At last! A poll that Matthew Dowd can be happy about. While the Gallup folks were busy collecting their data (June 21-23), the fair and balanced folks over at Fox News were busy collecting theirs (June 22-23). To say the

The Fox poll has Bush up by 6 points (48-42) among registered voters (RVs). As I discussed in my previous post, Gallup has Kerry up by 4 (49-45) in the identical Kerry-Bush RV matchup. Kind of different!

And check this out. Fox has Bush ahead by 20 points in the solid red states (Gallup had Bush ahead by 8), Kerry ahead by only 3 (!) in the solid blue states (Gallup: Kerry by 14) and Kerry ahead by an identical 3 point margin in purple states (Gallup: Kerry by 9). Huh?!? Kerry ahead by only 3 in the solid blue states--and up by no more there than in the battleground states?

Was Fox really polling the same country? You've gotta wonder. The survey dates of the two polls are virtually identical, we're talking about the same universe (registered voters) and the same matchup--and yet the results are starkly different.

So who do we believe? Well, if it's a choice between Fox News or the Gallup Organization, I don't find this a particularly difficult choice to make. To tell the truth, I rarely pay much attention to Fox News polls, which are invariably and significantly pro-Bush relative to other public polls, but this one seemed so egregiously off and so directly contradicted by the Gallup data that I just had to comment on it.

You might well ask: how on earth do the Fox News folks get such weird results? I don't really know, but one possibility is that they weight their data by party ID. Under this procedure, if you've got, in your view, too many Democrats (like in that pesky Los Angeles Times poll), you simply weight them down and weight the Republicans up so you get to the presumed proper distribution of party ID (those respondents can't really be serious about indentifying with the Democrats!).

I don't know that this is true of the Fox News poll. But it certainly would help explain why their horse race results differ so much from Gallup's (who, like good girls and boys, never weight by party ID--see this good article in the Los Angeles Times explaining why public polling organizations worth their salt eschew this practice). Or how Fox News--again, polling on essentially identical days--could find John Kerry's favorability rating at 42 percent favorable/43 percent unfavorable, while Gallup has it 58 percent favorable/35 percent unfavorable.

While we're on the subject of Fox News polls, it's worth mentioning their new polls of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, which also seem--well, a little surprising. Yesterday, I discussed the June 21-23 ARG poll of Ohio, where Kerry led by 6. Fox, polling on June 22-23, has Bush ahead by 4 in Ohio. Hmmm. Yesterday I also mentioned the June 21-23 ARG poll of Florida, where Kerry was ahead by 2. Fox's June 22-23 poll of Florida has Bush ahead by 9!

Curiouser and curiouser said Alice. Now, if it was anyone but Fox, I might be tempted to ascribe these differences to ARG's use of likely voters (LVs), rather than RVs, as Fox uses. But these are mighty big differences and this is Fox, so I don't buy it.

I especially don't buy it when we look at Fox's Pennsylvania results. Fox, polling on June 22-23, has Bush ahead by 3 among RVs in Pennsylvania. But, the highly reputable Quinnipiac University poll, polling on June 21-22 and also polling RVs, has Kerry ahead by 6. What a difference a day makes--or, considerably more likely, what a difference the Fox News treatment makes.

I have a new slogan for Fox News: "Pro-Bush Results Guaranteed". Unlike "Fair and Balanced", this would allow them to stick closely to their empirical record.

The new Gallup poll is chock full of interesting data. Perhaps the most interesting finding is this: For the first time in this poll, a majority of Americans

Note that these data were collected before the wave of violence that was unleashed Thursday in Iraq.

Another turnaround is on whether the war with Iraq has made the US safer from terrorism. Just 37 percent now say the war has made us safer, compared to 55 percent who say it has not; when Gallup last asked this question in mid-December it was 56-33 the other way.

The poll also finds a majority (51-46) saying it was not worth going to war with Iraq, pretty much where this measure has been since late May.

Bush's overall approval rating, compared to Gallup's last measurement three weeks ago, is down a point to 48 percent. His rating on Iraq is up a point to 42 percent, while his rating on terrorism is down 2 points to 54 percent.

By far the biggest change is his rating on the economy: up 6 points to 47 percent with 50 percent disapproval. This is close to his mid-April rating in this poll (46/52), though still substantially below his 54/43 rating in early January.

Note that the latest Washington Post poll, conducted right before the Gallup poll, registered only a slight improvement in Bush's economic approval rating (just 2 points) and had his disapproval rating dropping only a point, compared to Gallup, which has his disapproval rating declining by 8 points.

Despite Bush's improved economy rating in the Gallup poll, voters still favor Kerry over Bush (53-40) on which candidate can better handle the economy. That Kerry advantage is essentially unchanged since early May.

On the situation in Iraq, Kerry and Bush are nearly tied (47-46 in Bush's favor), a slightly improvement for Kerry over his 3 point deficit in early May. This tie is notable, of course, because sentiment is now so strikingly negative about the Iraq war. Perhaps Kerry's failure to gain an advantage reflects the public's view, captured in other polls, that Kerry does not have a clear plan himself for dealing with the Iraq situation.

Another interesting finding is that, while Bush has a modest lead (51-43) over Kerry in terms of who the public trusts more to handle the responsibilities of commander-in-chief, the public expresses an identical degree of confidence in the ability of Bush and Kerry to handle the responsibilities of commander-in-chief (61 percent in each case).

In terms of favorability ratings, it seems significant that Kerry's net favorability rating (favorable minus unfavorable) is now substantially higher than Bush's. Kerry is +23 on this measure (58 percent favorable/35 percent unfavorable), up from +17 in Gallup's last measurement in April. In contrast, Bush is just +8 (53/45), down from +14 in April. These data are consistent with the recent New York Times story that suggested the GOP's frontal assault on Kerry has not had much success creating an unfavorable image of him.

Turning to the horse race, as ever we must, Kerry leads Bush by 4 points (49-45) among registered voters (RVs). That approximates Gallup's early June result when Kerry led 49-44.

Of course, there's bound to be confusion about this, since Gallup and its clients tend to highlight the likely voter (LV) rather than RV results, which, in this case, actually show Bush ahead by a point (49-48) . And then some media outlets tend to report the Kerry-Bush-Nader results, rather than the Kerry-Bush results, which further clouds the issue.

Let me reproduce, as a public service, my thinking about why you are well-advised, at this stage of the race, to pay more attention to RV than LV results, especially when both are reported. As for why it is preferable to look at Kerry-Bush matchup results, rather than Kerry-Bush-Nader results, I will refer you to a recent analysis I did on the issue.

There's been considerable confusion about which trial heat results to pay the most attention to at this point in the race. Here's my take, which should help clarify why I choose to focus on certain results over others.

And then there are the comparability problems. LV samples are difficult even to compare to one another, since methodologies differ, and clearly can't be compared very well to RV samples, which are the bulk of polls at this time. That's another strike against paying much attention to LV results this early.

So, RVs and Kerry-Bush it is! Looking further at this match-up, Gallup shows Bush ahead by 8 points in the solid red states (won by Bush by 5 points or more in 2000), but Kerry ahead by 14 in the solid blue states (won by Gore by more than 5 points) and ahead by 9 in the purple states (decided by less than 5 points in 2000). And Kerry is carrying independents nationwide by 10 points and moderates by 24 points.

Pretty good news for Mr. Kerry. Some of you may have heard, though, that the latest Fox News poll has wildly different results from the ones just summarized. A bit later in the day I'll offer some comments on the Fox News "findings".

Good news from the provinces. A very recent (June 21-23) ARG poll of likely voters in Ohio has Kerry ahead by 6 (49-43), even with Nader in the mix. (He has an identical 6 point lead (50-44) when

Especially good news is Kerry's wide 15 point lead among independents (53-38). That's up from a 5 point Kerry lead in May. In Ohio, independents very much hold the balance since the numbers of Republican and Democratic voters in presidential elections are roughly equal and tend to be roughly equally polarized in favor of their candidate. In 2000, Bush won the state by 4 points and independents by 15 points. If Kerry can maintain anything like his current lead among Ohio's independents, Bush will be toast in the state.

Another June 21-23 ARG poll has Kerry ahead by a point (47-46) among likely voters in Florida; two points if Nader is not included (48-46). The key here is again independent voters--in 2000, Gore and Bush were dead-even among these voters in Florida. In this ARG poll, Kerry leads Bush by 13 among independents (51-38), up from a 7 point lead in May.

Finally, Kerry leads a Kerry-Bush matchup 49-43 in a just-released Quinnipiac University poll of Pennsylvania registered voters. In their late May poll, Kerry led by only 3 in this matchup. Again, independents are swinging Kerry's way, giving him a healthy 19 point lead (55-36). Pennsylvania independents also give Bush a stunningly low approval rating: 34 percent approval to 64 percent disapproval.

There's some good news in the latest Annenberg Election Survey for President Bush. His overall approval rating in the poll, conducted June 8-21, is

The poll also found Bush's approval rating in specific areas like the economy and Iraq slightly improved over their late May levels, though still solidly net negative. And on a series of personal characteristics like "inspiring", "trustworthy" and "shares my values" Bush's ratings are generally up over their May values.

The bad news for Bush is that, among "persuadable voters"--that quarter of the electorate who seems open to changing their minds about which candidate to support--he has gone nowhere. In fact, on that series of personal characteristics I just mentioned, his ratings among persuadable voters have almost all gone down, not up, since the last Annenberg survey.

Moreover, only 27 percent of persuadable voters currently think the country is headed in the right direction, identical with the May figure. Bush's approval rating has actually slid a point--down to 44 percent--among these voters. And his approval ratings of the economy (31 percent approval/59 percent disapproval) and Iraq (26/68) are also slight declines from his already-abysmal May ratings.

And check out these figures for persuadable voters on Iraq-related issues, all more negative than they were last month. Only 34 percent of these voters feel the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, compared to 59 percent who feel it was not. Just 17 percent believe the war in Iraq has reduced the risk of terrorism against the United States, compared to 71 percent who believe it has increased that risk. And a mere 37 percent of persuadable voters want to keep the troops in Iraq until a stable government is formed, while 57 percent now say they want to bring the troops home as soon as possible.

I guess you could say the persuadable voters haven't been persuaded.

I agree with my friend and esteemed co-author, John Judis, that Kerry would be well-advised to put aside the "personal comfort" criterion in choosing a running mate. As John points out, the historical justification for ignoring that criterion is

So: back to politics. Who would help the ticket the most? Again, I agree with John that Edwards would likely help the most. I believe he would make a substantial contribution to increasing the ticket's appeal among white working class voters in culturally conservative swing states, especially where it is most necessary--outside of the unionized working class. Even if one assumes that Gephardt has appeal to the unionized rank-and-file of the working class, as opposed to labor leaders, that still leaves out the vast majority of the white working class--well over four-fifths. And it is among these non-unionized white working class voters that Democrats have had the most trouble and where Gore got really hammered in 2000.

One particular trouble spot is among those with some college--the upwardly striving working class. Because of severe underperformance among whites with this educational credential, Gore lost the group as a whole by 6 points in 2000. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, won them by 8 points in 1996.

Where is Kerry right now? Gallup data indicate that he has gone from a 6 point deficit among some college voters in early May to a 9 point advantage among this group in their early June poll. That's largely responsible for the overall shift in the horse race from a tie in early May to a 5 point Kerry advantage in the June poll.

Kerry needs to keep those some college voters down on the farm. One way that would help would be to select Edwards as his running mate. Regardless of whether he enjoys drinking beer and shooting pool with the guy.

For those who missed it yesterday, an excerpt of John Judis's new book is available in the July/August Foreign Policy.

Thanks to all the people who wrote in response to my first attempts at blogging. As Josh will testify, I was a bashful bride who had to be wooed with flattery. But I am glad I did it. I learned something about the vitality of this medium. It is an important replacement for the vanishing soapbox, union hall, and neighborhood pub. I hope you support this site, as I do, by occasionally clicking the “contribute” button at the bottom. It’s free to view this site, but it’s not free to produce, and Josh shouldn’t have to depend entirely on advertising to support it. (I suspect it will also get harder to attract advertising after the elections are over.) I now leave you in the able hands of my friend and sometime collaborator, Ruy Teixeira.

Speculation is rife about whom John Kerry will choose as his running mate. Newsweek reports that Kerry "is engrossed in the final shortlist of veep picks. Kerry sources say the choice is

There are different criteria Kerry and the Democratic convention delegates should use in choosing a running mate, but they should not include whether the candidate is "personally comfortable" with whomever he chooses. If John F. Kennedy had used this criterion in 1960, Richard Nixon would have won the election. If Ronald Reagan had used it in 1980 and chosen his friend Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt rather than his leading challenger George Bush, Reagan might have lost that election. Gore did use this criterion in 2000, and it's one reason why he lost. In the final tally, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman didn't bring Gore a single electoral college vote. Kerry has to choose a running mate who, above all, will help him win states in the Midwest and South that he may not be able to win on his own.

Among those prospects currently being discussed, there are only two who are sufficiently battle-tested and who could help Kerry where he may not be able to help himself. These are Edwards and Gephardt. In the primary, Edwards showed a Clintonesque ability to appeal to both of the constituencies with whom Kerry is going to have trouble--the white working class voters who used to be described as "Reagan Democrats" and the independent upscale suburbanites who have been trending Democratic, but are leery of the party's leftwing. Edwards could help Kerry be competitive in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Ohio. (In a Mason-Dixon poll last month pairing Bush and Cheney against Kerry and Edwards in North Carolina, Bush was only ahead by 46 to 45 percent.) He could force the Bush campaign to expend resources in regions it would have liked to take for granted. Gephardt might help Kerry with white working class voters in Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio. But Gephardt's appeal may be more limited than Edwards'. Gephardt is very popular among labor leaders, but, as this year's primary made clear, not necessarily among the rank and file or among non-union workers. He would also reinforce Kerry's image as a Washington insider, making him less attractive to upscale suburbanites.

There is another reason to hope that Kerry puts aside his "comfort level" and picks Edwards. In 2004, 19 Democratic Senate seats are being contested, compared to only 15 Republican ones; and five of the nineteen are in Southern states where Democrats are retiring. Republicans could conceivably win all these seats. If they won even three of them, Democrats would have an almost impossible task of winning back the Senate in 2004, and would face an uphill challenge in 2006 when more Democratic than Republican seats are again up for grabs. Democrats have an interest in fielding a presidential ticket that has credibility, if not popularity, in the South. With Edwards as the vice presidential candidate, the Democrats could put forward a Southern face. If Kerry picks another Northern liberal like himself, Democratic candidates in the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia will be put on the defensive and forced to dissociate themselves from the national ticket. My advice to Kerry: forget chumminess, choose Edwards.

The Justice Department attempted to dissociate itself from an August 2002 memo condoning the torture of prisoners. But it didn't dissociate itself from the memo's author, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee. As TPM reader Hope P. reminded me, George W. Bush nominated Bybee as a judge on the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Seventeen Democrats, citing Bybee's opposition to gay rights and his highly restrictive views of the First Amendment, opposed his nomination, but he was confirmed by the Repbulican Senate in March 2003. This man, who advocated that the United States ignore international law--and some might say, commit war crimes--now holds a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.

Business schools like to analyze the reasons for famous flops, such as Ford's Edsel or the merger of AT&T; and NCR. Perhaps in the future, foreign service schools will study the Bush administration's flop in Iraq. What they'll find is an administration

In a week, chief administrator Paul Bremer will leave his post in Baghdad. In his appearances before Congress, Bremer projects an air of rational purpose. He was, it seemed, faced with an impossible task in Baghdad. But it is becoming increasingly clear that Bremer, who worked under the supervision of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was living in a kind of neoconservative dream world and had no understanding of the obstacles he faced.

Bremer arrived in Baghdad in May after the Pentagon fired General Jay Garner. According to Garner, the Pentagon objected to his plan to hold early elections before Iraq's economy had been privatized. Bremer's mandate was, above all, to privatize. In June, as Bremer returned to Baghdad aboard a U.S. military transport plane after speaking at an international economic conference, he discussed his plans for Iraq with Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran. According to Chandrasekaran, Bremer spoke of privatization "with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold." "We have to move forward quickly with this effort," he said.

Bremer's economic program wasn't confined to selling off state enterprises. Bremer saw privatization as part of the broader conservative economic agenda that Reagan had endorsed in the 1980s. It would include supply-side tax cuts and elimination of import duties. And he proceeded to get his way. In September 2003--against the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention that require occupying powers to respect existing laws--Bremer got the Iraqi Governing Council to issue an order privatizing state companies and abrogating Iraqi laws that prohibited private ownership of "national" resources and the "basic means of production." Later, he also got his way on taxes and import duties.

You might think that in the face of the continued insurgency, the absence of electrical power, and of elementary safety on city streets, Bremer would have seen these measures, in the words of the poet Blake, as "sand thrown up against the wind." But this month, as he was about to leave his post, Bremer told Chandrasekaran that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. He said that "among his biggest accomplishments ... were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties."

Is this daffy? Set aside for a moment the actual condition of the country. If Iraq's streets were safe and lighted, and its pipelines pumping oil to Western Europe, it would still be better off with the kind of managed economic approach that worked in East Asia rather than the kind of economics that Reagan recommended for post-Carter America. But Bremer's schemes weren't even relevant, let alone appropriate, to the country he was supposed to be administering. What does reducing tax rates do in a country that lacks income and profits and is entirely dependent on foreign aid to run its basic institutions? What good does it do to offer up businesses for sale when no foreign company would dream of investing capital in the current Iraq? The only businesses that have profited in Iraq are those like Haliburton that are funded by American taxpayers. Reading Bremer's reflections on his tenure makes one wonder whether, even in the face of chaos and possible civil war, post-Saddam Iraq wouldn't have been better off without the Bush administration's bureaucrats and the Pentagon's military in charge.

During the Cold War, American officials discovered that one of the best ways to promote democratic capitalism at the expense of communism was by luring foreign students to American colleges. Some of these foreign graduates returned home to become

In the wake of September 11, the Bush administration tightened visa rules for foreign students. Prospective students have had to pay a $100 fee to file a visa application. And it has taken up to eight months to process the applications. As a result, foreign applications to American colleges have plummeted. According to the Financial Times, graduate school applications have declined 32 percent this year. "The word seems to be out that you can't get a visa to come and study in the US, so why bother," said Liz Reisburg, who helps recruit foreign MBAs.

Undoubtedly, some aspects of this new visa program were unavoidable in the light of how the September 11 terrorists entered the country. But one would hope that the Bush administration would be trying to streamline the program, and to reduce the delays, so that students would once against be drawn to American universities, as they were during the high-tech boom of the 1990s. Instead, the administration is on the verge of putting still another and greater obstacle in the face of foreign students.

The legislation establishing the Department of Homeland Security included a provision creating "Sevis." a database for keeping track of international students. Each student would have to register with the Sevis. Last October, the Department of Homeland Security proposed that in addition to the $100 visa fee, every prospective student would have to pay another $100 to fund Sevis. The payment would have to be through a credit card or dollars. Universities have not objected to the program itself; but they have objected strenuously to imposing another fee on foreign applicants. "Having yet another thing students have to do to come to the US that they don't have to do in any other part of the world will drive more people away at a time when enrollments are declining," said one official from the Association of International Educators.

The universities, of course, are understandably worried about declining enrollment, but what is most disturbing about the administration's program--and about its general approach to foreign students--is its hostile attitude toward the outside world. It's fortress America applied to educational policy. Such an approach won't necessarily prevent terrorist attacks, but it will in the long run encourage the anti-Americanism on which al Qaeda and other terrorist groups feed.

Hello, TPM readers. This is editorial assistant Zander Dryer with a quick update. As Spencer announced below, John B. Judis will take over guest blogging later today. He'll be followed tomorrow afternoon by Ruy Teixeira. Hosting two great political minds in two days is an honor for TPM, and Josh is delighted to have John and Ruy fill in for him during the remaining few days he's away. He has said that they are two of the people whose political analysis he respects most.

As for Josh himself, he sends his greetings from Antigua. He is having great luck learning to snorkel, but he managed to embarrass himself in front of the locals by getting seasick on a deep sea fishing exploration. He'll be back at the keyboard soon. In the meantime, enjoy our guests.

One final word about "Shakir," and thanks to reader R.S. for pointing this out to me. The al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist known as Hambali--Riduan Isamuddin, the commander of Jemaah Islamiyah--is not, as I mistakenly wrote, dead. This jihadist murderer

Anyway, TPM readers, this will be my last post. It's been a blast, and I'd like to thank Josh for providing me with the opportunity to guest-host. Thanks as well to TPM behind-the-scenes wizard Zander Dryer, who ensured that I did no lasting technical damage to the site and fixed my mistakes. Thanks especially to all of you who wrote in with your kind words and your criticism. I hope to see you over at my TNR blog, IRAQ'D.

I leave you in the extremely capable hands of my TNR colleague John B. Judis. Judis is occasionally willing to gamble with his formidable reputation by collaborating with me, so let me show my gratitude by sneaking in a plug for his truly excellent forthcoming book. It's called The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and it examines both the historical precedents for our occupation of Iraq and how two great American presidents dealt with and learned from them. You can read an excerpt in the just-released issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Take it away, John...

Stories out today by Newsday's Knut Royce and The Washington Post's Walter

The Post quotes John Lehman, who floated the prospect that new evidence indicates Hikmat Shakir Ahmad was a "very prominent member of al-Qaeda" as saying the issue "needs to be run into ground." He seems to discard the importance of Ahmad as a Fedayeen officer, one of the components of the prospective connection in Steve Hayes's account. As Lehman says, "The most intriguing part of it is not whether or not he was in the Fedayeen, but whether or not the guy who attended Kuala Lumpur had any connections to Iraqi intelligence. . . . We don't know."

But, as I wrote this morning, this is something we probably can know. We have three individuals in custody who either were directly present at the Kuala Lumpur meeting or pulled its strings: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Kuala Lumpur attendees Khallad bin Attash and Yazid Sufaat. Between them, the 9/11 Commission stands a good chance of finding out what, from al-Qaeda's perspective, Azzawi was doing at the meeting--i.e., whether he was an emissary from Saddam Hussein. This is something we should be able to run into ground, as Lehman put it. What do their debriefings indicate? Have they been interrogated on this connection? If they haven't, can they be re-interrogated? The 9/11 Commission has a month and four days before it has to deliver its final report (and then go through what one commissioner told me would be one of the Commission's "battles of Armageddon" with the administration: declassifying it for the public). With the "Shakir" story taking on surprising importance; with the administration determined to hew to elusive Iraq-al Qaeda links as a central justification for the Iraq war; and with the 9/11 Commission probably being the last opportunity for such a broad and comprehensive exhumation of al-Qaeda's history of planning against America, that needs to be enough time to settle the question once and for all.

Buried at the end of a Saturday New York Times piece is a blind quote that carries a lot of explanatory heft

One outside adviser to the White House said the administration expected the debate over Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda to be "a regular feature" of the presidential campaign.

"They feel it's important to their long-term credibility on the issue of the decision to go to war," the adviser said. "It's important because it's part of the overall view that Iraq is part of the war on terror. If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it's part of the war on terror. If it's not part of the war on terror, then what is it--some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?"

Now, the absence of a Saddam-bin Laden link doesn't make Iraq ipso facto irrelevant to the war on terrorism. In fact, as Josh among others has documented, the Bush administration has argued that the establishment of a democratic Iraq will have a transformative effect throughout the Middle East, where radical Islam presently stands as the most compelling and accessible alternative to the region's ossified tyrannies. This is what Bush means when he says,"A free Iraq will stand as an example to reformers across the Middle East." Of course, with Iraq lapsing more and more into Hobbesian chaos, Bush's talk about establishing stable democracy there makes me want to ask him for a urine sample. And it's much more concrete to talk about "contacts" between al-Qaeda and Saddam to frame the Iraq war in the context of the war on terrorism. But, as the 9/11 Commission's fifteenth staff statement reported, Iraq's furtive contacts with al-Qaeda do not appear "to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." So for the Bush administration to cling to "contacts" that don't appear to have gone anywhere as its reason for placing Iraq in the context of the war on terrorism, it will be deemphasizing its strategic rationale for launching the invasion in favor of an easier to understand but more tenuous argument.

But that seems to be the war the administration is going. Which brings us to the case of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir.

If you haven't heard of Shakir, that's because the administration has never brought him up publicly. The most prominent attention given to Shakir has come from Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard. Shakir, an Iraqi, was a greeter for Malaysian Airlines, a job that, according to Hayes, he boasted of landing thanks to a contact at the Iraqi embassy. In early January 2000, the four al-Qaeda operatives originally intended by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to carry out what would become the attacks met in Kuala Lumpur with jihadist colleagues Hambali and Yazid Sufaat. According to Hayes, Shakir escorted Khalid al-Mihdhar into a car at the airport, then accompanied al-Mihdhar--one of the 9/11 pilots--to the terrorist meeting. Shakir was picked up by Qatari authorities in October 2001, reportedly with contact information for al-Qaeda operatives and associates in his possession, but he was released. Later that month, en route to Iraq, Jordanian intelligence detained him. According to Hayes, the Jordanians and the CIA tried to get Shakir to spy on Baghdad for them, but Shakir never reported back when he was allowed to return to Iraq. Hayes goes on to report that in February of this year, Christopher Carney, one of Douglas Feith's deputies in the Pentagon's policy shop, discovered Shakir's name on a recovered list of officers in the Fedayeen Saddam, identified as a Lieutenant Colonel.

On Sunday, 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman told Tim Russert that since the 9/11 staff statement asserting no operative link between Iraq and al-Qaeda was written, "new intelligence [has been] coming in steadily from the interrogations in Guantanamo and in Iraq and from captured documents. And some of these documents indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al-Qaeda. That still has to be confirmed." Why this intelligence should just be coming to the 9/11 Commission now is unclear. According to Hayes, Carney found Shakir on the Fedayeen officers list in February, and it would stand to reason that Carney would find that information pertinent enough to deliver to the 9/11 Commission, which is mandated by law to review all documents in the possession of the bureaucracy relating to the 9/11 conspiracy. It could be that new information suggesting Shakir "was a very prominent member of al-Qaeda" has recently been found. I don't pretend to know. But Lehman's disclosure on Meet The Press was the first public, on-the-record reference to Shakir as a possible link from Baghdad to al-Qaeda.

There were, however, off-the-record references floated by the Bush administration. Newsweek's Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported the tale of Shakir's imprisonment and release (though not that the Jordanians and CIA tried to flip him) in an October 7, 2002 story. They obtained an intelligence document putting Shakir at the Kuala Lumpur meeting. The story carried a quote from an administration official: "Shakir connects to both Iraq and 9-11." But the reporters cautioned, "It's a startling claim--though far from proven." As best as I can tell, the administration didn't return to Shakir as a prospective link between Iraq and al-Qaeda until Feith sent his famous memo to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in October 2003. Leaked to Hayes shortly thereafter, the memo said Shakir "facilitated the arrival of one of the Sept 11 hijackers for an operational meeting in Kuala Lumpur (Jan 2000). Sensitive reporting indicates Shakir's travel and contacts link him to a worldwide network of terrorists, including al Qaeda. Shakir worked at the Kuala Lumpur airport--a job he claimed to have obtained through an Iraqi embassy employee."

Again, I don't know what intelligence the 9/11 Commission has obtained about Shakir. Nor do I know why the Commission is still receiving new intelligence about him now--specifically, whether it's just getting all the information about Shakir now, or whether it's now getting new information indicating Shakir is, as Lehman said, "a very prominent member of al-Qaeda." Now, there would have to be some additional information on Shakir to indicate that he's an al-Qaeda member, as nothing public to date indicates that he is. It's possible. But, even assuming that Saddam authorized Shakir to attend the Malaysia meeting, which we don't yet know, it's also possible that Saddam was trying to gather intelligence on terrorist operations.

But even without Shakir in custody, it should at least be theoretically possible to advance our understanding of his connection to the plot, to Saddam, and to Saddam's heretofore-elusive connections to al-Qaeda: While three of the attendees of the meeting are dead (al-Midhar, fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hambali), and Shakir's whereabouts are unknown, two other attendees, Sufaat and Khallad bin Attash are in custody. If Shakir was acting as Saddam’s delegate to the meeting, theoretically Sufaat and Attash would know, though I freely concede that this might not necessarily be the case. Perhaps if they were kept in the dark, the al-Qaeda operative who arranged the meeting would know: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. KSM, as he's known, was captured in Pakistan in 2003. The 9/11 Commission, staff director Philip Zelikow told me in January, has had full access to debriefings of his interrogations, and clearly they've informed the staff reports. (KSM has told interrogators that Iraq was not in any significant way tied to al-Qaeda.) It would stand to reason that at least one of these three detained terrorists involved with the Kuala Lumpur meetings would know if Shakir attended on behalf of Saddam Hussein--after all, is it really plausible that Saddam was involved with the meeting if the terrorists involved were unaware who, if anyone, Shakir was working for? I suppose it's possible, but it would seem a stretch.

Lehman told Russert that Shakir's link to al-Qaeda "still has to be confirmed." It may be possible to get an answer to this question based on detainees to whom the 9/11 Commission supposedly has access. The quote from the informal Bush adviser suggests that the White House isn't going to let the Iraq-al Qaeda connection go quietly into that good night, and Shakir appears to be at the heart of the newest White House push to demonstrate ties of any significance. An answer, or at least more of an answer, to the question of Shakir should be possible by the Commission's final report next month.

(One last thing: As I write this, Steve Hayes is on The Daily Show. Congratulations, dude! You're famous! You have an important advantage over me in the Iraq-al Qaeda debate: My girlfriend just pointedly asked me, "So why don't you get to go on The Daily Show ?")

For more Imperial Hubris-related fun, check out Political Animal.

A valuable addition from reader J.:

There are many indigenous forces that push for liberalization and democratization [in the Middle East]. These range from the moderate Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to the old leftists--most of whom are quite tired by now--and the newer, human rights-oriented generation of activists and sympathizers. There are, in other words, plenty of people who are willing to make the sacrifices for democracy that this process will require, and are doing so now.

Perhaps because of distance, one tendency is to go for name recognition. ... In the case of the Arab world, Saad Eddin Ibrahim has come to fill that role. And he has a certain heroic air about him in the U.S. in particular. But it should be made clear that he is primarily disliked not for heroically espousing freedom, but for accepting funding from foreigners and then apparently espousing their causes. This is more like U.S. congressmen and women accepting special interest funding and then moving legislation through government that benefits those interests. Ibrahim is linked especially to the deeply unpopular American policies that have had enormously negative impact on the lives of millions of Arabs.

At one point, while I was an impoverished graduate student here in Cairo, I freelanced as a translator for an NPR reporter who was asking people their opinions about the imprisonment of Saad Eddin. Nobody would speak to us. In fact, one man became enraged, saying, "why are you focused on Saad Eddin, go report on what is happening to the Palestinians." This point isn't worth more effort than this, but I just want to argue that people ... should perhaps consider not making Saad Eddin Ibrahim the poster boy of democratization and liberalization. Shirin Ebadi of Iran is much more convincing as a poster girl, if we need such a person. Others exist, as well and should be given, as you say, very discreet support by people who are genuinely sympathetic to them and to their causes, not by intelligence types who are hoping to use them as wedges to crack open their respective societies.

Anonymous makes several arguments in Imperial Hubris for why we're losing the war on terrorism. Some are a matter of keeping score in the military ventures we've undertaken. He sees our intervention in Afghanistan as a disaster. While not as strident, a host of mostly liberal critics generally agree, arguing that the Bush administration has allowed Afghanistan to slip back into warlord-dominated instability. The prescription this critique implies is a vigorous nation-building effort. Anonymous rejects this entirely. Expanding Hamid Karzai's writ across the country is a recipe for violence, he writes: "After twenty years of war and ineffective or alien government in Kabul, the regions, subregions and tribes have never been more autonomously minded and jealous of their prerogatives." Democratization in Afghanistan, he believes, is a mirage. "We focus on issues that don't matter to Afghans--women's rights, democracy--and we denigrate those things that matter to Afghans--Islam, tribal and clan relationships, ethnic pecking orders," he says. Sometime soon, "you're going to have a government back in Kabul that looks like the Taliban, perhaps under a different name." The proper purpose of the 2001 war, he believes, was to use U.S. forces to annihilate the Qaeda presence in the country and do no more. With our inability to do that, our garrisoning of troops in Afghanistan and support of a weak central government of ethnic minorities provides little aside from an Islamist rallying cry against U.S. occupation--what he terms "an unmitigated defeat."

Then there's Iraq. "[T]here is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," he writes.

All Muslims would see each day on television that the United States was occupying a Muslim country, insisting that man-made laws replace God's revealed word, stealing Iraq's oil, and paving the way for the creation of a "Greater Israel." The clerics and scholars would call for a defensive jihad against the United States, young Muslim males would rush from across the Islamic world to fight U.S. troops, and there--in Islam's second holiest land--would erupt a second Afghanistan, a self-perpetuating holy war that would endure whether or not al-Qaeda survived.

The reason we've made these mistakes, he argues, is that we fail to understand that bin Laden doesn't hate us because of our freedom. Or, rather, while he does hate the licentiousness and modernity that the U.S. represents, it's not what compels him to declare war on us. Nor does an anti-modernist bent explain bin Laden's appeal across the Muslim world. Instead, it's what Anonymous identifies as six points bin Laden repeatedly cites in his communiqués: "U.S. support for Israel that keeps the Palestinians in the Israelis' thrall; U.S. and other Western troops on the Arabian peninsula; U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; U.S. support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low; U.S. support for apostate, corrupt and tyrannical Muslim governments." Combined with his charismatic biography, bin Laden's strategic success has been to frame these arguments through a Koranic prism, "to convince everyone that U.S. policy is deliberately anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic," he says. Bin Laden's critique presents in resonant Islamic terminology a coherent jihadist explanation for practically everything Muslims can find offensive about the U.S.--the most deadly slippery slope there is. And the more Americans insist on treating bin Laden's anger with the U.S. as a pure hatred of freedom, the less equipped we'll be to answer him in a battle of ideas.

But Anonymous doesn't really consider it possible for the U.S. to answer bin Laden in a battle of ideas throughout the Islamic world: U.S. support for what many Muslims may see as unjust policies has drained us of our credibility, he argues. He combines that critique with a rejection of anything resembling democracy promotion. Woodrow Wilson, to Anonymous, is a "bloody-handed fantasist." Insisting on democratic reform in the Muslim world then becomes naïve futility--even though one of Bin Laden's rallying cries is, as Anonymous puts it, U.S. support for "tyrannical Muslim governments."

Without the option to work for reform, a large portion of what Anonymous advocates is essentially a policy of brutal and unforgiving war.

To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing …

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. … [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

While military force will surely be necessary in the war on terrorism, a scorched-earth policy of warfare, especially in the age of Al Jazeera, seems tailored to play into Bin Laden’s arguments about U.S. desires to destroy Islam, to say nothing of transforming the U.S.'s war on terror into something resembling Russia's dirty war in Chechnya, or the Indian or Chinese responses to Islamic extremism. (Which, as Anonymous observes, is something Bin Laden denounces the U.S. for supporting.) I asked him about this.

ANONYMOUS: The war we need to conduct is simply to protect America. It's to stop the enemy, to have him cease and desist from attacking us. It is not--I hope it's not--to make them democratic, or to make them become libertarians or whatever, whereas the Indian intention in Kashmir is to install Hindu domination. The Chinese intention in western China is genocide: a silent genocide as they're doing in Tibet by inundating the Uighurs with Han Chinese. And the Russians are intent on doing what they tried to do in Afghanistan: to subject the population and eliminate whatever percentage of that population is necessary.

TPM: But isn’t it enough like those governments, or certainly like Russia in Chechnya, in that you’re calling for scorched-earth tactics? And isn't that at the heart of what the Islamic resistance in Chechnya views as Russia’s attempt to destroy Chechnya--and what in fact fuels the Islamicization of Chechnya?

ANONYMOUS: I think that's a good argument. My argument, I think, taken from the whole book, is that we've left ourselves with no option but the military option, and our application of military force against our foe, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, has not been particularly intimidating. They've ridden out two wars. They're on the offensive at the moment. What are we left with? If we don't use our military power, we really just sit and take it. …

TPM: But isn't the argument that we'd be using our military force disproportionately?

ANONYMOUS: The question is survival. What are we going to do, dive an airplane into the Grand Mosque at Mecca? No, we're not going to do that. Proportional war ends up being war forever, because they'll never stop being able to attack us, and if the cost they pay is minimal, it just goes on forever. That's where we are now.

TPM: When you say that we're left with few options besides military options, what are the other options we should be pursuing?

ANONYMOUS: I try to outline them in the book. I don’t think very many of them will even be debated. I think we should look somewhat at our relationship with Israel. Clearly we need an energy policy, not just in the United States but in the West, that makes us less dependent on oil out of the Gulf. For myself, I can't figure out what American interest we would have in Saudi Arabia if it wasn't for oil. If they all killed each other to their heart's content, it wouldn't affect America at all.

TPM: Is there an ideological war America can wage against al-Qaeda?

ANONYMOUS: I think the whole idea of public diplomacy is finished. For a long time, America was indeed viewed as a broker, as a mediator. Franklin Roosevelt helped ensure the British empire went away. [Eisenhower] stopped the Israelis and the French and the British at Suez. Ronald Reagan supported the mujahideen. There's none of that left anymore. No one gives us the benefit of the doubt. Partially, I think a large part, because of our policies. But also because of the domination of Arab satellite television. Our words are never going to be listened to while Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera is broadcasting live every day from the West Bank, as homes are being bulldozed and the Israelis are fighting the Palestinians and the Palestinians are blowing up the Israelis. No one's out there to listen.

Our ideology of democracy and personal freedoms and civil liberties can have an effect in the world--by example, not by transfer. … [Not] by our trying to transfer it, by putting it on a CD-ROM and giving it to Chalabi and saying, "Here, you have three months to install this."…

TPM: But can't we support, and materially support, Arab liberals? And in the case where it would hurt Arab liberals to be associated with us, to say "We'll back away and give you what you need?" In order [for them] to seek an open path according to [their] local circumstances?

ANONYMOUS: I'm not sure if there is a liberal element out there anymore in the Arab world, insofar as someone who would stand up and say "We want to adopt Western society or democracy." I think we're so viewed as malignant in the Islamic world that there aren't that many people who would say that, first because they're mad at us, and second because they'd risk being killed by people who disagree with them. So I'm not so sure we can talk our way out of this one. I think that's probably one of the most important points of this crossroads we're at. No one's going to listen. It doesn't matter what we say. It doesn’t matter how many Madison Avenue people we hire to put out the word, to put out magazines. Ain’t no one out there listening anymore.

As the above exchange illustrates, I think relinquishing the promotion of democratic reform in the Muslim world limits our options in the war on terrorism to basically military measures that stand a significant chance of spiraling out of control. And there are Muslim liberals and reformers out there--just ask Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim. After the occupation of Iraq, and especially after Abu Ghraib, it's hard to disagree with the proposition that our credibility is in serious disrepair, but that's not an argument for cutting our losses and ceding the intellectual battlefield to the jihadists. In order to sharpen this point and chart a course forward in what Anonymous rightly identifies as a war of survival, Imperial Hubris is worth examining and debating.

Julian Borger has a story in The Guardian that paints the anonymous intelligence professional who penned the forthcoming Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror as animated in no small measure by "contempt for the Bush White House and its policies." That's a bit wide of the mark. Does the book exhibit contempt for the administration's policies? Certainly. It also takes a dim view of the White House's conception of what motivates al-Qaeda and how to fight it. But in the book and in an interview, Anonymous doesn't traffic in Bush-bashing. He has much harsher words to say about the leadership of the intelligence community, whom he faults for bending too far to the predispositions of the policymakers they serve.

ANONYMOUS: The intelligence community, and especially the CIA, serve the president. I think the mistakes that were made [in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terrorism broadly] were probably made by the intelligence community not having the balls to stand up and to say any number of things that were knowable. "Mr. President, the people we're backing in Afghanistan will not be able to form a government and will ensure continued war and instability." "Mr. President, if you attack Iraq you will be giving bin Laden a gift." "Mr. President, we don't have enough [intelligence] officers and people to run two wars at a time." "Mr. President, all of the reporting about Iraqi WMD is coming from opposition politicians, and you have to take it with a massive grain of salt.”

I tend to blame, as I do in the book, a leadership generation in the intelligence community that is more interested in its next promotion and its career prospects than it is in talking about hard issues. Somebody needed to go and say, not just to Mr. Bush, but to Mr. Clinton, "Mr. President, this is a war about Islam. You can say all you want that it's not a war about religion, but it is." And it's much more so now than in 1992, and still no one will say it.

More to come shortly about Anonymous's critique of how the U.S. is waging the war on terrorism.

From national treasure Trent Lott's Q&A; in the Sunday Times Magazine:

You recently created a stir when you defended the interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib.

Most of the people in Mississippi came up to me and said: ''Thank Goodness. America comes first.'' Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class. You don't get information that will save American lives by withholding pancakes.

But unleashing killer dogs on naked Iraqis is not the same as withholding pancakes.

I was amazed that people reacted like that. Did the dogs bite them? Did the dogs assault them? How are you going to get people to give information that will lead to the saving of lives?

Somewhere in Tashkent, as he's schmearing his morning bagel over the cries of prisoners being submerged in boiling water, Uzbek President Islam Karimov is nodding in approval, relieved to have found a kindred spirit.

For an indication of how rapidly sectarian divisions in Iraq can inflame the country, read this New York Times story. Not long ago I spoke with a prominent Iraqi leader, and he left me with little doubt that the Kurds were deeply unsatisfied with U.S. intransigence over resolving Kurdish displacement in the north--something Saddam engineered preceding and during his genocide of the Kurds in 1987-8--and that Iraqi Arabs would not react to unilateral Kurdish actions passively. Such a situation appears, dangerously, to be coming to pass:

Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.

The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.

In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.

But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.
The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.

American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.

"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don't own anything here anymore.' " …

The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980's.

To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.

"The Kurds are pushing, pushing," said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. "We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes."

Arabs will not react passively if they perceive the Kurds expelling Arabs from the north. Already, in heavily-armed Falluja, anti-Kurdish sentiment pervades. The Washington Post recently quoted one Iraqi who blamed the U.S. and the Kurds--participants in the April attack by the U.S. on the city--for the death of his daughter. "I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds," he said . The displacement of Arabs from the (oil-drenched) north might be all the spark that the (resource-light) Sunni areas require to lead to an all-out civil war.

And in that situation, what will the U.S. do? The Kurds are our allies in every significant sense: One of the most betrayed people in the history of the world, they fought with us to overthrow Saddam. We may well find ourselves having to deploy forces to separate Iraq's different ethnicities, a very dangerous situation for our troops. How this will play out in practice in a place like Kirkuk--multiethnic, resource-rich and claimed by Arabs and Kurds alike--is incredibly difficult to determine. And it puts the U.S. in something close to a worst-case scenario.

The Washington Post, which has provided consistently excellent coverage of the Iraq occupation, now provides what might be termed a requiem for the war. I say

Infrastructure is in total disrepair, and only getting worse with this month's spate of attacks on oil pipelines, bridges and other economic arteries. There is no security in the country--not just for American and foreigners but for Iraqis simply seeking to live their lives, who are the ones we desperately need to buy in to a brighter future. Violent crime has skyrocketed and gangs and militias have proliferated. Sectarian fissures in the country are severe: Grand Ayatollah Sistani's rejection of the interim constitution has inflamed Kurdistan, and even if the Kurds decide against secession (still a dangerously open question at this point), future peaceful compromise in Iraqi politics will be significantly more elusive as a result. Falluja, a symbol of resistance to the U.S. occupation, is both armed to the teeth and feels threatened by both the Kurds (who participated in the April siege of the city) and Shia aspirations of ruling the country. One of the scariest questions in Iraq is what revanchist Sunnis will do now that they have the city as a base of operations. They're not as well armed as the Kurds, nor are they as numerous as the Shia, but one lesson of the last year is that just one armed fanatic can inflict massive bloodshed. Against this background, it's difficult to see civil society--a constituency for the rule of law and the nonviolent adjudication of legitimate disputes--taking hold. Typically in such cases, democracy is a Potemkin affair.

On July 1, the CPA will cease to exist, but it is extremely unlikely that Iraqis will consider themselves no longer under occupation. The presence of 138,000 Americans--visible enough to provide a symbol of hated foreign domination, too few to stop the chaos that plagues Iraqis--who are hated by about 90 percent of the country probably ensures this. As one Baghdad policeman told Reuters last month, "Bush is a scorpion. He is a liar. He is sneaky, making all kinds of promises when he just wants to control Iraq." As a result of this distrust, Iraqis are unlikely to shed what administration officials exasperatedly term the "Man On The Moon" syndrome: The expectation of American omnipotence to solve their problems, since a superpower mighty enough to put a man on the moon can surely provide electricity in Baghdad for more than nine hours a day. After all, the U.S. Embassy will still reside in the Republican Palace in the middle of Baghdad, garrisoned in the Green Zone. We're still going to be blamed for everything that goes wrong, and a lot looks primed to continue going wrong.

The U.S. will leave behind foundations for liberalization, but they come entwined with foreign domination. A good example is the legal structure that the CPA is bequeathing to Iraq: It provides significant openness and political space for Iraqi civil society, both from L. Paul Bremer's proclamations and the interim constitution. But as Nathan J. Brown of George Washington University observes,

[Iraqis'] nationalist sensibilities will be offended when they turn their attention to specific provisions. When Iraqi political and legal officials discover that multinational troops still are effectively granted extraterritorial status; that their vehicles must be given priority in traffic; that the official name of the country in some documents has been changed (from the "Iraqi Republic" to the "State of Iraq"); and that international agreements may—even absent an explicit provision—override requirements for open and competitive bidding in procurement, they will probably conclude that the CPA orders, while often liberal, are inconsistent with full sovereignty.

A consequence of all this is something that undercuts an implicit premise of the Post’s excellent coverage: That the occupation is in a significant sense ending. What appears more likely to happen is abdication. The U.S. will be declaring that it's not responsible for the deteriorating course of the country while Iraqis suspect (with significant foundation, as Brown points out) that the U.S. is the real power broker in Iraq. As retired State Department official Richard Murphy writes in his Post article, "Washington has oversold the significance of the June 30 handover." All this makes the actual fulfillment of our strategic objectives increasingly remote. Which is a euphemism for failure.

About an hour after news of the despicable murder of Paul Johnson went over the wires yesterday, I spoke with a veteran intelligence official who's tracked terrorism and radical Islamism going back to the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Next month, as "Anonymous," he'll publish a book titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror. There's a lot in the book to consider, disagree with and debate, and I'll be writing more about it shortly. First, here's some excerpts from our conversation about what the Johnson murder tells us about al-Qaeda strategy and Saudi counterterrorism efforts.

ANONYMOUS: I don't know if it tells us a lot about their worldwide strategy. It reinforces a lot about what we know about al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda is in many ways a reflection of Saudi society. Osama bin Laden is not an aberrant or deviant product of the Saudi educational system. He is its poster boy. He is the product of an educational system that has existed for more than half a century and turns out people who are of a mindset quite similar to bin Laden and his al-Qaeda people, though probably not as talented.

We saw al-Qaeda execute the operation of killing one American, kidnapping another, within two days. It reinforces the idea of nearly simultaneous attacks. They posted the information about Mr. Johnson, said what they wanted, said what they were going to do, and did it. Which perhaps is the most important trademark for al-Qaeda: they tell you what they’re going to do and then they do it.

In terms of their goals in Saudi Arabia, which are not entirely reflective of their overall strategy, it's to demonstrate the inability of the al-Saud government to provide security for expatriates--and to rally their supporters within the kingdom, which are numerous. So I think the unfortunate, tragic murder of Mr. Johnson is just another step in their attempt to unravel Saudi control over the kingdom.

TPM: Over the last couple days, a lot of the commentary about the kidnapping has been that it's al-Qaeda’s intent to spare Saudi society and instead inflict pain on foreigners who work on the oil sector. It sounds, though, that you’re saying a more important aspiration of al-Qaeda is to provide a demonstration effect of what the power of its ideology and the steadfastness of its operatives can do for people inside Saudi Arabia.

ANONYMOUS: I think that’s right. I think clearly al-Qaeda does not want to kill Muslims unnecessarily. They’re willing for Muslims to die in an attack on the United States or some other target, when the deaths are part and parcel of an act of war. But within Saudi Arabia I think they're kind of the society's Robin Hood. It's an oppressed society, the Saudi government is a tyranny, and I think they have a tremendous audience in Saudi Arabia. I remember reading in The National Interest in 2002 that a poll taken by the Saudi government showed 95 percent of Saudis between 18 and 40 supported Osama bin Laden. Domestic support is not an issue for bin Laden. He's always wanted to protect the oil industry in the sense of its infrastructure, its natural production of oil. He's found a way through this type of murder to affect the American economy, probably, without destroying the future potential of the energy industry in Saudi Arabia. It makes sense for all of those things he wants to do to follow this sort of practice.

TPM: … What should we be asking the Saudis to do after the Johnson murder? How do you assess Saudi anti-terrorism efforts inside the country--have the bombings last May, as many have commented, proven to be a wake up call? How do you rate what the Saudis are doing, both in terms of discrete anti-terrorism efforts, in terms of cooperation with the United States, and in terms of combating terrorism [at] its root?

ANONYMOUS: I think the attacks in May brought the message home to the Saudis that they have a domestic problem. In the course of the last decade, it's clear that the Saudis paid lip service to anti-terrorism, but as long as it didn't happen in the kingdom, that was all they did. The Saudis walk a very fine line on this issue. What we identify as terrorism is identified as jihad, as a religious responsibility within the Salafist or the Wahhabi doctrine that dominates Saudi educational facilities and has forever since the founding of the Saudi state in the '30s. Their efforts to suppress al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-like people angers as many as it pleases. So their efforts are not and cannot be to eradicate the problem, because it will just aggravate a huge number of people in a very young populace that is very religious. There's a certain point at which they can't trust anti-terrorism efforts without risking a much wider anti-al Saud response.

TPM: Is this just a fatal and unavoidable contradiction of Saudi Arabia?

ANONYMOUS: It's a very difficult issue. It's hard for me, and there's other people far more expert on the kingdom, but I cannot see it reconciled in the near term. The Saudis had a breathing space in the '80s because they exported so much of their young men who were bin Laden-like to Afghanistan. For a decade they kept their unhappy young militants focused on fighting the Soviets. Now they have a problem, because those folks are home--although I would suspect that the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Tunisians and the Algerians and the rest of them are exporting some of their militants to Iraq, with the same idea that they can fight the jihad there and hopefully they won’t come back alive. But to answer your question, there’s a fundamental danger to the existence of the Saudi regime if they press too hard on counterterrorism.

TPM: So what has that led to in terms of cooperation with the United States?

ANONYMOUS: From what I can tell, including what I see in the media, it's much better than it used to be, but I'm not sure what that means in terms of progress because we're faced by a community that is by and large sympathetic and familiar with the arguments bin Laden makes about the responsibilities of religion. I would say there has been improvement but I think the Saudis really are in a Catch-22 situation, and that will have a limiting effect on their cooperation not only with us but with any other country.

TPM: What should we be asking them to do?

ANONYMOUS: I think we're focused on what we want them to do. We want to control al-Qaeda within the kingdom. We want them to continue to produce oil. We want them to do any number of police-type, and intelligence-type cooperation, and I'm sure they'll be willing to do that. But what we [really] want them to do, as I wrote in the book, I don't think is going to happen: people argue that we should force them or pressure them to change their curriculum and their education system, and that is very unlikely to happen. The al-Sauds, when they came to power, made a deal with the Islamic establishment: the al-Sauds would take care of the economy and foreign policy, and the religious establishment would take care of education. I'm not sure they're terribly eager to adopt a curriculum of Islamic education as it’s proposed by the United States. …

It's a system that's not prone to reform at a pace that would satisfy us. A pace that would satisfy us would completely destabilize the country. We're going to watch them do as much as they can, and they'll do as much as they can that's consistent with the survival of the state.

Or, in terms of cooperation with the U.S., perhaps less. As The Washington Post reports today, the intransigent interior minister, Prince Nayef, greeted the dispatch of 20 FBI officials to the kingdom by deriding U.S. counterterrorism proficiency to Le Figaro.

More to come soon from our conversation on the future of al-Qaeda, U.S. counterterrorism, and Imperial Hubris.