-imperialism" to the status of sole principle underpinning your foreign policy, you jump in bed, ipso facto, with forces far, far scarier than the US. How many UNSC votes did Venezuela lose to Chavez's flirting with North Korea? To his embrace of Ahmadinejad? To his solidarity with FARC? Certainly more than a few, probably more than he gained.

When anti-imperialism is interpreted, Chavez-style, in the most primitive and unreflexive way possible - as an imperative to side with every enemy of Washington, all other considerations be damned - some governments may line up to applaud, but many more will write you off as an ideological zealot.

Because it should be clear that it's Chavez's lack of sophistication, his utter tin-ear for the sense of the ridiculous that ultimately doomed Venezuela's bid. A loud and firm voice meant to balance US hegemonic power? Probably most countries in the world would love a country like that in the UN Security Council. But when you call George W. Bush the devil, a genocidal drunk, when you say he makes Hitler look like a suckling baby etc. etc. you cross that fateful border between the corageous and the ridiculous. Reducing diplomacy to the level of vaudeville act, you manage only to discredit the cause you claim to champion.

Ironically, by intensifying the link in international policy-makers' minds between "anti-US hegemony" and "comedically unhinged lunacy," Chavez has probably bolstered the legitimacy of US power more than he has undermined it. In a world where "only folks as nutty as Chavez" strike anti-imperialist postures, posing a strong challenge to American power makes you look like a nut. In the wake of Chavez's "devil" speech, the perception that Venezuelan foreign policy is just not serious has hardened. And that's an own-goal Chavez has scored all on his own, with no help at all from his myriad enemies, real or imagined.

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Caracas Chronicles is a blog by Venezuelans and for Venezuelans giving a sober and lucid look at Venezuelan life under the authoritarian communist rule of Hugo Chavez.

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Caracas Chronicles: Bonehead Populism

By Francisco of Caracas Chronicles
October 17, 2006

This article about the first day in operation of the Caracas-Cúa rail line in today's El Universal could be used as textbook material in a first year microeconomics course. I can just see it in the chapter on the Price Mechanism, a little side-bar on the unforeseen (but far from unforeseeable) consequences of making costly things free:

None of the new train users were surprised to find long lines outside the stations in Cúa and Charallave, even before 5 in the morning this Monday. The cause? The start of operations came with the delays typical of a brand new system, and user demand outstripped expectations, due to the last minute decision to make rides free.


People from Urdaneta County waited at their station until 5:20 am to take the first railroad, while the second only got there at 6:40. The delays meant that wagons arriving at Cúa - the start of the line - were already pratically full, since some passengers from Charallave-Norte and Charallave-Sur who wanted to go to Caracas opted to get on the southbound trains to Cúa so they could find seats and enjoy a more comfortable trip. This situation generated a vicious circle that led to total congestion all through the system.

The wait was in vain for many users who could not get to the train platforms before 9 a.m. in any of the three stations. Though they had paid Bs.1,100 (US$0.50) to get to Charallave-Norte or Charallave-Sur on minibuses, they ended up having to ride buses to Caracas as usual because they missed the last morning train.

21st century socialists can't seem to understand that price is a rationing mechanism - the way you make sure that no more of a scarce good or service is demanded than can be supplied. You can take away the price signal, remove any incentive not to over-consume, but that does not magically increase supply. Encourage over-consumption of rail services and you don't strike a glorious blow against the ideological superstructure of savage neoliberalism: you just create a shortage.

Which, of course, gets back to JayDee's point yesterday. Everybody wants a society where people can afford to move quickly and comfortably from home to work and back again. But if you try to bring it about in the most primitive, least thought-through way possible (free train for everybody!) you don't advance social justice, you just make an all around mess.

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Caracas Chronicles is a blog by Venezuelans and for Venezuelans giving a sober and lucid look at Venezuelan life under the authoritarian communist rule of Hugo Chavez.

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Can you tell a Sunni from a Shiite?

By Jeff Stein
October 17, 2006

For the past several months, I've been wrapping up lengthy interviews with U.S. counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?"

A "gotcha" question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don't think it's out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I'm not looking for theological explanations, simply the basics: Who's on what side today, and what does each want?

The 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry playing out in Baghdad's streets raises the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda.

It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other. But so far most American officials I've interviewed don't have a clue. That includes not only intelligence and law-enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing U.S. spy agencies.

My curiosity about policy makers' grasp of Islam's two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other television comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top FBI officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam.

One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau's counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Bald maintained, wasn't as important as being a good manager. A few months later I asked the FBI's spokesman, John Miller, about Bald's comments.

"A leader needs to drive the organization forward," Miller told me. "If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective."

Of course I hadn't asked about reading Urdu or bin Laden's writings. A few weeks ago I took the FBI's temperature again. I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau's new national-security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"Yes, sure, it's right to know the difference," he said. "It's important to know who your targets are." So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed.

"The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following," he said. "And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following."

All right, I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran, Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second.

"Iran and Hezbollah," I prompted. "Which are they?" He took a stab: "Sunni."

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? "Sunni."

Right. And, to his credit, Hulon did at least know that the vicious struggle between Islam's Abel and Cain was driving Iraq into civil war. But then we pay him to know things like that, the same as some members of Congress.

Take Representative Terry Everett, Republican of Alabama, vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment.

"One's in one location, another's in another location," he said. "No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something."

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni.

"Now that you've explained it to me," he said, "what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area."

Representative Jo Ann Davis, Republican of Virginia, who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the CIA's performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. "Do I?" she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. "You know, I should."

She took a stab at it.

"It's a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs," she said. "The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it's the Sunnis who're more radical than the Shia."

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda's leaders follow?

"Al Qaeda is the one that's most radical, so I think they're Sunni," she replied. Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies to know the answer to such questions, so that they can cut through officials' puffery when they came up to the Hill?

"Oh, I think it's very important," Davis said, "because Al Qaeda's whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you've got to understand, and to know your enemy."

It's not all so grimly humorous. Some agency officials and members of Congress have easily handled my "gotcha" question.

But as I keep asking it, I get more and more blank stares. Too many counterterrorism officials simply don't care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy America is fighting.

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Russian Chess King Fears for Life

MosNews.com
October 12, 2006

Former chess champion Garry Kasparov, an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Thursday he fears for his safety in the wake of the weekend murder of a critical Russian investigative journalist, AFP news agency reports.

"I try to protect myself and my family as much as possible but I am aware that no protection is possible," he said in an interviewed published in daily Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Negocios.

"Putin’s regime is seen in the West as a strange democracy, a Russian-style democracy. But in reality it is a police state. And the sooner Putin leaves, the better off the country will be," he added.

Speaking at a business conference in Lisbon late Wednesday, Kasparov said "it would be stupid for someone who is hostile to an authoritarian regime to not be afraid," daily newspaper 24Horas reported.

Kasparov, who was born in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, helped set up Committee 2008, a group dedicated to bringing down Putin and stopping the constitution from being changed so that he can run for a third term.

On Saturday Anna Politkovskaya, one of the last journalists to investigate human rights abuses in Chechnya and openly criticise Putin, was gunned down in what police said was a professional hit.

The murder caused an international outcry and raised fears about freedom of the press in Russia, where at least 42 journalists have been killed since the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Aide to Kasparov Badly Beaten in Moscow
MosNews.com
March 21, 2006

Marina Litvinovich, an aide to Russian opposition politician Garry Kasparov and a former head of the electoral headquarters of the liberal SPS party was badly beaten on a Moscow street on Monday evening.

The Gazeta.Ru web-site reports that Litvinovich was hit over the head from behind as she was going out of her office and heading for her car at about 21:15 Moscow time. She collapsed after the very first blow and cannot describe the attackers.

Litvinovich was hospitalized but released from the hospital after about one hour, after doctors diagnosed her with bruising but not concussion.

Litvinovich carried some valuables with her — a notebook computer, some money, car keys and a mobile phone, but nothing was missing after the attack and thus the victim holds it unlikely that the reason behind the incident was attempted robbery. She says the attack may be linked to her work with the victims of the Beslan and Nord-Ost crises.

Litvinovich has not reported the attack to the police.

More Kasparov-related Articles on MosNews

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Abu Fatass Charged with Treason

By Dan Eggen and Karen DeYoung
October 12, 2006

A California native who has appeared in al-Qaeda propaganda videos has been indicted for treason, making him the first American to be charged with that crime in half a century, the Justice Department announced yesterday.

Adam Gadahn, a 28-year-old fugitive believed to be living in Pakistan, could be sentenced to death if convicted of treason, which has been alleged only about 30 times in U.S. history and has not been used since the aftermath of World War II.

Gadahn, allegedly "gave al Qaeda aid and comfort . . . with intent to betray the United States" by appearing in videos calling for attacks on U.S. targets, according to the indictment, which was handed up by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, Calif. Gadahn is also charged with providing material support to terrorists, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

Gadahn was also added to the FBI's official list of "Most Wanted Terrorists," officials said.

In a Washington news conference announcing the charges, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty said that the treason charge "is not one that we bring lightly" but that "this is the right case for this charge."

"Adam Gadahn is an American citizen who made a choice -- he chose to join our enemy and to provide it with aid and comfort by acting as a propagandist for al-Qaeda," McNulty said, adding later: "Today's indictment should serve as notice that the United States will protect itself against all enemies, foreign and domestic. . . . Betrayal of our country will bring severe consequences."

McNulty said the government had no information indicating that Gadahn was directly involved in planning or carrying out terrorist attacks.

The treatment of Gadahn is notably different from the Justice Department's approach to other U.S. citizens accused of working on behalf of al-Qaeda since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, who have been charged with lesser crimes than treason or have been designated as enemy combatants outside the normal criminal justice system.

California native John Walker Lindh, for example, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing support to al-Qaeda and aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan. Former Chicago gang member Jose Padilla was held as an enemy combatant for years and now faces charges in Miami of participating in a North American terrorist cell and traveling to the Middle East for military training.

McNulty dismissed questions from reporters about the timing of the indictment, which comes as the Bush administration and other Republicans are seeking to focus attention on national security issues for the midterm elections. McNulty said that authorities are concerned over the growing number of videos from Gadahn and hope to use publicity to capture him. He added that the latest video finally provided enough evidence for him to be indicted. A previous indictment against Gadahn, without the treason charge, had been sealed.

One of the offenses alleged in the new indictment occurred "on or about Sept. 11, 2006," when Gadahn appeared in an al-Qaeda video montage released to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks. He had made a far longer and more substantive appearance on Sept. 2, in a production titled "An Invitation to Islam," which made a direct appeal to American soldiers and citizens to turn against their government.

Gadahn publicly emerged as a terrorism suspect in May 2004, when FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him in a press conference as one of seven alleged al-Qaeda agents planning imminent attacks on the United States. Relatives in Southern California's Riverside County expressed astonishment that the young man named Adam Pearlman, who had converted to Islam in 1995 and moved to Pakistan in 1998, was the same person who appeared in a terrorism video that month with his face wrapped in a kaffiyeh, and who provided English-language voice-over for Osama bin Laden.

Gadahn was born in Northern California and moved south with his parents at a young age to a wooden cabin in rural Riverside, southeast of Los Angeles, where the family operated a goat farm. According to relatives interviewed in 2004, he grew into a teenager enamored of heavy-metal music and, eventually, Islam.

In addition to his May 2004 video debut, he appeared in a video on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. This time, his face was only partially covered, and he was identified on the tape as "Azzam the American." The American people, he said, could expect "unpleasant consequences" if they continued to support their government.

The last person convicted of treason was Tomoya Kawakita, a Japanese American sentenced to death in 1952 for tormenting American prisoners of war during World War II; President Dwight D. Eisenhower commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

The Gadahn case bears at least surface similarities to the prosecution of "Tokyo Rose," the Japanese propagandist convicted of treason in 1949. It later emerged, however, that she had secretly plotted against Japan, prompting President Gerald R. Ford to pardon her.

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