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April 03, 2006, 7:34 a.m. Get Him to Gitmo Where Yale should send its Taliban student. By Deroy Murdock What must Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi think of his new school's insignia? Yale University's crest features the words "Light and Truth" emblazoned on an open book — in Hebrew. This must irk Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, the anti-Semitic, Islamofascist theocracy that misruled Afghanistan and hosted Osama bin Laden before 9/11. Hashemi has generated headlines since it emerged that Yale admitted this former adviser to the notorious one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. As Yale officials stated, Hashemi got in — despite his fourth-grade education and high-school equivalency certificate — because "Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding." The Wall Street Journal's John Fund reports that Yale, which bars military recruiters and the ROTC, discounted Hashemi's tuition 35 to 40 percent. Click Here! Imagine if Yale had accepted German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's top aide in 1942 to "increase understanding" of Nazism. Maybe Yale should add David Duke to the faculty to help students "increase understanding" of neo-Nazism. This affair may show that "my enemy's enemy is my friend." Yale's politically correct administrators hate that reckless Texas cowboy George W. Bush (Yale, class of 1968). How better to smack him, while preening their liberal feathers like peacocks, than to welcome one of W's enemies? Of course, Hashemi is not Bush's enemy, but America's. He is no Taliban defector, but someone largely unrepentant about fronting an autocracy whose diehards have killed 139 GIs while at war with this country, including one Wednesday in Helmand province. Hashemi last year called Israel "an American al-Qaeda." He trivialized stonings of adulteresses in Kabul's soccer stadium by saying, "There were also executions in Texas." Reviewing Taliban public policy might "increase understanding" of Hashemi and the dictatorship he perpetuated. As Yale alumnus Clinton Taylor has written, the Taliban was "a brutal regime of retrograde, misogynist, terrorist-abetting, drug-running, Buddha-blasting, gay-murdering, freedom-hating tyrants." They expressed their feminism by banning the education of girls over age 8, closing Afghanistan's women's university, banishing females from their jobs, and forcing them into burqas. They also celebrated diversity by fatally collapsing brick walls onto the heads of gay men. Consider these other Taliban evils: The Department to Propagate Virtue and Eliminate Vice abolished white paper bags, since they could have been made from recycled Korans. It banned kites under the theory that time spent flying them should be devoted to reading the Koran. Not unlike the Nazis' yellow stars for Jews, the Taliban ordered all non-Muslims to wear yellow badges in public. In January 2001, Amnesty International reports, Taliban soldiers in Yakaolang fired rockets into a mosque as 73 women, children, and old men took sanctuary there. According to the 2004 PBS documentary Afghanistan Unveiled, after blowing up a pair of huge, 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha in March 2001, the Taliban targeted the Hazara tribe in Bamiyan. "From hundreds of women here, not one has a husband," said a local woman named Zainyab. "From 100 children, maybe just one still has two parents. They bulldozed houses with women and children inside. They cut off women's breasts." Rather than support this outrage by donating to Yale, alumni Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber organized a protest called "Give Yale the Finger." They ask Yalies and concerned Americans to mail red, press-on fingernails (available at drugstores) to "President Richard Levin, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520." This should remind him that the Taliban extracted the fingernails of women who wore nail polish. Yale owes America an apology for giving aid and comfort to a former member of the government that gave aid and comfort to al-Qaeda as it plotted the September 11 massacre. Meanwhile, Hashemi cannot believe his luck. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. Good point! Who knows how much valuable intelligence remains in this former Taliban's skull? Let's find out. The FBI should arrest this young Yalie and fly him south for spring break at Guantanamo. Then, Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi can help U.S. interrogators "increase understanding " of America's battlefield enemy.

Yale's Taliban: Defending the indefensible, part II Apr 3, 2006 by Clinton W. Taylor Speaking at a Yale College Master’s Tea last week, Columbia Professor Todd Gitlin lamented the condition of the American Left: “There is currently a degree of intellectual paralysis, public fog, and collective and enthusiastic ignorance that defies comprehension,†he moaned. Professor Gitlin may as well have been speaking of Yale itself these days. Upon learning that Yale admitted former Taliban “rising star†Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi as a non-degree special student, America became “pig-wrestling madâ€â€”to quote the usually less colorful Economist—and retaliated with a sustained barrage of invective, ridicule, and outrage that has lasted well over a month. Yale’s response was to issue a brief non-response, and then to stick its head in the sand. A promised debate on the subject at the Yale Political Union was ungracefully scuttled. The Yale Daily News, whose editors at first demanded answers from the Yale administration, is distancing itself from the controversy and, according to a student source, does not wish to cover the story further. Even the tour guides have been instructed not to discuss the issue. Although Yale won’t defend itself, others are trying to do so. On Thursday, I examined three of the arguments Yale’s defenders are offering. There are more attempts to defend the indefensible, including a bizarre rationalization by the members of the Foundation that foots Mr. Rahamtullah’s bill. The Academic Freedom Defense—The full title of William F. Buckley’s first book was God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.†His subtitle referred to the invocation by Yale’s faculty of “academic freedom†as an excuse for subversive teaching. Even liberal notions of academic freedom were not without limits—Buckley pointed out that a faculty member who tried to justify Aryan supremacy would be fired. (As shown by the collaboration of some faculty in keeping deconstructionist professor Paul de Man’s Nazi past a secret, Mr. Buckley may have overestimated Yale’s opposition to fascism.) Academic freedom has emerged again in the debate over the Yale Taliban. When the Yale Herald polled the student body about their thoughts on Mr. Rahmatullah, about fifty percent of those who chose to respond ( a third of the student body) declared their support of his presence. Their chief reason for doing so was “academic freedomâ€. This contemporary sense of academic freedom appears to embrace a right to a Yale education, no matter how sordid one’s past. Yale is trying to be both meritocratic and relativist at the same time, and that is a very self-destructive notion for an elite college to embrace. The abnegation of good and evil in assessing applicants calls into question the purpose of selective admissions in the first place. If Yale can’t stir itself to exclude, say, a Klansman or a jihadist based on the evil organizations and ideology he has espoused, what does that say about the value of admission to Yale at all? Underlying this plea that “academic freedom†ought to give Mr. Rahmatullah’s Taliban past a pass is, I think, a profound fear of rocking the boat. My friend Mark Oppenheimer has suggested that the decisions of Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions deserve more deference. Why should we go second-guessing their professional judgment about who ought to be a Yalie and who shouldn’t? I used to agree with that idea. Before Mr. Rahmatullah came through, it was convenient to assume that admissions decisions were, if necessarily somewhat arbitrary, at least sincere and legitimate. Most, I’m certain, still are. But today Mark, and many of those Yale undergrads crying “academic freedomâ€, are asking me to pretend that a system that doesn’t even blink at the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister—that in fact welcomes him precisely because of his “interesting†background—is above criticism. I can’t do that. Emperor. Breeze. Flap. Flap. Flap. The Tat Maxwell Defense—Mr. Rahmatullah was brought to America and to Yale by some folks in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who have formed the “International Education Foundation†to promote this sort of cultural exchange. Along with Mike Hoover, the filmmaker and CBS cameraman who first met Mr. Rahmatullah in Afghanistan, the other members are Yale alum Robert Schuster and area mom Tatiana “Tat†Maxwell. Last week, Maxwell and Hoover talked about the controversy in their local paper. I’ll respond to their personal criticisms of us later this week. But their defense of Yale and of Mr. Rahamtullah, that they’re not that bad, deserves a discussion here. Upon learning of Hashemi’s presence at the university, two graduates, Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, launched a campaign called “Nail Yale†to get people to mail false fingernails to the university to protest the Taliban’s treatment of women. They say the Taliban yanked fingernails of Afghan women who wore nail polish, a claim disputed by Jackson resident Tatiana Maxwell, president of the foundation set up to help pay for Hashemi’s education. “It’s not even a legitimate, documented thing,†Maxwell said. “The Taliban certainly do some bad things ... but get your facts right.†The Yale alumni who have been featured on Fox News and MSNBC are “patently uninformed,†Maxwell said. “There’s no substance to what they are talking about.†Get your facts right, indeed, Ms. Maxwell. From Amnesty International: On at least one occasion, such punishments have taken the form of bodily mutilation. A woman in the Khayr-Khana area of Kabul in October 1996 was reported as having the end of her thumb cut off by the Taleban. This ‘punishment’ was apparently meted out because the woman was caught wearing nail varnish. But that’s just the beginning of Ms. Maxwell’s own spin on the Taliban and their spinmeister: When she first heard about him she was extremely skeptical. “Why would I want to listen to this Taliban?†she said, recalling her initial reaction. Maxwell had been passionate about Afghanistan for years and supported the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. The independent organization of Afghan women fights for human rights and social justice in their country. Off Maxwell went to the talk, armed with burkha and ready to face off with the mysterious Taliban guy. But after listening to him for a few minutes, she was “completely overtaken by him,†as he was “very intelligent, self-effacing and incredibly knowledgeable,†she said. “He just seemed unbelievably credible,†Maxwell said. The next day she attended another talk he gave at Teton County Library and invited him to come and stay with her.... Maxwell sees the education of Hashemi as a two-way street. “We can learn as much from him as he can learn from us,†she said. As a society, there is much we can learn about Islam, the Taliban and this incredible rift between the United States and the Middle East, she said. “If not, we are just making assumptions,†Maxwell said. Ms. Maxwell’s immediate, credulous acceptance of Mullah Omar’s personal advisor sounds pathologically naïve, but she is not the only one. Former Dean of Admissions for Yale Richard Shaw underwent a similar conversion when he first met Mr. Rahmatullah: "When I first met him I was a little anxious,'' recalls Shaw, ... ''My perception was, 'It's the enemy!' But the interview with him was one of the most interesting I've ever had. I walked away with a sense: Whoa! This is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world." Ms. Maxwell, to her credit, is active in charities and international organizations that aid refugees. Yet within a few minutes she was offering the spare room to someone who, in the summer of 2001, was justifying the capital trials of international aid workers, perhaps workers like those Ms. Maxwell supports. Ms. Maxwell is rightly appalled by violence and hatred against homosexuals. When interviewed about a sculpture commemorating the murder of Matthew Shepherd, she responded that she was “moved†by the tribute to Shepherd: “I think the message is a wonderful one," she said. "It’s hard to go against ’Do not hate.’ The mere thought of a human being left on a fence is highly emotional for me." Yet after a dose of Mr. Rahmatullah’s blandishments, she helped pay for his freshman year at Yale. The Taliban he advised and defended, of course, used to debate whether homosexuals should be pushed from a high wall to their deaths, or crushed by bulldozing the wall on top of them. Eventually the crushers won out. While a the idea of a human being on a fence may be highly emotional for Ms. Maxwell, the idea of a human being crushed beneath one must be somewhat less compelling. After Dick Cheney’s recent hunting accident, Ms. Maxwell welcomed him to Jackson Hole wearing a sign that proclaimed, “Dick Cheney is not a straight shooter.†Yet, this guy in Mr. Rahmatullah’s Taliban is a straight shooter: The Taliban certainly do some bad things, to use Ms. Maxwell’s modest phrase. Books have been written about the bizarre, totalitarian, misogynist, immiserating, barbaric nature of their reign. One of them, Ahmad Rashid’s Taliban, is referenced in the Jackson Hole article linked above, but only to make the point that Unocal might possibly stand to profit from a pipeline through Afghanistan. The litany of their horrors, with which both the reporter and Ms. Maxwell are obviously familiar, is omitted. Uncanny, isn’t it? There’s a reason the Taliban sent this fellow abroad to lie for them. He’s good. He’s smooth. He plays limousine liberals like fine violins. Even now the Yale administration and most of its faculty and students—especially those on usually vocal left—are refusing to speak out against the evil he represented. Their ignorance is willful. Their gullibility is inexcusable. Their silence is damning. In an effort to hold Yale accountable for its frighteningly bad judgment, we have urged concerned citizens to contact Yale’s President. He has raised the drawbridge, hoping the problem will go away. It won’t. Yale is accountable, ultimately, to the members of its Corporation, which is meeting in mid-April. We have posted their mailing addresses—as well as some fax and e-mail contacts—on our blog here. We hope you will join us now in spreading the word and contacting as many members of the Yale Corporation as you can. Urge them to take responsibility for Yale’s blunder and put this ridiculous episode behind them. Clint Taylor is a '96 Yale alumnus.

Excellent...three in a row....wow, little boy made another funny....seriously, are you gettng some help righting these hilariously original lines....what a talented little jester you are..... You are always good to laugh at defect, please keep them coming....fucking tool:laugh:

...wow, another good one. Is that an original too? You are on a roll little boy! Fucking idiot:laugh:

:laugh:

March 31, 2006, 7:45 a.m. When Cynicism Meets Fanaticism Critiquing the critique of the war in Iraq. Opponents of the war in Iraq, both original critics and the mea culpa recent converts, have made eight assumptions. The first six are wrong, the last two still unsettled. 1. Saddam was never connected to al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11. 2. There was no real threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. 3. The United Nations and our allies were justifiably opposed on principle to the invasion. 4. A small cabal of neoconservative (and mostly Jewish) intellectuals bullied the administration into a war that served Israel’s interest more than our own. 5. Saddam could not be easily deposed, or at least he could not be successfully replaced with a democratic government. 6. The architects of this war and the subsequent occupation are mostly inept (“dangerously incompetentâ€) — and are exposed daily as clueless by a professional cadre of disinterested journalists. 7. In realist terms, the benefits to be gained from the war will never justify the costs incurred. 8. We cannot win. First, notice how the old criticism that Saddam was not connected to al Qaeda has now morphed into a fallback position that “Saddam was not connected to September 11†— even though the latter argument was never officially advanced as a casus belli. Opponents have retreated to this position because we know that al Qaeda cadres were in Kurdistan, and that al Zarqawi fled to Baghdad, as did a mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin. The Clinton administration in 1998 officially cited Iraqi agents as involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That is part of the reason why the U.S. Senate, not the Bush administration, authorized a war against Saddam in October 2002: “ Whereas members of al-Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq." From the slowly emerging Baathist archives, we are learning that for more than a decade Saddam’s agents had some contacts with, and offered help to, al Qaeda operatives from the Sudan to the Philippines. The issue is closed: Saddam Hussein’s regime had a mutually beneficial association with al Qaeda. All that remains in doubt is the degree to which Iraq’s generic support enabled al Qaeda to pull off operations like September 11. It may be that Saddam and Osama, in their views of Islam and jihad, were as antithetical to one another as Japanese and Germans were in attitudes about racial superiority. But in both cases, rogues find common ground in their opposition to hated Western liberalism Second, we know now that worries over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were both justified and understandable. Postwar interviews with top Iraqi generals reveal that Saddam’s own military assumed that his stockpiles of WMDs were still current — confirming the intelligence estimates from Europe and most of the Arab world. In addition, Iraqi arsenals of WMDs, in the judgment of both the Clinton administration and the United Nations, were still unaccounted for in March 2003. And even if the stocks were moved or destroyed, the prerequisites for the rapid mass-production of biological and chemical agents — petrodollar wealth, scientific expertise, alternate-use facilities, and a will to produce and use them — were met in Saddam’s Iraq. Third, the opposition of the United Nations to the invasion lacks any moral significance, given the postwar revelations that the $50 billion Oil-for-Food scandal not only led to thousands of starved Iraqi civilians, but also enriched both Saddam’s family and U.N. insiders themselves. Europe’s opposition may have seemed ethical, but when one learns of French and Russian oil deals with Saddam, and German construction projects that fortified Saddam’s own Führerbunker, European principle too evaporates into nothing. Fourth, the charge of neocon plotting has now reemerged under a patina of academic respectability in a recent paper by Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Harvard Kennedy School of Government academic dean Stephen Walt. “Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.†At the tip of that Jewish spear was a “band†that was “small,†but of course still “a driving forceâ€: “Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud.†Instead of silly allegations of conspiracy theories, we are lectured ad nauseam that an “Israeli lobby†got us into Iraq. This recrudescence of blaming Israel first is false for a variety of obvious reasons. Likud opposed much of American strategy. That is why Ariel Sharon was hated by his former base — and why there is now a new political party in Israel that suffers the same charge that it caves to American pressures all too easily. And far more influential than Israel in American academia and politics is the role of Gulf State petrodollars and worry over Middle East oil. There is no need for an Israeli lobby in the United States, not when nearly 70 percent of the American people support Israel because it is an atoll of Western democratic values in a sea of theocracy and dictatorship. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice — no Jews there, just plenty of hard-headed veterans who are not easily hoodwinked by supposedly clever Straussians in the shadows. Our point man in Iraq, who prior to the war urged the removal of Saddam Hussein, is Ambassador Zalmay M. Khalilzad — a Muslim and an Afghan-American. And our current general in charge of all American troops at Centcom in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, is an Arab-American. Meanwhile, the U.S. pressured Israel to get out of Gaza, to support elections on the West Bank that led to the victory of Hamas, and to dismantle more settlements. Fifth, after the three-week victory of April 2003, we have now forgotten the earlier prognostications of millions of refugees, oil wells afire, and thousands of dead that were to follow in Iraq. Twenty-three hundred American fatalities are grievous losses, but must be weighed against three successful elections, and the real chance that such sacrifice might result in the first true Arab democracy emerging in Iraq, with ramifications beyond the Middle East for generations to come. Currently, tens of thousands of Iraqis are the only Arabs in the world who daily risk their lives to fight al Qaeda terrorists — something that just may be in America’s interest. Sixth, we have not had another September 11. Two-thirds of the leadership of al Qaeda is dismantled. Fifty million people have voted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria is out of Lebanon. The Middle East is in democratic turmoil from the Gulf to Egypt and Libya, not mired in the old autocratic stasis. The Europeans are waking up to the dangers of Islamism as the Western world seeks to deal with a nuclear Iran. Weigh that success against the behavior of the media that sees mostly American incompetence. At CBS, Dan Rather insisted to us that a clearly forged memo, but one that fit his own ideological agenda, was authentic. Michael Isikoff relied on one anonymous — and unreliable — source about the purported desecration of a Koran that had serious consequences for thousands in the Middle East. CNN’s executive Eason Jordan admitted that his network passed on coverage of a mass-murdering Saddam Hussein — and later he wrongly alleged that the American military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. Now we hear Time Baghdad Bureau Chief Michael Ware, in a drunken, live interview (“In fact, I'm drinking now…I try to stay as drunk for as long as possible while I'm hereâ€) from the heart of dry Muslim Iraq, recklessly throwing around charges that American soldiers are guilty of manhandling Iraqi women (“We've seen allegations that women have been mishandled or roughly handled. That always inflames passionsâ€) and terrorizing civilians (“We've also seen insurgents criticize other insurgent groups, 'cause you're not doing enough to get the chicks out! I mean, that's how important it can be, this is a matter of great honor, and it's a sparkâ€). Ware’s are precisely the lies and fantasies that feed the Islamists. Indeed, the better example of ineptitude in this war lies with the media that demands from others apologies for incompetence that it will never offer itself. Few professions today ask so much of so many others and so very little of themselves. Seventh, we won’t know the ultimate judgment of costs and benefits in Iraq until its parliament convenes and the executive government is formed and operates. If we leave now and a Lebanon follows, then, of course, the invasion was a costly mistake. If we secure the country for a constitutional government that brings freedom, order, and prosperity to its long-suffering people, then it will be the most welcomed global development since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Had the British and Americans quit in 1943 — after Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the Kasserine Pass, Tobruk, and other assorted disasters — then the carnage of 1939 to 1943 would have properly been seen as a tragedy that led not to emergence of a free Europe and a reborn Japan, but as needless sacrifice against the unstoppable juggernaut of Asian and German fascism. As for the eighth complaint that we cannot win (or “the war is lostâ€), the verdict is still in the future and depends mostly on us. Our military cannot be defeated by either the Islamists or their autocratic supporters. We have the right strategy of hunting down terrorists, securing the homeland, and insidiously, but carefully, promoting democratic reform in the Middle East (an impossible notion, by the way, with the sinister presence of an oil rich and genocidal Saddam Hussein, given his history of attacking four of his neighbors.) We have even articulated, at last, an exegesis of the dangers of radical Islam — why it hates Western freedom and how it thrives on the oil, misery, and dictatorship of the Middle East. There remains this last unknown — how well can a liberal democracy, in its greatest age of affluence, leisure, and self-critical reflection, still fight a distant war against emissaries of the Dark Ages who seek to behead apostates, blow up democrats, and silence with death writers, journalists, and cartoonists. It is not just our democratic values versus their IEDs, but whether our idealism still has the resilience to defeat their nihilism. Or put more directly: Can Western enlightenment and power, embedded in deep cynicism, still prevail over ignorance and self-inflicted pathology energized by fanaticism? — Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Taliban Man at Yale The story thus far. John Fund Thursday, March 23, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student. The three backers of the foundation that, along with Yale, is subsidizing Mr. Hashemi's tuition have told the Yale Daily News that they are withdrawing their support. But the university remains mute and paralyzed. "The intelligentsia haven't told Yalies what to think yet, because even they haven't made up their minds," says Daniel Gelernter, a Yale freshman whose father is a Yale professor. He clearly has: He calls the Taliban "an evil and macabre terrorist group. . . . The fact that Hashemi didn't do actual killing does not absolve him. Goebbels didn't shoot anyone either." Universities are places where free inquiry, debate and information sharing are supposed to be guiding lights. In reality, the ivory towers too often now resemble dark castles, which raise their drawbridges at the first hint of criticism or scrutiny. Never has the moat separating elite universities from the rest of America been wider than in the case of Yale's Taliban Man. In justifying its grant of a place to Mr. Hashemi, Yale has cited his approval by the State Department. And Yale's sole official statement says it hopes "his courses help him understand the broader context for the conflicts that led to the creation of the Taliban and to its fall. . . . Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding." That justification is unsettling to two women who will join voices at Yale tonight. Natalie Healy lost her Navy SEAL son Dan in Afghanistan last year when a Taliban rocket hit his helicopter. Ms. Healy, who notes that her son had four children of his own, is appalled at Yale's new student. "Lots of people could benefit from a Yale education, so why reward this man who was part of the group that killed Dan?" she told me. "I want to tell [Yale President] Richard Levin that his not allowing ROTC on campus is one thing, but welcoming a former member of the Taliban is deeply insulting to families who have children fighting them right now." Ten days ago Ms. Healy met Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan's parliament, when she spoke near her home in Exeter, N.H. Tonight, Ms. Joya will speak at Yale on behalf of the Afghan Women's Mission. She is appalled that many people have forgotten the crimes of the Taliban, and was surprised to hear that Mr. Hashemi, who, like her, is 27 years old, is attending Yale. "He should apologize to my people and expose what he and others did under the Taliban," she told me. "He knew very well what criminal acts they committed; he was not too young to know. It would be better if he faced a court of justice than be a student at Yale University." Mr. Hashemi probably won't be attending Ms. Joya's lecture tonight. He has dodged reporters for three weeks, ever since his presence at Yale was revealed in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Some claim he has fully repented his Taliban past, but in his sole recent interview--with the Times of London--he acknowledged he'd done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," attributing that to his disgust with the textbooks: "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda." At the same time, Mr. Hashemi won't explain an essay he wrote late last year in which he called Israel "an American al Qaeda" aimed at the Arab world. When asked about the Taliban's public executions in Kabul's soccer stadium, he quipped: "There were also executions happening in Texas." Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn't look more closely into his curriculum vitae. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department's door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale's decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi's caliber apply but "we lost him to Harvard" and "I didn't want that to happen again." Mr. Shaw won't return phone calls now, but emails he's exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking. The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics." Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students. He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin." Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks." But there may be one other source of worry for Yale. Mr. Hashemi told the New York Times that he will apply next month for sophomore status in Yale's full-degree program starting next fall. An admissions official told me Yale's plan all along was to do just that if his grades were acceptable. But next week, Yale will mail out 19,300 rejection letters to those who applied to be in its class of 2010. "I can't imagine it'll be easy for Yale to convince those it rejects that the Taliban student isn't taking a place they could have had," a former Yale administrator told me. Former Yale president Benno Schmidt says admitting Mr. Hashemi is an exercise in "amorality and cynicism." He told me that "diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations." It's not as if Yale can't muster moral indignation. Yale is divesting from Sudan, responding to pressure from student activists and labor unions. But when it comes to a former Taliban official, there is a desire to move on. A case in point is Amy Aaland, executive director of Yale's Slifka Center for Jewish Life, where Mr. Hashemi takes his meals (Kosher complies with Islamic dietary laws). When I asked her if any of the revelations about his past disturb her, she noted that he was "very, very young" when he had been a Taliban official, and that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country." I asked about the Taliban's decree in May 2001 that all non-Muslims--chiefly Hindus--had to wear yellow badges. The order, reminiscent of the Nazis, was met with global censure. A reporter then in Kabul recalls Mr. Hashemi had no trouble defending the decree as a protection for minorities against punishment by the religious police "until I pointed out it also required non-Muslims to move out of housing they shared with Muslims within three days; he didn't have a coherent response to that." Ms. Aaland absorbed all that I told her, and replied: "I don't expect learning to happen overnight." She still thought that "just living here, [Mr. Hashemi] can learn values and ideals from our society." There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale "went nearly unchallenged." He concluded that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.

Foreign Exchange Why did Yale slam the door on Afghan women? Friday, March 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST A statement from Yale University, defending its decision to admit former Taliban spokesman Ramatullah Hashemi, explained that he had "escaped the wreckage of Afghanistan." To anyone who is aware of the Taliban's barbaric treatment of the Afghan people, such words are offensive--as if Mr. Hashemi were not himself part of the wrecking crew. It is even more disturbing to learn that, while Mr. Hashemi sailed through Yale's admissions process, the school turned down the opportunity to enroll women who really did escape the wreckage of Afghanistan. In 2002, Yale received a letter from Paula Nirschel, the founder of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. The purpose of the organization, begun in that year, was to match young women in post-Taliban Afghanistan to U.S. colleges, where they could pursue a degree. Ms. Nirschel asked Yale if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined. Yale was not alone. Of the more than 2,000 schools contacted by Mrs. Nirschel, only three signed up right away: Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, Notre Dame College in New Hampshire and the University of Montana, Missoula. Four years later, the program enrolls 20 students at 10 universities, listed in the table nearby. Not Yale Schools participating in the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women Duke University, N.C. Juniata College, Pa. Kennesaw State University, Ga. Middlebury College, Vt. Montclair State University, N.J. Mount Holyoke College, Mass. Roger Williams University, R.I. Simmons College, Mass. University of Montana, Missoula University of Richmond, Va. Mrs. Nirschel, it should be noted, had an "in" at Roger Williams. Her husband, Roy, is the president. Mr. Nirschel recalls that after 9/11 his wife mourned not only for the American victims but for the people of Afghanistan, whose brutal regime had helped to sponsor al Qaeda. Mr. Nirschel admits that his first reaction, upon hearing his wife's concern, was to say that they should just give to a charity. But Mrs. Nirschel asked whether he, as university president, could give a scholarship to an Afghan woman instead. He was doubtful at first about the practicality of the idea but eventually agreed. "My wife can be very persuasive," he told us. Mrs. Nirschel, who has been a homemaker for most of the past three decades, set up the program to find suitable college-ready candidates and pay their travel expenses to the U.S. But the colleges themselves were asked to cover tuition, room and board. Mrs. Nirschel did not want the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women to be treated as a chance to "escape." The program requires that its students return to Afghanistan each summer to work for an organization involved in rebuilding the country. And they must go home at the end of their four years in the U.S. Aren't the students tempted to remain in this land of plenty? Nadima Sahar, who will graduate from Roger Williams in May with a political science degree, says: "Staying here has never crossed my mind. . . . We are responsible for making sure our country succeeds, so that future generations don't face problems we did." Mrs. Nirschel expects a "trickle-down effect." The returning students will "influence their family, their community and the country at large." Clearly there is more going on here than the usual search for campus "diversity." These women require no remedial classes, by the way. They come prepared, many having huddled in basements secretly imbibing what information they could from male relatives or having lived in Pakistani refugee camps to gain access to schools. Not one of them has a GPA below 3.5. Arezo Kohistani, now attending Roger Williams, tells us that she had planned to major in journalism. But she changed her focus when several reporters were assassinated in Afghanistan during her first semester. Stories like this remind us that her country has a long road ahead. The graduates of the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women will surely help to speed it along the way.

Today Tehran, Tomorrow the World What's at stake in the dispute over Iranian nukes? Ultimately, human survival By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Posted Sunday, Mar. 26, 2006 Like many physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman could not get the Bomb out of his mind after the war. "I would see people building a bridge," he wrote. "And I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless." Feynman was convinced man had finally invented something that he could not control and that would ultimately destroy him. For six decades we have suppressed that thought and built enough history to believe Feynman's pessimism was unwarranted. After all, soon afterward, the most aggressive world power, Stalin's Soviet Union, acquired the Bomb, yet never used it. Seven more countries have acquired it since and never used it either. Even North Korea, which huffs and puffs and threatens every once in a while, dares not use it. Even Kim Jong Il is not suicidal. But that's the point. We're now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power. We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran's newest rulers. Then again, we don't understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant "Death to America"--and Denmark(!)--and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom. This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new--medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects--but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends. That is why Iran's arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi'ism's version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for "those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink ... as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive" his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution's raison d'être is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame? Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients. That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman's vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism--a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom. Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay. Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps--referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment. Our planet is 4,500,000,000 years old, and we've had nukes for exactly 61. No one knows the precise prospects for human extinction, but Feynman was a mathematical genius who knew how to calculate odds. If he were to watch us today about to let loose the agents of extinction, he'd call a halt to all bridge building.

TALIBAN AT YALE - AND HARVARD? March 31, 2006 -- MAYBE Yale isn't the only elite university with a "Tali ban Man" problem. Yale is taking flak for making a student out of an ex-Taliban spokesman. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi once toured America defending the hideous regime that pulled out women's fingernails for the "crime" of wearing nail polish. The Taliban also barred girls from school, banned women from working, stoned adulterers to death and used its soccer stadium for mass executions. In a scene that landed in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," Rahmatullah confronted an American woman who'd showed up to protest his speech wearing the burqa imposed by the Taliban on Afghan women - a head-to-toe sacklike garment with just an eye slit: "I'm really sorry to your husband. He might have a very difficult time with you," gibed Rahmatullah. Nice to know what earns you Yale entry these days. The New York Times Magazine first revealed Taliban Man's sweetheart deal with Yale a month ago. Richard Shaw, the Yale dean who decided that Rahmatullah was Yale material, bizarrely invoked the school's historic rival to explain it, telling the Times that Yale's admissions office once had "another foreigner of Rahmatullah's caliber" apply for special-student status but "We lost him to Harvard. I didn't want that to happen again." So, is it true that Harvard also accepted a Taliban-style student - a high official from an outlaw regime? Shaw, now Stanford University's admissions dean, won't say. He has gone deep inside the bunker. The recorded message in his office says his assistant will return calls - but detailed messages asking if he'd truly claimed to have lost a Taliban-type applicant to Harvard drew no callback. Yale is also mum. It took spokesman Tom Conroy two days to come up with a non-answer - he refused to say whether Yale has any records to back up Shaw's claim. "If [shaw] said he lost an applicant that he wanted to Harvard, I'm sure he was telling the truth," was all Conroy would say. Meanwhile, as The Wall Street Journal revealed last week, Yale has declined to admit Afghan women who were Taliban victims: It snubbed a request from the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women (IEAW.org), which brings Afghan women to U.S. colleges. Conroy, the Yale spokesman, declined to say why Rahmatullah - whose formal education ended in fourth grade - was somehow more qualified or deserving than those women. What about Harvard? You might think the college would be eager to deny Shaw's charge - to insist that it would of course reject a student whose prime "qualification" was working for one of the most odious regimes on the face of the earth. Wrong. It took Harvard four days to come up with its weasel words. Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman Bob Mitchell finally returned a call - at the direction of university spokesman Joe Wrinn. But Mitchell adamantly refused to answer, claiming it would violate university policy to say if Harvard had admitted a Taliban-type applicant. "I can't say anything. We do not discuss applicants," Mitchell said, sounding peeved that he'd even had to return the call. Which wasn't a total surprise. Both Yale and Harvard - indeed, many if not most elite U.S. universities - seem to feel they aren't answerable to anyone, that anyone who questions them has unmitigated gall. For example, when a few Yale grads publicly complained about the admissio of Taliban Man, an assistant director of fundraising at Yale Law School sent them an angry e-mail suggesting they're "retarded." Harvard's stonewall leaves us with no clear answer on whether it also admitted a Taliban type. But it is clear is that Harvard, like Yale, feels there's nothing shameful about admitting a Taliban Man. Also like Yale, Harvard hasn't seen fit to admit one of the Afghan women. (Among those that have are Duke, Mt. Holyoke and New Jersey's Montclair State University.) The good news is that those 20 Afghan women are doing well at 10 colleges across America, even though the Ivy League couldn't be bothered to admit them. All have averages of at least 3.5. At Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, two Afghan women tutored high school students as part of their community service. Imagine - women who Rahmatullah's Taliban wanted to bar from school are now helping American kids learn to read. Meanwhile, America's most elite schools prefer to educate the enemy. Deborah Orin, The Post's Washington bureau chief, is a Harvard grad.

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Yale’s Taliban: defending the indefensible, part I Mar 30, 2006 by Clinton W. Taylor Yale is in a dilemma. It made a huge, indefensible blunder when it admitted the senior advisor to Mullah Omar as a special student, and now it’s taking hits from students, from alumni, and from the media. How can Yale spin its way out of this one? They have at their fingertips an invaluable resource, someone who made a career of defending the indefensible. In fact, this PR flack extraordinaire was so successful that he was reportedly on the fast track to become the Taliban’s next foreign minister. Unfortunately for Yale, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi isn’t talking. Others are taking up for Yale, but the results aren’t convincing anyone. Let’s take a look at some of the excuses offered on Yale’s behalf. The Non-partisan Defense Yale officials don’t like all the politics surrounding Mr. Rahmatullah’s admission. According to Yale Herald reporter Yotam Barkai, who interviewed some of Yale’s brass, they “believe that alumni donations should not be used as a form of political activism.†“Oftentimes, the people who are most generous understand the University well and they know that we are an educational, not a political institution,†Yale’s Vice President for Development Inge Reichenbach told the Herald. Yale College Dean Peter Salovey added, “What is remarkable about our alumni is they continue to be generous even when something happens on campus with which they might not agree.†Funny, because I believe that college admissions should not be “used as a form of political activismâ€. Especially political activism that supports our enemy’s officials during a live, shooting war. In fact, it takes an amazing degree of gall for Yale administrators to make such a blatantly political admissions decision, and then to blame the alumni for politicizing the process. The Jim Sleeper Defense Yale lecturer in Political Science Jim Sleeper has hinted darkly that there is some intelligence/CIA angle on the Boola Boola Mullah’s presence at Yale. In an open letter to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who has been doggedly investigating this issue, Sleeper urges him: W]hy don’t you look a little more deeply than you did into the provenance and motives of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi’s patron Mike Hoover, who commended him to Yale's admissions office? Why don’t you ask if Rahmatullah's enrollment was facilitated less by the "diversity" ethos than by yet another of Yale conservatives' recent, bumbling efforts to revive the university's old conduit to national intelligence and to framing grandiose "grand strategies?" First, if Mr. Sleeper has some reason to believe that is the case, it is a dreadfully irresponsible charge to make. If Mr. Rahmatullah were being groomed to be a CIA asset, Mr. Sleeper’s braying about it can only serve to compromise his mission. But whether or not there is an intelligence angle to this story, the mere rumor that Mr. Rahmatullah is some sort of spy will endanger his life when he does return to Afghanistan—and unlike Valerie Plame Wilson, there is every reason to think Mr. Rahmatullah will be going abroad once more. Regardless of Mr. Rahmatullah’s true status, he has been branded an American intelligence asset now. The irony of Mr. Sleeper’s accusations is that they are almost certainly baseless. Granted, Yale has historically had links to the intelligence community—detailed thoroughly in Robin Winks’ book Cloak and Gown—but the notion that CIA agents are parachuting into Mazar-e-Sharif with briefcases full of Yale acceptance letters, passing them out to willing defectors and warlords, does not pass the smell test. Having worked in Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions for three and a half years, I can say pretty confidently that the idea is ludicrous. Yale’s admissions office is not interested in accommodating the CIA’s nation-building ventures. Besides which, if this was some sort of spook deal, why would Mr. Rahmatullah suddenly start interviewing for a long, smoochy biopic in the New York Times Magazine? Why would then-Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw pop up in the interview as well? And why would the fellow who brought him to America, CBS cameraman and stuntman Mike Hoover, show up to defend him on Fox News, or brag about his two CIA debriefs to Outside Magazine in 1996? Sleeper claims that Hoover has contacts at the CIA. Hoover also quite obviously has contacts to the Taliban, since he was able to operate in Afghanistan under their reign and even—perhaps as a quid pro quo, as with CNN’s Eason Jordan?—arranged Rahmatullah’s 2001 tour of the United States, which was an extended apologia for how the Taliban made the trains run on time. Yet just because of those contacts, no one on the left would seriously entertain the thought that Mr. Hoover some sort of Taliban mole. I don’t either; I simply think Mr. Hoover and his compatriots at the International Education Foundation are simply besotted by a one-world faith that educating the Taliban will magically solve all our problems. In fact, that is the next defense I’d like to address. The Alan Colmes Defense Fox News’ Alan Colmes asked me, liberal Yale alum (and Rahmatullah opposer) Christina Bost-Seaton, and Natalie Healy, mother of a SEAL killed in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the same question: isn’t this guy better off at Yale than he would be in a madrassa? He even asked Healy, “You don't want him back there with them [the Taliban] killing them [our children], do you?†What is fascinating about the Colmes defense is his presumption that but for the grace of a Yale education, Mr. Rahmatullah would be toting an RPG through Waziristan, picking off American troops. Mr. Colmes, usually a reasonable sort of liberal, apparently sees some danger in Mr. Rahmatullah that the rest of us do not (as I’ve said from the beginning, I don’t think he’s a terrorist, but merely an apologist for them). But if Mr. Colmes honestly believes that Mr. Rahmatullah is that close to snapping and becoming a terrorist, he should be arguing that the place for him is certainly not at Yale, but in detention. In any case, education is important, but it is not magic. Exposure to a liberal arts curriculum—even to a “great books†curriculum—broadens minds, changes lives in unpredictable ways, and makes better citizens, but it cannot transform a hardened jihadist into a civic-minded scoutmaster. For someone with an open mind, it might make a difference, but Mr. Rahmatullah is a Taliban ideologue, and as he has said at USC in 2001, “For the Taliban, ideology is everything.†Ironically, those who scoff at neoconservative efforts to democratize the Middle East are all about democratizing Mr. Rahmatullah. Somehow they think that discussing Diderot over calzones at Yorkside Pizza will overcome the murderous ideology that he helped manufacture and articulate, and that he was still defending on September 12, 2001. Yale couldn’t even succeed in making me into a liberal, though it took off a few rough edges. Does anyone think Yale could do any better for someone who proudly told reporters why Christian missionaries must be tried—and possibly face capital punishment—for proselytizing? Does this sound like someone open to the give-and-take of academic discourse? It may succeed in smoothing out his delivery a bit, but given that we are in a shooting war with his regime, how can that be a good thing? There is more defense of the indefensible going on. The Good Lord and Townhall’s editors willing, I will post part two of this column in a day or two, answering the rest of the Boola Boola Mullah’s defenders. Clint Taylor is a '96 Yale alumnus.

Wow....... March 28, 2006, 7:28 a.m. Iran Is at War with Us Someone should tell the U.S. government. Michaell Ledeen Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dying of cancer. But he is convinced that his legacy will be glorious. He believes that thousands of his Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers effectively control southern Iraq, and that the rest of the country is at his mercy, since we present no challenge to them — even along the Iraq/Iran border, where they operate with impunity. They calmly plan their next major assault without having to worry about American retribution. The mullahs have thousands of intelligence officers all over Iraq, as well as a hard core of Hezbollah terrorists — including the infamous Imadh Mughniyah, arguably the region’s most dangerous killer — and they control the major actors, from Zarqawi to Sadr to the Badr Brigades. Khamenei and his top cronies believe they have effectively won. They think the U.S. is politically paralyzed, thanks to the relentless attacks of President Bush’s opponents and the five-year long internal debate about Iran policy, and thus there is no chance of an armed attack, even one limited to nuclear sites. They think Israel is similarly paralyzed by Sharon’s sudden departure and the triumph of their surrogate force, Hamas, in the Palestinian elections. They despise the Europeans, and hardly even bother to pretend to negotiate with them any more. They believe they have a strong strategic alliance with the Russians and they think they have the Chinese over a barrel, since the Chinese are so heavily dependent on Iranian oil. Recent statements from Beijing and Moscow regarding the chance of U.N. sanctions will have reinforced the Supreme Leader’s convictions. Hapless in the Beltway Above all, Khamenei believes he has broken the American will, for which he sees two pieces of evidence. The first is that there seems to be very little American resolve to do anything about punishing Iran for the enormous traffic of weapons, poisons, and terrorists into Iraq from Iran. Khamenei must inclined to believe that the Bush administration has no stomach for confrontation. We have done nothing to make the mullahs’ lives more difficult, even though there is abundant evidence for Iranian involvement in Iraq, most including their relentless efforts to kill American soldiers. The evidence consists of first-hand information, not intelligence reports. Scores of Iranian intelligence officers have been arrested, and some have confessed. Documentary evidence of intimate Iranian involvement with Iraqi terrorists has been found all over Iraq, notably in Fallujah and Hilla. But the "intelligence" folks at the Pentagon, led by the hapless Secretary Stephen Cambone, seem to have no curiosity, as if they were afraid of following the facts to their logical conclusion: Iran is at war with us. In early March, to take one recent example, several vehicles crossed from Iranian Kurdistan into Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iraqis stopped them. There was a firefight. The leader of the intruding group was captured and is now in prison, held by one of the Kurdish factions. The Kurds say that the vehicles contained poison gas, which they have in their possession. They say they informed the Turks, who said they did not want to know anything about it (the Turks don’t want anything to do with the Kurds, period, and they shrink from confrontation with the mullahs). The Kurds holding this man say that he confessed to working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Apparently they have his confession. They say they are willing to make him available to U.S. military personnel. But the Pentagon, which has all this information, has not pursued the matter. This is just one of many cases in which the Iranians believe they see the Americans running away from confrontation. The second encouraging sign for Khamenei is the barely concealed delight in Washington, including Secretary Rice’s recent statement at a press conference, that we will soon be negotiating with Iran about Iraq. This mission has been entrusted to Ambassador Khalilzad, who previously worked with the Iranians when he represented us in Kabul. It is a bad decision, and it is very hard to explain. The best one can say is that Khalilzad speaks Farsi, so he will know what they are saying, and it is probably better to have public dealings than the secret contacts this administration has been conducting all along. But those small bright spots do not compensate for the terrible costs the very announcement of negotiations produces for us, for the Iranian people, and for the region as a whole. Talk Does Not Thwart Iran has been at war with us for 27 years, and we have discussed every imaginable subject with them. We have gained nothing, because there is nothing to be gained by talking with an enemy who thinks he is winning. From Khamenei’s standpoint, the only thing to be negotiated is the terms of the American surrender, and he is certainly not the only Middle Eastern leader to take this view; most of the leaders in the region dread the power of the mullahs — now on the doorstep of nuclear military weapons — and they see the same picture as Khamenei: America does nothing to thwart Iran, and is now publicly willing to talk. In like manner, many Iranians will conclude that Bush is going to make a deal with Khamenei instead of giving them the support they want and need to challenge the regime. If this administration were true to its announced principles, we would be actively supporting democratic revolution in Iran, but we do not seem to be serious about doing that. Yes, Secretary Rice went to Congress to ask for an extra $75 million to "support democracy" in Iran, but the small print shows that the first $50 million will go to the toothless tigers at the Voice of America and other official American broadcasters, which is to say to State Department employees. The Foreign Service does not often drive revolutionary movements; its business is negotiating with foreign governments, not subverting them. There were whispers that we were supporting trade unions in Iran, which would be very good news, but such efforts should be handled by private-sector organizations, not by the American government per se. Yet this seems a particularly good moment to rally to the side of the Iranian people, who are known to loathe the regime of Ayatollah Khamenei, and who are showing their will to resist in very dramatic fashion. About ten days ago, seventy-eight regime officials were killed or captured in Baluchistan when a convoy (including the chief of the region’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and the regional governor) was attacked. Some of the captives have been shown on al-Jazeera, pleading for cooperation from the regime, and supporting their captors’ demands that five Baluchi prisoners be freed. The regime has responded by accusing the United States and Britain of masterminding the operation, which is the second such strike in the past six months. In addition to calling for the release of Baluchi prisoners, the insurgents are calling for the toleration of Baluchi Sunnis, the appointment of locals (instead of Persian Shiites) to govern the region, and the use of local radio and television. Caring about Carnage The situation in Kurdistan is likewise extremely tense. The city of Mahabad is now surrounded by the regime’s military and paramilitary forces, following the eruption of anti-regime demonstrations on the occasion of Persian New Year’s celebrations on March 20. It is impossible to get precise figures — Western journalists don’t seem to be able to cover such events — but dozens of Kurds were arrested and many more were beaten up in the streets. Worst of all is the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing directed against the Ahwaz Arabs in Khuzestan, where up to three divisions of the army, the Revolutionary Guards, and the infamous thugs of the Basij have been deployed, following the sabotage of a major oil pipeline by anti-regime dissidents. Radio Farda, our official Farsi-language station, quoted a local journalist, Mr. Mojtaba Gehestani, who says that 28,000 Ahwazi Arabs have been jailed in the past ten months, hundreds have been summarily executed, and many corpses have been fished out of the Karoon River, with telltale marks of torture. Nonetheless, the regime’s interior minister recently announced that there is no "ethnic problem or issue" in Iran today. But he has quite clearly failed to convince President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that all is well. The president cancelled trips to the region four times in the past few months. He and his cronies have a lot to worry about, because the Iranian people, in the face of a vicious wave of repression that recalls the worst moments of this dreadful regime, are showing themselves prepared to stand against it, and to move to remove it. Lacking a full picture, we should base our judgment at least in part on the behavior of the mullahs, and their dispatch of so many armed forces to three different regions suggests they are profoundly worried. This is not a good time to throw the mullahs a diplomatic lifeline. We should instead show them and their democratic enemies that the tide of history is running against them. It’s time to take action against Iran and its half-brother Syria, for the carnage they have unleashed against us and the Iraqis. We know in detail the location of terrorist training camps run by the Iranian and Syrian terror masters; we should strike at them, and at the bases run by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards as staging points for terrorist sorties into Iraq. No doubt the Iraqi armed forces would be delighted to participate, instead of constantly playing defense in their own half of the battlefield. And there are potent democratic forces among the Syrian people as well, as worthy of our support as the Iranians. Once the mullahs and their terrorist allies see that we have understood the nature of this war, that we are determined to promote regime change in Tehran and Damascus, and will not give them a pass on their murderous activities in Iraq, then it might make sense to talk to Khamenei’s representatives. We could even expand the agenda from Iraqi matters to the real issue: we could negotiate their departure, and then turn to the organization of national referenda on the form of free governments, and elections to empower the former victims of a murderous and fanatical tyranny that has deluded itself into believing that it is invincible.

The Sino-Russian strategic romance Mar 27, 2006 by Peter Brookes ( bio | archive | contact ) A blossoming Sino-Russian romance is undercutting U.S. global interests on an unprecedented scale. But the relationship is about more than balancing American predominance in the post-9/11 world--Russia and China have their eyes on restraining European and Japanese power, too. A failure to connect the seemingly scattered dots of Russian-Chinese cooperation--and recognize its hazards--could put Moscow and Beijing's power-hungry potentates in distasteful positions of increasing advantage over the U.S., its friends and allies. Just look at the U.N., where Russia and China are hampering U.S. and European Union-led efforts to address Iran's nuclear program. While Iran was reported to the Security Council weeks ago, little progress has been made in, even, condemning Tehran, much less imposing economic sanctions. No surprise: Neither Moscow nor Beijing want to bully their buddy, Tehran. They've way too much at stake. China has billions invested in Iran's oil/gas fields; Russia wants to make its own billions in reprocessing Iranian reactor fuel. Both sell millions in advanced weapons to Iran. In Beijing, China hosts the Six-Party Talks (i.e., U.S., Russia, China, Japan, North/South Korea), aimed at containing and rolling back Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Years of diplomatic chitchat have yielded almost nothing due to Russian/Chinese unwillingness to squeeze the defiant North Koreans. While North Korea may be an annoying, needy country cousin for Russia and China, neither minds that it causes nuclear-strength heartburn for Washington, exacerbating festering U.S.-South Korean alliance problems. China certainly doesn't lose sleep over North Korean missiles bore-sighted on Japan, either. The Sino-Russian strategic parallelism is also exemplified by their blatant, anti-American call for the closure of U.S. bases in Central Asia (used for Afghan ops), succeeding in Uzbekistan, but falling short in Kyrgyzstan. Last summer, Russia and China conducted their first-ever joint military exercises, which included 10,000 military, intelligence and internal security forces. Both capitals claimed the drills weren't aimed at any country-not that anyone in the U.S., Taiwan or Japan believed that... Russia and China also meet annually for bilateral military and technical cooperation talks. Rumors abound that at the Beijing meeting last December, plans were laid for another series of joint military exercises later this year. Of course, Russia is fueling China's military buildup. In addition to billions of dollars in advanced submarines, fighters, destroyers and missiles, Beijing recently purchased strategic aircraft from Russia for troop movement, air-to-air refueling and AWACS-type duties. Moreover, China and Russia have been cooperating on foreign and military intelligence since the early 1990s, and both are growing counterintelligence problems for the U.S., Europe and Japan, especially against high-tech and military targets. Facilitated by the end of Cold War-era travel restrictions, Chinese and Russian spooks see open societies as easy pickings. According to the FBI, China is now America's greatest spy threat. But Russian intel operations--under Russian President Vladimir Putin (a former KGB Colonel)--are at an all-time, post-Berlin Wall high, too. In fact, just last week, the Pentagon claimed Russia gave U.S. war plans and troop movements to the Iraqis. Chinese espionage rings have also been exposed in Europe; Russia redoubled its efforts there in recent years. With the presence of U.S. forces (of interest to Beijing and Moscow), an advanced scientific-technical base and weak espionage laws, Japan is a spy's happy hunting ground. In a match made in heaven, just last week, the world's second largest energy producer (i.e., Russia, after Saudi Arabia) signed a slew of energy deals with the world's second largest energy consumer (i.e., China, after the U.S.), including building a 3,000 kilometer-long gas pipeline. The pacts allow Beijing, now the world's fourth biggest economy, to feed its insatiable energy appetite, while competing with energy-poor Japan for access to Russian oil/gas resources. For Russia, China will decrease their dependence on the demanding, increasingly "Green" European market. On balance, everything isn't completely rosy between the two capitals: There are trade frictions, mass Chinese migration into resource-wealthy Siberia, latent Russian concerns about China's growing military muscle and a budding Russo-Japanese rapprochement. Sure, China and Russia aren't perfect strategic partners. But, their concerns about American global power, EU/NATO expansion, more Orange/Rose/Tulip revolutions and Japan's higher international profile, are encouraging the long-time rivals to give each other a second look. Regrettably, neither power is just interested in geopolitical balancing. Putin's Russia is nostalgic for its Soviet glory days; President Hu Jintao's China wants to restore the all-powerful Middle Kingdom. For the moment, neither country at the top of the international order is in the interest of the U.S., its friends or allies.

Moscow spies tipped Saddam on U.S. war plan By Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES March 25, 2006 Moscow had informants inside U.S. Central Command whose information on the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was relayed to dictator Saddam Hussein days before American troops ousted him from power, according to a Defense Department history released yesterday. And, as U.S. troops encircled Baghdad in April, Russia's ambassador fed information from Moscow's intelligence service to Saddam's regime regarding U.S. troop movements. The new disclosures show that Moscow was working against the Bush administration in private, as it opposed in public the U.S. desire for a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing the invasion. The report was produced in book form by U.S. Forces Command, which studies "lessons learned" in military operations. This document, however, focused not on American units, but on how Saddam, his regime and military prepared for the March 19, 2003, attack and tried to blunt it. Titled "Iraqi Perspective Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom From Saddam's Senior Leadership," it is based largely on postwar interviews and seized documents. It is in one of those documents that the Iraqis told of spies inside U.S. Central Command, which planned and executed the invasion. "The information that the Russians have collected from their sources inside the American Central Command in Doha [Qatar] is that the United States is convinced that occupying Iraqi cities are impossible, and that they have changed their tactic," states the Iraq intelligence report. Another part states, "Jordan had accepted the American 4th Mechanized Infantry Division." Although U.S. forces did avoid occupying towns and cities on the march to Baghdad, they did enter Tikrit, Mosul and other large cities. But as for Jordan, the 4th Infantry Division never docked there, instead traveling by sea to Kuwait. The Forces Command report offered no information on whether Central Command ever identified and purged the spies. The report also tells of a seized memorandum from Iraqi's Foreign Ministry. The memo said Russia's ambassador was relaying intelligence reports to Saddam aides, including one memo that stated that allied forces would not enter Baghdad until the 4th Infantry Division arrived. That turned out to be false. In other report findings: • ?The regime planned to restart production of weapons of mass destruction. It continued to hide scientists from U.N. inspectors right up to the time U.N. inspectors left and the war began. A seized Dec. 15, 2002, memo, written by an Iraqi intelligence agent posing as a U.N. escort, states, "Inside Bader WMD inspection site, there are Russian and Turkish scientists. When we visited the site, they were forced to hide from inspectors' eyes." And, Saddam continued to tell his commanders he still had such weapons. "For him, there were real dividends to be gained by letting his enemies believe he possessed WMD, whether it was true or not," the report said. • The quickly assembled air strike on one of Saddam's residences, Dora Farms, in pre-dawn March 19, 2003, never had a chance of succeeding. Saddam had not stayed there since 1995. • There was no evidence that Saddam or his top aides planned the insurgency, now in its fourth year; in fact, Saddam was sure the Americans would never advance on Baghdad. "There were no national plans to transition to a guerrilla war in the event of military defeat," the report states. This fact helps explain why commanders did not predict, nor plan for, the robust insurgency and al Qaeda terrorists now spreading violence. Saddam's misguided belief that he would stay in power in 2003 was fed by the support he got from France and Russia, his top aide, Tariq Aziz, told U.S. investigators. "France and Russia each secure millions of dollars worth of trade and service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraqi," Mr. Aziz said. "In addition, the French wanted sanctions lifted to safeguard their trade and service contracts in Iraq."