Major General Paul Eaton, who was in charge of training Iraqis for the Iraqi army and other security forces, blames instability in Iraq on the poor training of the aforementioned forces.

Misguided U.S. training of Iraqi police contributed to the country's instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces, the head of armed forces training said Wednesday.

‘‘It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress,'' said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops.

‘‘We've had the wrong training focus — on individual cops rather than their leaders,'' Eaton said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A credible, well-equipped national security force is crucial to America's plans to pull its 138,000 troops out of Iraq, along with the 24,000 soldiers from Britain and other coalition countries.

As U.S. occupation leaders prepare to hand power to an Iraqi government in less than three weeks, Iraq's own security forces won't be ready to take a large role in protecting the country.

At least Eaton has the sense to acknowledge his own errors. But the question is, will his successors? Proper training of Iraqi forces is crucial, and hopefully the problems in their training can be rectified.

John Kerry has selected his running mate. His selection comes as no surprise to long-time political watchers.

Ending months of speculation, presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry announced Tuesday that he has selected the young, vibrant, recently decorated war hero John Kerry as his running mate.

"In my search for a vice-president, I considered many qualified men and women," Kerry said, announcing his decision at Boston University. "But one man stood apart from the madding crowd as brave, honest, and full of life. One man displayed a true desire to change America for the better—not through political maneuvering, but through hard work. That man was me, 35 years ago."

Kerry said he was inspired to nominate John Kerry of 1969 by, of all things, a photo in a magazine.

"I was paging through Time and I came across a picture of a very proud, and, might I add, handsome 25-year-old man in full military uniform, just returning from the conflict in Vietnam," Kerry said. "He was strong, fit, and in the flower of youth. I couldn't look away. It was as if there was a light shining from within him. I knew that this man was destined for the White House."

Veterans groups are expected to protest the nomination.

To date, the information surrounding the now-infamous torture memos from Defense Department lawyers illustrates something really rotten in the core of the Administration somewhere. Look, I don't blame the lawyers for developing legal theories legitimizing torture: that's a lawyer's job. But who is to blame are the people who ordered those arguments to be made.

But what's murky to me from my reading is who, exactly, wanted these arguments. This, I think, is where the attention needs to go. Someone who wants a legal theory upholding torture likely does because either he or someone in his chain of command has ordered and/or committed torture, or at the very least is contemplating it.

Whoever that is needs to be revealed and he needs to be fired (in the case of contemplation) or put on trial (in the case of ordering or committing).

Torture is immoral, impractical, and illegal. Whoever's responsible for the desire to make it part of the arsenal against terror has to go. Especially if that person occupies a desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan sums it up nicely:

I'm hoping to write at length about this, but let me say one thing. I should have spoken up earlier. The signs were there - including the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to al Qaeda in Guantanamo. In a very small number of cases, this might have been a debatable question. But what we have clearly seen is a green light from the very top condoning at best mistreatment and abuse of prisoners of war in a whole slew of cases. We'll see as more facts emerge what the truth is. But the brutality of U.S. forces against prisoners in their care and custody is now public record - and a permanent mark of shame for the United States.

And let me also point out a huge mistake that some defenders of the Administration are making. It may well be true that the fighters captured in Afghanistan or Iraq are not POW's under the Geneva Conventions. There's certainly an argument for that, though I'm not sure I totally agree with it. However, it's certainly true that our treatment of prisoners in Gitmo at the very least violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party. And certainly torture is prohibited by the Convention Against Torture.

I've noticed that some conservatives are holding international law on this matter in disdain. Well, sorry, kids, but according to the Constitution of the United States, treaties ratified by the Senate are the law of the land. I also hate to point out the obvious that the Constitution also prohibits indefinite detention of persons as well as cruel and unusual punishment. But you know what? It does.

"I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can."
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Lord knows I'm not exactly the world's biggest fan of organized religion (or unorganized religion, for that matter), but I've frequently felt that my fellow secularists go to far. The Pledge of Allegiance flap, for instance. Going after the cross in L.A.'s city seal is another. Cathy Young, no religious apologist herself, has an excellent article regarding the dangers of going to extremes in building a secular society.

Volokh also reasonably wonders where this crusade will go next. Will the secularist zealots want to change the names of cities that contain religious references—Santa Fe (Holy Faith), Providence, Corpus Christi? Or, for that matter, Los Angeles, which means "the angels" in Spanish and is derived from the name of the original settlement, "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels"?

Many Americans today believe that secularist forces in this country are implacably hostile to all things religious, particularly Christian, to the point of wanting to purge our culture and our history of all traces of Christianity.

This exaggerated perception is exploited by religious extremists who really would like to undo the separation of church and state—who believe, for instance, that same-sex civil marriage should be illegal because the Bible condemns homosexuality. When secularists go after a tiny cross on a county seal or Christmas decorations at a firehouse, they lend substance to the "religious persecution" complex—and play right into the extremists' hands.

She'll get no arguments from me. Look, some religious references and endorsements by government are clearly wrong: teacher-led prayer in school, for instance, clearly endorses a particular religious worldview in violation of the First Amendment. But a lot of things are just plain trivial. Sure, government probably shouldn't have "In God We Trust" on currency (although the unintentional irony of that is delicious). But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter, and it would be a very silly battle to fight to remove. The cross on the L.A. seal is even more trivial, and trying to have it removed only hurts the cause of keeping church and state seperate.

"Evaluation and judgment are responses to what exists, sorting the things that pass before us into categories of good, bad, and indifferent. But a rational life, the life of a valuer, does not consist essentially in reaction. It consists in action. Man does not find his values, like the other animals; he creates them. The primary focus of a valuer is not to take the world as it comes and pass judgment. His primary focus is to identify what might and ought to exist, to uncover potentialities that he can exploit, to find ways of reshaping the world in the image of his values."
-- David Kelley

P.J. O'Rourke, long a favorite of mine, is lamenting the demise of argument.

I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.

I suppose I should be arguing with my fellow right-wingers about that, and drugs, and many other things. But I won't be. Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives. The formats of their radio and television programs allow for little measured debate, and to the extent that evidence is marshaled to support conservative ideas, the tone is less trial of Socrates than Johnnie Cochran summation to the O.J. jury. Except the jury—with a clever marketing strategy—has been rigged. I wonder, when was the last time a conservative talk show changed a mind?. . .

. . . Does the left have this problem? Do some liberals feel as if they're guarding the net while their teammates make a furious rush at their own goal? NPR seems more whiny than hectoring, except at fundraising time. There's supposed to be a lot of liberal advocacy on TV. I looked for things that debased freedom, promoted license, ridiculed responsibility, and denigrated man and God—but that was all of TV. How do you tell the liberal parts from the car ads? Once more I resorted to books.

To answer my question I didn't even have to open Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. But having done so, I found these chapter headings: "Ann Coulter: Nutcase," "You Know Who I Don't Like? Ann Coulter," and "Bill O'Reilly: Lying Splotchy Bully.". . .

. . . Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, seems to have gone out of fashion with everyone. I'm reduced to arguing with the radio. The distaste for political argument certainly hasn't made politics friendlier—or quieter, given the amount of shouting being done by people who think one thing at people who think the same thing.

I really don't think this is the case. Throughout American history, there have been loads of obnoxious gasbags and people ready to pony up the cash to buy their crap. But there's also been a lot of honest, decent discussion, too. I try to ignore obnoxious, idiotic partisans, and you know what? It's pretty easy. When I think "liberal," I don't think Michael Moore--I think Matthew Yglesias. When I think "conservative," I don't think Ann Coulter--I think James Joyner (who I got this link from). When I want my libertarianism flavored with right-leaning pragmatism, I go Stephen Green. When I want it flavored with left-leaning idealism, I go Amy Phillips.

Of course, there's many more thoughtful conservatives, liberals, and libertarians than the aforementioned. The point is, you can get political discussion and debate from all sides without ever even thinking about bloated gasbags like Bill O'Reilly or Al Franken. But guess what? Other people like their political commentary flavored with obnoxious choir-preaching. That's their perogative. It just ain't mine.

According to UN inspectors, several known Iraqi weapon sites appear to have been looted or dismantled.

A number of sites in Iraq known to have contained equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been either cleaned out or destroyed, U.N. weapons inspectors said Monday. . .

. . ."It is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap," the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission said in its quarterly report to the U.N. Security Council.

UNMOVIC said its experts and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was responsible for dismantling Iraq's nuclear program, were jointly investigating items from Iraq that were discovered in a scrap yard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. . .

. . . UNMOVIC spokesman Ewen Buchanan said the Shumokh site and the adjacent Ibn Al-Batyr facility contained biological, chemical, and missile-related items subject to U.N. monitoring. These included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles, and a 130-gallon "jacketed reactor vessel" which could be used in biological or chemical weapons production, he said.

"All sorts of sites seem to have been systematically dismantled, and it's not clear to us what has happened to items and material that was subject to U.N. monitoring," Buchanan said. "It creates a headache in trying to keep an accurate picture of what happened to everything."

What happened to the Iraqi WMD sites? Where are there components? Were there WMD stockpiles? If so, where are they?

ALL of these are unanswered questions and they are, in my mind, of vital importance in the cause of preventing terrorists from getting their hands on chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

And to answer Rick DeMent in advance, yes, it's true that biological weapons are not very effective. And yes it's true that the use of chemical weapons requires precision or else they're useless. But there are two important points to consider: (1) Someone with the proper training can use these weapons to devastating effect, culminating in the deaths of hundreds or even thousands. (2) Even if the use isn't effective in causing death, repeated tries--even if they're failures--can result in increased terror, which can have other adverse effects, particularly economic.

The worse part of this whole Iraqi WMD debacle is that there is no political incentive for either side to change their stance. For the Administration, it's enough for them and their supporters to say, "Look, the programs were there and in place, and weapons could have been made." Obviously, the idea that the weapons did exist, but fell into the wrong hands as the result of the war is not something the Administration wants brought to light. There's an election on, after all. As for the Administration's opponents, failure to immediately finding WMD in Iraq (or, perhaps simply failure to identify discovered WMD) is beneficial because it makes the whole thing look like a major debacle for the Bush Administration. The discovery of WMD in Iraq, in the Administration's opponents eyes, is a victory for the Administration no matter what.

The net result? Nobody in power has any incentive to spend too much time investiging what happened to Iraq's WMD. This is not acceptable. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about it either. Except pray that not too many people die as a result, I suppose.

"I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain sublime assurance of success, but as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is also reassuring news.

A statement purportedly from al Qaeda militants in Saudi Arabia warned Monday of new attacks on U.S. and Western airlines, as a Saudi diplomat said the militant group was behind an attack that killed a BBC cameraman.

"All compounds, bases and means of transport, especially Western and American airlines, will be a direct target for our coming operations in the near future," said the statement, posted on a pro-al Qaeda site on the Internet.

Why is this reassuring? Because all of al-Qaeda's deadliest attacks--like 9/11 and the Cole bombing, for instance--came without public warning. Since the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, al-Qaeda has made many public warnings--and followed through on none. And even in the case of successful attacks in other countries, such as the Bali bombings, the U.S. warned the countries in question of an impending attack only to be ignored by those governments.

So seeing public warnings by al-Qaeda cheers me up, because it reminds me that we're winning the fight against them.

Here's some more good news out of Iraq.

Nine major political parties agreed Monday to disband their militias, the interim prime minister said, although radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's fighters did not join the agreement.

In the southern city of Kufa, explosions rocked the compound surrounding the mosque after ammunition used by fighters loyal to al-Sadr apparently caught fire, witnesses and Shiite militia members said. At least one person was killed and eight others were wounded.

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said about 100,000 armed individuals will enter civilian life or take jobs in the state police force or security services. The militias have been credited with an active role in the U.S.-led ouster of Saddam Hussein.

None of these militias, of course, were involved in the fighting against Coalition and Iraqi forces. However, one major benefit of this is that it strengthens the central government of Iraq and makes it less likely that an all-scale civil war will break out in Iraq. It's hard to complain about that.

"The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself."
-- Helmut Schoeck

Today is the 60th Anniversery of D-Day. I doubt I can say anything to add to the multitude of voices expressing gratitude for the soldiers in Normandy that fateful day when the liberation of Europe from Nazi oppression began.

However, one of my favorite aspects of D-Day was the brilliantly audacious Operation Fortitude in which the Allies convinced the German High Command that the Normandy invasion was just a feint. It is probably the greatest work of deception ever committed in warfare and it made the difference in the success of the Normandy invasion. Without the hard work of the spies, generals, and soldiers in this operation, D-Day may well have been remembered as the day the Allies lost their gambit to win World War II. My hats off to them, as well.

"Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious. Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."
-- Sen. John Kerry

Gail Heriot has some good comments on the popular sport of "SAT-bashing" that is well worth the read. One good point she makes is this:

Moreover, insofar as the children of successful parents do score more highly, the test is measuring something real and not something that will disappear if the SAT is abolished. Such students, on the whole, don't just tend to get better scores, they tend to do better in college too. Ignoring SAT scores just because the children of high-achievers tend to do well would be like ignoring height in basketball players just because the children of tall people tend to be tall.

More to the point, a lot of the SAT bashers tend to ignore the purpose of the SAT: it is a predicitve evaluator of how likely a student is to perform in college. And all of the empirical studies have read suggest that the SAT is, in fact, a pretty good predictor of how well a student will do in college.

But facts are harsh, cruel things, and I'd never expect an education theorist to actually consider them...

This is great news.

The Saudi government yesterday outlined plans to dismantle all international charity organizations operating in the kingdom and place their holdings under a new commission in what officials said is an effort to stop the flow of funds to terrorist groups.

The charities to be dissolved include the al Haramain Islamic Foundation, one of the largest and most influential Saudi charities, whose chairman is the Saudi minister of Islamic affairs.

At a joint news conference with Saudi officials, the U.S. Treasury Department also announced that it had designated the longtime chief of al Haramain as a financier of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

This is a great big blow to al-Qaeda and similarly minded Islamist groups. As Stephen Green points out:

As all us chickenhawks have known for a couple years at least, international Saudi "charitable" groups have long been a source of terrordollars. If the Saudis are serious about cracking down on those organizations (which remains to be seen), then that's a victory on par with Libya's decision late last year to dismantle its WMD programs.

No arguments from me.

There are no doubt a number of reasons why the Saudis are changing their tune on this, but I would suggest three primary reasons:

1) The recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia have changed the House of Sauds minds on the wisdom of funding terrorists. After all, if they're attacking their financers, what's the point of protecting them or financing them?

2) Iraq and the withdrawal of US troops for Saudi Arabia have taught the House of Saud two lessons: 1) that the US keeps its word in the sense that we said we'd move out the troops, and we did. 2) that the US keeps its word in the sense that we said if Saddam wouldn't comply with UN resolutions, we'd attack. And we did.

3) The House of Saud's desire to join the WTO. Saudi Arabia is about 95% of the way there of being granted full membership in the WTO. The only thing keeping them out is us. I've no doubt that the Saudis hope that this step will help convince the US that WTO membership for Saudi Arabia is a good idea.

Zeyad, the indispensible Iraqi blogger, has a great post on Iraq's new President, the new Cabinet, and his hopes for the future. He concludes his post by saying:

So, perhaps I'm a bit optimistic today? Maybe. But Iraqis need to be optimistic at such a critical moment. There is no use in shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't care.." anymore. You will be left behind along with the dark forces that insist on killing more Iraqis and disrupting the new changes. I'm confident that the Arab world is now watching Iraq with eyes wide open (or wide shut). Some Iraqis are saying the new government will be just a copy of the GC. It depends. Another problem is that I can already feel that the majority of Iraqis are expecting miracles from this new and young government. Unrealistic expectations tend to create endless problems and frustrations. Just like when the GC was formed, or when the Americans first entered Baghdad and people expected that their decades long problems would be fixed in a week.

I hope that the Iraqi people and their new government are going to work to solve the country's problems. They can't, by their very nature, be solved by Americans. As time goes on, only the Iraqis themselves are going to make things better.

We know John Kerry is a decorated Vietnam war hero, chiefly because he has the annoying habit of reminding us of it every chance he gets. We know he came home and spoke out against the war and maybe or maybe not threw his medals or ribbons or whatever over the White House fence. We know some of his compatriots thought he was a good guy and some thought he was a phony, and, and, and -- all of it ancient history. But after that -- what? In his nearly two decades as a United States Senator, John Kerry has not stood out as a leader on any key issue."
-- Cheri Jacobus