All the weekend op-eds and commentary that matter.

Charles Krauthammer sets the record straight on the NIE report, Michelle Phillips comments on the veil debate in the UK, Youssef Ibrahim writes about a growing European anti-dhimmitude, Michael Novak recounts the Battle of Lepanto, Zachary Abuza looks at Indonesian Islamism on the rise… and much much more.

Charles Krauthammer in the Seattle Times: “Iraq and terrorism: a rebuttal” (h/t IRIS)

Ah, but those seers in the U.S. “intelligence community,” speaking through a leaked National Intelligence Estimate — the most famous previous NIE, mind you, concluded that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, slam-dunk — have peered deep into the hypothetical past and found the answer. As spun by Iraq war critics, the conclusion is that Iraq has made us less safe because it has become a “cause celebre” and a rallying cry for jihad.

Become? Everyone seems to have forgotten that Iraq was already an Islamist cause celebre and rallying cry long before 2003. When Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war against America in 1998, his two principal justifications for the jihad that exploded upon us on Sept. 11, 2001, centered on Iraq: America’s alleged killing of more than 1 million Iraqis through the post-Gulf War sanctions and, even worse, the desecration of Islam’s holiest cities of Mecca and Medina by the garrisoning of infidel U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia (as post-Gulf War protection from the continuing threat of invasion by Hussein).

The irony is that the overthrow of Hussein eliminated these two rallying cries: Iraqi sanctions were lifted and U.S. troops were withdrawn from the no-longer-threatened Saudi Arabia. But grievances cured are easily replaced. The jihadists wasted no time in finding new justifications for fury and reviving old ones. The supply is endless: Danish cartoons, papal pronouncements, the liberation of women, the existence of Israel, the licentiousness of Western culture, the war in Afghanistan. And, of course, Iraq — again.

How important is Iraq in this calculus? The vaunted National Intelligence Estimate — unspun — offers a completely commonplace weighing of the relationship between terrorism and Iraq. On the one hand, the American presence does inspire some to join the worldwide jihad. On the other hand, success in the Iraq project would blunt the most fundamental enlistment tool for terrorism — the political oppression in Arab lands that is deflected by cynical dictators and radical imams into murderous hatred of the West. Which is why the Bush democracy project embodies the greatest hope for a reduction of terrorism and why the NIE itself concludes that were the jihadists to fail in Iraq, their numbers would diminish.

It is an issue of time frame. The bombing of the Japanese home islands may have increased short-term recruiting for the kamikazes. But success in the Pacific war put a definitive end to the whole affair.

Moreover, does anyone imagine that had the jihadists in Iraq remained home they would now be tending petunias rather than plotting terror attacks? Omar al-Farouq, leader of al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from a U.S. prison in Afghanistan a year ago and was apparently drawn to the “cause celebre” in Iraq. Last month he was killed by British troops in a firefight in Basra. In an audiotape released Sept. 28, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq said that more than 4,000 of its recruits have been killed there since the American invasion. Like Omar al-Farouq and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they went to Iraq to die in Iraq.

It is clear that one of the reasons we have gone an astonishing five years without a second attack on the American homeland is that the most dedicated and virulent jihadists have gone to Iraq to fight us, as was said during World War I, “over there.”

Does the war in Iraq make us more or less safe today? And what about tomorrow? The fact is that no definitive answer is possible. Except for the following truism: During all wars we are by definition less safe — and the surest way back to safety is victory.

Youssef Ibrahim in the NY Sun: “Europe Is Growing Skeptical Of Dialogue With Muslims” (!!!)

After years of dithering over political correctness with Muslims and Islam, Europe is waking up to a different morning.

A three-week tour of Italy, France, and Britain last month was enough for me to conclude that Western Europeans have moved way beyond dialogue. Confrontation, indeed even provocation, is their preferred approach to the Muslims in their midst.

Long before Pope Benedict XVI’s scathing comments in mid-September on the fallacy of phony Muslim-Christian dialogue, signs of hardening European views toward current Islamic values were plentiful on the Continent.

It was telling, for example, to see how Europeans greeted the naïve commentary that surfaced in America’s National Intelligence Estimate, titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States.” The NIE told bemused Europeans, among other things, that “greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.”

Situated closer than America to that rough neighborhood called the Middle East, Europeans reacted by noting that the chances for “greater pluralism” in any Muslim country are about as plausible as hell freezing over.

Jack Straw, originally in the Lancashire Telegraph, his piece that started the British veil controversy: ‘I felt uneasy talking to someone I couldn’t see’
This is Jack Straw’s column in the Blackburn-based Lancashire Telegraph, which prompted the debate ( h/t Ayaan Hirsi Ali)

“It’s really nice to meet you face-to-face, Mr Straw,” said this pleasant lady, in a broad Lancashire accent. She had come to my constituency advice bureau with a problem. I smiled back. “The chance would be a fine thing,” I thought to myself but did not say out loud. The lady was wearing the full veil. Her eyes were uncovered but the rest of her face was in cloth.

Melanie Phillips: A man of straw no more?

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. Jack Straw of all people has broken the great taboo by daring to challenge the wearing of the Islamic full-face veil in Britain and ignited a hitherto suppressed public debate? Overnight, the man has become a national and international hero. Radio and TV stations report that messages of passionate support have been pouring in from all over the world – with a significant number coming from British Muslims. Yet Straw, Leader of the House of Commons and Britain’s former Foreign Secretary whose Blackburn constituency contains a high proportion of Muslims, has hitherto been the embodiment of appeasement and cultural cringe before the forces of Islamic extremism. Now he has written in an article for his local paper that for the past year, when women have come to see him in his constituency surgery with veils covering their entire faces except for the eyes, he has been asking them to lift their veils so he could speak to them properly. Today he went further still and said he would prefer it if women removed these veils altogether.
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Deborah Hope in The Australian: “Fatwa on freedom”

IN 1989 Iran’s mullahs accused Salman Rushdie of blasphemy and declared a fatwa against everyone associated with publishing The Satanic Verses. The novelist went underground for the next decade, followed by a 24-hour security detail. The Japanese and Italian translators of the book were stabbed two years later, Hitoshi Igarashi fatally.

At the time, the fatwa was seen as an isolated stroke of lunacy by a crazed Islamic regime. Westerners were troubled but few ruminated on the possible link between this assault on freedom of speech and the Islamist bombs that were targeting US embassies in Africa, or envisioned what they augured for the future.

Five years after the September 11 attacks the world is a foreign place. Identity is the West’s obsession; one of its core values, freedom of speech, is under assault; and Europe is convulsed by the rise of Islamism within its borders.

In the new climate, in which some Danish cartoons and the Pope’s use of a quotation by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor sparked violent, even murderous, protests by Muslims across the world, terrorists’ bombs caused mass slaughter in Madrid and London, and the children of North African immigrants torched schools, community centres and 10,000 cars in riots across France, a fatwa against Rushdie would be less remarkable.

Only two weeks ago, German opera house Deutsche Oper halted the production of Mozart’s Idomeneo citing an “incalculable risk” because of scenes in the production dealing with Islam.

At the heart of the West’s identity crisis is where to mark the limits of tolerance.

Since its release last month, this increasingly loud debate about how much intolerance the West can suffer and still survive has focused on Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam, his book about the ritual killing of the uncompromising Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh.
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Buruma’s conclusion is one that few will dispute. Immigrants and their offspring must learn that to be offended is the price we all must pay for our freedom of speech and freedom of thought: “Since many immigrants come from places where such freedom does not exist, they should be the first to appreciate its benefits.”

By Anthony Browne in the Times online: I’m oppressed, you’re oppressed, we are all oppressed: the victim culture (h/t Crusader Rabbit)

HE vast majority of people in Britain are officially oppressed, according to a report that claims we have become a “nation of victims”.

The study calculates that 73 per cent of Britons are members of officially recognised “victim groups”, including the disabled, women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Each group is given government support, including protective legislation.

The report, We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now, by the socially conservative think- tank Civitas, gives warning that the rise of a “victimocracy” undermines democracy because people are no longer considered equal under law.

“We have become a nation of victims,” it says. “Victimhood today is a political status that is sought after because of the advantages it brings, including preferential treatment in the workplace, the possibility of using police power to silence unwelcome critics, and financial compensation. To be classified as a victim is to be given a special political status, which has no necessary connection with real hardship or oppression.”

H. W. Crocker III in The Spectator: “Message to Islamists: Don’t Tread on Me” (h/t JihadWatch)

That anti-imperialism is a harmful idea should be obvious from our own history. Should we not have annexed the American southwest from Mexico? Should we have prevented Andrew Jackson from seizing Florida from Spain? Should we have accepted the British-drawn proclamation line of 1763 and left the interior of America to the Indians? Should we regret the British Empire’s original sin of planting us here at all?

The left beats the anti-colonial, anti-imperial drum because it serves the liberal interest of accommodating the West to retreat, to moral relativism, and to multiculturalism.

BUT IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS, though apparently it isn’t, that if America is to win the so-called war on terror we will need to revert to our imperial heritage as a people whose regnant spirit has always been Don’t Tread on Me, who would not willingly accept any restrictions on our trade, our travel, or our speech, and who had no doubt that where Americans went, there went liberty, and that Indians and Mexicans and Spaniards and Frenchmen, had better make way because a superior civilization was plowing through. We need a similar confidence if we are to tame militant Islam.

The Pax Britannica was a tremendous civilizing force. We now need a renewal of a Pax Americana that likewise thinks of our own institutions, our own ideas of justice, and our own civilization — including, even most especially, our religion — as worth spreading, as a benefit to the world, and to be denied nowhere.

Imperialism is an outward sign of such confidence and vigor. Today, it is something of an imperative as well. If we are going to win the clash of civilizations, if Europe is to be saved, if America’s spirit of Don’t Tread on Me is to be perpetuated, it will be because we will once again have convinced our enemies — and ourselves — that the West is best.

Michael Novak in the National Review: “Remembering Lepanto: A battle not forgotten” (h/t Miss Kelly)

The future author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, served on one of the Christian galleys in what he called the greatest naval sea battle in history and the most important to that time for the safety of Europe. The Turks had been massing an enormous fleet for an invasion of Italy. The preparations began to be reported on many months in advance. It was the year 1571 when that fleet was gathered near a port in Greece, not far from the Gulf of Lepanto.
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Only Don Juan of Austria, the bastard son of the king of Spain, was stirred by the danger. Despite his youth, despite his modest standing, Don Juan sent out urgent appeals and eventually gathered a sturdy fleet, outfitted with new warfare technologies invented in the West and rapidly mass-produced by the fledgling ship-building and armament firms of what was later to be called “Western capitalism.” He gathered fleets from Venice and Genoa, from Spain, and from the Knights of Malta. In a deliberately preemptive strike, blessed by the pope, this small fleet set sail to catch the Turkish armada before it left the waters of Greece.
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To make a long story short, Don Juan aimed his own galley directly at the heart of the Turkish armada, directly at the clearly colored sails of the Ali Pasha’s galley, with its great green flag, inscribed 28,000 times with the name of Allah in gold. The Venetian vessels sailed furiously into the Turkish right wing, and with the help of the revolt of the galley slaves collapsed that wing. Six of the largest Christian vessels had been outfitted with a platform elevated above normal levels on which rows of devastating cannons were arrayed. Blasts from these new cannons were withering, and within minutes sank dozens of Turkish ships. The sea, witnesses said, was covered with flailing sailors, floating turbans, pieces of wood and sail.
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The Christian victory was far more complete than anyone had dreamed. The victory seemed to many quite miraculous, and victory was immediately attributed to Our Lady Queen of the Rosary — soon to be called by a new title, Our Lady Queen of Victory. All over Europe, from city to town, church bells rang out continuously when news of the impressive victory arrived. Ever since, October 7 has been celebrated as a feast day by the Catholic Church.
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Since Osama bin Laden and others often cite these battles, for which he is still seeking revenge, it is not unwise for the people of the West to bear them in mind. Besides October 7, 1571 — the great victory by Jan Sobieski’s Polish calvary over the Turks outside the gates of Vienna on September 11-12, 1683 — deserves to be remembered. But there were also other great battles — some victories, some defeats — over that thousand-year period that still live in memory, or should.

Robert Satloff in the Washington Post: The Holocaust’s Arab Heroes (h/t Norman Geras)

Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust.
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The Holocaust was an Arab story, too. From the beginning of World War II, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout the area that Germany and its allies hoped to conquer. That included a great Arab expanse, from Casablanca to Tripoli and on to Cairo, home to more than half a million Jews.
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The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even helped save Jews.
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Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews’ valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, “The Arabs watched over the Jews.”

I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.

And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe — Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris — saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque’s administrative personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true heroes.

Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Page scandal makes America look silly”

There are many legitimate reasons for electors to toss out the Republican Congress, but the notion that they’re a hotbed of gay pedophile enablers is not one of them. Had Foley dug in and attempted to cling on, his GOP colleagues would have been all over TV deploring his behavior, calling on him to step down, expressing outrage, etc. After two or three days, a few lefties might even have piped up to assail the Republican theocrat sexual McCarthyites tormenting the poor chap. Had he actually had sex with congressional pages, affronted gay groups would have pointed out this was perfectly legal in the relevant jurisdictions and would have complained ferociously about the stigmatizing of gay relationships and Democrats would have declared there should be places for all at the American table, especially had Foley done a Jim McGreevey and announced that “my truth is I am a gay American.” A few quirks of timing and the parties’ respective roles might have been entirely reversed. Scandalwise, the Republicans always play the submissive masochists but the Dems are bi-swingers, happy to flay the GOP as either (a) uptight prudes or (b) pedophile enablers, according to what suits. What would have been consistent in both narratives is the assumption by the Democrats, the media and the Gay Page Tip-Line end of the Republican Party is that the electorate is stupid. In the sense that there’s any “child abuse” going on here, the American people are being treated like children and abused by the politico-media class.

This last week is unbecoming of a mature democracy. In the wider world, America can survive being the Great Satan, but not the Great Laughingstock.

Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard: “The State Dept. Was Right To deny Tariq Ramadan a visa.” (via Counteterrorism Blog)

For her 2004 book Brother Tariq, Caroline Fourest, a French expert on Islamic fundamentalism, studied Ramadan’s 15 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and–most important–his 100 or so tapes, which sell tens of thousands of copies each year. Her conclusion: “Ramadan is a war leader.” When an interviewer from the weekly L’Express asked Fourest how she could be so sure that Ramadan was indeed the “political heir of his grandfather,” Hassan al-Banna, here’s how she replied:

Because I’ve studied his statements and his writing. I was struck by the extent to which the discourse of Tariq Ramadan is often just a repetition of the discourse that Banna had at the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt. He never criticizes his grandfather. On the contrary, he presents him as a model to be followed, a person beyond reproach, nonviolent and unjustly criticized because of the “Zionist lobby”! This sends chills down one’s spine when one knows the extent to which Banna was a fanatic, that he gave birth to a movement out of which the worst Jihadis (like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number 2 man of al Qaeda) have emerged, and that he wanted to establish a theocracy in every country having a single Muslim. Tariq Ramadan claims that he is not a Muslim Brother. Like all the Muslim Brothers . . . since it’s a fraternity which is three-quarters secret. . . . A Muslim Brother is above all someone who adopts the methods and the thought of Banna. Ramadan is the man who has done the most to disseminate this method and this thought.

In response to her book, Ramadan calls Fourest an agent of Israel but doesn’t refute her findings. Predictably, as soon as her book was published, an Islamist website threatened Fourest and posted her address and the pass code to get into her building.

Fourest is not the only one who has seen through Ramadan’s game. Prominent moderate Muslims also accuse Ramadan of double talk. For instance, the head of the largest French antiracism association, SOS Racisme, Malek Boutih (an Arab Muslim), told Ramadan after talking with him at length: “Mr. Ramadan, you are a fascist.”

But while the French have come to see Ramadan as one more Islamist, the British have honored him with a fellowship at Oxford University and, more important, a seat on the Blair government’s committee tackling extremism. As one stunned European diplomat told Radio France Internationale, “It’s like putting a diabetic in the middle of a pastry shop.”

Hugh Fitzgerald at DhimmiWatch: “Fitzgerald: To collaborate in this effort at deception is monstrous”

Tariq Ramadan has never rejected, and will never reject, a single passage in the Qur’an, or a single one of the most “authentic” Hadith. He accepts Muhammad’s words and deeds as those of a man who was the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. He rejects nothing of Islam at its most permanently menacing. He has never taken the slightest issue with, much less denounced, the Muslim worldview that divides the universe uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel.

Like Edward Said, he has a certain oleagineous charm that works, apparently, on a few of the unwary (such as Timothy Garton Ash, whose knowledge of Islam is insufficient to allow him to remain uncharmed by his St Antony’s colleague, Tariq Ramadan). His words are sly, but his goal is clear. He wishes to ensure that Infidels in Europe are not unduly alarmed, for now, by the growing Muslim presence here. He counsels Muslims that, for now, in the most trivial but obvious of ways, they should “fit in” but not change Islam. He prates on about a “European Islam,” but never suggests that this “European Islam” will be any different in its essential doctrine or practice from the Islam that is to be found everywhere else — for how could he? How could he suggest a different Qur’an, or a different version of the Hadith, or a new life of Muhammad? He can’t. He reads the same Qur’an and the same Hadith as his grandfather Al-Banna, or Sheik al-Qaradawi, or Al-Zawahiri, or Nasrallah, or any Muslim Believer anywhere.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid (“an Egyptian physician, Islamic scholar and former extremist”) in the Rocky Mountains News: “Speakout: Muslims must both denounce, renounce their violent hadiths” (via Jihadwatch)

Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida’s No. 2 man, last month announced that Americans must choose: Convert to Islam or continue to receive acts of terror.

Al-Zawahri was reiterating a fundamental concept of Salafi Islamic teaching, the fountainhead of extremist thinking. Yet the authors of the American government’s recent intelligence report on terrorism’s spread seem not to have been listening.

Zawahri’s threat is based on a saying of the Prophet Muhammad as written in Sahih Al-Buchary, a central book of Salafi Islamic teaching. This hadith, or fundamental concept, states: “I have been ordered by Allah to fight and kill all mankind until they say, ‘No God except Allah and Muhammad is the prophet of Allah’ (Hadith Sahih).”

Based on this hadith, early Muslims used the sword to spread Islam throughout the world. The same hadith inspires contemporary Islamic terror including this summer’s thwarted London airplane explosions. Other rationales that terrorists use to justify terrorism – the Arab-Israeli conflict, America’s involvement in Iraq – are simply useful propaganda cover stories, not the actual causes or goals of terrorists’ actions.

Americans must be wary of political leaders who accept the propaganda explanations. To win the war on terror, America’s leaders must recognize the powerful role of the Islamic religious principle of jihad, Islam’s belief that it must conquer the world, which derives from the above hadith. Belief in jihad is what causes so many Muslims worldwide to cheer terrorist acts such as 9/11, European subway bombings, and Hezbollah and Hamas attacks against Israel.

Allowing jihadist teaching to continue is like allowing cancer cells to survive in a human body.

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.. the cancerous teachings of Salafi Islam could become insignificant if the majority of Muslims were to vocally oppose them.

Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of Muslims, Islamic organizations and Islamic scholars have not publicly objected to these teachings. There have been no powerful Muslim demonstrations to denounce Osama bin Laden and not a single fatwa by top Islamic scholars or organizations to consider bin Laden an apostate – as was done to Salman Rushdie just for writing a novel.

Because the teachings continue, a significant proportion of the world’s Muslims have become passive terrorists, peaceful citizens whose sympathy in their hearts and support with their purses enable terrorism’s spread.

Zachary Abuza in The Australian: “Killer network spreads: JI’s Long-term Growth Strategy” (via Counterterrorism Blog)
A leading scholar on terrorism in Southeast Asia, warns that the threat posed by al-Qa’ida affiliate Jemaah Islamiah is rising
October 09, 2006

IT’S bombing season in Indonesia. This month marks not only the fourth anniversary of the first Bali bombing, it also marks one year since the most recent Bali bombing.

And although progress has been made against al-Qa’ida’s terrorist affiliates in the region, it would be naive to write off Jemaah Islamiah’s capacity to strike again.

To be sure, in the wake of last November’s death of master bomb maker Azahari bin Husin, the local police feel more confident about JI’s diminishing capabilities. After all, Indonesia can claim the arrest of 330 members and more than 250 successful prosecutions.

Anyone who follows Indonesia can only be impressed with Jakarta’s successful counter-terrorism efforts at a time of democratic transition. Counter-terrorism has not come at the expense of civil liberties or brought Indonesia back to the repression of Suharto’s New Order. Still, despite some progress, we have a growing JI problem.

Joshua Sinai in the Washington Times: “Defeating Internet terrorists”

The Internet has become the “seductive hypermedia” for radical Islamic terrorists, with official and unofficial Web sites, forums and chatrooms that appeal to supporters worldwide. Most Web sites are intended to advance a group’s propaganda to increase their supporting audience, while some have operational intentions. But how do we defeat such terrorism in cyberspace?
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The different types of terrorist activities on the Internet require appropriately differentiated responses. As outlined by Mr. Weimann, one such response is based on what he terms a “MUD” approach (Monitoring, Using and Disrupting).
c First, terrorist Web sites need to be monitored to learn about their mindsets, motives, persuasive “buzzwords,” audiences, operational plans and potential targets for attack. These sites will also reveal whom they consider to be their political and religious authorities, as well as moderate religious clerics they regard as particularly threatening. Monitoring also reveals their inner debates and disputes.
c Second, counterterrorism organizations need to “use” the terrorist Web sites to identify and locate their propagandists, chat room discussion moderators, Internet service provider (ISP) hosts, operatives and participating members.
c Third, terrorist Web sites need to be “disrupted” through negative and positive means. In a negative “influence” campaign, sites can be infected with viruses and worms to destroy them, or kept “alive” while flooding them with false technical information about weapons systems, circulating rumors to create doubt about the reputation and credibility of terrorist leaders, or inserting conflicting messages into discussion forums to confuse operatives and their supporters. In a more positive approach, alternative narratives can be inserted into these Web sites to demonstrate the negative results of terrorism or, to potential suicide bombers, to suggest the benefits of the “value of life” versus the self-destructiveness of the “culture of death and martyrdom.”

Alexander Casella, Prospect Magazine: “The decline of Kofi”

Kofi Annan’s ten years as United Nations secretary-general have left the organisation in worse shape, politically and adminstratively, than it has ever been

Annan brought a new dimension to the function of secretary-general. Rather than doing little but doing it well, in the absence of anything to do in the political arena, he did nothing but did it very well. The little that could have been done as regards management was left undone.

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As the clouds of war loomed on the horizon, Annan felt increasingly uncomfortable. His career had been built on temporisation, conciliation and, if necessary, appeasement. Action went against his grain. This had served him well in the past but, having inflated the post of secretary-general to the dimension of a guiding light, he was now expected to take sides; his credibility demanded it. The Bush administration had chosen the road to war. The UN security council had chosen another path. Suddenly, the man whom a close assistant had described as the “ultimate fence-sitter” found the fence too narrow to sit on. As the Iraq crisis developed, Annan went on appealing for negotiations, referring to the “unique legitimacy” that only the security council could provide and asserting that war is an “issue not for one state alone.” While these words were anathema to the Bush administration, they were still not explicit enough to satisfy the opponents of the war. The man who had built a career pleasing everybody ended up satisfying nobody.

In March 2003, after it became clear that security council endorsement for an attack on Iraq could not be obtained, the US went it alone. For the UN, it was an all-time low. In the days following the invasion, Annan dropped from public view. In New York it was an open secret that he had lost his voice, and diplomatic sources confirmed that the illness had been diagnosed as psychosomatic. The man’s nerves had cracked. When he reappeared in public, a few weeks later, tranquilisers had helped him regain his voice and his composure but his hands betrayed him; they were in a state of constant agitation.