The employer payroll survey shows a smaller than expected increase in the total number of employed workers.

In a stunningly weak performance, the American economy effectively ceased creating jobs last month, the government reported Friday, saying just 32,000 positions were added in July.

Put that in perspective. Imagine that the economy added 12 times that number of jobs in a year. That would be 384,000 jobs. With the econoy employing about 139 million workers that number would lower the unemployment rate by less than three tenths of a percentage point if that growth rate in employment was sustained for a whole year.

Wall Street economists were forecasting much larger jobs growth for July.

Mr Bush's treasury secretary, John Snow, reflected the administration's disappointment that the gain in jobs last month had failed to match Wall Street's 228,000 forecast.

Using the payroll survey measure there are still fewer people working now than at the beginning of Bush's term of office.

Payroll jobs remain 1.5 million short of where last winter the White House said they would be by now. To avoid being the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net job loss, Bush must hope for 372,000 new jobs a month in August, September and October.

The economy has to produce a 150,000 net increase in employment per month just to keep up with population growth.

Analysts with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, said that the economy has lost 1.1million jobs since Bush took office in January 2001 and that job growth has not kept pace with the 150,000 new jobs that are needed each month to keep up with growth in the workforce population.

Note, however, that the payroll survey is only one of two major methods used to measure employment. The household survey provides a separate independent way to measure employment and the household survey is also the source of the unemployment rate.

The unemployment rate, based on the household survey paints a rosier picture of declining unemployment rates.

The unemployment rate, however, dipped to 5.5 per cent last month, from 5.6 per cent in June. The new rate was the lowest since October 2001.

The household survey paints a rosier picture.

The Labor Department said its survey of households — which includes agriculture workers and the self-employed — again showed a picture vastly different from the employers' payroll survey, with a whopping 629,000 jobs being added in July, to 139.7 million.

From the standpoint of the Presidential election what is very importnt is who is getting the new jobs. Are the new jobs going to voters or non-voters? Here the news looks worse for Bush's reelection prospects. See my previous posts Black Male Labor Market Participation Declines In Face Of Immigrant Influx, Non-Citizens And Illegals Getting Over A Quarter Of New Jobs, and Foreign Employment Rises In US As Native Employment Declines.

A man who has availed himself of the benefits of family connections to powerful institutions comes out against the practice of allowing people born into wealthy families of buying preferences for their kids.

President Bush said yesterday that U.S. colleges and universities should abandon a long-standing, if disputed, practice of giving preference in admissions to students with family connections.

"I think colleges ought to use merit in order for people to get in," Bush said. His remarks, before 7,000 minority journalists, were the first time the White House has addressed the issue of "legacy" admissions, the practice of giving an edge to the children of alumni.

Hypocrite. This very same George W. Bush decided to tear the guts out of Inspector General Theodore Olson's strong anti-affirmative action briefs in the University of Michigan Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz and Hamacher v. Bollinger cases in order to give the Supreme Court room in which to write an opinion supporting "diversity" as a proxy for racial preferences.

Ted Olson (a real conservative as distinct from George W. Bush) was so troubled by Bush's decision that Olson almost resigned over Michigan cases.

Much of the confusion the Bush Administration has (intentionally) engendered stems from the briefs suffering multiple personality disorder. The attacks on the Michigan system were clearly written by Ted Olson's anti-racial preference warriors, but their centerpiece -- the endorsement of phony "race-neutral" techniques that are defended on the grounds that they can reproduce the precise quotas currently in place -- was obviously dreamed up by Bush's political team. (Newsweek reported that Olson considered resigning rather than signing the briefs.)

An argument can be made that private institutions should be able to discriminate for or against any group they choose to treat differently based on a private right to free association. By contrast, government institutions should not be free to discriminate using unjustifiable prejudices because governments should treat all as legally equal in rights. But do not expect to hear either argument from Bush.

Update: Bush's opposition to legacies amounts to an attempt to undermine a valuable technique used by colleges and universities fund-raising among alumni. Well, this brings to mind another recent George W. Bush announcement.

He was in superb form yesterday, offering what may have been his best Bushism ever in a speech at a White House signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense bill.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," he said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

No argument here Mr. President. Does this mean you are going to admit that your immigration proposals are a bad bundle of ideas? Or are you going to change your mind and admit that the term the "diversity" that you trumpet is actually the label for a set of left-wing ideas that are incompatible with the basic principles of a free socieity? Unfortunately, that would be too much to hope for.

Trying to get rid of over 26,000 foreigners who have been denied asylum the Netherlands is going to bribe them to leave.

The Dutch government this week softened the blow of its tough new immigration law by offering refugee families whose asylum applications are rejected a sum of $7,200 to voluntarily leave the land of windmills, dikes, wooden shoes and Hans Brinker.

Their thinking is that the cost of monthly government benefits is high enough that bribing the illegals to leave will save money. But why can't they just round them up and put them on airplanes to their countries of origin?

As nutty as Dutch immgration polcy may seem tighter enforcement and changed immigration laws are having a dramatic effect in reducing the influx of new asylum seekers and applicants for citizenship.

The number of people applying for asylum in the Netherlands fell from 43,500 in 2000 to just 13,400 in 2003. The Immigration Ministry said last week that just 4,832 asylum applications were received in the first half of this year.

And applications for Dutch citizenship are also expected to fall sharply this year, from 32,000 in 2003 to a projected 24,000 this year.

Update: Part of the problem is that, as this report on European Commission negotiations mentions, countries of origin for illegal aliens resist taking back their own nationals.

The Commission has also put forward a communication focusing on the seven re-admission agreements that the Commission is negotiating with Morocco, Russia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Algeria, China and Turkey to get them to take back their illegal immigrants. The communication says these pacts are a key element in fighting illegal immigration. Since September 2000, only four readmission agreements have been signed with Hong Kong, Macao, Sri Lanka and Albania. Finalising such agreements is proving difficult because third countries think they do not get enough in return for their efforts. They are asking the EU to open its labour market to their nationals in return for their efforts.

The Dutch have started to force immigrants to learn Dutch language and culture.

Under the new system, immigrants will be forced to pay for the courses themselves and if they successfully pass the course within three years, they will be refunded part of the costs. If they have not passed a language exam in five years, immigrants will not be issued with a permanent residence permit.

Eventually immigrants to the Netherlands will even be required to pass an integration exam before being allowed to enter the Netherlands.

AMSTERDAM — It will take at least another year before would-be permanent immigrants will be required to complete an integration exam in their country of origin before being allowed entry to the Netherlands.

Imagine the United States carrying out such a program. Millions of Mexicans would have to learn English and American ways before they can even cross the border. Only would-be immigrants motivated enough and smart enough to pass the tests would get in. Immigrant quality and willingness and ability to assimilate would rise and the numbers coming in would fall.

Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute surveys the current state and trends in Latin America and finds the Andes is politically in the greatest trouble.

The most troubled region politically is the Andes--Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Recent issues of this Outlook have discussed four of the five of these countries in some detail. Colombia has an unusually close relationship with the United States, thanks to a plan inaugurated by the Clinton administration to provide it with economic and military aid to confront the combined menace of a guerrilla insurgency and a movement of narco-gangsters both left and right. So far the U.S. role in that country has enjoyed considerable popular support, despite continual complaints from various human rights organizations. And under President Alvaro Uribe, Colombia has become one of the sturdier allies of the United States within inter-American councils, partly because both countries share an adversary in Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez.

Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador are societies slowly being strangled in the roots of their own history--the exploitation and neglect of indigenous populations is coming home to roost. Identity politics, driven by urbanization of rural folk and often funded by European NGOs, bids fair to replace the traditional class-based electoral left. The U.S. drug eradication program is unwelcome to the Indian peasantry, particularly in Bolivia, all the more so because ordinary folk have not benefited significantly from the larger export industries--minerals, oil, and natural gas. In the case of Bolivia, the political class has cleverly turned popular resentment against the foreign companies who make possible extractive activities, as opposed to the politicians who squander (and steal) the royalties they generate. The fact that many are based in the United States adds a soupçon of “anti-imperialist” flavoring to the ideological stew.

The term "indigenous populations" refers to the Amerinds who have been ruled over for centuries by the Spanish white upper class ever since the Spanish Conquest.

The Spanish white upper class in Venezuela has lost power to President Hugo Chavez becaue the poor people have voted so overwhelmingly for Chavez and his party. Chavez used the strong position of his party in the elected national assembly to rewrite the constitution to give himself more power. The poor Amerinds support Chavez against the upper class Spanish whites.

Immediately after taking office in 1999, Chavez called for the election of a Constitutional Assembly in order to reform the 1961 Constitution of the Republic of Venezuela. His party won more than 90 percent of the assembly's seats; this allowed Chavez to obtain a new, tailor-made constitution. The assembly modified the structure of the three branches of government: dissolving the existing bicameral congress, which had been controlled by the opposition, to create a unicameral congress; reshuffling the judiciary to appoint loyalists in key positions; and extending the presidential term from five to six years while allowing for immediate reelection, which had previously been prohibited. As a result of these constitutional changes, a general election took place in 2000. Chavez again won with 60 percent of the vote. To counterbalance the six-year presidential term, the 1999 constitution included a provision for one recall election following the president's first three years in office and in accordance with the wishes of 20 percent of voters.

Chavez's populist style and his unwillingness to negotiate alienated the middle class, the mainstream media, the trade unions and the business sector. Unable to request a recall election for three years, however, the opposition attempted to illegally remove Chavez from power.

In late 2003, the opposition groups collected nearly 2.5 million signatures requesting the recall of the president and 33 pro-government legislators. After several debates on the verification of signatures presumed to be forged, the National Electoral Council set the date of the referendum for Aug. 15. The question on the ballot reads: "Do you agree with terminating the popular mandate given through legitimate democratic elections to citizen Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias as president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for the current presidential term?"

"The [Chavez] administration now confronts three challenges: the mainstream media is adamantly anti-Chavez; the international public opinion distrusts the current administration; and the Venezuelan middle class, who supported the president in the 1998 election, has abandoned the boat," Perez-Linan explained. "On the other hand, Chavez still has much personal charisma and controls the Venezuelan oil revenues that sustain his education, health, and labor programs for the poor. As a result, the president remains popular among the poorest sectors in the country, which may represent as much as 70 percent of the Venezuelan population."

It says a lot about Venezuela (none of it good) that a Venezuelan President can alienate the middle class, the mainstream press, the trade unions and the business sector and yet still have favorable odds of beating a recall referendum. When the lower class is very large, of a different ethnic group than the upper class, and politically enfranchised with the vote then democracy inevitably becomes a way for the less successful to seize assets from the more successful.

On the one hand the white upper class in Latin America have been too corrupt. This process of corruption inevitably seems to happen when nations have smaller ethnically-based upper classes that are far more successful than than larger lower classes of different ethnicities (in case you were wondering what is in store for the United States in the future). On the other hand the Latin American Spaniards are on average relatively more talented than the Amerinds and so they were more competent to rule. So the loss of power by the Spanish whites and other Latin Americans of European ancestry places into power people who are less able to rule effectively.

This brings to mind Amy Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. The market dominant Spanish white minority of Latin America are going to fare poorly under a trend toward democratization as the Spanish whites in Venezeula are learning. Even without the ethnic divisions it is unlikely that a country like Bolivia with $2400 per capita GDP or Ecuador with $3300 per capita GDP would have slim chances of maintaining their democracies for long periods of time because poor countries rarely remain democratic. Peru with $5200 per capita GDP has better odds but the continuation of its democracy is by no means assured. Of course, maintaining a democracy is no guarantee of good government, non-confiscatory taxes, prosperity, or freedom of speech. The winds from Washington DC may continue to blow in support of democracy for some time to come. So my expectation is that we will see the maintenance of the outward appearances of democratic forms of government in Latin America while some countries such as Venezuela become more authoritarian. Though popular dissatisfaction with democracy in many Latin American nations is so high that even the continuation of the outward forms of democracy is by no means certain.

What is happening in Latin America also holds obvious lessons for Iraq and for the demographic future of the United States.

Valerie Richardson has a report on Republicans who are turning against Bush due to his position on immigration.

The anti-Bush Republicans didn't switch allegiances immediately. Terry Anderson, a conservative Los Angeles radio talk-show host who focuses on immigration issues, said frustration with the party's acceptance of the status quo — in which hundreds of thousands of illegals enter the country each year — has only recently reached the boiling point.

"At first, when I started to, you might say, bash Bush, and say how sorry I was that he was doing this, I got a lot of flak for it. People were saying, 'Well, he's still a good man, he's just getting bad advice from [adviser] Karl Rove,' " said Mr. Anderson, whose KRLA-AM talk show is syndicated in eight markets.

"Then the calls and e-mails started to change, and people were saying, 'Maybe you're right,' " he said. "Now I hear from Republicans all day long who are totally against him. These are staunch, hard-core conservative Republicans who do not like him [Bush] anymore."

Bush has given up promoting his less than half-baked worker permit and amnesty plan because he wants to get reelected. But he is probably going to take up promoting it if he gets reelected. Unless he completely shifts his position on immigration and comes out for closing the Mexican border with a barrier there is no reason to trust him on immigration. This is beginning to sink through the Republican ranks. Bush doesn't realize yet just how far he'd have to shift on immigration to win back his base. At the same time, his current position on immigration is doing nothing to help Bush with Hispanics. Bush would benefit from shifting to a restrictionist position. But I do not expect him to make such a huge shift in his position.

Count me in the ranks of those who are going to vote for a third party candidate as a protest vote. I do not believe that protest votes are wasted. Political parties must periodically be made to understand that they can't take their base for granted. In the longer run the Republican Party will be better off if Bush loses. Immigration will be one of the issues that his loss will be blamed on. We will get double bonus points as the neoconservatives (who, it bears repeating, are not really conservatives) will lose considerable influence as well. The bulk of the neocons are in favor of continued high levels of low skilled immigration anyway. So damage to their standing in the Republican Party will damage the pro-immigration coalition in the party as well.

Some neocons know that they are being hurt by their faction's position on immigration. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy comes to mind. Though it is hard to tell whether Gaffney opposes high levels of immigration or just opposes the Bush Administration's alienation of its base over immigration. My guess is that Gaffney is not a restrictionist. But he sees immigration policy as something less important than the use of a Republican Administration to pursue neocon foreign policy goals. So he'd sacrifice neocon preferences on immigration in order to be able to have the power to implement neocon foreign policy.

Update: Over on the Claremont Institute's Remedy web log Ken Masugi argues Bush may be able to win back his disgruntled ex-supporters by trumpeting the importance of court appointees.

They are not taking anything for granted, and the campaign will camp out in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Significant conservative defections (on issues ranging from tariffs to spending to failure to veto to, worst of all, immigration) may be won back by mere mention of the courts (unmentioned, as far as I can recall, by the Boston Democrats). Will the same number or more people vote for him in 2004, in the right states, than in 2000?

Note that Masugi recognizes the scale of the damage done by Bush's immigration position. I'd also add Bush's Iraq fiasco along with the Bush Administration position on the University of Michigan racial preferences cases. Bush's placement of the winning of Hispanic votes ahead of principle led even George Will to criticise Bush's embrace of group rights. Well Ken, for myself the argument about court appointees is just not going to fly. First of all, the demographic future of the US is more important than the courts in the long run. Republicans in Congress will be very reluctant to vote for a new amnesty if Bush goes down in defeat this fall. Also, I'm betting that Bush in a second term will appoint a Hispanic who favors racial preferences to the US Supreme Court. A leading candidate is Bush White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales. Gonzales rewrote and gutted Solicitor General Theodore Olson's Supreme Court brief in the University of Michigan cases. Bush may appoint Gonzales to the Supreme Court if reelected.

Another essay by Heather Mac Donald on immigration takes a look at the growing Latino underclass.

Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture. Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally - rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002 - driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics - they worsen.

Debate has recently heated up over whether Mexican immigration - unique in its scale and in other important ways - will defeat the American tradition of assimilation. The rise of underclass behavior among the progeny of Mexicans and other Central Americans must be part of that debate. There may be assimilation going on, but a significant portion of it is assimilation downward to the worst elements of American life.

So much for the much touted myth of Hispanic family values.

Many cops and youth workers blame the increase in gang appeal on the disintegration of the Hispanic family. The trends are worsening, especially for U.S.-born Hispanics. Nationally, single-parent households constituted 25 percent of all Hispanic households with minor children in 1980; by 2000, the proportion had jumped to 34 percent. The trends in teen parenthood – the marker of underclass behavior - will almost certainly affect the crime and gang rate. Hispanics now outrank blacks for teen births.

Hispanics are failing to get educated.

On the final component of underclass behavior - school failure – Hispanics are in a class by themselves. No other group drops out in greater numbers. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 16 and 24 were high school dropouts nationwide, compared with about 13 percent of blacks and about 7 percent of whites.

The constant inflow of barely literate recent Mexican arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic education levels. But later American-born generations don't brighten the picture much. Mexican-Americans are assimilating not to the national schooling average, observed the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically lower "Hispanic average." In educational outcomes, concluded the bank, "Ethnicity matters."

No one knows why this is so. Every parent I spoke to said that she wanted her children to do well in school and go to college. Yet the message is often not getting across. "Hispanic parents are the kind of parents that leave it to others," explains an unwed Salvadoran welfare mother in Santa Ana. "We don't get that involved."

Heather also slams the pro-immigration argument that the Mexicans will retrace the Italian model of eventually rising educational attainment and economic success. The scale of Mexican immigration is too large and the problems span many generations past the initial immigrant generation. Samuel Huntington has pointed out that even into the 4th generation Hispanic educational attainment in America is extremely low. Meanwhile, East Asians are charging through academia with amazing achievements.

Oil futures prices peaked at over $44 per barrel before retreating.

Oil prices reached record levels for the second day in succession as the price of a barrel of crude in New York broke through the $44 (£24) mark to peak at $44.24.

...

Analysts have forecast that prices are likely to rise further ahead of winter, possibly to a peak of $50 a barrel.

So much for the conspiracy theory that the Saudis were going to cause oil prices to drop in order to help George W. Bush get reelected.

Rising demand from China and the United States combined with fears about supplies have pushed up prices.

The price was fuelled by fears of a terrorist attack in the U.S., concerns about the reliability of oil shipments from Russia - and the realisation that there may not be much that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries can do to stabilize prices.

High energy prices take money from consumers that otherwise would have been spent on other goods. This decreases demand for locally produced goods in oil consuming nations while at the same tine increasing inflation. Higher oil prices may force the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates.

The US may be more directly exposed, however, in that the Federal Reserve has not ruled out a rise in interest rates in the case of increased inflation and has slightly lowered its GDP growth forecast for 2004, now between 4.50 per cent and 4.75 per cent, ahead of a more marked slowdown in 2005 of between 3.5 per cent and 4 per cent.

US consumer spending turned down in June.

U.S. consumer spending in June took its biggest plunge since September 2001 as shoppers, sapped by high energy costs, cut back sharply on car purchases, a government report showed on Tuesday.

Consumer spending might have bounced back in July according to some preliminary reports. But rising energy prices are going to put pressure on consumer spending.

The Saudis are denying that they are having problems pumping oil.

But there is little OPEC can do to relieve the pressure: it is already operating within 5% of capacity. There are even rumours that Saudi Arabia’s state oil company is experiencing production difficulties, suggestions the kingdom strenuously denies.

The Saudis claim they have huge oil reserves. But the information which they use to make their reserve estimates is not available for other parties to examine and verify. Some analysts believe that the Saudis are exaggerating the size of their oil reserves (see the update at the bottom of that post). If the more pessimistic assessments of oil reserves are correct then the current high prices of oil may be the beginning of a trend toward still higher oil prices.

Looked at in inflation-adjusted terms the highest peak in oil prices came in 1981 when oil was almost $60 per barrel when measured in 2004 dollars. An attack on Saudi oil fields could put oil prices up to the level reached in 1981 and perhaps even well above that.

A different kind of bad news could cause oil prices to drop. A big terrorist on an oil consuming nation could lead to a reduction in economic activity that results in lower oil demand and lower oil prices.

However, Tony Nunan at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, said that should an attack happen, prices would be more likely to fall.

"After 9/11 people stopped consuming because of the uncertainty... If the target is a consuming nation, you would expect an attack to affect the market to the downside," he said.

We need a better energy policy along with better immigration and border control policies to make it harder for terrorists to get into the United States. Rising oil demand from China means more money for the Wahhabis.

On the US Department of Justice web site I came across the most curious fact: The US Virgin Islands is the only part of the United States where all illegal immigrants are prosecuted for breaking the law.

The District contains separate customs zones. Unlike Puerto Rico, when persons leave this District they are required to go through U.S. Customs. Goods are duty free up to $1,200. Duties which are paid go to the Territory of the Virgin Islands. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) office in this District is very active. This is the only District which prosecutes all illegal alien cases. Recently, it was noted that the District had the 8th largest number of Immigration cases of all of the nation's 94 districts.

Anyone know the reason for this? I'm guessing that the USVI are probably seen as especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of illlegal immigrants owing their location, small size, and small population. The US government should build upon this example and extend real immigration law enforcement to other parts of the United States.

Writing in the UK Spectator Rod Liddle argues Islam and democracy are obviously not compatible. (requires free registration - and it is a site worth registering for)

It is far too early to say that Indonesia is working. Growling Muslim extremists — including the loathsome Jemaah Islamiyah, the boys who brought you the Bali bomb — gained nearly 40 per cent of the vote in the spring elections. The madrasahs continue to spew out their bilge every day, indoctrinating a new generation of Indonesians with monotheistic authoritarianism. Right now, the government is sort of secular. How long will that last?

...

Malaysia is the only Muslim country in the world with a tradition of democracy, albeit democracy of a somewhat paternalistic kind. However, it is a democracy in spite of Islam rather than because of it. The country has been economically dependent upon the 35 per cent of its population which is not Muslim — notably the Chinese and the Indians and, to a lesser extent, the Christians of Sarawak — and so there are safeguards and concessions to protect this sizeable and vital minority. It is largely these safeguards and, it has to be said, strong and clever leadership from Mahathir Mohamad until last November that have preserved democracy in Kuala Lumpur against every stone-age impulse from the mullahs. Neither of these qualifying conditions exist in the Middle East: there are neither the talented political leaders, nor the moderating influence of a large non-Muslim population.

Some would argue that Turkey has a stronger tradition of democracy than Malaysia. Though in Turkey the military has been playing the role of guard rails that keep the politicians from going too far toward Islamization. If the Turkish attempt to get into the European Union continues to weaken the power of the military then those guard rails will continue to decay and Islamists may eventually push the Turkish government in a far more religious direction.

Liddle relates the recent story of 4 Malays who announced they were no longer Muslims and who were arrested and thrown in jail for not acting like proper Muslims. If you are curious to know more about their case here are some links about their case. These ex-Muslims tried to argue that since they were no longer Muslims the Muslim Syariah court could no longer exercise jurisdiction over them as Muslims. The Federal Court was not amused.

The Federal Court this morning dismissed an appeal by four individuals who had renounced Islam in 1998, for a declaration that they have absolute right and freedom to practise the religion of their choice.

The four - Daud Mamat, 62, Kamariah Ali, 51, her husband, Mohamad Ya, 57 (now deceased) and Mad Yacob Ismail, 62 - had also wanted the court to declare that the Syariah Court had no jurisdiction over them in view of the fact that they had renounced Islam.

For an account of how these people were treated after renouncing Islam see this article.

In Malaysia the ruling party is feeding the trend toward more Islamization in order to compete against a more Islamic PAS.

In some areas, such as Brickfields in Kuala Lumpur, one can find mosques next to churches next to Indian and Buddhist temples. But non-Muslims still live in a country whose new Islamic-themed administrative capital houses a prominent mosque but no other house of worship; a country that since the early 1980s has become increasingly Islamized - inspired first by the Iranian Revolution and Mahathir's former charismatic deputy Anwar Ibrahim, who founded ABIM and joined Malaysia's most powerful political party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) in the 1980s; and then by government attempts to out-Islamize the hardline Parti Islam seMalaysia (PAS).

There is not an Islamic government in the world that has a democracy that looks solid.

Some cars come with key rings that have electronic transmitters that can lock and unlock the car. One option that can be used this technique is for the horn to beep briefly to tell the driver he has successsfully hit the button to lock the doors. In residential neighborhoods literally dozens of people may be subjected to a horn beep every time someone shows up and locks their door. Beeping a horn every time one locks one's car door is inexcusably rude.

I have managed to talk one friend out of doing this. But someone just parked across the street and beeped their horn twice as they walked away from the car. They didn't even bother to pay attention to the first beep and did it a second time. What an obnoxious jerk.

Modern life is already too noisy and distracting. We don't need to invent new ways for people to distract and interrupt the lives of each other.

Update: And while I'm on unnecessary horn blasts: Some cars have alarms that go off when improperly accessed where the horn starts blowing to warn of an attempted theft. Well, I've probably heard car horn alarms go off hundreds of times without one of those times being a real theft. Car horn alarms are also inexcusably rude and obnoxious. These alarms are worthless. When you hear one what is the first thought in your mind? It is probably something along the lines of "Oh god, does the owner hear it or will we have to listen to it until the battery runs down?"

Editors Philip Giraldi, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell of The American Conservative have scored with an absolutely great interview of the anonymous CIA agent author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. The anonymous agent (who really needs a neat pseudonymous name) says Al Qaeda is an insurgency, not a conventional terrorist group.

TAC: I was interested in your analysis of terrorism versus insurgency …

ANON: I worked on the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and watched the organizational structure and the ability of the Afghan insurgent groups to absorb tremendous punishment and survive, and then I worked for the next period of my career on terrorism, where the groups were much smaller. Their leadership is more concentrated, and if you hurt them to a significant degree, they cease to be as much of a threat. They are lethal nuisances, not national-security risks. Al-Qaeda is not a terrorist group but an insurgency with an extraordinary ability to replicate at the leadership level. When Mr. Johnson was executed in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi authorities killed four al-Qaeda fighters, one of them named Mukrin. Within four hours, al-Qaeda’s media enterprise had issued a statement acknowledging the death of Mukrin, appointing his successor, and providing a brief résumé.

TAC: You suggest that al-Qaeda would be delighted to have George Bush stay in the White House because nothing could be better for their international objectives. How do you see this playing out in terms of—this is totally hypothetical—a potential terrorist incident, somewhat like the bombing in Spain?

ANON: I said that al-Qaeda itself has said that it could not wish for a better government than the one that is now governing the U.S. because, on the policies of issue to Muslims, al-Qaeda believes this government is wrong on every one and thus allows their insurgency to grow larger to incite other groups to attack Americans.

He provides a list of things the United States either does or is perceived as doing that motivate Muslims to support Al Qaeda. If you click through and read the interview come back and post in the comments about what, if anything, we should do to change US foreign policy on each of those items. Also, before accusing him of being an appeaser note his absolute willingness to cause major collateral damage that kills a lot of Muslims as part of any operation to attack Al Qaeda. He's no dove. Yet he sees major errors in Bush Administration policy against Al Qaeda and in dealing with the Muslims.

The whole interview is intriguing as all get-out. Go click through and read the whole thing.

Also see my previous post that links to a Spencer Ackerman interview of this same CIA agent.

Update: In a USA Today interview the anonymous intelligence agent is hampering our ability to think clearly about Bin Laden.

Q: When you talk about the mind-set of the country on the war on terror, where do you think the misconceptions come from? The media, politicians? A: It's trite to say, but the idea of political correctness is very, very important in terms of the performance of the intelligence community. How many times has USA TODAY, or The New York Times or The Washington Post discussed the role of Islam as a motivating factor in bin Laden's appeal in the Muslim world? I can't remember it very frequently. The director of intelligence and the president say al-Qaeda represents the lunatic fringe of the Muslim world, which, on the face of it, is absurd. But there is no one talking about Islam as a motivating factor for war. There were times when our ancestors went to war to defend their faith. So, the debate is very constricted, not only in America but certainly within the intelligence community. We do a lot of analysis by assertion rather than by reality. Somehow the argument that someone is fighting for his faith is seen as a negative. So we assert that only gangsters do that. We make bin Laden into a gangster. But it doesn't get you anywhere.

That interview is also worth reading in full.

The Boston Phoenix has revealed Anonymous's identity as CIA agent Michael Scheuer.

Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics. "The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position," says Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at George Washington University Law School. "It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA..."

Click through and read that article as well. Very insightful.

Kevin Drum says Anonymous thinks democracy promotion is not going to help much if at all.

As he adds in our interview, “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.”

Since he doesn’t see much promise in an ideological (read: democracy promotion) campaign, or in trying to alleviate the “hopelessness” of the Muslim world (which he calls “cant” in the section quoted above), the military option is the one he relies the heaviest on, and his conception of what’s militarily necessary is very wide-ranging. The prospect of energy self-sufficiency and foreign disengagement (He writes, “There is no greater duty today’s Americans can perform for their nation and posterity than to finally abandon the sordid legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism, which soaked the twentieth century in as much or more blood as any other “ism”) can do something to diminish the need for war to an unspecified degree, but can’t substitute for it.

There is an important point that Drum alludes to: US policy options have become so circumscribed by how too many policy issues have been framed that Anonymous is trying to shock us by arguing that the US has no option left other than the Shermanesque scorched Earth approach of killing lots of people with large amounts of collateral damage of innocents. Why is he trying to shock us? In part so we won't repeat the timidity of the Clinton and early Bush Administrations in terms of constraints upon military actions. But he's also trying to stun us into reexamining the assumptions underlying a broad assortment of policy areas and debates.

In an interview with Andrea Mitchell Anonymous (who I'll henceforth call "Mike") makes the point that, yes, as long as we won't reexamine our policies ruthless war is our only option.

Mitchell: "And what are you going to say to those who say that this is anti-American and that this is a really prejudiced approach? What do you say to those who say that your call for a war against Muslim people, is really only going to make the situation worse?"

Anonymous: "I wonder how much worse the situation can be, in the first instance. We continue to believe that somehow public diplomacy or words will affect the anger and hatred of Muslims. And I'm not advocating war as my choice. What I'm advocating is, in order to protect the United States, it is our only option. As long as we pursue the current policies we have, until we have a debate about those policies, there's not a lot we can do. We won't talk them out of their anger, we won't convince them we're an honest broker between the Israel and the Palestinians. We won't convince that we're not supporting tyrannies in the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

"It's the only option. It's not a good option; it's the only option. And I'm not saying we attack people who aren't attacking us. But in areas where we realize our enemies are, perhaps we have to be more aggressive."

"Mike" is a very reasonable guy in my estimation.

Update II: "Mike" says the domestically oriented Terrorist Threat Integration Center is draining CIA agents away from fighting Al Qaeda on their home grounds.

Some experienced CIA experts have been reassigned to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, or TTIC. The unit, formed after Sept. 11, combines specialists from numerous agencies to fuse domestic and foreign information on terrorist threats. It has no direct role in killing or capturing terrorists overseas.

"You drain all of these experienced officers away from the organization that is doing the most to defend you and put them in the TTIC, which is basically an analytic domestic organization which will not do anything in Pakistan, Afghanistan or anywhere else," he said.

"Mike" says the jihadists will be flocking to Iraq for a long time to come.

"We have waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of al-Qaida and kindred groups," he wrote in one passage in the book.

In an interview this week, Mike, said Monday's transfer of authority in Iraq is likely to do little to curtail insurgent attacks.

"Iraq, with or without a transfer of power, will be a mujahadeen magnet as long as whatever government is there is dependent on America's sword," he said.

"Mike" says we are in a lose-lose situation with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Currently we're in a lose-lose situation both in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we stay we bleed. If we go, the problem festers even worse. The United States, I believe, needs to have a debate about its policies in the Middle East. All a set of policies that have been on autopilot for about 25 years. Before you can draft a policy to defeat Bin Laden you have to understand that our policies are, in part, what drives him and those who follow him.

An excerpt from Mike's book includes his list of US policies that tick off Bin Laden.

While important voices in the United States claim the intent of U.S. policy is misunderstood by Muslims, they are wrong. America is hated and attacked because Muslims believe they know precisely what the United States is doing in the Islamic world. They know partly because of Osama bin Laden's words, partly because of satellite television, but mostly because of the tangible reality of U.S. policies. We are at war with an al Qaeda-led, worldwide Islamic insurgency to defend those policies -- and not, as President Bush mistakenly has said, "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."

Keep in mind how easy it is for Muslims to hate the six U.S. policies bin Laden repeatedly refers to as anti-Muslim:

• U.S. support for Israel that keeps 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.

Only when U.S. leaders stop believing that bin Laden and his allies are attacking us for what we are and what we think can we put aside our ill-advised and hallucinatory crusade for democracy -- our current default response.

What notably is missing from this list? Things people do in the United States: Sinful dancing, pre-marital sex, mini-skirts, recreational drug use. Bin Laden is parochial in a sense. He cares about what happens in Muslim countries more than what happens in non-Muslim countries. He care about what happens in Arab countries more than what happens in non-Arab yet Muslim countries. He cares more about what happens in Saudi Arabia in particular - in part because he is from there and in part because Mecca and Medina are located on Saudi territory. Bin Laden is most angry and driven to change conditions in the places he cares most about. With that as a starting point and his Muslim religious beliefs as a source of his political desires a different view of his motives emerges. The US is first and foremost a target because of US involvement with the House Of Saud and secondarily with other neighboring countries.

Of course the Taliban government which Bin Laden propped up in Afghanistan was corrupt and tyrannical. So it is really the "apostate" part about various Arab governments that ticks off Bin Laden. He is a firm supporter of Islamic theocracy. Bin Laden is very enthusiastic about Islam and Islamic political rule. Islam has no place for the separation of church and state and neither does Bin Laden.

The theory that democracy will "drain the swamps" of support for Islamic terrorism is based on the assumption that democracy will produce such better government that people will feel more justly treated and their living standards will rise so they feel less aggrieved and resentful. Well, the lack of democracy is not the biggest obstacle to economic advance in the Middle East or elsewhere. But higher incomes are a necessary precondition to successful democracy anyhow. Plus, there are lots of other reasons democracy isn't in the cards for the Middle East.

Given that the threat from Al Qaeda is long term the United States would greatly benefit from an immigration and border control policy that enables us to far better keep out Muslim terrorists. Also, as "Mike" agrees, we need an energy policy aimed at the reduction of world demand for oil.