No, this one is not about Iran.

Vanity Fair has an edited excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s diary, which is going to be published this month, containing this entry:

Tues. Dec. 7, 1982 • The weather turned out fine for the official greeting ceremony for Pres. Zia of Pakistan. We got along fine. He’s a good man (cavalry). Gave me his word they were not building an atomic or nuclear bomb. He’s dedicated to helping the Afghans & stopping the Soviets.

(via Judith Klinghoffer, who draws attention to the potentially catastrophic trouble brewing in Pakistan)

Speaking of broken promises, here’s another entry from the diary:

Fri. July 22, 1983 • Today was Pres. Gemayal (Lebanon) day. We had a good meeting & lunch. I think he is reassured that we are not going to abandon them. While we were meeting word came that Beirut was under rocket attacks by the Syrians. We are going to send them the latest in Radar art which can zero in on exactly where the rockets are coming from.

If you’re wondering what “Islamic Revolutionary state” in the title has to do with Pakistan, here’s one more entry for you:

Thurs. June 16, 1988 • Zia has declared Islamic Law is law of Pakistan. That puts them into the Fundamentalist Revolution with the Ayatolah & Qaddafi.

And onward round the circle we go.

Below are excerpts from an interview with a very interesting fellow called Rory Stewart. Here’s a bit about him:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes.[*] The following text is based on Stewart’s dialogue about Iraq with audience members, after his discussion with broadcast journalist Dan Harris, at the Asia Society in New York on April 20, 2007.

Rory on the reconstruction effort:

Woman in audience: I wanted to know since you were in Afghanistan in 2002, and then had left and gone to Iraq in 2003–2004, what made you want to go back and live there?

Rory Stewart: The experience that I had in Iraq was a disillusioning one. Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, “What has the coalition ever done for us?” And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

There were only two projects we did that I thought had some kind of impact: one of them was the restoration of the bazaar in al-Amara, the capital of Maysan province, and the other was the creation of a carpentry school for street children in Nasiriyah. The carpentry school took two hundred children and had them go through a pretty good training course in carpentry and then found them jobs. It was the one project where suddenly we had the Iraqi police chief and the Iraqi mayor of Nasiriyah visiting it, and Iraqi television stations and al-Jazeera covering it, and people seemed gripped by it.

So coming to Afghanistan again in 2005, I saw that a quarter of the historic city of Kabul was due to be demolished again. They had resurrected the 1976 East German master plan under which it was to be flattened and replaced with East German–style concrete blocks. And I discovered that people like Ustad Abdul Hadi, who had been among the most famous craftsmen in the country, were selling fruit in the marketplace, the historic buildings were collapsing, and the garbage was seven feet deep in the street. Afghans wanted jobs, incomes, and a renewed sense of national identity. I sensed that restoring the traditional commercial center of the city and creating a crafts center that would make furniture, ceramics, and textiles would not only be good for the economy but would also catch imaginations. I could not undertake this kind of project in Baghdad. Those are some of the things that came together to make me do it. [..]

Moderator: Does the carpentry school still exist in Nasiriyah?

The carpentry school in Nasiriyah does not still exist, unfortunately. The funding stopped. It ran out of money.

I’d like to hear his thoughts on why “nobody in Iraq was interested or remotely engaged with the process” or reconstruction. Resentment, cultural differences, fear, stubbornness, prejudice, all of the above?

And his thoughts on withdrawal:

[.] I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system. That we’re like an inadequate antibiotic. We are sufficiently strong to have turned what might have been a conventional civil war into a highly unconventional neighborhood conflict. But we’re not strong enough to eliminate it entirely. At the same time I fear that, without intending to, we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis. We have created a situation in which many Iraqis now feel that the only way to keep security is to bring back a strongman. They are extremely skeptical of our programs and suggestions for development.

I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite–Sunni divisions. Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise. In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve

He goes on to further explain his reasoning and why he believes even the prospect of region-wide escalation or intervention by neghbouring states do not trump the reasons for withdrawal. I think he perhaps underestimates the ruthless determination of the Iranians and the extent to which they have already penetrated Iraqi society and the implications of this for the long term stability of the whole region. Iraq’s future is no longer a matter between the US and the various Iraqi factions. On a strategic level it is largely a matter between the US and Iran. Steward addresses the possibility of Iranian invasion or Iranian destabilisation of Iraq with covert operations. The problem is they may have already consolidated their power base in the Shiite regions too far for either option to be necessary. And then there is the question of what would happen to Kurdistan in the event of an complete withdrawal.

From a Radio Free Europe interview with Irshad Manji:

RFE/RL: You argue that Islam needs to be reformed and that the Koran — the holy book of Muslims — is a contradictory human book. Is your view, your perspective, being taken seriously in the Muslim world?

Irshad Manji: Well, it is in fact being taken seriously; and the reaction is most intense among young people in Muslim countries. It’s interesting [that] when my book first came out in English, and because of the burst of international press that it received, my e-mail box overflowed with messages from young Muslims in the Arab world begging me to get the book translated into Arabic so they could share these ideas with their friends, whom they said were hungry for honest conversation about Islam. My standard unimaginative response to them was, “Come one, name one Arab publisher that will have the guts to translate this book, let alone publish it.” And most of these young people wrote back to say, “You’re right, but so what, Irshad? You get the book translated into Arabic [and] you then post that translation on your website; and when we can download it privately, that means that we can read it privately and therefore safely.”

Well only a year and a half later, I can tell you that there have been already 200,000 downloads of the Arabic version of the book. Just last week, I received an e-mail from a reporter with “The New York Times” magazine who said that she saw how the book in Arabic is being distributed among young people in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Even when I was in Cairo this time last year, young Muslim men — not just women — would approach me to say, “Thank you, we’re reading it, our friends are reading it, and it’s now making the rounds of the democracy movement.” So much of the criticism that you hear is more from an older generation. The younger generation — the one that knows that it lives in a very interdependent, wired, and connected world — is hungry for more information and wants these debates even when the conclusions are ones that they can disagree with.

Drops in an ocean or a sign of changing currents? Proceed with caution.

Writer and philosopher Dariush Shayegan believes that the currents are indeed changing in.. Iran:

. In a lecture given last year and now translated for the magazine, he comes to a surprisingly optimistic conclusion. “Tehran is on the brink of fundamental change. In the shadows of this grey and sad city an astonishing new world lies hidden, and when its underground powers surface one of these days, we will witness a radical change in perspective. Its lay character will emerge in all its freshness from inside the so-called Islamic society. We hope that we are gradually beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel through which other Islamic countries, in the hope of establishing a religiously determined order, are travelling in the opposite direction. In the not too distant future Tehran will become the lively and eloquent example for change.”

And Fareed Zakaria concurs:

In five or ten years, an Iran will emerge with more modern policies than the other countries of the Middle East, putting religion once more firmly in the private sphere. That’s just the way it is: life exerts a natural pressure toward modernisation, and sooner or later religion follows.

Ever the optimist Zakaria has recently written that the Islamic Reformation has already started, pointing at the conflict between the Shia and the Sunnis. No, I don’t understand his logic either. For now I am taking his opinion with more than a grain of salt.

Back to Irshad though, with a bit of a feel good story:

RFE/RL: You have proposed the plan of reforms that you call Operation Ijtihad. What does that include?

Manji: The idea would be here for one plan to happen in the traditional Islamic world and another plan to take place among Muslims in the West. In the traditional Islamic world, the idea would be to offer women microcredit loans so that they can start their own businesses, earn money from their businesses. And there is consensus within Islam that when a woman owns her own assets, she gets to keep 100 percent of those assets and do with them as she sees fit. Now what could women do with the money they earn from micro-businesses? Well, for a starter they could become literate — learn to read the Koran for themselves instead of relying only on imams to give them selected verses. And when they learn to read the Koran for themselves, they see all of the passages that the Koran has that give them dignity and self-respect — passages that, for example, tell them that they have the right to choose marriage or not choose marriage. Let me tell you a quick story.

About eight months ago, a journalist in Kabul e-mailed me to say, “Remember those progressive female-friendly verses of the Koran that you identified in your book?” “Yes,” I said. And she said, “Today I met a Muslim woman in Afghanistan who took a microcredit loan from a nongovernmental organization; she started her own candle-making business, she earned her own money, and she learned to read the Koran for herself with that money. And she saw all the passages in there that give her options for dignity; she then recited those passages to her husband, who was illiterate and who had been beating her ever since they got married. And when he realized that these passages are in God’s book, he has never hit her again.

Good for her of course, but whats going to happen when she reads him the various “war verses” or even the verse that instructs that men are actually allowed to beat their wives? Something tells me she may skip that last one. Maybe she can explain that the Koran is a “contradictory human book” first.

Taqiyya: easy as ABC.

Yvonne Ridley ducks, weaves, splutters, lies, goes berzerk on the ABC’s AM radio program last Saturday:

JANE COWAN: Can you categorically condemn suicide bombing?

YVONNE RIDLEY: You know, the greatest purveyors of suicide bombing are the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organization, largely of the Hindu faith; I’m not really quite sure why it is being attached specifically towards Muslims.

JANE COWAN: But if you’ve been reported as saying you support suicide bombing, would you now here condemn it, no matter who perpetrates it?

YVONNE RIDLEY: I condemn shoddy journalism and poor research, and people like you should know better than to try and tackle people like me over things that have allegedly been said or not said.

ANE COWAN: But this is an opportunity for you to clarify your views, and …

YVONNE RIDLEY: I’ve clarified them. What don’t you understand?

Listen, I have told you exactly what I have said, now you tell me why you need me to condemn something that is as plain as, you know, as the language that I’ve just said. What didn’t you understand about what I have just said?

JANE COWAN: My question is, do you or do you not support suicide bombing?

YVONNE RIDLEY: Of course I don’t.

Feel free to read the whole thing, just to make sure she is not being taken out of context and that it still makes no sense what-so-ver. There is not much more to it.

Anyhow, of course she doesn’t support suicide bombing. The term that is. She much prefers the more glorifying description of martyrdom operations:

A: Yvonne Ridley - “Muslims have lost confidence since September 11th. Something as simple as suicide bombers being martyrs is being denied by prominent sheikhs. The dictionary definition of a martyr is a person who gives up their life for a cause - suicide bombers are martyrs.”

Now, about that bit on the Tamil Tigers and why oh why, as Yvonne wonders indignantly above, is suicide bombing associated with Islam.

Suicide bombing: 1980 - 2001

Lets start with the following numbers on Wikipedia and go from there:

“Lebanon saw the first bombing, but it was the LTTE Tamil Tigers who perfected the tactic and inspired its use elsewhere [2]. Their Black Tiger unit has committed between 76 and 168 (estimates vary) suicide bombings since 1987.

That first statement is a strange one to make, considering the Black Tigers carried out their first suicide bombing in 1987, by which time they were already common place in Lebanon, for example the suicide car bombing of the Iraqi embassy by Islamists in 1981, the bombing of the U.S. embassy by Hezbollah in 1983 and the bombing of the American and French barracks, also in 1983 and also by Hezbollah and Iran. In the least the word “bombing” above should be plural. Further, for a decade after 1987, most of the suicide bombings perpetrated by groups other than the Tamil Tigers were carried out by groups originating either in Lebanon or Israel, ie Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Brigades. Did Hamas need inspiration from Sri Lanka, when they already had plenty from next door in Lebanon, where they were also involved in the Lebanese uncivil free-for-all?

A quick look at those numbers on Black Tiger bombings - “between 76 and 168″.

The lower number, 76, is taken from Robert Pape’s book, “Dying to Win”:

Pape says that the group [the Tamil Tigers] accounted for 76 of 315 suicide attacks carried out around the world from 1980 through 2003, compared with 54 for the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and 27 for Islamic Jihad.

The higher number, 168, is taken from this report by Jane’s Intelligence Review (note these numbers stop just before the start of the intifada in Israel in 2000, see more recent figures from that region further down):

NUMBER OF SUICIDE ATTACKS BETWEEN 1980 - 2000

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and in India    168
Hizbullah and pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, Kuwait and Argentina           52
Hamas in Israel                                                                       22
The Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) in Turkey                                     15
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Israel                                       8
Al Quaida in East Africa                                                               2
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) in Croatia                                       1
The Islamic Group (IG) in Pakistan                                                 1
Barbar Khalsa International (BKI) in India                                          1
The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria                                       1

What we have above is 10 groups out of which 7 are Islamic, 2 are Marxists-Leninist nationalists (the LTTE and the PKK, although the latter began reclaiming their Islamic identity from the late 1980s on) and one Sikh separatist group, BKI. What we also have, by the way, is numbers pretty damn different to Robert Pape, whom everyone (and especially Islamist apologists) seems to quote, usually out of context, as an expert on suicide bombing.

The list from Jane’s seem far from exhaustive, for example the suicide bombing of the Iraqi embassy in 1981 in Beirut was carried out by the Islamic Dawa Party, which is a militant Shiite party, to which the current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki belongs. Others were also carried out in Lebanon by groups like Amal and even the schitzophrenically fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party, who are credited with the first suicide bombing by a woman. Overall however, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman calculates that 31 out of the 35 groups that have carried out suicide bombings since 1980 are Islamic (2005 figure).

Suicide bombing since 2001.

Looking at the numbers above, Yvonne would have had a point had she made her statement, often repeated by Islamist apologists, 5 or more years ago. Since then however the picture has changed completely, no matter how you look at it. As the number below will show, 95% - 97% of the suicide attacks in the last 5-6 years have been carried out by Islamists, with a large number against civilian targets.

In 2002 a ceasefire was signed in Sri Lanka and the suicide bombings ceased, until renewed hostilities in 2004. In the three years since 16 suicide bombings have been carried out by the Tamil Tigers. Taking the 168 from the Jane’s article, and adding the 16 recent one, plus 7 that occured between October 2000 (when the Jane’s article was published) and the ceasefire and we get a total of 191 in 20 years. Note however that most although certainly not all, of these were against military targets.

In the meantime the Second intifada started in Israel in September 2000. In 2002, as a ceasefire was signed in Sri Lanka, the intifada was at its peak - 42 suicide bombings were carried out by Palestinian Islamists that year, killing 228 people. Dozens more followed since. About 130 suicide bombings have been carried out in Israel in the last 15 years,