Swarms of online shoppers armed with new iPods and iTunes gift cards apparently overwhelmed Apple's iTunes music store over the holiday, prompting error messages and slowdowns of 20 minutes or more for downloads of a single song.

Analysts said they didn't anticipate a rash of iPod returns because of the delays.

[ insert Zune joke here ]

Music denied -- shoppers overwhelm iTunes - CNN.com

By Bob Woodward

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq - washingtonpost.com

Chinese president and commander-in-chief Hu Jintao urged the building of a powerful navy that is prepared "at any time" for military struggle, state media reported on Thursday.

At a meeting of delegates to a Communist Party meeting of the navy on Wednesday, Hu said China, whose military build-up has been a source of friction with the United States, was a major maritime country whose naval capability must be improved.

"We should strive to build a powerful navy that adapts to the needs of our military's historical mission in this new century and at this new stage," he said in comments splashed on the front pages of the party mouthpiece People's Daily and the People's Liberation Army Daily. "We should make sound preparations for military struggles and ensure that the forces can effectively carry out missions at any time," said Hu, pictured in green military garb for the occasion.

China's Hu calls for blue water navy - washingtonpost.com

Perhaps not essential, but quite interesting, and not something you see daily in the papers.

What we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict.

As a recent editorial in The Washington Post observed, five years after September 11 the FBI still has a mere thirty-three experts who speak Arabic — and most of those are far from fluent. The CIA and the Pentagon are not much better off.

On the "hollowing out" that will make stabilization nearly impossible:

The Iraqi authorities have issued two million passports since August 2005. An estimated 40 percent of Iraq's professional classes have left the country. New elites are rising in their place, sometimes through the use of violence; needless to say, this is not the sort of civil society that the Americans were hoping to promote.

Terrorized by horrific acts of bloodshed and torture, and frequently forced to leave behind the businesses that once sustained them economically, they have only the mosques, and their associated political parties, to turn to.

You've seen this before, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As I listened to these Iraqi voices, I could not entirely shake the feeling that we Americans are already becoming irrelevant to the future of their country. While people in Washington continue to debate the next change in course, and the Baker report raises the possibility of gradual withdrawal, Iraqis are sizing up the coming apocalypse, and making their arrangements accordingly.

What happens when the Decider can't make up his mind? We wait until our actions, whether carrots or sticks or both, are merely ambient noise amidst the discordant mix of sectarian signals. Then the debates over withdrawals, troop levels, milestones, methods, etc. are rendered moot. The Iraqis neither wave goodbye nor run us out of town. Ten years later, no one will quite remember exactly when the Americans left -- only that they were irrelevant long before they were absent.

What About the Iraqis?

George Packer is simply essential. This is a long post because there is no way to boil this down.

"After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate."

That's David Kilcullen, an Australian lieutenant colonel who may just be our last best hope in the long war.

"The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’"

“People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks."

In the 1 December issue of Jane's Intelligence Review, John Horgan writes (sub req'd):

People who leave terrorist groups or move away from violent roles do so for a multitude of reasons. Horgan explains why greater understanding of the motivations behind this so-called 'disengagement' will help in developing successful anti-terrorism initiatives.

The reality is that actual attacks represent only the tip of an iceberg of activity.

Here's the abstract of a recent RAND working paper:

In the battle of ideas that has come to characterize the struggle against jihadist terrorism, a sometimes neglected dimension is the personal motivations of those drawn into the movement. This paper reports the results of a workshop held in September 2005 and sponsored by RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy and the Initiative for Middle East Youth. Workshop participants discussed the issue of why young people enter into jihadist groups and what might be done to prevent it or to disengage members of such groups once they have joined.

Now, back to the Packer piece:

The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that “this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy." ... “bin Laden’s message was clearly designed to assist the President’s reëlection.” Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance.

You may recall the speculation that Bush would produce bin Laden's head just in time for the last elections. Perhaps the living bin Laden is a more valua... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

Knowing the Enemy | George Packer in The New Yorker

It's about leadership.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders. That issues like these should now command presidential attention testifies to the administration's disarray.

The most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end?

America's failure in Iraq lends considerable urgency to this question. That no responsible member of this administration possesses the presence of mind, the imagination or the courage to address the issue head-on forms yet another part of the tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

I am reminded of Baghdad Bob. The scary thing is that Bob is starting to sound prescient in places.

"Baghdad? It will be a big oven for them."

"This invasion will end in failure."

"We are winning!"

"They are lying every day. They are lying always, and mainly they are lying to their public opinion."

"They are achieving nothing."

"Iraq will spread them even more and chop them up."

"They are becoming hysterical. This is the result of frustration."

"Please, please! The Americans are relying on what I called yesterday a desperate and stupid method."

"They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them!"

By reminding us of the obvious, noteworthy (among his other (past) nyms) is proving why he is currently MemeStreams's most recommended user.

Bush's illusions | Andrew Bacevich in IHT

The Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office dropped two long delayed reports the Friday morning before Christmas – either as presents to civil liberties advocates or as a way to inflate their 2006 performance numbers – depending upon your degree of cynicism. One report (.pdf) concerns an anti-terrorism information sharing system known as the MATRIX, which got funding from the federal government. The ACLU asked the office to look into the program in May 2004. The other concerns (.pdf) Secure Flight and its invasive and undisclosed use of massive amounts of commercial data in early 2005 to test whether a centralized air passenger screening system that used data held by private data brokers would be more effective than the current name checks done by airlines.

Both reports date back to the office's first chief privacy officer, Nuala O'Connor Kelly. After she left in September 2005, her deputy Maureen Cooney took over, but had so little power that it was rumored she could not even hire interns without approval from the Department. The office is intended to have a measure of independence, and reports to Congress yearly, but it cannot force agencies within Homeland Security to turn over documents.

Neither report has much interesting to reveal, besides that they have nothing interesting to reveal. The Government Accountability Office issued its findings on how Secure Flight administrators abused the Privacy Act on July 22, 2005.

The GAO found (.pdf) that: "During the course of our ongoing review of the Secure Flight program, we found that TSA did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information in its fall 2004 privacy notices as required by the Privacy Act."

That's a very nice way of saying the program administrators broke the law.

27B Stroke 6 | DHS Privacy Office Wishes You a WhiteWash Xmas With Two Delayed Reports

But Tehran was profoundly disappointed with the United States response. After the 9/11 attacks, xxx xxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xx set the stage for a November 2001 meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s six neighbors and Russia. xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx Iran went along, working with the United States to eliminate the Taliban and establish a post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.

The x's are what the White House told the Times to chop out. A second article here talks about those deletions. References to articles and releases that contain all the retracted information are provided.

I'm glad that at least the absurdity is transparent. The end result of this will be to inspire people to read into the matter in more depth, and that can only be a good thing.

Redacted Version of Op-Ed on Iran - New York Times

The 2006 Winter Solstice will be occurring at roughly the time I post this message, as we pass closest to the sun, let have the longest night of the year.

Happy Solstice!!!

Happy Winter Solstice Everyone!!!

Martin Kaplan writes in today's LA Times:

We've had plenty of shouting matches on the war; what we need are better leaders and more capable media.

So I guess, by Decius's First Law of Political Leadership, he is implicitly asking for things to get worse in Iraq. I don't know if I like that idea ...

But I did like this turn of phrase on the upcoming primaries:

... the scene of multi-candidate cattle calls in which entrants will moo canned messages ...

If that wasn't enough to make you see Kaplan more as a comedian than a man of nuanced policy, the article loses all sense of seriousness when we get to this:

Newt has been calling for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates across the nation. I'd like that. I'd also like a pony, an end to racism, a cure for cancer and a date with Scarlett Johansson.

Speaking of Scarlett, did you know she has five films on tap for 2007? Now there's a hard-working woman in show business. Do you think after that, we could get her to run as a VP in `08?

Here's his pitch for civil war in Iraq:

Maybe we don't need a national debate. Maybe what we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in.

I really like that last thought there, but it's incredibly difficult to achieve through the contemporary model of a "free" press forever at the mercy of fickle, demanding advertisers. If more people were willing to pay their own way for news they didn't want, but, like vegetables and fiber, knew they should have, then perhaps the products of that press would be more useful.

Echoing Kaplan, Mike wrote:

Less "balance," more "fair," meaning make a damn call.

adam wrote in reply:

I disagree completely; it is for journalists to report points of view, not judge. My ideology tells me -- my liberal bias says -- let reporters report in as balanced a manner as they can and let we the jury decide.

The issue is one not so much of the reporter as of the editor. In any newspaper of significance there is room for a variety of content, from "just the facts" basic street beat reporting, to in-depth profiles, to news analysis, to investigations, to editorials, to letters, to opinion pieces, to regular columnists, and more. Any "balanced" newspaper ought to have all of these, in the same way that a "balanced" investment portfolio will have a little of everything.

What distinguishes a great newspaper from a merely average one is two-fold: first, the quality of its content, and second, the editor's skill in selecting and organizing a small subset of the available content. The requirement for good content goes without saying; even the best editor would be hard-pressed to turn crap into a great newspaper. (Nonetheless, let it be noted that a talented editor can still make crap sell like hotcakes.) The editor's role is perhaps less widely appreciated, but I'd argue it's essential to a top quality product.

An editor, in attempting to "balance" views, relies on internal scales to do so. What is equal? Is it based on word count? How do you equate photographs?

Does Iraq need more debate?