So What's the Surprise?

This Wednesday, at ~5:00 in the morning (aren't Memorial Day weekend rates fun?), I will be at Kansas City International Airport preparing to leave for Washington DC, where I will take up an internship position for pretty much the duration of the summer at the American Enterprise Institue, which is described by both Wikipedia and the Christian Science Monitor as being pretty much the headquarters of all things neocon. When not advocating perpetual war and US world domination on behalf of the Israeli Likud Party, I will likely be found engrossing myself in the collected writings of Leo Strauss.

All kidding aside, near as I can tell it probably would have been next to impossible for me to get ahold of this position if not for blogging. Let me tell you what I mean ...

Brief Bio Description

For those of you who don't know me, I'm a college student blogging from Leavenworth, Kansas and an army brat to boot. My father works at the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD) at the Command General Staff College (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth and churns out lengthy manuals worth of army doctrine on a fairly regular basis. Both of my parents are loyal Republicans who were both Reagan supporters during the 1980s and lackluster supporters of Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000. They are some of the most kind, loving, and supportive people that one could possibly meet, and both of them are conservative Baptists who have been drawn closer and closer to the GOP in recent years out of their belief that certain elements of the Democratic activist wing regard them and people who share their religious persuasion to be some kind of blight on the face of American civilization that must be driven from the public square at all costs. Having met some of these people online and encountered some of the fear-mongering against American Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists that occurs particularly in the European press and then contrasted the caricature with people I know who actually hold to these views, I can definitely understand how my parents came to the conclusion they did. In Kansas, which is for all practical purposes a one-party state divided between conservative and moderate Republicans, with many of both groups holding to conservative religious views, one learns very quickly that these folks are not exactly closet theocrats waiting to implement some Christian version of the sha'riah. Describing their ideal society would probably be something akin to what the zeitgeist was like during the Eisenhower administration without any racial discrimination. There are many things to be said both for or against such a worldview, but it isn't exactly the Christian equivalent to Iran.

In any case, I converted to Catholicism due in no small part to my encounter with the writings of Dave Armstrong. Because being a Catholic unfortunately means a great many different things these days, I should probably define myself as "orthodox" or "neo-traditionalist" for those familiar with the Beliefnet terminology, which more or less means that I hold to socially conservative views but as a general rule tend to agree with SAM that part of being Catholic is acknowledging that there is no "politics of faith" or specific God-given project for the perfection of human society according to specific set of social, political, or economic policies. I don't see this as the same as a blanket exclusion of religion from the public square, but rather an insurance policy that religion doesn't get dumbed down to the level of government, as I expect the Iranian Shi'ite leaders are beginning to wise up to. At least part of this idea is how my blog ended up getting the name Regnum Crucis ("Kingdom of the Cross") to begin with, as the theme appears in my hopefully-to-be-published books as well.

Anywho, I graduated from Wayne Simien Leavenworth High School in the class of 2002, though I'll be damned if I can remember actually learning anything from the curriculum while I was there. Far too much today's high schooling involves little more than memorization and then recitation in the form of testing rather than actually understanding any of the material that is being taught. One particular memory for LHS that sticks out in my mind is when one of my classes was watching the film Glory and at the end when the Union soldiers are all slaughtered one of my female classmates broke out into tears and continued crying until the teacher assured her that yes, indeed, the North did win the American Civil War. It was during the beginning of my senior year at LHS that I actually ended up working for the Kansas City Star's TeenStar section despite my utter lack of serious experience in journalism. I was in class the day that 9/11 happened and I can still remember every moment of horror from that terrible day.

For a lot of reasons, some of which I'd really prefer not to discuss, I became a news junkie immediately afterwards. I read every copy of Time Magazine, Newsweek, and US News & World Report that I could get my hands on, which I think is probably the first time that I ever actually learned who Andrew Sullivan was. My peripheral interest in politics expanded significantly and I took as much time as I possibly could to learn about al-Qaeda and its leadership. What frustrated me to no end was that while every American knew who bin Laden was after 9/11, most didn't have a clue who Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubaydah, and Saif al-Adel were. My maternal grandfather, who fought in World War 2, used to tell me how every American could name senior Nazis like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, ect. off the top of their heads and to this day I still think that it's a shame that we can't do the same with the top al-Qaeda leadership. As a result, when senior figures like Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Saif Islam al-Masri, Amir ibn Khattab, or Abu Sabaya were captured or killed we didn't have a clue what major coups our side had scored. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed appears to have been allotted at least some peripheral acknowledgement on the part of the public, if for no other reason than his status as the 9/11 mastermind or the fact that upon his capture in Rawalpindi, Pakistan he bore more than a little resemblance to porn star Ron Jeremy (for the record, I would also hold that there is a striking resemblance between the FBI mugshot of Saif al-Adel and one of the singers from "The Clash"). This is a long-term problem as far as public perception goes, and I think that a lot of it goes back to the red pill/blue pill situation that it is going to take a long time to break if things continue on their current course. If a sizeable number of the same nation that was attacked on 9/11 is more interested in ascertaining only their own or America's culpability in the attacks, then why in the world should we be surprised when other Western nations, to say nothing of the Arab world, react in a similar manner?

Unfortunately, like far too many Americans, I too drifted back into my pre-9/11 pursuits following Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Anaconda, and the capture of Abu Zubaydah. For me, this meant writing a series of science fiction/fantasy books, a goal that I still work on in my spair time. I still followed the war, abeit not as much as I should have, and so I decided to pretty much combine both ends into a single blog, Regnum Crucis.

How I Got Blogging

Here's an honest confession for you: I didn't have a clue as to what Instapundit was, let alone any of the other major bloggers, when I started up Regnum Crucis. I hadn't even heard of NRO or the Weekly Standard or any of the other right-wing alternative media outlets, let alone their left-wing counterparts. In short, I was completely lost inside of blogosphere. If I had a blogfather, it would probably be John Reilly, whose writings probably did the most that one single person could do as far as shaping my worldview are concerned. They still do, as a general rule, certainly as far as grand strategy, political ideology, and the like are concerned. Whether or not this makes me a neocon or not I'm not actually sure (I certainly took issue with a number of points in my review of An End To Evil), especially given my attempts to fit the war in Iraq with Thomas Aquinas's Just War Doctrine as a result of my own belief concerning Iraqi sponsorship of al-Qaeda. In any case, Regnum Crucis was originally set up to be more or less a mixture between keeping track of the war and working out the kinks on my books. From the looks of things, my efforts at the former have succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, while the reverse would seem to be true in the case of the latter. For whatever it's worth, I'd do it all over again.

Warblogging is fairly commonplace within blogosphere these days, but I did a good enough job at it that Regnum Crucis got a fairly nice readership between its start-up in August 2002 and when I first started writing for WoC in the summer of 2003. I remember having read WoC since at least mid-spring and Joe was looking for a new Winds of War writer. Having had some experience at what all of this entailed from my time over at Rantburg and figuring that I had nothing to lose, I decided to give it a shot. He put me on the team and as most of you know, I've been doing WoW ever since.

Getting Into AEI

I first got the idea to apply for the AEI internship program during the middle of the uranium flap in the State of the Union around mid-September 2003 when I came to the conclusion that AEI was one of the few think tanks in the United States that was still as interested in actually winning the war in Iraq as others were in declaring it a quagmire or following the nefarious designs of the neocons. So, the naive young college student that I was, I went to my professors seeking to get their recommendations for AEI.

Boy, was I in for a surprise.

Now before I begin, allow me to say that this is not intended as a blanket indictment against college professors, liberals, or opponents of the war, all of whom are, like any other subsection of people, as diverse a group as you'll find. It is, however, representative of the type of atmosphere among the academia at my particular college (though based on what I have read, this unfortunately does not appear to be a unique anomaly), which I trust you'll all understand my reluctance to name. These are people who have mere policy differences with the administration or believe that going into Iraq was the wrong thing to do. To put it quite frankly, these are people whose faces clench up and their bodies begin to shake at the very sound of words "Bush administration." At least one of these professors from the social scientist department (a Caucasian male, interestingly enough) regards the United States in general and its Caucasian population in specific as being nothing more than an instrument of death and destruction that has brought nothing but oppression and pollution to the rest of the world "in the service of their Semitic war god." This man would later remark in class that "real patriots" would have long since "killed the power elite in Washington" and taken over the country, leading me to suspect that he's probably a "smash the state" Trotskyite of some kind or another. The other professors held to similar types of opinions and I'll be quite honest and say that I think that the "not anti-war, just the other opinion." I once remarked to Joe in conversation that it seems that a number of European elites seem to regard George Bush as little more than a secularized version of Satan and I would say that that description is pretty much fits with how my professors regard the man. Indeed, some of the sentiments I encounter from the faculty are so patently stupid or knee-jerk anti-American (such as the claim that the US has killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did) that one's conspiratorial side might actually come to the conclusion at all of these anti-war professors are themselves some brilliant creation of the pro-war side.

In any case, my professors flatly refused to give me any recommendations for AEI. Any whatsoever. Didn't I know that AEI was the heart of the Cabal, the secret organization that ran the US for the interests of the Israeli Likud party? Most of my attempts to secure recommendations from them generally resulted in me being handed lengthy stacks of printed documents of which Seymour Hersh's piece on "the Cabal" was probably the most moderate thereof, but by the time they were done I had seen everything from Chomsky to Bob Fisk to CounterPunch brought out, all in a frenzied effort to dissuade me from even attempting to get an internship at AEI. Much later, I spoke with Scott Talkington on the subject, who informed me that this type of behavior was not kosher at the university level, an opinion shared by the dean of the department in question, who know doubt gave them a stern talking to when I brought the subject to his attention after my conversation with Scott.

Soon after this, Joe e-mailed me having expressed interest in my stated desire to go to AEI and I explained the situation to him. Joe, in an act that can only be described as the act of an absolute saint, decided to pull out all the stops in obtaining other sources for letters of recommendation for me, even going as far as to contact occasional WoC commenter Michael Ledeen to explain the situation to him. With the help of Joe, Robin Burk, Scott Talkington, one of the CGSC terrorism instructors, and the associate director of the Center for Tactical CounterTerrorism (you meet interesting folks blogging), I soon had my AEI resume complete with some very nice recommendations submitted to the think tank in short order.

Finally, around mid-April, I received a very cordial phone call from Michael Ledeen, the very man whom many of my professors (and I suspect more than a few members of the current regime in Tehran) regard as the devil. In all honesty, my first reaction was that was this was some kind of a prank call by several of my peers, who knew about my desire to be an intern at AEI as well as my high respect for Ledeen and his work. As the realization sunk in that it was Ledeen I was talking to on the phone, I imagine I was acting more than a little stupidly, but he was very kind and very patient to me as he calmly explained that I had indeed been accepted into AEI's internship program for the summer of 2004.

To put it quite simply, none of this would have probably been possible without blogging. A lot of the talk that has occurred about the impact of blogging to date has focused on blogs "replacing" the mainstream media as a regular source of information for many people. Not enough, however, has focused on the fact that blogs and the internet in general have become in many ways the ultimate democratizer of ideas. Here, I was able to formulate ideas and thoughts regarding a wide variety of issues and get them out to a far wider and certainly much more diverse range of people than I could otherwise do. While I by no means am advocating the internet or blogging as a replacement for our current channels of public discourse, I do think that by augmenting them we have been more than able to ensure that ideas, concepts, and positions can no longer be shouted down or excluded the way that they once were. If you want a real free marketplace of ideas, the internet is it.

In Conclusion

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

For those who are curious, I will remain on the WoC team for WoW, abeit in a probably more limited capacity for obvious reasons. However, if any readers are interested in taking on the position of an additional Winds of Change team member for the Winds of War, feel free to drop me an e-mail at scorpius@shwiggie.com for more details.

In addition, I would like very much to thank the following individuals, without whom I would have probably never made it to this point: Zulfiqar Khan (le Québec libre) and Rene Ferrer as (I believe) my longest-running readers, Scott Wiggins for hooking me up with a free e-mail account and helping me out with HTML, Joe Katzman and rest of the Winds of Change for recruiting me for Winds of War and all the other efforts they've made on my behalf, Fred Pruitt, the Army of Steve, and all the other Rantburgers, Kevin Ciavarra, Robert Stevens, David Kian, Todd Sweet, Vahae Engeian, Alastair MacKay, Aziz Poonawalla, Richard Fernandez, James Andrewartha, Nathan Hamm, Dan Haught, Pete Stanley, Mitch, Gerald Mattis, Dan Wismar, Don Hagen, Scott Draeker, Xavier Basora, Ahad Azizzada, Nick Peters, Allan Botica, Eric Kansa, Sherry Rylander, William Roggio, Brian Mulvaney, Dennis Culkin, Michele Catalano, David Schuler, Sarmad, Paul Moloney, Eric Cooper, Frank Vance, Jeff Miller, David Dorion, Michael Thayer, David Johnson, Matt Holmes, Leon Sparx, Tom Holsinger, Richard Heddleson, Jonathan Winkler, and any other Regnum Crucis readers or correspondents whom I may have missed. In addition, allow me to thank Praktike, Andrew Lazarus, and Abu Frank for their service in forming my worldview. In order to grow, one's positions must be challenged, and all three of you are have done an outstanding job of forcing me to reevaluate my positions based on your arguments. In many cases, I still return to my original position, but I believe that the capacity for self-criticism is one of the things that separates us (meaning, broadly speaking, Western civilization) from the enemy and would certainly much rather debate the war with any of you than with my professors.

Finally, there is one other person that I would like to thank, a stunningly beautiful violinist music major from Topeka who is currently attending the University of Vanderbilt in Tennessee. Without her affection, her spirit, and above all her inspiration, none of this would have ever been possile. And I would like to thank her for that, if nothing else, from the very bottom of my heart.

With that being said, I regret to announce that, with the exception of the Winds of War on Monday, this will be my last Winds of Change blog from here in Leavenworth. I'm going now, I wish you all a very fond farewell.

Nasrudin took him to the mosque, and rolled on the ground, calling upon Allah to restore the man's twenty silver coins.

Annoyed by his presence, the congregation made a collection and the sum was handed to the surprised loser.

"You may not understand the means which operate in this world," said the Mullah, "but I trust that you understand the end when it is handed to you in such a concrete form."

As always, this Sufi tale works on many levels. Superficially, it works as a joke: Nasrudin takes an unexpected and absurd path to perform a good deed, indulging in a bit of slapstick along the way. But there are instructional interpretations of the tale, as well...what lessons can we draw from the lesson Nasrudin delivers to the robbed man, and what do his actions -- and the response to them -- say about the congregation?

Root Causes - Careful What You Ask For

The harsh reaction against the "root causes" meme post 9/11 was motivated by the fact that many calls for such analysis were just thinly disguised invitations for America to engage in a Maoist orgy of self criticism and propitiate all those we had offended. But real root cause analysis remains deliciously contentious.

Here's one major thesis on the "root cause" with many proponents in the blogosphere: "It's the Islam, Stupid!" (If you know what RoPMA stands for, you know what I’m talking about). I don't accept this thesis, not out of any residual political correctness, but because I really think it is wrong and incomplete. Daniel Pipes' formulation - "Militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" - also misses, as many devout and fundamentalist Muslims are not our enemies (see, e.g., Robert Kaplan's book Soldiers of God) - though sadly, many are now radicalized.

Islamo-fascism, the hyphenated hatred

My working hypothesis is that the "root cause" of the murderous hatred is a viral cocktail of classical leftist anti-American ideology, far right European anti-Semitism, and 20th century political Islamism. Hence the running together of the Jew hatred and the America hatred - it's a function of the sources which make up the ideology.

Cogent example: Walid Jumblatt, Lebanese warlord legislator, has had some great screeds lately, offering helpful perspective on Palestinian terrorism and blaming 9/11 on the CIA. Jumblatt leaps from Chomsky to jihad in the space of one question.

I’ll expand on Jumblatt next week. And as Winds of Change.NET has noted before, there's more where he came from.

Our Self Declared Enemies

Michael Totten recently wrote a TCS column on the topic of Naming the Enemy. While this is a useful exercise, often we can take a shortcut: our enemies are the ones who stand up and say "I hate you and I'm going to kill you". Sadr comes to mind here, as do the Al-Qaeda who just beheaded Nick Berg. Who hates us this month? Please form a line at the microphone, and please leave your name with the nice men in black at the back of the room.

HateWatch will also cover other hate-based movements and trends on occasion - as Rwanda proved, this topic is (sadly) all too relevant in today's world.

HateWatch: And So It Begins...

We're going to try some different formats for HateWatch, try to provide some depth and perspective to the issues we highlight, and add some honest, provocative questions for discussion - believe me, this is a topic on which I have more questions than answers. Since I entered the blogosphere as a habitual commenter, mostly over at The Command Post, I'd like to create posts that spark some lively discussion.

And on that note, if you have ideas, thoughts, tips, questions or recommendations for me - or want to suggest a new name for this feature – leave a comment below! Also you'll be able to email me via my handle "hatewatch" here @ windsofchange.net.

See you next Tuesday. Entil'zha veni!

TURKESTAN

• The US has been retraining Uzbek troops for some time now, focusing on creating a corps of confident, well-trained NCOs that will be able to implement orders and leave big-picture issues to senior officers. The result? A military force with much more NATO interoperability.

• It is important to remember the smaller stories, such as the one above, when thinking of the implications of increasing warmth in Russia-Uzbekistan relations. The depth of Uzbek ties to the United States and the inertia those ties create suggest that there will be no significant shifts in international relations in Central Asia.

• Russia's border guards will be leaving Tajikistan. Perhaps only coincidentally, a Russian soldier was arrested with 12kg of heroin smuggled across the Afghan border around the time of the announcement.

• EurasiaNet spells out exaclty how Turkmenistan's education system is in absolute freefall. To make matters worse, the Turkmen government has decided not to recognize foreign degrees earned since 1993, leading to the firing of thousands of skilled workers.

• As Tajikistan's president seeks to consolidate his power in next year's elections, the ICG warns that corruptions, regionalism, and fringe Islamist groups threaten the country's hard-won peace.

• In other ICG-related news, the organization's Central Asia Project Director says that US policy towards Uzbekistan result from "erroneous assumptions" by American policy-makers.

• Forum 18 says that Uzbekistan uses Sufism as propaganda in the United States (they make a convincing argument if you connect the dots) while still subjecting Uzbekistan's Sufis to official suspicion and control.

• The head of Kyrgyzstan's anti-corruption unit was assassinated on May 6th, most likely by the types of criminals he had been investigating in recent months.

• Immediately following a strong rebuke in the State Department's new human rights report, Uzbekistan has started a crackdown on opposition leaders.

• Kazak opposition parties hope to capitalize from the ruling of the "Kazakhgate" scandal to be handed down in US federal courts on June 2. An American businessman, James Giffen, is said to have paid massive bribes to unnamed officials in the Kazak government to secure oil contracts for Western oil companies.

• China is making major investments in a new oil pipeline to bring Kazak oil to China's Western border. Eventually, the new pipelines will allow Kazakstan to export about 140 million barrels per year to China.

CAUCASUS

• Make no bones about it, the peaceful resolution of the Ajaria conflict is a stunning success for democracy in the former Soviet Union, and a demonstration of the power of Russo-American partnership.

• Mitch of Blogfonte graciously gives credit where it is due, to George Soros' OSI-Georgia and to the Bush Administration. The role of Russia and Igor The Angel of Death Ivanov also deserve recognition.

• With Abashidze's fall from power, Georgia moves one step closer to controlling all of its territory. Still not under Tbilisi's control are Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are independent but not recognized as sovereign states. Abkhazia appears to be the next target, and President Saakashvili will reveal Tbilisi's plans for Abkhazia on May 26.

• For summaries of the events in Ajaria, see EurasiaNet or my Caucasus Archive (lots of pictures...).

• Chechens who live in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge are worried about Russo-Georgian rapprochement. The ability of Chechen rebels to operate unmolested in Pankisi have been a sore point in relations between Russia and Georgia.

• After a lull, protests in Armenia against the President recently resumed.

• The US is offering additional aid to Armenia in exchange for political reforms.

AFGHANISTAN

• A faction of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e Islami has declared that it wants peace and a role in Hamid Karzai's government.

• Afghanistan's disarmament plan is not going well. Some footsoldiers are turning in weapons, but warlords see little benefit in participating. Ismail Khan, the "Emir of Herat," is a case in point.

• In fallout from the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, the US has ordered a probe of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. Arash points out that there are few prisoners in Afghanistan and that, in his opinion, if torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammad can save the life of one Afghan donkey, it's a fair trade.

• Bulgaria will add troops to its Afghanistan deployment amid NATO calls for more troops.

• In the continuing battles along the Afghan-Pakistan border, Pakistan has announced that it is seeking a female terrorist leader training Pakistani women as suicide bombers as revenge for her husband's death (he was an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan member) at the hands of the Pakistani military.

• By year's end, the Afghan Army will number between 16,000 and 23,000, making it the largest force in the country and increasing its chances of effectively standing up to militias.

• Sgt. Hook reports that rocks, and not the Taleban, are the danger he's facing around the base.

FINALLY

• From Dee, a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in Uzbekistan, we have: The Makings of a To'y (wedding), Parts One, Two, and Three.

• And, to end with an upbeat story, IWPR has the story of new opportunities for disabled athletes across Afghanistan.

The next installment of the Central Asia Summary will be in one month. In the meantime, regular updates on Central Asia and the Caucasus can be found at The Argus.

IRAQ BRIEFING

• 3-4 liters of sarin have been confirmed in a binary 155-mm shell, with another shell being recovered that also contained mustard gas. Blaster notes that if the sarin claim is accurate that Iraq didn't declare any binary 155-mm shells. I would also note, just based on my own experience, that if the reporting is accurate that it's pretty damned irresponsible to have your chemical munitions look just like regular munitions for a whole host of reasons. It doesn't appear to be an Iranian dud either.

• The US has arrested 4 in the killing of Nick Berg. Unfortunately, Abu Musab Zarqawi is not among them.

• US forces killed 51 Mahdi Army fighters in clashes in Karbala and An Najaf on Monday and another 9 on Tuesday.

• A suicide car bomb has killed 9 in Baghdad, including IGC head Abdul Zahra Othman Mohammed. Zarqawi's al-Tawhid is taking the credit for this one.

• The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders killed 35 insurgents near Amara in the first British bayonet charge in 22 years. The British are also staging a show of force in the surrounding area.

• The Washington Post has a nice lead editorial on why Iraqi elections offer the most pragmatic means of establishing a viable Iraqi government.

• Despite what one might think, the US is still more than welcome in Iraqi Kurdistan.

• Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zibari says that any turnaround on US support for Iraq would be catastrophic for the country.

• Medienkritik reports that Iraqi human rights minister Bakhtyar Amin, is noting the hypocrisy of the Arab media with respect to the abuses at Abu Gharib.

• The Belmont Club has a suggested goodwill effort that the US could undertake to offset the negative reaction from Abu Gharib.

• Former intelligence staffer Samuel Provance is alleging a cover-up in the Abu Gharib abuse investigation. The families of those still being held at Abu Gharib, interestingly enough, want the death penalty for those involved in the abuses.

• Phil Carter over at Intel Dump notes that US troops are being diverted away from South Korea to Iraq. He sees this as a symptom of troop stretch, a position that I readily concur with.

IRAN REPORTS

• Iran's supreme leader and grand poohbah Ali Khamenei is condemning US actions in An Najaf and Karbala as well as engaging in some not-so-subtle gloating over the recent trouble the US is having in Iraq. Khatami appears to be following suit.

• Iranian war veterans are accusing Germany of supplying chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War.

THE WIDER WAR

• The Afghan government has started a nation-wide campaign to disarm the powerful warlord militias.

• Pakistani women are being trained as suicide bombers by the widow of an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan member.

• Prior to Tony Blair's visit to Turkey, someone decided to send the local HSBC branches some bombs for good measure. HSBC was the same bank that was targeted during the Istanbul bombings last November.

• Thailand's separatists appear to be getting their direction not from nationalist sentiments or opposition to the war in Iraq, but rather from Wahhabism which has, in atypical fashion, been set up in the nation's southern Muslim provinces under the apparent auspices of Yala Islamic College. Another policeman has been killed in the latest round of violence, along with four civilians.

• Jack Roche, a British-born Australian convert to Islam, is on trial for involvement in an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the Israeli embassy in Canberra.

• Lionel Dumont, a senior al-Qaeda leader, was based in Japan for over a year and made contact with at least one other operative during that time.

• Spain has arrested 3 Algerians and a Spaniard on suspicion of recruiting for al-Qaeda.

• The Pentagon has been unable to confirm reports that GSPC second-in-command Abderrazak el-Para has been captured by Chadian rebels. This comes as 2 more victims have been added to the group's long list of victims.

• Egyptian police have arrested 50 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the latest crackdown on Egypt's largest Islamist group. According to the authorities, they were planning a coup.

• Gambia has arrested Abdullah Ould Nafeh, a Mauritanian national, on suspicion of belonging to an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.

• Al-Qaeda is said to be planning more explosions in Saudi Arabia, with the most likely targets being a Western compound or an office. This may be connected to the recent wounding of a Saudi police chief.

• We try to end on a lighter note if possible. A talking toilet? Does this strike anyone else as just plain bizarre? Still, stranger things have happened, I guess.

Not a new charge ...

The standard response to questions about al-Qaeda's WMD efforts from both current and former US officials is generally something to the effect that the network has a desire to produce chemical and biological weapons but that there is no evidence to date that they have succeeded in such efforts. These claims are hardly new and go at least as far back as August 1998, and I believe that I've noted before that the Clinton administration's primary rationale for destroying the al-Shifa plant in Sudan was that al-Qaeda was working with Sudan and Iraq to create VX, a claim that was repeated by former defense secretary Bill Cohen in his statement before the 9/11 commission.

The first real picture that the general public got as far as the nature of al-Qaeda's WMD program came in the form of a computer that was used by the organization in Afghanistan and later purchased by the Wall Street Journal. According to the NTI Newsire version of the story, the group's WMD program, Project al-Zabadi was established in 1998 after the African embassy bombings (because of the loss of al-Shifa?) and set up with $2,000-4,000 worth of seed money under the leadership of an Egyptian (though some reports say Saudi) scientist named Midhat Mursi, better known by his kuniyat (assumed name) of Abu Khabab. Mursi ran Darunta camp in Afghanistan, where he is said to have tested nerve gas. CNN aired the tape of several of Mursi's tests on animals and the testimony of Ahmed Ressam gives us some idea of what Mursi's curriculum was.

According to the Los Angeles Times, al-Qaeda attempted to carry out a poison gas attack in France in March 2001. Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed, a senior al-Qaeda leader in Italy who used coded porn to communicate with his superiors and apparently had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, sent his top deputy Essid Sami Ben Khemais to speak quite openly with another al-Qaeda member about obtaining the necessary substances to perpetrate a chemical attack in Europe. There was a cyanide gas plot against the US embassy in Rome (as well as the Italian water supply?) in February 2002, the first in a long series of plots in Europe that would involve North Africans, generally connected to the al-Qaeda affiliates GIA or GSPC.

And, of course, during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, there were more than a few attempts to perpetrate chemical or poison attacks of varying degree in at least 3 European countries. All of the suspects involved in these various plots were trained by two men - Midhat Mursi and Abu Musab Zarqawi.

Ansar al-Islam and the Pankisi Gorge

That Ansar al-Islam was working on cyanide gas, arsine, phosgene, attempts produce mustard gas and VX, botulinum and alfatoxin is, generally speaking, old news. What is unfortunate, however, is that the role of the Pankisi Gorge in serving as an incubator for this type of al-Qaeda activity is not receiving more press coverage, though I will give former French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy a great deal of credit for mentioning the threat posed by the continued existence of al-Qaeda bases in the Russian republic of Chechnya as well as neighboring Georgia.

Some historical perspective may be needed here to explain why al-Qaeda has been able to obtain a more or less secure base of operations even several years after 9/11. Russia has fought two extremely brutal wars (the second of which is still ongoing) against Chechen separatists and as a result a lot of neighboring Caucasus nations as well as many Westerners possess a great deal of sympathy towards the goal of Chechen independence that, not to put too fine a point on it, has led to a somewhat skewed perception as to just what Chechen al-Qaeda (see my previous analysis on Chechnya for my use of this term) leaders actually want in Caucasus. According to Amir Ramzan among others, those jihadi elements within the Chechen rebellion that make up al-Qaeda's arm in the Caucasus plan to create a giant Islamic emirate from the Black to the Caspian Sea, well beyond the original borders of Chechnya. These jihadis, particularly members of the late Khattab's International Islamic Peacekeeping Brigade, are actually much the same people who started the Second Chechen War in 1999 with their ill-fated invasion of Dagestan. In all likelihood, they are also the same rebel leaders who met with members of the French al-Qaeda cell prior to their return to France.

Under Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian government more or less turned a blind eye to Chechen rebel activity in the Pankisi Gorge, likely for a number of reasons. The first is that they weren't really doing anything in Georgia proper and that moving against them could easily turn them against Tbilisi. The second is that Russia has sponsored at least two separatist movements within Georgian regions of Ajaria and Abkhazia and Shevardnadze may have wanted to return the favor by playing host to Chechen rebels (even providing the late Ruslan Gelayev, a key Chechen leader, with a house in Tbilisi by some accounts). I'm not entirely certain of whether or not Shevardnadze was entirely aware of the international implications of what he was doing or not - his government accepted help from US military advisors after reports surfaced of al-Qaeda fleeing into the Pankisi Gorge from Afghanistan and allowed the US to capture 15 of the estimated 60 Arab al-Qaeda members in Pankisi and apparently thwarted at least two major plots against Western targets in Europe and Central Asia. All the same, near as I can tell Georgia made little if any effort to put an end to Chechen al-Qaeda activity in the "lawless" Pankisi Gorge, much the same way Pakistan seems to have more or less given up on ending Taliban activity in the similarly "lawless" Northwest Frontier Province.

Thankfully, Shevardnadze proved to be just as bad as being a dictator as he had as Gorbachev's foreign minister and was overthrown by his own people in November 2003. The new Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has vowed to take action both against the Islamic terrorists hiding out in the Pankisi Gorge as well as against Wahhabism in general. Given that Saakashvili's prestige has just suffered a major boost from reclaiming Ajaria in a major victory for Russo-American diplomacy, the general assumption is that it's only a matter of time before Georgia launches a full-scale crackdown in Pankisi. The most recent report that I've seen on the subject suggest that a crackdown is indeed nigh, and it's probably a case of the sooner the better.

The Pakistan connection

Another problem that should be noted in this regard is the role of the Kashmiri groups and in particular the Lashkar-e-Taiba to the continuing threat posed by Project al-Zabadi. The Indian military has been reporting that "foreign mercenaries" operating in Jammu and Kashmir possess chemical weapons since at least April 2003. While thankfully only chemical-laced bullets have been recovered to date, the Pakistani connection does need to be examined further. According to French counter-terrorism officials, the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) has helped to develop close chemical weapons skills that are now dispersed throughout the al-Qaeda network, which would seem to support other reports that the LeT is now the de facto trainer for al-Qaeda in the aftermath of Operation Enduring Freedom.

The Pakistani connection is also extremely important because of what was found on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's computer after his capture at the home of Pakistani bacteriologist. But if the information on Mohammed's computer were accurate, al-Qaeda is dangerously close to having a feasible production plan in place with which to make anthrax. From the looks of things, the events of Operation Enduring Freedom (and I expect Operation Iraqi Freedom as well with respect to the destruction of the Ansar al-Islam bases at Sargat and Khurmal) set them back quite a bit, but if recents events in Amman are anything to judge by it's only going to be a matter of time until they come at us again. The Los Angeles Times recently profiled the three men believed to be key members of Project al-Zabadi: Midhat Mursi, Assadalah Abdul Rahman (one of several of the blind cleric involved in the 1993 WTC bombing), and Abu Bashir al-Yemeni, all of whom are still at large.

The Amman Plot

Before getting into the nuts and bolts aspects of the Amman plot, let me just try to debunk two unfortunately very common theories that have been floating around the internet ever since the story first broke:

1. This whole talk of chemical weapons and the like is nothing more than fear-mongering on behalf of the Jordanian government.

If the only source of information concerning this particular plot was the Jordanian press (which is actually fairly reliable by Arab standards). However, Jordanian officials have appear to have been more than willing to inform foreign news outlets of the situation, with King Abdullah even going as far as to tell the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview that had the attack succeeded it would have "decapitated" the government. That's an extremely dangerous admission to make in the Arab world, where weakness or even suspicions of weakness has meant the end of many a monarch. It is also the reason why, in my opinion, Jordan allowed the international media to start reporting the story as early as April 17 but didn't disclose the truth to their own population until April 26 - when they were certain that the plot had been thwarted.

As for just how many people this attack would have killed, my opinion is that the 20,000 to 80,000 figures that have been tossed around by the Jordanian government are non-scientific, but consider this: if the body count were anywhere even approaching that figure, it would certainly be ranked among the worst chemical weapons attacks of all time. Saddam Hussein, for example, "only" killed 5,000 Kurds during his most infamous use of chemical weapons at Halabja.

Some have cited Zarqawi's audiotaped denial as evidence to support the position that the Jordanian government was exaggerating the details of the plot. You'll forgive me if I don't take him at his word on this one, especially when, as Alphabet City first noted, Ansar al-Islam was passing out leaflets in Baghdad threatening chemical attacks on US forces just weeks before news of this plot broke.

2. This is it! Zarqawi must've been planning to use Saddam Hussein's WMDs against Jordan!

There are a number of variants to this story and the fact that most of the cell members entered Jordan through Syria has been combined with the "Iraqi WMDs moved to Syria" theory to produce any number of scenarios, some of which regard the Syrian regime as complicit in the planned attack on Amman. Unfortunately, it is also completely inconsistent with actual confessions provided by the arrested members of the al-Qaeda cell that was to have carried out the attack. According to Azmi al-Jayyousi's confession, the "chemical explosives" (gotta love that term) that were intended to be used in the attacks were created by him, first at the Sal farm and then later a series of shops near al-Ramtha Bridge. So any chemical weapons that were going to be used in the planned attack on Amman are going to have been manufactured by al-Jayyousi rather than by the Iraqi regime.

Charges of Syrian complicity in this attack are probably likewise erroneous. While it is true that the plot was financed to the tune of $170,000 by Suleiman Darweesh (now in custody), a Zarqawi aide formerly based in Syria, probably via the Commercial Bank of Syria which has since been blacklisted by the US government. Unlike Iran, Syria's strategic worldview appears to be focused solely on Israel and Bashar al-Assad has been grudgingly cooperative in the fight against al-Qaeda, though they still appear more than happy to allow the terrorist network to use their country as a transit point when en route to Iraq and al-Assad has recently questioned the existence of al-Qaeda. All the same, al-Assad seems at the very least able to acknowledge the latter when they start operating in his own backyard. That three of the four attackers had recently returned from Iraq is also unlikely to escape the attention of the Syrian security services.

More to the point, the place where al-Jayyousi began manufacturing his chemical arms is near Irbid in northern Jordan. There are smuggling routes in that part of the world that literally go as far back as the days when the Nabateans used to rule the land and given what the al-Qaeda cell in Jordan allegedly received from their Syrian counterparts there would seem to be little reason to suspect Syrian involvement in the plot, at least at this time.

So what was in the works, anyway?

There are a number of conflicting accounts on this one. So far, I've been able to identify at least five separate sources of information as far as what the Jordanians believe was actually going to occur, tying together the different pieces of information from King Abdullah's letter to General Khair, King Abdullah's interview, the account from al-Hayat as reporting by the Washington Times, AFP, the BBC, and Knight-Ridder, as well as the computer graphics that were aired on Jordanian TV. With all of that out of the way, here is my tentative reconstruction of what I believe was intended to occur. Keep in mind that a lot of this information is fragmentary and I could be completely off-base here, but we all know how much al-Qaeda loves to carry out simultaneous terrorist attacks.

1. At least one of the major targets is said to have been the Dairat al-Mukhabarat or GID to use its English acronym. In addition to being one of the key pillars that holds up the Jordanian monarchy, the GID is also one of the various agencies that the US has been known to subcontract out to when it comes to performing "coercive interrogations" on high-level al-Qaeda suspects. This has been public knowledge since at least June 2003 when US News and World Report first broke the story, though I imagine that any reasonable analyst could probably deduce as much. As a result, in attacking the GID not only could al-Jayyousi have severely weakened the Jordanian government but he could also have hoped to start the domino effect that would eventually result in the release of numerous mid-level to senior al-Qaeda operatives. According to the al-Hayat account, the GID HQ was also supposed to be gassed and my guess is that al-Jayyousi was planning to use conventional explosives or truck bombs to deal the openly blow to the GID HQ and then use the alleged poison gas cloud to deal with any survivors that was supposed to spread out over an area of several miles.

2. The US embassy was supposed to have been attacked with poison gas. Attacking US embassies is, of course, standard al-Qaeda MO.

3. The prime minister's office in Amman was also supposed to have been a target. Given that the original time table for these attacks was set to occur when King Abdullah was out of the country meeting with President Bush (the meeting was delayed after word of the plot broke, allegedly over disagreements concerning the Israeli plan to retain certain settlements in the West Bank), Ali Abu al-Raghib, the Jordanian prime minister, is in effect regent in the absence of his Hashemite liege. Killing him would deal a major blow to the Jordanian government and, combined with the destruction of the GID HQ, pave the way for a potential coup. If history is any guide, coups are generally far more likely to succeed when the ruler in question is overseas.

4. Al-Hayat says that a Jordanian military base was also being targeted by al-Jayyousi cell. This makes a fair amount of sense, as destroying the Jordanian military base closest to the capital would also be a sure-fire way of removing any chance of Hashemite loyalist opposition to a coup. Also, the Jordanian military intervened in Maan back in late 2002 to apprehend several of Zarqawi's minions, so he would have good reason to want revenge against them.

As for what agents the al-Qaeda cell was planning to the use, the CNN account only lists one of the allegedly 71 chemicals that the cell planned to use in Amman, sulfuric acid, which fits with Ahmed Ressam's testimony as far as what he learned to use at Darunta camp. Sulfuric acid can be used to make a blister agent, but that still doesn't explain the nerve or choking agents that were also allegedly recovered by the Jordanian authorities. I'm no doctor or chemist, but the description of what the cloud was intended to do from the Knight-Ridder article sounds more than a little like the effects of mustard gas to me.

Implications

Project al-Zabadi still appears to be in operation to at least some degree and is likely to more or less continue apace until Midhat Mursi is captured or killed. In all likelihood, Darunta camp 2.0 has already opened up at one of the Lashkar-e-Taiba training camps in Pakistan as it appears to have in the Pankisi Gorge as well. The US can and has made efforts with regard to dealing with the latter, but our options available in the former case are unfortunately less than ideal, particularly if we're talking about stopping these attacks before an al-Qaeda cell succeeds in carrying out an attack of this nature against a major Western city. At least part of this, as noted in the Financial Times story via Rantburg, is due to the sheer number of graduates from either the Pankisi Gorge or Darunta training camps still at large. Ahmed Ressam was being taught this stuff at Darunta as far back as 1998 and I suspect that he's hardly alone in this regard. If the recently thwarted plot in the UK involving osmium tetroxide is anything to judge by, this expertise would appear to have been passed on to al-Qaeda's Pakistani alumni as well.

The idea of what anything on level of Amman could do to a Western city if successfully carried out is staggering, especially considering the loss of life involved in such an attack and witnessing how easily a single conventional terrorist attack was able to alter the course of the Spanish elections. How exactly would the United States react if something like what was planned in Amman occurred in DC? Or in New York City or Boston during the respective party conventions? All of these are important issues, like the continuing existence of reasonably easily accessible al-Qaeda training facilities over two years after 9/11 and are going to need to be dealt with regardless of who ends up occupying the White House in November 2004.

One thing that needs to be stressed, however, is that important victories have been made in stopping al-Qaeda's plans to unleash use chemical weapons - I count no less than 6 plots of this nature that have been disrupted to date. Operation Enduring Freedom help dealt Project al-Zabadi a significant blow (as did the destruction of al-Shifa, per the former administration officials who ordered the strike), and regardless of what one thinks of the war in Iraq, the destruction of Ansar al-Islam was a service on behalf of humanity. Diplomatic efforts between the US and Russia helped to ease Shevardnadze's removal from power and have set the stage for stabilizing Georgia for the first time in the better part of the last decade. However, these efforts must be continued in order to ensure that what was planned to occur in Amman is never realized in any city.

• Burma: Diplomats have boycotted a meeting sponsored by Burma’s ruling junta which was to unveil a draft for a new Constitution. The junta had not invited the head of the Democratic Movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, currently under house arrest, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Kofi Annan, has asked the countries of Southeast Asia to place pressure on the Burmese junta to release the Nobel peace prize winner so she could attend the meeting. Speculation has increased that, in any event, a release of Suu Kyi is imminent.

• Kuwait: In a surprise move, the cabinet of Kuwaiti PM Sheikh Sabah has approved a bill to allow women to vote and stand as candidates in parliamentary elections. The bill still must garner parliamentary approval. A similar proposal by Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah was defeated narrowly in 1999 by Islamist and conservative assembly members, who remain significant in the 50-member legislature.

• Malawi: On Thursday, Malawi votes for both a new president and parliament. The election campaign has been fought largely over AIDS, and despite widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s policies, a fragmented opposition is expected to result in a victory for the ruling UDF. Apart from minor disputes over the dropping of double-counted names from the voter rolls, the election is expected to be free and fair.

• South Africa: The UK minister for Africa, Chris Mullin, visited South Africa today to discuss policy toward Zimbabwe with the government in Pretoria. The two governments agreed that both sought to bring about democracy in Zimbabwe, and that their disagreements lay only in the realm of tactics.

• Ukraine: With Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma stepping down after two terms, upcoming elections in October will pit currently favoured pro-western opposition leader Victor Yushchenko against current prime minister Victor Yanukovych. 38 percent of Ukrainians—over one-third—believe the results of the upcoming election will be falsified, while only 14 percent believe the elections will be free and fair.

• American Ambassador John Herbst called on the government to hold free and fair election, or threatened that the country’s relations with the United States would suffer as a result.

INDIA: ELECTIONS IN THE WORLD’S LARGEST DEMOCRACY

• In a massive upset, Congress routed the BJP, only for leader Sonia Gandhi to step aside in favour of former finance minister, and respected economist, Manmohan Singh. Singh is to be India’s first Sikh prime minister.

• Singh, while in government service before, has always described himself as a technocrat, and there are concerns about whether his political skills are adequate to the task of maintaining a governing coalition in the Lok. More significant are worries that the BJP, after campaigning on an ‘India Shining’ campaign of economic growth (combined with aggressive whispers about Sonia Gandhi’s Italian birth and Roman Catholicism), will draw the lesson that it should return to its electoral roots in fomenting communal discord.

• For more commentary on India’s elections, see Attara Datta and Economist.