Here’s a statement to ponder (no fair reading the source first):

The Madrid railway bombings were perceived by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to have advanced their cause. Al Qaeda may perceive that a large-scale attack in the United States this summer or fall would lead to similar consequences.

That, to me, reads pretty much like a statement of fact: al-Qaeda may believe (correctly or incorrectly) that a large-scale attack on the United States will advance their cause. I think they’d be incredibly wrong on that point, but, nonetheless, I think it’s a fair statement for a politician to make.

Robert Garcia Tagorda documents nicely Al Gore’s minor Ahmed Chalabi problem—namely, that he also treated Chalabi as a credible figure in the Iraqi exile community, at least until it came time for him to follow Howard Dean down the road of ex-DLCer dementia.

For the record, I found Chalabi less than credible, and was hardly a fan of Judith Miller’s Iraq WMD reporting, largely based on information provided by Chalabi’s pals, at the time either.

The Iraq “Wedding Party” Attack story is getting attention at Belmont Club, and it seems more complex than it first appeared; U.S. Central Command* indicates that the attack was actually directed at a meeting of insurgent forces and that the location of the attack was a way-station for foreign fighters entering the country from Syria.

Like Moe Lane, I generally take Seymour Hersh’s journalism with a huge grain of salt—and immediately suspected a fresh round of “inside the beltway” fingerpointing as the source for the latest revelations, which purportedly trace the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib all the way to Donald Rumsfeld’s desk. Now, however, I’m not so sure. And, clearly if Rumsfeld (or his inferiors, like Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone) condoned or specifically authorized the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, he/they should be fired and prosecuted—and if the president won’t can him/them, Congress can and should impeach and remove Rumsfeld (and/or Cambone) from office.

More at OTB and Matt Yglesias.

I suppose the whole blogosphere will be linking to it soon, but I’m linking to it anyway, because everyone should read this:

Tacitus posts a eulogy for Nick Berg, written by JakeV, a friend of Mr. Berg.

Link via Obsidian Wings.

If they're found guilty, I hope these assholes go to jail.

Because when the Islamist pricks do this kind of thing to our soldiers, I want to be able to go after them with a vengeful spirit.

Why not just hope those assholes go to jail because what they did was morally wrong? By adding the qualification, it seems as if the only reason Profs. Volokh and Reynolds are outraged is that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners (or “alleged” mistreatment, as Prof. Volokh writes) will no longer let Americans hold the moral high ground in the ongoing war in Iraq.

To be fair, the quote Reynolds pulls from Citizen Smash does recognizes the wrongness of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. But the quote from du Toit is the most prominent one in Reynolds’s post.

UPDATE: More on Reynolds's reaction from Jim Henley. Henley points out that "[i]t takes four sentences for Glenn Reynolds to start whining about John Kerry in his attempt to condemn the Abu Ghraib abuses," and also notes that Dan Drezner "devotes most of his passion to resenting that Arabs have gotten indignant about it."

Gary Farber and John Cole (also here) rightly characterize as “appalling” reports that Army soldiers tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners, possibly with the connivance of higher-ups. A special fisking is in order for the lawyer for one of the accused soldiers, as quoted by the New York Times:

“This case involves a monumental failure of leadership, where lower-level enlisted people are being scapegoated,” Mr. Myers said. “The real story is not in these six young enlisted people. The real story is the manner in which the intelligence community forced them into this position.”

No, the real story is that Mr. Myers’ client (allegedly) obeyed an illegal order, violated the Geneva Conventions, and deserves to spend every single minute he gets in Leavenworth—right along side the officers whose orders he obeyed. “I was only following orders” is a chickenshit excuse, especially for an E-6.

Update: More from Xrlq and Steven Taylor, who labels the soldiers “sadistic morons” and catches another soldier pleading “we didn’t know any better,” as well as news that British troops are also accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners.

I need to get to bed in a few minutes, since I have an appointment with an American Eagle plane at oh-dark-thirty. So I’ll leave you to ponder this Dan Drezner post and the linked article on Larry Diamond’s experiences in Iraq attempting to promote democracy there.

More when I’m safe and sound back in Oxvegas, sometime late Tuesday.

I’ve been tied up preparing for this job interview the last couple of days, so I haven’t gotten around to posting about the Iraq situation. Thankfully, Steven Taylor read my mind in his critique of the decision to hand over power on June 30th without figuring out who would be getting the power first (though the silver lining in this process is the belated jettisoning of Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq’s Charles de Gaulle wannabe), as well as his consideration of how the UN’s involvement in the handover is undercutting John Kerry’s position on Iraq.

My panel this morning ("Public Support for the Iraq War") was surprisingly well-attended (at least, compared to panels I’ve presented on in the past), and we had a good discussion despite the absence of our original chair/discussant due to a family illness.

You can browse the MPSA paper archive online; my panel was Section 13, Panel 13 (I can’t figure out how to make a direct link that won’t break); of course, if you’re only interested in my paper, you can get it here.

Well, it’s not going to go down as the best paper I’ve ever written, but here’s the Midwest paper in all its glory. Now I have to prepare for those back-to-back phone interviews this afternoon…

I won’t spoil the whole Midwest paper for you, but here’s the pretty path diagram of the LISREL model. Guess the coefficients and standard errors—it’s fun for the whole family!

Actually, the most amazing thing about the paper is that the model works, despite the suboptimal polling data it’s based on—almost all of the manifest variables are dichotomous or trichotomous.

Via Electric Venom and InstaPundit, it looks like things are taking a bit of an ugly turn in Baghdad today.

Update: Wretchard at Belmont Club has some worthwhile thoughts on the matter.

Well, ain’t this lovely? (Via John Cole.)

Alex Knapp links a lengthy analysis of the Iraq Survey Group’s work in Iraq that raises a lot of very important questions, to wit:

US forces participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom had the latest chemical detection gear, including chemical detection paper, chemical agent detector kits, improved chemical agent monitors, and sophisticated Fox Chemical Recon Vehicles. Some American GIs remembered well the shortfalls of this equipment in Gulf War I. Now all of these older devices had been improved, and new and more accurate devices had been issued. In fact, some mobile Army labs had highly sensitive mass spectrometers to test for suspicious substances. Who could argue the results of repeated tests using these devices without explaining how DoD had apparently been ripped off by contractors for faulty products? Apparently, the ISG could and did.

One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide. In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results. More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent. A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative. Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin. An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.

But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground. The “agricultural site” was also co-located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.

The bottom line is that Saddam’s troops apparently needed to use a lot of “pesticides” for rather mysterious reasons. Definitely RTWT™.

Quagmire? Well, maybe for the soon-to-be ex-Parrots of Fallujah.

The Baseball Crank has a pretty good analysis of the Clinton-Bush response to terror prior to 9/11. Key graf:

Bottom line: yes, in hindsight, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations, with more foresight, could have done more on both counts [Iraq and al-Qaeda]. Yes, they should have done more. Yes, I hand Clinton the larger share of the blame, at least as far as the failure to develop a long-range offensive strategy is concerned – whereas it appears that Bush was at least thinking in that direction. On the defensive question (i.e., having the homeland on alert), there’s less to fault Clinton and a bit to question about Bush, but I regard the failings as mostly institutional – the problem was the inability to pursue evidentiary leads and get urgent warnings up the ladder, rather than a failure of leadership.

Elsewhere: The Belgravia Dispatch finds The New Republic in November 2001 saying much different things about Richard Clarke than it is today (scroll down to “Interesting Update” – link via Glenn Reynolds), while Steven Taylor and Dan Drezner, as always, have interesting things to say.

I think the general reaction to today’s Richard Clarke testimony can be summed up as something of a redux of the David Kay testimony a few months back: everyone was able to take away something to reinforce their preexisting views, and a few blowhard politicos got to spend a lot of time listening to themselves talk.

What’s pretty obvious is that Clarke is saying significantly different things today than he was in 2002. And, as Steven Taylor and Stephen Green note, Clarke wasn’t exactly winning friends and influencing people up on the Hill during either the Clinton or Bush administrations; the normally mild-mannered Chris Shays had this, in part, to say about Clarke’s help to his subcommittee on national security:

Before September 11, 2001, we held twenty hearings and two formal briefings on terrorism issues. Mr. Clarke was of little help in our oversight. When he briefed the Subcommittee, his answers were both evasive and derisive.

Shays, as Taylor notes, is no Republican firebrand—he was one of the few GOP congressmen to not support Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, and has been somewhat marginalized in the caucus for that stand.

The substance of Clarke’s criticisms seems to actually be refuted by the evidence (not to mention his own words from 2002 and earlier)—the administration was formulating an aggressive policy to go after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda even prior to 9/11, administration officials Clarke criticizes (most notably, Condoleeza Rice) were well versed in the threat that al-Qaeda posed to the United States,* and the administration kept Iraq on the “back burner” for over a year after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan.

I was sort-of thinking in the back of my mind that if incoming Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wanted to prove he was serious about terrorism, he’d reassign those troops he’s talking about removing from Iraq to Afghanistan. As Edward of Obsidian Wings notes, that’s pretty much what he plans to do. Good for him.

Now, if he’d actually been smart enough to announce this proposal at the time he was talking about withdrawing troops from Iraq, he might have been spared the blistering treatment he got from this side of the pond.

David Adesnik writes:

But when it comes down to getting votes, I think there are only two questions that really matter: Did Bush ignore (and then withhold) compelling evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major attack? And did Bush knowingly lie about Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological (not nuclear) weapons? Unless Clarke can answer one or both of those questions in the affirmative, his revelations won’t amount to much more than a very loud footnote.

I think that’s just about right.

Update: Dan Drezner has a roundup and a more expert reaction.

One thing I will say: the sum total of my international relations training is four graduate courses, and my scholarship focuses on mass political behavior (public opinion, voting behavior, political parties, things like that) and legislative behavior, not IR theory or practice. I’ll defer to Dan and James Joyner on the substance of IR policy—though, to the extent the discussion has an impact on electoral politics or public opinion, I’m probably a decent judge.

Much blogospheric virtual ink has been spilled over Richard Clarke’s new book revelations about internal administration discussions about the response to 9/11. I am generally compelled to agree with Steven Taylor and James Joyner, who generally characterize the revelations as “old wine in new bottles,” to borrow a phrase.

Nevertheless, the political risk to the Bush administration is substantial. Not just because of the flood-the-zone coverage that Kevin Drum has applied or the widespread optimism that this scandal will stick to the Teflon Shrub, but also because it dovetails nicely with the Lisa Myers spin on the reactions of the Bush and Clinton administrations to Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11: Clinton was “too weakened by scandal” to attack Osama (in the two years after impeachment, mind you), so the blame necessarily falls to Bush—who, you might recall, didn’t exactly have the strongest of mandates from the electorate—in the eight months of his administration prior to 9/11.

Nonetheless I think the political argument for using Dick Cheney as the fall guy is stronger than ever—not right away, but a mid-June announcement that Mr. Cheney’s ticker isn’t 100% seems increasingly likely (particularly if Cheney v. U.S.D.C. District of Columbia looks like it went badly).

Update: Dan Darling points out Clarke’s role in the decision to attack the Sudanese al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998, which was based on allegations that Osama bin Laden was working with Iraq to produce VX nerve gas precursors at the facility.

A lot has been said about the political effects (or lack thereof) of the Madrid bombings on the Spanish elections this week; I won’t try to sum it all up here. In general, though, I have to agree with those such as Robert Garcia Tagorda, Jacob Levy, and Steven Taylor, and disagree with those (who will go unlinked, but you can find them easily enough) who ascribe the Spanish electorate’s behavior to being cowed by terror. Rather, I think much of the blame for the Popular Party’s loss has to be laid at the foot of prime minister Aznar’s hasty connection of ETA, the Basque separatist terror group, to the bombings, and the perception that he was “playing politics” with the situation at the U.N. Security Council.

There are two other worthwhile data points to mention. Post-Franco, Spain’s governments have generally been center-left coalitions led by the Socialists, in part because of the lingering association of the political right with the Franco dictatorship. The Popular Party victory in 1996 was very much against the long run trend of Spanish voting behavior, and probably should not have been expected to persist.

Secondly, the Mediterranean ex-dictatorships—Greece, Portugal, and Spain—have had a (not entirely unjustified) dislike of U.S. foreign policy, in large part due to the realpolitik decision that America made in supporting those countries’ former unelected governments as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. In the cases of Portugal and Spain, the United States was essentially confronted with faites accompli: the Salazar and Franco dictatorships were consolidated during the interwar period in which the U.S. retreated from European affairs, although arguably the United States—and Britain and France—should have continued the war against the Axis to eliminate Hitler and Mussolini’s Iberian fellow travellers. (Greece is a far less forgivable case.)

As a practical matter, it is still an open question whether an accommodation can be worked out with the incoming Socialist government on keeping its forces in Iraq, perhaps in a different command structure under the authority of the soon-to-be-sovereign Iraqi interim government. It remains to be seen whether, as David Brooks alleges today, in the pages of the New York Times, “Al Qaeda has now induced one nation to abandon the Iraqi people.”

This is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

Sunday’s New York Times has the goods on Saddam Hussein’s corruption of the oil-for-food program. Sample highlight:

In the high-flying days after Iraq was allowed to sell its oil after 10 years of United Nations sanctions, the lobby of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad was the place to be to get a piece of the action.

That was where the oil traders would gather whenever a journalist, actor or political figure would arrive in Iraq and openly praise Mr. Hussein. Experience taught them that the visitor usually returned to the hotel with a gift voucher, courtesy of the Iraqi president or one of his aides, representing the right to buy one million barrels or more of Iraqi crude.

The vouchers had considerable value. With the major oil companies monopolizing most Persian Gulf oil, there was fierce competition among smaller traders for the chance to buy Iraqi oil. And as long as Iraq kept its oil prices low enough, traders could make a tidy profit, even after buying the voucher and paying the surcharge.

“We used to joke that if you get one million barrels, you could make $200,000,” Mr. Faraj, of SOMO, added, referring to a period when the vouchers sold for about 20 cents per barrel. “And yet the ones who got it were those people who used to come here and praise Saddam for his stand against imperialism.”

Read the whole, sad, damning thing. (Link via InstaPundit.)

I’ve been deliberately avoiding posting anything about Iraq. I didn’t support the war, and in retrospect I still wouldn’t have, but I don’t really have anything terribly insightful to say, and frankly I find the topic rather tiresome. But one of the cover stories from today’s Wall Street Journal deserves more attention than it’s getting in the blogosphere. The headline:

How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market

Choice quotes:

At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news, and didn’t follow the stock market. All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq’s shuttered stock exchange. But Mr. Hallen was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad in September.

In early November, Mr. Hallen traveled to Baghdad’s Hamra Hotel for a lunch meeting with Luay Nafa Elias, who runs an investment company here. Mr. Elias says he was expecting to meet a middle-age man and therefore was astonished to see the baby-face Mr. Hallen sit down at the table and order a plate of Kabobs. “I had thought the Americans would send someone who was at least 50 years old, someone with gray hair,” says Mr. Elias.

As the lunch continued, Mr. Elias found himself impressed by Mr. Hallen’s confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world.

Mr. Elias’s faith in Mr. Hallen, however, began to evaporate when the market’s opening was delayed without explanation, first to the middle of this month, and then into February. “Maybe someone older and more experienced could have gotten this done on time,” Mr. Elias says.

That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority's ability to turn Iraq into a stable democracy.

The long-awaited Hutton Report emerged today in Britain, and it looks to be far more embarrassing for the BBC than it is for Tony Blair’s government. On a similar note, David Kay’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee today painted a picture of widespread intelligence failures, rather than a deliberate effort by the Bush administration to distort intelligence on Iraq.

Later today—after I get some work done on a consulting project I’m doing—I’ll have further thoughts on the nature of intelligence gathering and how it relates to, of all people, Howard Dean (among others).