This isn’t writing, it’s typing.

Coming to a cublicle near you …

First, the manifesto.

Now, the blog.

If you've ever worked in an office, you'll be rolling on the floor in about five minutes.

Darkness at Noonan

There she goes again …

I continue to think the president's inaugural address, suggesting as it did that he was on a mission to expunge all political tyranny from the globe, and asserting that our nation's survival depended on this utopian project, was a rather crazy speech, weirdly Wilsonian and at odds with conservatism's ancestral knowledge of the imperfectability of this world and the inability of politics to heal all that wounds us. (Take it away, FreeRepublic.) Samuel Johnson was a genius of literature, but he knew his politics: "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!"

Dr. Johnson also knew "promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement"—and an inaugural is nothing if not an advertisement for the agenda of the next four years. Some hyperbole comes with the territory.

By my count, today's column represents Ms. Noonan's fourth swipe (the third was by paralipsis) at the Bush inaugural, a speech I believe she had once expected to write. Instead of sharing a second-floor office with Dan Bartlett in the West Wing, she's again ensconced in her Cesar Pelli prison of steel and glass at the World Financial Center—repeating the same tired war stories ("I worked at CBS 20 years ago …" "Then John Paul made the sign of the cross …" "I was asked … about comparisons of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush …"), recycling the same inane wisdom ("If I were a Democrat right now I would think big and get serious …" "The mainstream media's monopoly on information is over …" "[Hillary Clinton] is inevitable as a candidate, but not as a president …") and ransacking her new-found El Dorado, the blogosphere.

Still, amid the tedium that is her Thursday column, Ms. Noonan has managed to add a dose of drama—her intermittent flashes of contempt for the President's support of freedom around the globe.

It's clear that attacking tyranny and championing democracy is a project that stretches well beyond a four-year time-line. But America has never been a nation of small ambitions. And the dangers of clinging to realpolitik—as we've done for decades in the Middle East—have been laid bare by the stunning developments of the last few months. In the President's words earlier this week:

By now it should be clear that decades of excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability, have only led to injustice and instability and tragedy. It should be clear that the advance of democracy leads to peace, because governments that respect the rights of their people also respect the rights of their neighbors. It should be clear that the best antidote to radicalism and terror is the tolerance and hope kindled in free societies. And our duty is now clear: For the sake of our long-term security, all free nations must stand with the forces of democracy and justice that have begun to transform the Middle East.

But Ms. Noonan stubbornly clings to the notion that tyranny (for other, less fortunate countries, of course) remains a necessary evil:

Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as—ugly imagery coming—garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage--the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists—pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

But again, as the President observed more than a year ago, sixty years of "keeping the garbage can lids on" did nothing to make America more safe; it only allowed the garbage to fester. Thus, Ms. Noonan finds herself in the curious company of John Kerry and Hosni Mubarak, "frustrated" by all this messy instability that comes from unleashing the forces of democracy.

"Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history," writes the weary revolutionist Rubashov in his diary in Darkness at Noon. "At its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means." Throwing in one's lot with despots represents a capitulation to the logic of ends and means and garbage can lids.

Like Kerry, Mubarak and Rubashov, Ms. Noonan seeks the high ground of stability and security. But, unwittingly, she positions herself on the ash heap of history.

As the nerd mantra puts it: Garbage in, garbage out.

UPDATE: Attaturk at Rising Hegemon distills Noonan's latest column into a mere eight words: "I am right because I think I am."

The new Middle East

In the closing months of his administration, Bill Clinton embarked on a quixotic project to achieve yet another "historic" peace agreement in the Middle East, an effort that ultimately collapsed as the result of Syrian instability and intransigence. During his last interview as President, Clinton was asked whether he felt the incoming Bush administration would continue to pursue the same peace process.

He responded:

Well, I think they will be very interested in stability and peace in the Middle East. Their orientation has been a little more toward, you know, the Gulf, the oil-producing states, honoring our historic commitments to Israel to maintain their qualitative military capacity.…

[But] I think that our concern for stability in our relations with the Saudis, with the Kuwaitis, with not letting Saddam Hussein develop weapons of mass destruction again, the whole range of concerns that any American administration would have to have leads you back down to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to get to the end of the road there. I mean, I just think you do.

Or, then again, maybe you don't.

It's clear by now that President Bush opted to take a road to peace in the Middle East his predecessor never seriously contemplated. (In fairness, the events of September 11 and Saddam's monumental pigheadedness gave Bush an opening Clinton lacked, though one it's doubtful he or his fellow Democrats would have thought to pursue. But I digress.) Certainly, "stability" has never been an overarching goal of our current President's Middle East policy—indeed, quite the opposite. And, for some time, Bush's alternative strategy looked as if it would lead nowhere but to chaos.

As recently as two months ago, in fact, John Kerry emerged from a meeting with Egypt's President Mubarak to denounce again the U.S.-led effort in Iraq:

All of the countries of the region have a significant stake in the outcome and yet they are frustrated. They are frustrated because they don't feel that the steps necessary to be able to advance the stability of Iraq are really being taken.… I think it's critical to use every possible avenue of creation of stability forces as fast as possible.

The "stability forces" were advanced two weeks later, of course, by the creation of a new Iraqi electorate—whose existence has so fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Middle East that the once-"frustrated" Lebanese warlord-turned-politician Walid Jumblatt now opines:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.

Mark Steyn neatly summarizes what the President's approach to regional peace via war in Iraq has achieved:

Regionally speaking, the reasons for toppling Saddam were to (a) end Iraq's ongoing subversion of Jordan; (b) put the squeeze on Syria; (c) show, by the sheer scale of intervention, that the Saudis' non-co-operation on the matter of terrorist funding would no longer be tolerated; and (d)—the big one—initiate democracy in Egypt, to which America gives billions of dollars and which in return gives America Osama sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the man behind the 1993 World Trade Centre attack) and Mohammed Atta (the man in the cockpit on the second attack). To one degree or another, (a), (b), (c) and (d) are all under way.

I might add to the list (e) re-kindle democratic hopes in Iran and (f) marginalize and expose the anti-democratic agenda of Iran's proxy, Hezbollah.

War—not least "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time"—may seem a long and unnecessary detour on the road to peace. But true tyrannies have seldom been overturned except by war. The tree of liberty, as Jefferson reminded us, must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Yet, paradoxically, only in its shade can lasting peace be found.

The President outlined America's new grand strategy in a speech yesterday at the National Defense University:

Our security  increasingly depends on the hope and progress of other nations now  simmering in despair and resentment, and that hope and progress is  found only in the advance of freedom. This advance is a consistent  theme of American strategy, from the 14 Points to the Four Freedoms to the Marshall Plan to the Reagan Doctrine.

Democracy can't be defended, in short, unless its gifts are shared. And when that sharing happens, enormous, hitherto-invisible political forces are suddenly unleashed in ways that upend traditional notions of security and stability.

"Americans, of all people, should not be surprised by freedom's power," the President added.

And yet—after more than two centuries of experience with democracy—we still are.

Nothing to sneeze at

I've been laid up with a bout of the grippe, so I've fallen behind the news curve. But this Reuters story from last month caught my eye:

The threat of a biological terrorist strike by al Qaeda is very real but the world is still not prepared, the head of Interpol said.

Ronald Noble said governments, police and security services were more organized than ever before but he warned it would be wrong to assume the threat from Osama bin Laden's group, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, had eased.

"The terrorist threat is as real today as in 2001 when September 11 occurred," Noble said in an interview with the BBC late on Tuesday.

"The number of terrorist attacks that have occurred around the world and the evidence that has been seized revealing the kind of planning that al Qaeda has done in the area of biological weapons or chemical weapons … is enough evidence for me to be concerned about it.…"

"Anyone who is honest about this has to admit that if al Qaeda launches a spectacular biological attack which could cause contagious disease to be spread, no entity in the world is prepared for it," Noble said.

This detailed analysis from Recombinomics is even more sobering:

If pandemic flu is the contagious disease of choice, selection of WSN/33 at this time would offer some advantages. It is already transmissible from human-to-human, has been shown to be lethal in mice, has mutations in NA and PB2 that increase lethality, is widely available, and could be used without genetic manipulation.

As has been seen in Korea, introduction of the agent into pigs would allow it to spread almost undetected. Verification of its spread (or existence) has proven to be exceedingly difficult.  Movement from swine to humans has not been reported and all reported isolates are missing the PB2 mutation. This may be due to a survival selection offered by recombining or reassorting with prevalent H9N2 subtypes. Most of the swine isolates have an avian PB2, but even the isolates that have half of a human PB2 have the 3' half of the human gene replaced with avian sequences. Thus, the results from the Korean swine may indicate that starting with a very lethal virus has disadvantages in that a less lethal virus will emerge virtually undetected.

A second choice would be the H5N1 currently causing the high case fatality rate in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. This version would be even more available, since it is excreted in large amounts by asymptomatic ducks, and is present in multiple organs in fatal infections. Although human-to-human transmission of H5N1 is limited, infecting a few international travelers would generate worldwide panic if these passengers became ill outside of areas with indigenous H5N1.  Use of infected currency as a vector for transmission has been widely discussed.

A third approach would involve genetic manipulation. Creating an efficiently transmitted H5N1 would be relatively easy. Swapping a human receptor binding domain from a human flu virus into an H5 backbone would improve transmission efficiency and such an agent would quickly disseminate worldwide. Of course such an agent would be hard to control, and most unvaccinated people would be at risk. Since influenza evolves via recombination, implementation of an efficient laboratiry strain might be eclipsed by a natural version, and there would be uncertainty over the origins of such an agent.

Thus, like WSN/33 in Korean swine, taking credit for such a biologic attack may be difficult, since most countries appear to be unable to even determine if such an attack has happened.

[A flu primer that can help you decipher terms like NA and PB2 can be found here. It'll definintely make you the envy of your non-medical-expert friends.]

The current avian flu strain (H5N1) that has been ravaging Vietnam—should it mutate (or be deliberately weaponized) into a form that's easily transmitted person to person—could produce results as devastating as the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed  as many as 100 million people around the world, 600,000 of them in the United States.

In The Great Influenza—his definitive history of the 1918 epidemic—John Barry cheerfully writes, "A weaponized influenza virus could be the equivalent of a worldwide nuclear holocaust."

Laurie Garrett describes the near-miss of just such a holocaust that occurred back in December:

Shortly before Christmas, some genetic data was—as a matter of routine—posted with GenBank, a mammoth, publicly accessible computer repository located at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. No special phone calls were made, no alarms sounded. But the GenBank posting looked like the genetic code for a new, manmade killer influenza that was infecting pigs in South Korea. Fingers seemed to point to Pyongyang.

Before you have a heart attack, let me assure you that, two months later, it looks like the nightmare of weaponized super-flu did not happen this time. But the scenario that played out is probably pretty close to what might unfold in a genuine bioterrorism incident, and it reveals critical weaknesses in our global security system—or lack thereof.

If your nerves aren't sufficiently jangled, here's the latest word on the H5N1 avian flu virus from the CDC, a Vietnam update from the WHO and a Q & A on the subject from The Wall Street Journal (via The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Recombinomics has further disturbing thoughts here and here. This post at Redstate.org is also worth a look.

Stay tuned.

Who killed Joe Wemple?

The following was posted in the comments section on Dan Wismar's Wizblog, addressed to me:

Rodger,

Thanks for continually keeping my Brother and Dale's killing and killers in the light of day. Like roaches, they like to run and hide in the dark.

My deepest appreciateion for everything you and all the press have done and continue to get to the bottom of all of this. They say that they have great pride in what they do, but they cover their faces as to not take credit. I say, stand in the light of day, and if you are truly proud, take pride and accept the consequences.

I would ask: Who is fulfilling the contract now that my brother and Dale were killed?

Maybe there is your answer.

Best regards,

Joe Wemple's Brother

I'd like to ask the readers of this blog for any help they might be able to furnish regarding the killings of Joe Wemple and Dale Stoffel—and, in particular, the reallocation of their Wye Oak Technologies contract.

I'll also be making some inquiries of my own and will keep you updated on any answers I find.

Unfortunately, since my original post and the Los Angeles Times story on the re-opening of the investigation by the FBI, there's been almost no news on the subject, and I must confess that I've moved on to other matters. But perhaps it's time to take a second look.

My original post on the Stoffel/Wemple murders can be found here. I've designed it as a jumping-off point to further investigation to those who may be so inclined. I'm sure many of the links have expired; I'll update it as much as possible, as time permits.

Sanity attacks again

This time on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

Nancy Soderberg, a former national security advisor to President Clinton, comes to hawk her book, The Superpower Myth, and ends up having to acknowledge the success of the Bush administration's foreign policy and to admit that the best hope her party has is for democracy to fail in the Middle East. (If you've got a broadband connection and Windows Media Player installed, you can watch it here.)

Here's a partial transcript, courtesy of James Taranto and his TiVo:

Stewart: This book—it talks about the superpower myth of the United States. There is this idea, the United States is the sole superpower, and I guess the premise of the book is we cannot misuse that power—have to use it wisely, and not just punitively. Is that—

Soderberg: That's right. What I argue is that the Bush administration fell hostage to the superpower myth, believing that because we're the most powerful nation on earth, we were all-powerful, could bend the world to our will and not have to worry about the rest of the world. I think what they're finding in the second term is, it's a little bit harder than that, and reality has an annoying way of intruding.

Stewart: But what do you make of—here's my dilemma, if you will. I don't care for the way these guys conduct themselves—and this is just you and I talking, no cameras here [audience laughter]. But boy, when you see the Lebanese take to the streets and all that, and you go, "Oh my God, this is working," and I begin to wonder, is it—is the way that they handled it really—it's sort of like, "Uh, OK, my daddy hits me, but look how tough I'm getting." You know what I mean? Like, you don't like the method, but maybe—wrong analogy, is that, uh—?

Soderberg: Well, I think, you know, as a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen. I think the way to look at it is, they can't credit for every good thing that happens, but they need to be able to manage it. I think what's happening in Lebanon is great, but it's not necessarily directly related to the fact that we went into Iraq militarily.

Stewart: Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had, sort of, the courage of their conviction, having not seen—not only the invasion but the election which followed? It's almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy—something's going on over there. I'm smelling something.

Soderberg: I think partly what's going on is the country next door, Syria, has been controlling them for decades, and they [the Syrians] were dumb enough to blow up the former prime minister of Lebanon in Beirut, and they're—people are sort of sick of that, and saying, "Wait a minute, that's a stretch too far." So part of what's going on is they're just protesting that. But I think there is a wave of change going on, and if we can help ride it though the second term of the Bush administration, more power to them.

Stewart: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"—if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost—I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.

Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process—they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole—

Stewart: This could be unbelievable!

Soderberg:—series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which—it may well work. I think that, um, it's—

Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's—

Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.

Stewart: He's gonna be a great—pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.

Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us.

Stewart: [crossing fingers] Iran and North Korea, that's true, that is true [audience laughter]. No, it's—it is—I absolutely agree with you, this is—this is the most difficult thing for me to—because, I think, I don't care for the tactics, I don't care for this, the weird arrogance, the setting up. But I gotta say, I haven't seen results like this ever in that region.

Soderberg: Well wait. It hasn't actually gotten very far. I mean, we've had—

Stewart: Oh, I'm shallow! I'm very shallow!

Soderberg: There's always hope that this might not work. No, but I think, um, it's—you know, you have changes going on in Egypt; Saudi Arabia finally had a few votes, although women couldn't participate. What's going on here in—you know, Syria's been living in the 1960s since the 1960s—it's, part of this is—

Stewart: You mean free love and that kind of stuff? [audience laughter] Like, free love, drugs?

Soderberg: If you're a terrorist, yeah.

Stewart: They are Baathists, are they--it looks like, I gotta say, it's almost like we're not going to have to invade Iran and Syria. They're gonna invade themselves at a certain point, no? Or is that completely naive?

Soderberg: I think it's moving in the right direction. I'll have to give them credit for that. We'll see.

Stewart: Really? Hummus for everybody, for God's sakes.

Ms. Soderberg seems to have thought better of her cheerleading for American failure, and offered a clarification in a subsequent interview on C-SPAN.

Soderberg: Thank you very much because I saw that late last night and encourage people to actually look at the tape of the show and what the context of what that is.

This is a comedy show. We were joking about the dilemma of Jon Stewart having criticized the Bush administration over the last 4 years. What does he do now. And we were joking back and forth.

Um, I think anyone who follows the Democratic party knows that they want America to succeed and the President Bush to succeed. Um, it 's a completely a—a—a—mixed conte—a miscontext that the article from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

And I of course welcome the opportunity to rebut that.

There's nothing better the Democrats would like than to see peace in the Middle East, nonproliferation.

What I argue in the book is that the last 4 years of the Bush Administration had failed to advance those agendas and I welcome what appears to be a shift in the administration right now to take those issues on with more realistic policies.

And of course I want them to succeed.

So thank you for that question.

Just offhand, I'd have to say the stampede toward democracy in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the wake of Iraqi elections has caught the President's critics completely flatfooted.

To paraphrase Albert King, without bad luck for the world, the Dems ain't got no luck at all.

UPDATE: Fareed Zakaria writes in the current issue of Newsweek: "The other noted political scientist who has been vindicated in recent weeks is George W. Bush. Across New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—and probably Europe and Asia as well—people are nervously asking themselves a question: "Could he possibly have been right?" The short answer is yes. Whether or not Bush deserves credit for everything that is happening in the Middle East, he has been fundamentally right about some big things." Pass the hummus, please, Fareed.

Giant Steps

Schlegel called architecture "frozen music."

Animator Michal Levy provides the proof, with a little help from John Coltrane.

(If it's not in your CD collection—and it should be—you can purchase the definitive Giant Steps here.)

Old habits die hard

There's been a new twist in the LeCarre-like plot revolving around the death of Ukrainian investigative journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

The country's former interior minister was found dead of an apparent suicide Friday, just before he was to meet with prosecutors for questioning about the 2000 slaying of an investigative journalist, dealing a blow to an investigation that could also implicate former President Leonid Kuchma.

Yuriy Kravchenko had been implicated in the killing of Heorhiy Gongadze, who wrote about top-level corruption under Kuchma.

The death of the journalist—who was found decapitated in a forest outside the capital—sparked months of protests against the former president. The opposition alleged Kuchma had ordered the killing, but he has denied any involvement.

President Viktor Yushchenko said Kravchenko's death could be linked to the probe into Gongadze's slaying and ordered Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko and the Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun to investigate.

''Everyone has a choice: Either appear before the court and publicly stand up for his rights and honor, or dispense justice on himself,'' Yushchenko told journalists in Ukraine's parliament.

In the short term, Kravchencko's suicide will hinder the investigation, but it could also result in other witnesses coming forward whom Kravchenko may have been intimidating.

Meanwhile, in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, another muckraking journalist has just been murdered:

The editor-in-chief of an Azeri opposition magazine has been killed in front of his home in Baku.

Elmar Huseynov was reportedly shot seven times while walking out of the lift at about 1700 GMT, news agency Turan reported.

The magazine, Monitor, is strongly critical of Azeri authorities and President Ilham Aliyev.

Huseynov had been sued for defamation after accusing local officials of behaving like the Sicilian Mafia.

Human rights groups have already linked the murder to his journalistic activities.

"Huseynov became the victim of his citizen's activism—this is terrorism against the press," said Arzu Abdullayeva, a representative of the international Helsinki human rights committee in Azerbaijan.

Huseynov's murder follows that of Byelorussian reporter Veronika Cherkasova, who was stabbed to death at her home in Minsk last October. Among many articles critical of the Byelorussian government, Cherkasova published a controversial series entitled "The KGB Is Still Following You"

Could this be what former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir Putin was alluding to when he told President Bush last month: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS"?

Neither Eason Jordan nor the World Economic Forum could be reached for comment.