A growing conventional wisdom holds that Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy has brought Russia stability and prosperity -- providing a new model of successful market authoritarianism. But the correlation between autocracy and economic growth is spurious. Autocracy's effects in Russia have in fact been negative. Whatever the gains under Putin, they would have been greater under a democratic regime.

The Myth of the Authoritarian Model

This is the latest in a series of reports from the Combating Terrorism Center drawing on newly released information from captured al-Qa’ida documents maintained in the Defense Department’s Harmony Data Base. The report is a preliminary analysis of records containing background information on foreign fighters entering Iraq via Syria over the last year. The data used in this report was coded from English translations of these records and undoubtedly contains some inaccuracies de to imprecise translation as well as through errors in the transcription process. The CTC plans further studies based on the Sinjar Records and expects to hone and improve the accuracy of our database as we do so.

Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq: First Look at the Sinjar Records

Kaleidoscopic ... and the New Middle Ages ...

“That’s how the city rolls right now.”

The Americans are haunted by the possibility that Iraq could go the way of Afghanistan, where Americans initially bought the loyalty of tribal leaders only to have some of them gravitate back to the Taliban when the money stopped.

The government has made only the most halting steps toward rapprochement with the Awakening groups, even those who have been fighting insurgents for months in their neighborhoods.

In interviews with more than a dozen sheiks in the province, along with police officers, local leaders and imams, not one expressed any trust in the government of Prime Minister Maliki.

And for the Americans who helped create and nurture the movement, the initial excitement has been tempered by the challenge of managing a huge, and growing, force where many of the men have shadowy pasts.

The Awakening groups in just their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: they fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite “dogs.”

The Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni Arab force recruited to fight Sunni Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has become a great success story after its spread from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province to become an ad-hoc armed force of 65,000 to 80,000 across the country in less than a year. A linchpin of the American strategy to pacify Iraq, the movement has been widely credited with turning around the violence-scarred areas where the Sunni insurgency has been based.

But rivalries and sectarianism are still undermining the Americans’ plans. And in particular, the Awakening’s rapid expansion — the Americans say the force could reach 100,000 — is creating new concerns.

In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict

To be sure, there were plenty of instances in which American officials did less than they could have. Diplomats or politicians intent on preserving the relationship with Pakistan for other strategic reasons (its help in the Cold War and then the war on terror) downplayed evidence of its nuclear chicanery for fear that any revelations would undermine cooperation.

The most egregious case involved Richard Barlow, a young CIA analyst who figures prominently in all three books. Barlow defied the cautious dissembling about the Pakistani nuclear program that was the official line -- and then was run out of the CIA for calling the intelligence as he saw it. In another instance, the State Department apparently intervened to downplay the potential proliferation implications of a smuggling trial. Customs officials also repeatedly failed to ask questions that would have quickly led them to realize what Khan and his operatives were up to.

But despite such missed opportunities, what becomes clear in these books is that the United States at various points drew on most of the tools it had to influence Pakistan, and none of them had much effect on its nuclear ambitions.

'The Nuclear Jihadist', 'Deception', 'America and the Islamic Bomb'

China's rise will inevitably bring the United States' unipolar moment to an end. But that does not necessarily mean a violent power struggle or the overthrow of the Western system. The U.S.-led international order can remain dominant even while integrating a more powerful China -- but only if Washington sets about strengthening that liberal order now.

The Rise of China and the Future of the West

It's like the jihadist equivalent of the YouTube debates!

Al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab, has invited individuals, organisations and journalists to submit questions for an open interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri.

See also, How's al-Qaeda doing? You decide, By Michael Scheuer:

If an analyst in al-Qaeda's intelligence services or a journalist friendly to al-Qaeda were asked to compile a roundup of news stories from 2007 that supported his sympathies, here is what he would write. It would be a reasonably effective and sophisticated bit of open-source reporting (or what some might even call disinformation) that would be carefully slanted to the author's agenda, and al-Qaeda might itself publish or distribute the article as evidence of the decay of the West.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Al-Qaeda to give 'open interview'

Realizing that the corpse, known as the world financial system, is quickly getting cold, LaRouche PAC organizers over the past few weeks have been acting on Lyndon LaRouche's principle of the mass effect, to galvanize the population into action. Contrary to the presently popular, nonetheless ineffective model of "poll watching," the mass effect is a universal physical principle. As Johannes Kepler's principle of universal gravitation governs the changing relations of bodies in physical space-time, the mass effect governs human social relations, specifically the way in which new ideas in an individual human mind are transmitted to a population, to create revolutionary political effects. This dynamic principle, when acted upon by people, stirs up society, especially in times of crisis, and frees individual members of society to think more clearly about what might be done.

Outflanking the British Empire: The Mass Effect

The actress Mia Farrow was adopting children from the Third World nearly 30 years before Angelina Jolie got in on the act. Her rainbow family was blown apart when her then husband Woody Allen fell in love with their adopted daughter. Now she has turned her focus to the beleaguered people of Sudan, and has set up the Fund4Darfur to help the 2m people driven from their homes by government militias

Mother Waif calls to the forsaken

As southern Afghanistan collapses into chaos, and as corruption and massive inflation takes hold, the Taliban is gaining more and more recruits. The generals who convinced Benazir that control of Kabul via the Taliban would give them ‘strategic depth’ may have retired, but their successors know that the Afghans will not tolerate a long-term Western occupation. They hope for the return of a whitewashed Taliban. Instead of encouraging a regional solution that includes India, Iran and Russia, the US would prefer to see the Pakistan army as its permanent cop in Kabul. It won’t work. In Pakistan itself the long night continues as the cycle restarts: military leadership promising reforms degenerates into tyranny, politicians promising social support to the people degenerate into oligarchs. Given that a better functioning neighbour is unlikely to intervene, Pakistan will oscillate between these two forms of rule for the foreseeable future. The people who feel they have tried everything and failed will return to a state of semi-sleep, unless something unpredictable rouses them again. This is always possible.

Tariq Ali: Daughter of the West

America's military policy is in disarray, but not for the reason most people think. For the first time since around 1950, there is no coherent theoretical framework for thinking about how to shape our armed forces for current and future threats. This fact presents both a danger and an opportunity. The danger is that we will either fail to develop one and therefore drift aimlessly at a troubled time, or that we will reach back to some of the tattered remnants of the theories that guided military policy until 2007. But we now have the opportunity for a serious discussion about the shape of the world today and its likely shape tomorrow.

American Defense Policy at a Crossroads