The Long View

George Bush does not give bad formal speeches. Last night's address was up to the usual standard. It differed from the usual Bush commentary on foreign affairs by being very detailed and modest in scope, perhaps misleadingly so. What the president seemed to be doing was explaining the tactics of a minor campaign to restore the police situation in Baghdad. The difficulty of that enterprise may not so great as we might suppose, if this report is accurate and as important as it seems:

NAJAF, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Iraq's national security adviser said on Wednesday the country's most senior Shi'ite cleric had given his blessing to government efforts to disarm militants as it prepares to implement a major new security plan for Baghdad....Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said he had briefed Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on the security situation in Iraq, and particularly in Baghdad, during a meeting in the holy city of Najaf.

The reclusive Sistani hardly ever makes public statements but is an influential figure behind the scenes and the spiritual leader of Iraq's majority Shi'ites.

"His eminence Sistani recommended an emphasis on the implementation of the law without any discrimination based on identity or background," Rubaie told reporters.

"He also asserted the need for weapons to be in the hands only of the state, and to disarm those holding weapons illegally," said Rubaie, who is himself a Shi'ite....The meeting with Rubaie comes just three days after Sistani met Sadr for the first time in over a year.

Essentially, the Bush Administration is proposing to put down the reaction to last year's bombing of the Golden Mosque, an event that was intended to cause Shia retaliation and which, as the president noted, succeeded in doing so. Before that, the US strategy of training Iraqi forces and pressuring for local political compromise was working well enough that the Pentagon was contemplating beginning troop reductions for late 2006. The Administration now is, in part, seeking to return to that glide path. A problem with Bush's speech was that it failed to communicate that his plan requires several weeks of telegenically unsightly street-fighting.

Regarding the official Democratic reply to the president's address, I think that Senator Dick Durbin was quite mistaken in expressing the desire for the Iraqi government to now make the hard political decisions. That should be the last thing that anyone wants. The hard decision in Iraq would be to abandon attempts at compromise with the Sunni minority and to ethnically cleanse it. The presence of US troops in Iraq is to facilitate workable half-measures and tactful evasions.

Meanwhile, one suspects that this is the real news:

U.S. forces stormed an Iranian consular office in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil early on Thursday and arrested five people, including diplomats and staff, Iranian officials said...As the overnight raid was in progress, President George W. Bush was vowing in a keynote address on American television to disrupt what he called the "flow of support" from Iran and Syria for insurgent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

Plus there is that extra carrier group the president mentioned he was sending to the area.

It would be very foolish if the Administration were doing this to deter Iran, or to "send a message" to Syria. The results of last November's elections deprived the Administration of the power to deter, in the sense of threatening a wider war: few people believe the US political climate would support such a war. We should assume that the new air and sea forces have some specific mission.

Among the most interesting new members of Congress is Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia. In recent days, he has been favoring the media with statements like this:

“One of the biggest problems in the entire approach to the Iraq war is that this administration has never articulated a strategy that will show you an end point,” Mr. Webb said in an interview on National Public Radio. “If you can’t tell this country when this war is going to be over in specific terms, then you don’t have a strategy.”

Webb's ideas seem to be one of those tests that divide the world into two kinds of people: those who find his statements to be wise and sober and those who find them manifestly idiotic.

If you start looking for a class of story, you start to find examples. I have been looking for items demonstrating the collapse of Islam's long immunity to conversion; and look, here's an example, which MEMRI quotes this from the Algerian paper El-Shourouq El-Yawmi:

"It appears that the fears…concerning the Christianization of the Kabylie region have in effect come true this time, and it has become clear that President Bouteflika's admonition to the region's population to uphold Islam and not to surrender to the lures of Christianization… stemmed from knowledge of what is going on there. 'Santa Claus' appearing there, overtly this time, is a sure sign of the swiftly descending danger that has come into [our] Algerian home. Will the relevant authorities - and first and foremost the Ministry of Religious Affairs - seize the initiative, or will [Algeria] be left to its own devices, in confronting the death arriving from the West?"

MEMRI prefaces the quote with these comments:

The article comes in the context of an ongoing polemic over the phenomenon of conversion to Christianity in the Kabylie region. In 2004, Minister of Religious Affairs Bouabdellah Ghlamallah denounced Christian proselytizing, warning that it could lead to bloodshed. Several weeks later, in an about-face, he said that proselytizing posed no danger, and that "everyone is free to convert to the religion he finds right for him."...

While there is debate over the scope of conversion to Christianity in Kabylie, there is no doubt that the phenomenon exists. The regional daily La Depechede Kabylie often reports on it...and the Berber activist website www.kabyle.com currently features on its home page a link to a November 17, 2004program on the subject, that aired on the Franco-German Arte TV.

While the vast majority of Kabyles are Muslim, they tend to be liberal and secularist. In the 1991 elections in which the Islamic Salvation Front won the landslide victory that led to civil war, Kabylie was one of the few regions that did not grant them a majority.

Again I ask: is this systemically important? Suppose it becomes so?

There are embarrassments within Christianity, of course, as we were reminded by the sudden resignation of Bishop Stanislaw Wielgus, who had been appointed metropolitan-archbishop of Warsaw. During the Communist era, he seems to have at least gone through the motions of cooperating with the secret police, though apparently not to their benefit. Many people in similar situations did likewise without committing any gravely evil acts. Reasonable people may differ about whether he should have been offered the appointment, or accepted it in light of the elements in his past that he knew might become public.

The real embarrassment here is the behavior of the Vatican which, as Robert Miller noted at First Things, is part of a pattern:

“[T]he current wave of attacks against the Catholic Church in Poland,” the Vatican Press Office continues, “rather than a sincere search for transparency and truth, has many hallmarks of being a strange alliance between the persecutors of the past and their adversaries, a vendetta by those who used to persecute the Church and were defeated by the faith and the thirst for freedom of the Polish people.” ...Similarly, in 2002 many high church officials complained that the sex scandals had been ginned up by anti-Catholics in the media. For example, in an interview in Spain, reported in the Zenit Daily Dispatch for December 3, 2002, then Cardinal Ratzinger said: “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign. . . . This sort of thing will not do. For one thing, we’re not supposed to judge the intentions of hearts. If someone does something that is, in itself, moral and reasonable—like using documentary evidence in the public domain to show that someone nominated to a high and responsible office is not fit to hold it—we do not ordinarily inquire into his motives; even if we have reason to believe they’re questionable, we leave such things to God. That’s a large part of what the Lord meant when he said, Judge not.

It's perfectly true. Some of the most necessary reporting is done by some pretty dreadful people, and for the shabbiest of motives.