DEBKAfile`s special report

January 6, 2004, 12:05 PM (GMT+02:00)

They got a harsh response from Prince Nayef, the interior minister who leads the war against al-Qaeda. “The weak can’t challenge the mighty. We are not a regime that wants people to be satisfied with us. We are here in Saudi Arabia in order to rule,” he declared last weekend during two stormy meetings with two separate reformist delegations, which included notables, intellectuals, academics, and senior business figures.

In response to Nayef’s remarks, one participant remarked “We should understand from what you are saying that you are a regime that is working against the people.” DEBKAfile sources report that this sharp exchange, which occurred at the beginning of the meeting, was later followed by a climactic outburst by a leading businessman who got up and said, “We haven’t gone down this whole road (of reform efforts) in order to regress now because of the way you are talking. If you want to throw us into prison, do it now before we leave this meeting.”

Such straight talking has not been heard before at meetings between members of the royal house and influential citizens. The royal family now faces double pressure: the war against al-Qaeda and a fast growing domestic demand for reform. The absence of essential reforms, and the refusal of members of the royal family even to discuss these reforms, is causing ever larger sections of the Saudi population to distance their support and themselves from the royal house. In such an atmosphere, young Saudis find themselves encouraged to join radical and militant opposition movements, such as al-Qaeda.



This is bad news (if this DEBKAfile report is correct) for gradual reform in Saudi Arabia on a number of counts. We are here in Saudi Arabia in order to rule? This hardly indicates a government willing to be voted out of power. Less obviously, "We" are the rulers, they do not consider themselves of the people.

For the United States the conundrum is harder still. The balance of the evidence indicates that a popular government would not be friendly to the United States. And a conference like this does not indicate a stable strongman either. A democratic government must be willing to accept the popular will - and an authoritarian one cannot stay in power unless people are afraid to speak out against it. I don't think a government can sustain free speech without democracy, or people are free to gather support for a revolution.

"There are already signs that Al Qaida is considering the country's petrochemical complexes; a joint CIA-Saudi effort in the summer of 2002 broke up a plot targeting Ras Tanura, and Saudi security arrested five men," the report said. "Even Ali Al Naimi, Saudi Aramco chairman and Minister of Petroleum and Natural Resources, has acknowledged the vulnerability of the oil infrastructure, admitting that, 'terminals and power systems could be a problem.'"

Is the true heart of the War on Terror in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? If so, you could understand why we only hear limited amounts about it - the Saudi government and even that of Pakistan might be further undermined by open news of cooperation between them and the CIA. It's a sober thought though - where even our friends are ambivalent, and our enemies hate us unshakably.

Yes, the CIA is involved.

CIA: Al-Qaida targeting Saudi royals
TOP-SECRET MEMO WARNS OF TERROR GOALS; OIL INSTABILITY WOULD HARM U.S. ECONOMY
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON - The Al-Qaida terrorist network has decided to intensify its efforts to foment instability in Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, and overthrow the royal family, warns a new top-secret CIA assessment.

The highly classified CIA intelligence memorandum, portions of which have been provided to President Bush, was described to Knight Ridder by intelligence and other officials on the condition of anonymity.

Calpundit deliberately put this Instapundit post on Blogdex by asking other bloggers to write about it instead of doing so himself.

Or maybe not, but it's a great idea. Instapundit has published two updates, Glenn Reynolds doesn't admit to being embarrased in retorspect but he's published some abusive e-mail he got on the subject, perhaps to make himself look moderate in comparison.

Maybe Calpundit is just glad he happened to be busy when this post came out. Either way I'm happy to be one of the many people who brought it near the top of Blogdex.

Calpundit links to a rather remarkable Instapundit post.

A REQUEST....Can somebody please give this post of Glenn's the attention it deserves? I've got a houseguest this week and I just don't have the time. Or the energy.

Although I do wonder what he means when he says "It's not clear that they even deserve to keep what they've got." What, exactly, does he think they have?

THE UNITED STATES SHOULD NOT TRY to play a "neutral arbiter" in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. We should, in fact, be doing our best to make the Palestinians suffer, because, to put it bluntly, they are our enemies. Just read this post and follow the links to see how they feel about America.

And read this piece by Amir Taheri on the Iraqi "resistance," which notes Palestinian terror connections by the Iraqi insurgents, and features a Palestinian "journalist" egging them on.

These folks are our enemies, and deserve to be treated as such. They don't deserve a state of their own.

First, who is MEMRI? It hardly seems reasonable to use their translations without asking this. The most balanced answer I have found so far is here:

To be fair, MEMRI's picture of an extreme, militant and delusional Arabic press allows for a few shadings. One recent article notes the efforts of Kuwaiti professor Ahmad Al-Baghdadi to critique Arab Muslims as 'the masters of terrorism towards their citizens.' Another cites a rhetorically deft dismantling of current anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories by Saudi columnist Hamad Abd Al-Aziz Al-'Isa. But there are enough stories about extremist kindergartens and calls for jihad to attract criticism from the growing Arab and Islamic lobbies. 'They tend to translate non-representative stories,' says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, 'and members of the pro-Israel lobby then use them to club Muslims.'



That MEMRI has a bias against Arab societies can hardly be disputed. Although chairman Yigal Carmon occasionally argues for restraint in Israel's dealings with the Palestinians, he has been fixated on both the failure of the peace process and extremist Arab media for many years. Co-director Wurmser argues at length for blood-and-iron approaches to Israeli nationalism. MEMRI writers stay focused on the Middle Eastern culture of incitement when writing for other publications.

What is not clear is why this is necessarily an unfair representation of the Arabic media. 'They look for the absolute worst, most inflammatory rhetoric they can find in the Arabic press,' says CAIR's Hooper. 'It's kind of like if we translated Franklin Graham's remarks [condemning Islam as a 'wicked' religion], and then went to the Arabic press and said 'See, this is what they're saying in America.''

Well, since Franklin Graham is the son of a prominent U.S. religious leader, and his views are neither unique nor even particularly unusual, it would be quite fair to do just that.

Here's a link to a debate between MEMRI and one of their sharpest Arab critics.

Here is an article from the Guardian and a reply from MEMRI.

Now back to the post itself. Joe Katzman of Winds of Change asks, "Someone remind me again why creating another Talibanesque terror-state in the Middle East is a good idea?", in the article linked to by Glenn Reynolds (above). Well, clearly we don't want a Talibanesque terror-state. Anyone who is truly more concerned about the fate of Isreal than the neocon agenda has to remember the choices which currently face Isreal. From a purely military point of view, they could exterminate the Palestinians - but the vast majority of Isrealis would find that horrifying. It might actually create an effective Arab military alliance against Isreal, and certainly it would guarantee the loss of American support eventually, although I'm not absolutely sure it would happen while this administration was in power. They could not be driven into Jordan without wholesale slaughter, and perhaps war with Jordan. Other than that, the alternatives are some kind of negotiated settlement, acceptance of the status quo of terrorist, or the hope of somehow defeating the Palestinians short of a huge bloodbath in such a way as to actually put an end to terrorism. Some will find the latter attractive, but the historical evidence makes it look at least as difficult as permanent and lasting peace through a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. Sometimes the last appears impossible, but a great many Isreali's consider the attempt better than any of the other alternatives, and the primary reason to act as a neutral arbiter is to help THEM achieve that goal. Isreal hasn't even asked us to help make the "Palestinians suffer", and it's far from clear how we might help them if we did.

I think it's important for bloggers to look for and think about stories which might require them to rethink their basic views on things.

At Medgar Evers, where 97 percent of the male students are black, the number of male students has been disproportionately low for more than a decade. Right now, only 22 percent of the students are male. And the men are far less likely to graduate than the women.

The discrepancies are not unique to Medgar Evers. Women outnumber men at most colleges, but the gap is especially large among black students. Nationally, barely a quarter of the 1.9 million black men between 18 and 24 — prime college-going years — were in college in 2000, according to the American Council on Education's most recent report on minorities in higher education. By comparison, 35 percent of black women in the same age group and 36 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in higher education.

And the graduation rate of black men is lower than that of any other group. Only 35 percent of the black men who entered N.C.A.A. Division I colleges in 1996, for example, graduated within six years, compared with 59 percent of the white men, 46 percent of the Hispanic men, 41 percent of the American Indian men and 45 percent of the black women who entered the same year.

"It's the shame of American higher education," said Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University.

Researchers say the obstacles keeping black men from earning college degrees include poor education before college, the low expectations that teachers and others have for them, a lack of black men as role models, their dropout rate from high school and their own low aspirations.

While most of these problems are common to disadvantaged minority students regardless of sex, black men have the special burden of being pigeonholed early in a way that black female students are not. This was among the findings of the African-American Male Initiative, a program set up by the University System of Georgia to research and remove the obstacles to college enrollment and graduation for black men. The system has 17,000 black men among 250,000 students on its 34 campuses.

The downward spiral begins in Head Start classrooms, said Arlethia Perry-Johnson, the chairwoman of the initiative and an associate vice chancellor of the Georgia system. Some black male students are labeled developmentally delayed, funneled into special education and "never get mainstreamed," she said. Shoved off the college prep track, they begin a "cycle of being reprimanded, disciplined and ultimately suspended for negative behavior," she said, leading to expulsion, unemployment and even crime and imprisonment.

Solving the problem is beginning to get more attention at colleges. Nearly three dozen selective liberal arts colleges, including Amherst, Swarthmore and Wesleyan, have united to create a working group on minority achievement issues, including the underrepresentation of black and Latino men in colleges.

Recently, Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., sponsored a symposium on the absence of black men in higher education. Women outnumber men by about 2 to 1 at Howard.

This artictle from The New York Times looks at many different problems. I'm not saying affirmative action won't help directly or indirectly with any of them, but in some cases I'm not sure if it will help or how. One thing is clear though - for everyone who is not a black American to look for excuses to say that this is not our problem because it's someone elses fault would be counterproductive in the extreme. It is much cheaper to find the cause of a problem and solve it than to wait until someone does something illegal and spend a lot of money keeping them in jail.

Steven Den Beste has a great post on Hive minds. I felt disoriented for a moment, because even though politics might well be one of the major concerns of a collective human Hive mind as relating to it's survival, the blogs I follow by people who have shown interest in collective intelligence seem less interested in politics than even random chance would dictate. I'm delighted to find an exception.

There is one thing I felt he could have spoken more about. The colony animals discussed in his post have near converging interests - it is difficult or impossible for an individual to help reproduce the genes it carries except by contributing to the group. Without this there is a strong incentive to 'slant' information to favor your own offspring in some way, or even go off and lay some eggs somewhere instead of foraging for the hive. It appears some female ants besides the queen can lay some eggs, but there are disincentives as well.

In some ways humans may actually have near converging interests. For instance, suppose somewhere in China livestock practices tend to contribute to the emergence of new contagious diseases. It might actually be cheaper to pay part of the costs of changing them than to try to quarrantine China at intervals or deal with the results after they spread to the United States.

Planes with explosives found at Saudi airport

LONDON — Saudi security forces have seized light planes packed with explosives near Riyadh's King Khalid airport, foiling a plot by suicide pilots to blow up a Western airliner on the runway, a British newspaper said today.

Two pilots apparently intended to crash the planes into a Western jet on the tarmac, Patrick Mercer, homeland-security policy chief for Britain's opposition Conservative Party, was quoted as saying in the Mail. British Airways was believed to be the likely target.

In light of this, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there were terrorists on the French airlines today. It's worth thinking through this tactic before it hits us in the face. The easiest way to stop it would be to refuse to let non American airlines (except maybe for a handful of the securest countries) fly airplanes to United States airports. If they do the same to our airlines, the result could be devastating economically. I sure hope somebody in the Bush administration is up for a quick and tough round of negotiations.

SEABROOK, N.H., Dec. 23 — Swatting away attacks from all corners in the 10 days since the capture of Saddam Hussein, Howard Dean has returned to the combative posture that propelled his insurgent candidacy to the front of the field this fall. Denunciations of "Washington Democrats" once again dominate his speeches, even as he complains that negativity has taken over the primary campaign.

It is a clear contrast from just two weeks ago when Dr. Dean, buoyed by the backing of several major unions, former Vice President Al Gore and a swelling crowd of elected officials, was beginning to change his style. Smiling more than finger-thrusting, he fancied himself a frontrunner above the fray, experimenting — briefly — with a more moderate tone, as he kept one eye on the general electorate.

But the relentless battering has stymied his effort to look long range, forcing him to hunker down in the final month before the first votes.

This is good news in disguise. I have to admit I was a bit worried as to whether Dean realized how much he would have to move towards the center for the general election, but this makes it clear he does. Actually doing it will still be a challenge, but it would be wrong for him to lose the nomination because he was trying to prematurely ready for the general election.

All the same, all the bloggers who have done great things for Dean need to be ready not merely to accept his swing towards the center but to cheer it on. In particular, he needs to win the votes of at least some of the people who favored the invasion of Iraq. This might not be quite as hard as it seems at first - but merely saying we need to finish what we started isn't enough. He has to give the people who believe in rebuilding Iraq reason to believe he can do it better than Bush. He must speak in language acceptable to those who favored the invasion but are unhappy about subsequent rebuilding efforts. He should talk about how many intelligent people - Democrats as well as Republicans - favored the invasion of Iraq, partly because of misleading information from the Bush administration, and partly because they were lead to believe we were adaquately prepared for the aftermath.

Then he must say that part of the reason Bush can't make the drastic changes needed to succeed in Iraq is because this would involve admitting just how much has been done wrong so far. Bush cannot and will not do this, but Dean can and will. A vote for Dean is a vote for rebuilding Iraq - whether or not you favored the initial invasion.

This is wrong:

Dean says he thought the war was a terrible blunder—a "catastrophic mistake," said Al Gore when endorsing him—but now that we're there, we should stay and see it through. This makes no sense. If the war was a blunder—draining resources and distracting Washington—the smartest thing to do is get out fast. Dean has argued that America must stay in Iraq because it cannot allow the country to become a base for Al Qaeda. But that outcome could easily be avoided by our pulling out and turning the place over to a general or Shiite leader who will also have no interest in having his country become a Qaeda base. Why bother helping in a massive transformation of politics, economics and society in Iraq? In a sense, the most consistent Democrat in the race is not Dean, but Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who says the war was a mistake, so let's leave now.

Some Democrats, like Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman, have criticized the administration for having a worthy goal but doing a good thing badly. And there's much to criticize. The reconstruction has been botched from the start, with too few troops, weak leadership (remember Jay Garner?), self-defeating arrogance and now (at least the appearance of) a cut-and-run transfer of power. It has produced problems that were predictable—indeed were predicted. But to make this critique effectively, the Democrats have to buy into the basic goal of Iraq policy. If Howard Dean has his way, the party of Woodrow Wilson will be decidedly uninterested in the most Wilsonian project in recent history.

OK, maybe the second paragraph is right. But the first paragraph is silly. There is no general or Shiite leader who has the power to prevent Al Qaeda from using Iraq as a base - or even from splintering into bloody civil war. Part of our goal must be damage control - preventing a horrible bloody civil war following our retreat which would put nails in the coffin of US prestige. Those who lead us in there without preparation don't have the calm determination to get us out without leaving such a civil war in our wake. Unfortunately, blindly lashing out without preparation for the consequences is a natural human response to fear and anger - and Bush and his advisors have successfully tapped into that vein. Dean must successfully win the support of those who do not fully realize how they have been lead around, not so much by Bush as by their own emotions, which as far as I know Bush and his advisors sincerely shared.

Pakistani President survives 2nd assassination attempt
ISLAMABAD (Pakistan) -- A massive suicide bomb ripped through a crowded road near the capital on Thursday in a failed attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf, a senior government official said. The President was unhurt, but at least seven passers-by were killed.

It was the second attack this month targeting the military President, and came just a day after he agreed to step down as army chief by the end of 2004.

Could this be Al Qaeda's shortcut to gaining effective control of WMD? If so, we'd better do something fast.

Joi Ito has written a lot of good stuff about Emergent Democracy. I'm worried about the impact of this:

I've had blogger's block lately. As more people read my blog, I realize that I am writing for larger and larger audience. Just about every time I post something, I get thoughtful comments and email from a variety of perspectives. I realize that post early/post often is probably the best policy for blogging, but the rigor in which entries are discussed and the increasing percentage of people who I meet who have read my blog cause me to try to blog about things which are interesting yet not likely to cause me to spend a lot of time defending myself. The fact is, I'm becoming more and more conservative about what I blog.

I suppose he could write in the abstract about emergent democracy under his new rules, but I'm not sure he could discuss any concrete progress or setbacks or ideas without saying anything that could offend anyone of some political persuasion or another. I can't help hoping he doesn't follow his new rule.