Haecceity

Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt.
Ah, Christian compassion is alive and well.

“The Project for the New American Century” has been reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website. A single employee has been left to wrap things up.

A more glorious lead sentence has never been written about the Project, which basically created and nurtured the neo-con view of the world, and the policies of the current presidency - 8 signatories have been senior members of the administration.
The Project is apparently going the way of Republicans across America with some fantastic backstabbing…. Kenneth Adelman, one of the signatories of the Project (and considered to be a member of its pro-war faction - a pretty terrifying concept, given the hawkish tendencies of the Project in general) and a member of the Defense Policy Board, has gone from

“I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

to

“I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.
They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

in just four years.
Sadly, this isn’t the death knell sounding for neo-conservatism - but it’s always nice to see its edifices crumbling, even just a little.
Merry Christmas!

Both of these come via Newshog; the first is a very interesting article from NBC talking about the ”unprecedented cooperation and coordination” between US and UK officials; unprecedented in this case appears to mean ”arguing all the way to the police station”, but this is just according to one unnamed UK official, so possibly a pinch of salt required. The article goes on to mention in passing the arrest of the ringleader, Rashid Rauf, in Pakistan, apparently causing another disagreement between the US and the UK over choice of jurisdiction - which some are linking to the possibility of torture.

There are some fantastic quotes in the NBC article, regarding the timing and actual preparedness of the “attack”, especially that ”the suspects in Britain had obtained at least some of the materials for the explosive but had not yet actually prepared or mixed it.” and that ”the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.”. All this added up begins to bring serious doubt as to the actual danger represented by the terrorists, and also raises the question of what a more “hands-off” - not arresting the suspects, but allowing them to continue their preparations longer - approach to monitoring and intelligence gathering would have resulted in.

The second is interesting in its own right - Max Hastings - friend of Lady Thatcher, dyed in the wool Conservatist - writing for the Guardian - left/liberal and proud of the fact - leads his article with “George Bush sometimes sounds more like the Mahdi, preaching jihad against infidels, than the leader of a western democracy”

(edited to link to Wikipedia’s conservative party page.)

The “foiled” terrorist attack looks suspiciously like an attack on the underlying system, rather than an actual attempt to blow planes up - it’s almost laughable that terrorists in this day and age could hope to get explosive devices onto planes in hand luggage.

If we decide that the terrorists aren’t stupid, the attack begins to look decidedly different. They’ve succeeded in causing absolute chaos in one of the busiest weekends in the british airline calendar, the effects of which will probably drag on for a few days. If you wanted to be really nasty, they’ve also caused a large number of people to be trapped in one place, and extremely vulnerable to attack. The BBC report says Heathrow Terminal 1 is “jam packed”.

I suspect that a terrorist organisation will look at something like this as relatively cheap, too - 18 peons arrested, sure, but we know they can afford the manpower and they’ve once again demonstrated that the air travel infrastructure our society is so reliant on is extremely fragile and vulnerable.

I feel obligated to blog this - I wish someone would pay me the best part of half a million US dollars of public money to investigate blogging…

Essentially they’re Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush.

John Robb asks a relatively obvious question that I’ve not seen elsewhere - was he hiding, or had he been stashed there by a third party in the hope of his being useful later in the game?
To me, it seems like it’s going to be an interesting question to answer, especially given how bad Saddam looks in the photos the Americans have released.
I wonder, however, how this capture will be seen by the iraqi-on-the-street - while I have no doubt that eventually their quality of life has to improve - they still have comparitively good natural resources which are in strong demand in the west - I also think that until the US stops treating them in the same way us Brits treated India and Africa in the 19th century, there will always be resistance and fighting. Because no nation likes being turned into a vassal state by a country with fundamentally alien cultural mores.

So following Jaldhar’s link, I had a go at the Political Compass.
I was pretty much where I expected to be: Social Libertarian/Economic Left.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -5.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.82