Ali Eteraz is on a tear again…this time he’s writing to ask people to take action to save seven women sentanced to be stoned to death for adultery in Iran.

He’s got facts, impassioned argument, and useful links. Go over, take a look, and do something.

‘Stand Against Women Stoned to Death You Apathetic Monsters‘

Adam Bellow has been telling me for a year that he wants to bring back pamphleteering – not just the style of it, which has pretty well extended itself into blogging (“Blogging as modern-day pamphleteering” being a pretty well-accepted trope), but in the fact of it – little paper booklets you can buy in odd places like coffee shops, train stations, news racks. Booklets about serious things, because he believes as I do that the average American can take attention away from Survivor and Paris Hilton’s coochie to read, think, and talk about things that matter if they are presented in an accessible way.

Well damn if he hasn’t actually pulled it off.

He’s publishing a 3-part series by Michael Totten on Hiz’bollah. And it will be the first, I hope, of a long series of works he will put out under his own imprimatur: The New Pamphleteer. Their website is at www.pamphletguys.com, check it out. I just bought the first set, and suggest that you take a look and consider doing it as well.

I think a lot about the contingency of history, about the essentially random events that wind up turning our lives one way or another.

My strongest reaction to the news of “The Foley Scandal” was a kind of amusement that the course of future events might wind up depending on one self-righteous pervert’s lack of sexual self-control. I mean think about it – while I don’t think these elections will irreversably impact the intermediate future we all face, they’ll be important – and the results may well turn on some dumbass Congressman’s inability to keep it zipped when teenage boys are around. How can you say that the human condition isn’t a comedy?There’s a serious point as well, and it’s my long-standing one about the increasing isolation of the elites from the rest of us, a characteristic that is best called into sharp relief by an article on Ray Ozzie in this month’s Wired:

“When I find a hairy bug,” he wrote in a 2003 blog posting, “I love having the developer come in and debug it face to face. It gives me a chance not only to understand more about the product’s internals, but also, you have no idea what I learn chitchatting while waiting for debug files to copy, etc. Design and implementation issues, stuff that people have been building off to the side, things about the organization, rumors, etc.” He continued: “I suppose this is just classic ‘walking the halls,’ but I feel as though without this sort of direct nonhierarchical contact I would lose touch with my organization, and people throughout would know I was disconnected and would have no respect for me.”
[emphasis added]

The strongest feature of our society is that everyone is called to account. Power and wealth shield you from it – somewhat. But what is happening that frightens me far more than a randy Congressman and abused teenagers is the increasing ability of many elites to keep themselves from being held to account – a trend that is (slightly) pushed back by the increasing transparency of society and the fact that so damn many of us are watching. Foley felt free to indulge his (immoral, illegal) sexual obsessions because he felt protected by his position. The GOP leadership looked away because he was inside the walls, and so entitled to the protection of his position.

He got caught, and they got caught, and the fallout will be a price they have to pay. (note that Mickey Kaus has some numbers that suggest that Florida voters either expect this kind of thing or just don’t care.)

But, on a cosmic scale, or to an American soldier somewhere, it must seem funny as hell that this is the kind of thing that can turn elections.

He asks: “So can she call you, then?”

And you reply – because you’re polite – “Sure, go ahead and give her my number,” because you don’t really think she’ll call. And what would you say to the mother of the man who died riding the motorcycle that crossed the centerline and caused the head-on collision that almost killed one of your good friends? The entire mass of modern society – from the cell phone that dialed 911 through the computer network that dispatched the Life Flight helicopter to the emergency room and medical team that saved his life, rebuilt his bones with titanium plates and bolts, and then cared for him as he recovered from three major operations – saved my friend.

Now it’s time to deal with the losses.

Through the Internet, the other rider was identified, and the message came across that his survivors – his widow and parents – wished to talk to the injured rider, his girlfriend, and his parents.

I wound up as the message-bearer back and forth, and after a long discussion with my friend’s parents, eventually conveyed the message that they would be willing to talk with the bereaved parents. As I passed the message, my counterpart – a close friend of the deceased rider – asked if they could call me as well.

And I said yes, and didn’t think about it until today, when my cell phone rang and a strange, sad voice was there when I picked up.

She called me as I merged onto the 110 South and we spoke until I left the 110 for the 405 North…maybe twenty minutes. And as I spoke with her I suddenly wasn’t just a friend of one of the riders any more; I was a parent, imagining a call like this about one of my sons and how I know my heart would be tearing its way out of my chest with every word I spoke. And we talked as parents.

“He was so happy that morning when he left to go for a ride…” And then the phone rings and the Sheriff’s car, and a mountain of grief that – in the best of all world – becomes a hill of sadness you’ll climb every day from now on.

My friend is looking at a hard year to become what he was one corner before his accident – and knowing him, and watching his girlfriend lovingly sit holding his fingers – I know he’ll come out on the other side of it.

We all will. All of us except one…

We’ll come out of it but we will be changed.

Leftist Muslim blogger Ali Eteraz has been beating the drum about the Pakistani divorce reform proposal, and feeling kind of lonely in doing so.

Today, he uses this history to talk about the interaction between domestic reformers with the Muslim world and Western progressives.

This might be part of the reason that so many Muslim ‘reformers’ like Irshad Manji, Hrsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, end up becoming a “chamcha” (joke for insiders) to the neo-imperial right. They become unhappy with the progressives for seeming so “distant” from activism and so flock to those who seem “all up in the bizness” (even if its the worst way to do bizness). It’s a sort of Reformist Dilemma I discussed earlier.

Reformists are activists; and that means they are impatient. They don’t want to sit around and explain why demanding equality in divorce rights is not cultural imperialism. The neo-right doesn’t bother to ask such questions, and therefore draws the Reformists to it. I see that Ziba Mir’s film was made and financed in 1998. Back then it was the progressives who were the vanguard of human rights advancement in the world and the conservatives preferred isolationism. I doubt that a left group in England today would fund her film. They would be more concerned with how such a film would advance the neo-con ambitions over Iran. While the concern is legitimate, I think it is overwrought. In the end, progressives need to usurp and re-assert their former dominance in the international human rights arena. At the time being, they have utterly and totally lost their status. So they have been supplanted.

The problem is that mainstream progressives are caught in a logical bind; they can’t promote that which further imposes perceived Western hegemony; and at the same time they can’t abandon their human values.

Ali is already a signer of the Euston Manifesto, and so he’s participating – more so because he’s working the hard seam of progressive values within the Muslim world.

For the conservatives here who are harrumphing about the uselessness of progressivism or human rights in the face of Islamist tyranny, let me suggest that liberating women in the Muslim world would do far more to solve Islamist tyranny and terrorism than any weapons system you can imagine.

Has anyone else noticed that the newest version of Technorati is basically useless? Does anyone at Technorati pay attention or care?

Go over and click on a search for windsofchange.net.

Look at the results – most of them are either a) posts within WoC itself (from the ‘read more’ links); or b) blogrolls of sites that have update recently that contain WoC.

I went and looked for Smythe’s World as a control…same thing.

Look, it would be ridiculously easy to eliminate results from within sites (or at minimum from ‘read more and other set links) and equally easy to eliminate results from blogrolls. If they can’t figure out how to do it, they can buy a day of my time and a plane ticket and I’ll go show them.

Or I could get off my butt and build a better one…

There’s an old joke in which “chutzpah” (Yiddish for ‘nerve’) is defined by a young man who has killed both his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

Today, we have a new definition.

Political seer Matt Stoller writes about Joe Lieberman (in response to Lieberman’s interview at Pajamas Media):

Lieberman is throwing the whole party under the bus. It’s time for 2008 candidates to step up.

Matt, let me say here and publicly that this proves you’re an idiot. Lieberman didn’t throw the party under the bus – you tried to throw him under it, and are going to fail, and are being petulant about it.

How did you think he was going to respond? By sending flowers? By campaigning to lose so you’d approve of him? Christ, you’re even stupider than I thought you were if that’s the case – and that’s pretty stupid. Or, alternatively, you’ve set the new standard for chutzpah.I said it once and still stand by it:

Ask yourself this, if you’re all excited at the notion of Lieberman running against Lamont as an independent. Who do you think is going to be sitting in the Dirksen Building in February of ’07? Lamont? In a state that was – in 2004 – 44 percent unaffiliated, 34 percent Democratic, and 22 percent Republican. Come Election Day, what exactly do you think is going to happen?

And when Lieberman is sitting in his Senate office next year, do you think the Democratic Party will be stronger or weaker for his departure?

I say it will be weaker.

It will be weaker because a losing Lamont candidacy will not have local and regional coattails as large as Lieberman’s – and I somehow don’t see Lieberman doing a lot of campaigning for downballot offices in the next few months.

It will be weaker because a senior sitting senator will owe very little allegiance to the national party.

Weaker because other senior officials will sit and weigh the cost of party allegiance against the benefit, and will have a concrete example of what party loyalty buys.

So when such bloggers as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Chris Bowers, Jerome Armstrong and Jane Hamsher preen that they have pushed “Rape Gurney Joe” (Hamsher’s sobriquet) off the island, there’s only one problem: They think they are winning in doing so.

Right, then. See you all at the inauguration in January.

So this weekend the Long Beach Opera (disclosure: I’m on the board) is performing our tribute to Mozart’s birthday – without any actual music by him (or any heads of deities, you’ll be glad to know).

We’ll be performing work by Michael Nyman, Arvo Part and Louis Andriessen composed to honor Mozart, as well as showing a Peter Greenaway film – ” M is for Man, Music & Mozart.”

I happen to have a couple of extra tickets for Friday night (two because of my friend’s motorcycle accident last weekend), so drop me an email if you’re in Los Angeles and are interested in coming. I’ll make you a deal…

My review of Jim Geraghty’s book “Voting to Kill” is up at the Examiner site.

I had to edit it pretty brutally for length, and as a consequence it reads, I think, a little more harshly about the book than I feel.

I think that Geraghty’s point is right on – which ties into Kevin Drum and Eric Martin’s posts expressing massive frustration with William Arkin.Kevin wrote:

Outside the blogosphere, of course, we have the actual Democratic establishment, the one that wields genuine influence. Some of them are in Congress and make floor speeches — about both Iraq and national security more broadly. Some of them run for president and lay out detailed position papers about how best to conduct foreign policy in an age of jihad. Others host symposia at think tanks or write lengthy articles in places like Foreign Affairs and Democracy. Still others write books covering practically every nuance of liberal foreign policy you could ever hope for.

Some of these liberals think we ought to withdraw from Iraq and some don’t. I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them believe that a less militaristic and more internationalist foreign policy would be a net benefit. But it’s also safe to say that none of them — not one — believes this is all it will take to put a stop to militant jihadism. And yet, after five years of speeches, articles, symposia, and books by Democrats on national security, that’s what Arkin writes.

Kevin, I read most of that stuff, and I’ve got to tell you first that I don’t see a clear Democratic line of reasoning beyond the kind of thing that Martin has in his post here:

More profound success in this endeavor will ultimately require, as praktike and Matt Yglesias pointed out, a fundamental rethinking of many of the tenets that have guided our foreign policy decisions in that region for over a century. These tectonic shifts will be difficult to set in motion, slow developing once undertaken, and hardly aided by a noted lack of political will in many respects. These are the hard steps.

But there are easier ones too. For one, by focusing on the real costs of Iraq, and placing Iraq in its appropriately important context as one hindrance among a handful currently undermining our efforts in the war on terror, we can seek to avoid making a similarly counterproductive blunder in Syria, Iran or wherever else it is that the neoconservative wander/bloodlust would take us. Not invading yet another Muslim country in the span of a few years would be, you know, a positive first step even if that simple abstention wouldn’t solve all our problems overnight.

Further, rehabilitating our image and fortifying our influence by aspiring to back-up Bush’s soaring rhetoric with actual corresponding policies (ie, respecting habeas corpus, banning torture, etc.) – while not creating a solution “voila!” – will redound to our benefit in other areas crucial to our success. We would, among other things, decrease support for extremists, increase the likelihood of recruiting and maintaining valuable human intelligence assets, and help to secure the vital cooperation of a wide array of foreign governments and their respective intelligence agencies, on which we rely.

The use of human and signal intelligence, surgical military operations, marginalizing extremist organizations through the application of soft power in its myriad manifestations and fostering a more robust relationship with potentially helpful foreign national interests would all be attainable steps that would serve us well while we go about the larger, paradigm shifting overhaul cited above.

The praktike post he cites is the one that I commented on earlier – the one in which solving Israel/Palestine on terms acceptable to the Arab world, and not involving ourselves in any more invasions is pretty much the core prescription. I know that prak has made other suggestions…

But the part I emphasized is the part that the Democrats keep coming back to…better intelligence, surgical military operations, using ‘soft power to marginalize extremists’, and getting allies…and there are more than a few problems with that.

The first one is that the same Democrats are the ones who keep kneecapping intelligence programs like SWIFT and they are the ones who led the charge to get the ‘icky people’ out of the humint business. They don’t have a lot of credibility there.

The second is the classic Clinton ‘ninjas from helicopters’ fantasy. I’ve blogged my criticism of it several times in the past, but I’ll lay out the three core objections here: a) it probably won’t work (because we need huge networks within the target country to make such an attack work, and we can’t and won’t assemble intel networks in that depth everywhere in the world); b) it’s immoral – we’re talking a covert war of assassination here. Think the film Munich times 2,356; c) it consists of our committing acts of war in a number of foreign countries – something they may have a say about and a response to.

I’m all for using soft power – the attractive nature of our society and the value it has as an attractor – and I’ll fully agree that Bush hasn’t done a very good job of this. But it’s a feature of a strategy, not a strategy in and of itself.

And as to allies, you mean like the UNFIL troops in South Lebanon? The ones who won’t forcibly disarm Hizbollah, even though that’s what the UN resolution calls for? Or like the French, German, and Russian response to Iraq – the one that was certainly influenced by tens of millions in bribes paid to influential businessman and leaders in those countries?

Look, there’s nothing wrong with any of these proposals – but even as an intermediate term response while we’re getting the Arab world to stop educating its children that killing Jews is the highest calling (which makes the while ‘solving the Israel/Palestine’ thing problematic) – it’s obvious that the Democrats don’t have significant credibility here, either through stated policy or through their party history.

The Democratic presidents during my adult lifetime have been Carter and Clinton – and based on what I know of their administrations’ history (which is pretty well demonstrated by Geraghty), and which was just pretty closely confirmed to me by what I saw Tuesday night – and so here’s the problem.

The Democrats clearly have a perception problem – even within our own ranks. Is it perception, or is it reality?

Now I’m at a point where I’m disagreeing with Kevin and Martin (and all the folks standing behind them), as they’re telling me that I’m just flat wrong. Which is, as always, possible…

So here’s my proposal.

One thing that would be damn useful in deciding this issue would be to assemble a repository of links to core democratic positions on defense so that we could all go to primary sources. Right now the debate (including this part of it) consists of “yes they do” and “no they don’t” – which ought to be resolvable relatively easily, and seems like a perfect thing for blogs to do. I’m going to reach out to Kevin, praktike, and Phil Carter – and am open to suggestions on who else – and ask for links to top Democratic cites, papers, quotes, etc. on the subject of defense. I’ll keep a post live with the links we get, and offer to let them crosspost it as well and see what grows.

So folks, comment here with links central to understanding Democratic policy on defense.

This isn’t meant as a joke, and I’m not looking for people to do anything but contribute pointers to things we can use to do the best map possible of mainstream Democratic positions on defense. Let’s settle this debate with some facts – we can argue about what they mean once we have them.

David Corn has a piece in Slate piling on Christopher Hutchins – who needs my rhetorical support about as much as (pick and insert your own example of coals to Newcastle metaphor).

But the point he raises is such a sore point to me that I have to flag it and bitch loudly.

I summed up my issues in a post a while back.

Here’s Corn:

Bush’s claim that Iraq had “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”—one sentence in his speech—led to controversy and scandal. It begot the op-ed by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (whom the CIA sent to Niger to check out this report) that accused the White House of having misrepresented the prewar WMD intelligence. That op-ed begot the Robert Novak column that outed Wilson’s wife as a CIA operative. And that article begot the criminal investigation that targeted the White House and produced an indictment of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for allegedly lying to the FBI and a grand jury.

It’s now accepted by the U.S. intelligence community that there was nothing to the Niger charge. Even the White House in July 2003 disavowed its use of the allegation. Proponents of the war in Iraq no longer cite it as justification for the invasion. But there is one holdout: Christopher Hitchens.

Here’s the Senate Intelligence Committee report:

The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996- 1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted “expanding commercial relations” to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq.” (page 43)

Here’s my old post:

So Wilson directly confirmed to the CIA that Iraqi officials had met with Nigerian officials, and that they had – in the view of the Nigerian officials – attempted to broach the subject of uranium sales. Now the claim the President made wasn’t that Iraq had gotten uranium, or that it was even likely to get uranium. It was that:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Now skipping over the ‘gimme’ that Bush is saying that the British are saying etc. etc., the question is whether Wilson – who accused Bush of lying in that statement – was himself telling the truth in making that accusation.

And the problem I have, as a kind of simpleminded person, is that Wilson’s own words, as expressed in the consensus, bipartisan Senate report, also support the charge that Iraq was seeking uranium.

So what is it that I am missing, exactly?

Look, most things that matter are matters of judgment and degree. And to say that Bush overstated or over relied on the evidence – provided by Wilson himself – is one thing, while to confuse matters (by tossing in the forged Italian documents) by suggesting that Bush stated that Iraq had successfully bought (as opposed to unsuccessfully sought) yellowcake is, simply put, political fraud.

But that fraud is part and parcel of political commerce these days. It shouldn’t be when the stakes are as high as they are today. And those opposing Bush would get further with people like me if we weren’t left with a choice between people who make us uncomfortable but are at least engaging what we see as a serious issue – and folks who lie about the issue to make political points.