When I first commented on the UAE deal to acquire P&O and run operations at six American ports, I felt like the proverbial voice in the wilderness. The overwhelming consensus was that the deal was bad politics and that it should be dumped.

Now I'm noticing more an more "opinion leaders" takeing a side or a second look.

Charles Krauthammer, who initially condemned the deal in his column, was down right concilatory today on Brit Hume's show.

Glenn Reynolds has come around:

I will admit that my knee jerked on hearing this story, and that I should have waited to learn more before offering an opinion. In my defense, I'll note that I gathered more information and changed my mind. Still, mea culpa.

But (and this is a separate point from the merits of the decision, or of my take thereon) it wasn't just me -- there were an awful lot of knees jerking on this decision, and the White House, or somebody, should have foreseen that. That doesn't get me off the hook, of course, but it doesn't reflect well on them, either.

What's more, this issue resonates so much because there is a huge amount of dissatisfaction out there regarding the Administration's position on border control and homeland security. That's certainly something they should know about, and that made this problem even more predictable.

No knee-jerking here at UNCoRRELATED...bad knees.

As the details of the terror attack on Saudi oil infrastructure has filtered through, I couldn't help but look askance at the prospect that this was a bona fide al Qaeda attack. Apparently I wasn't alone.

Macsmind and others reflect the same view.

This was not only poorly planned, but doesn't bear markings of a typical AQ operation. Saudi guards are mean and lean enough, but not that well trained. More over, attackers - reminiscent of the amatures in Britain - aren't this bad.

Thus, this like other "insurgency" attacks which are automatically pinned on AQ, just don't fit the view. Notice too the lack of "ownership", normally bragged upon after such attacks. Noticeably absent as well and has me feelers in a twitter.

With the cutting off of funds from the U.S. and European Union, various Arab nations and Russia have stepped into the void to fund the Palestinian Hamas government.

Qatar said Monday it would give the Palestinian government $50 million in aid to help make up for a shortfall after the United States and the European Union cut off funding.

The official Qatar News Agency said the funds were offered to "bolster the budget of the Palestinian authority based on the decision of the Arab summit held in Khartoum" in March.

On Sunday, Iran said it was sending the same amount of money to the Palestinians to help fund the Hamas-led government.

Pledging is one thing, actually writing checks is another. To date, Hamas has not received a dollar from Arab nations and their security forces have not been paid in two weeks.

Its an interesting situation, one I had not anticipated when I first read that the U.S. would withdraw funding. In generally, money buys influence, and if U.S. money didn't buy the influence, someone else would. Yet Hamas refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist has undermined the reason to buy that influence.

Without the prospect of a settlement with Israel, financing the PA is tantamount to financing terror.

Clearly the Arab states are in a catch-22 situation. Their own domestic politics requires them to publicly support the Palestinian authority, but their relations with the West mandates that they don't support a known terrorist group.

There is no upside for Hamas, which like Fatah, depends on these subsidies to support the patronage system that keeps them in power. Arafat created a system which centralized virtually all economic power in the PA in order to maintain political order and control. The loss of its subsidies means that the Palestinians have no functioning economy.

There is little doubt that Hamas will attempt to divert the public's attention through an escalating attack on Israel, but ultimately, their government cannot be sustained over the long term.

Michael Totten provides a fifth installment on his travels in Northern Iraq.

Dohok is not a large city. Perhaps 750,000 people live there. Somehow it feels even smaller. I wouldn’t say it’s a backwater, but it’s not a cosmopolitan capital either. The more time I spend in the Iraqi Kurdistan cities of Suleimaniya and Dohok the more I think they really are so much like Utah.

I suspect he means Salt Lake City rather than greater Utah, but point taken.

Read the whole thing.

In the wake of the recent hostilities afflicting parts of the Levant, pundit and commentators are engaging in knowing glances and earnest tones, dispensing wisdom on why things seem so out-of-control in the middle east.

Has anybody been paying attention for oh, say the last 50 years? Its not news that there is war in the middle east, its news when there isn't.

Watching Fox News Sunday was rather surreal, as both Democrats and Republican shills sought to spin the battle to their political advantage. Chris Dodd, whose expertise I always thought was limited to waitress sandwiches, apparently is supposed to know something about foreign policy as well. Did Joe Biden have the weekend off?

According to Senator Dodd, the problem is that we don't have the French onboard (I inferred that from his blanket reference to the "allies"). Perhaps he failed to note France's consistent Arabist elan and its condemnation of Israel's retaliation for the kidnapping of its soldiers and rocketing of its civilian population centers. The larger message of course is that we are doing too much--we shouldn't be in Iraq, etc...

Bill Kristol perhaps best represents the conservative view that we aren't doing enough--too much kowtowing to Iran and other beastly regimes in the middleeast.

It seems to me to be as good a contrast between a 9/10 and 9/11 mindset as there can be.

The middle east has its own rules, and if you want to know how to play, just watch Israel.

Tom Friedman of the New York Times wrote a compelling book some years back called "From Beirut to Jerusalem", in which he recounts his experience of living in Lebanon and Israel for five years during the war there. He recounted a parable that sticks in my mind to this day--a story that goes far in explaining what is motivating Israel's aggressive retaliation for an ostensibly minor outrage.

A man is raising a turkey in anticipation of its aphrodisiacal qualities when one morning he discovers that the turkey has been stolen. Excitedly, he calls his sons together and informs them that they have to get the turkey back. His sons are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of so much aggravation over so little a matter, so they refuse to get involved and return to their own homes.

A short while later, the man finds that a sheep has been stolen, and so he calls his sons together and insists that they retreive the turkey. They commiserate, but a sheep isn't worth going to war over either, and again, nothing is done.

Not much later, a camel is stolen. Now a camel is a serious asset, one that can affect a family's survival and this time it is the sons that instigate a meeting with the father to plan strategy. The father is forlorn, and laments their doom. "If you had only acted when they stole the turkey, none of this would have happened, but our enemies were emboldened by our inaction and now they have no fear of us at all..."

Israel has, for all intensive purposes, had a "turkey" stolen, and they know damn well how important it is to get that turkey back at any cost.

Reputation is a valuable thing anywhere in the world, but in the middle east it can mean the difference between life and death. Ariel Sharon was a guy that Arabs knew not to mess with, and so he had the luxury of making concessions since it could not be perceived as weakness.

His successors are not so feared, and so they must prove their mettle on the battlefield. Israel will of course demolish Hezbollah and Hamas and whether they get their soldiers back or not (they will not), they will have succeeded in reminding their enemies of what the Israels have to fight with and what kind of punishment they can dish out.

If Israel plays its cards right, this may just be an opportunity to rid Lebanon of Hezbollah altogether and remove one of the last obstacles to that country acheiving real democratic reforms.

On the other side of this equation, this was a very bad move for Hamas and Hezbollah--their sponsors can't get directly involved, or it would defeat the purpose of having surrogate terror groups in the first place. So why do it?

The witless western media pimps only see what's blowing up within sight of their hotel balconies, so don't look to them for any insight, but consider the parable--someone is putting a lot of pressure of Iran and Syria and that someone is 'us'. They are reacting like people whose turkey, sheep and camel were stolen.

The media is always willing to give us the "downside" for the U.S. while never considering the position the enemy finds themselves in. While the U.S. and its allies continue to make steady progress in Iraq, and while Chris Wallace and others are stepping gingerly around the word "quagmire", that's how they want to see it all indications to the contrary.

That is not how Syria and Iran see it.

Sacrificing such valuable pawns as Hamas and Hezbollah is the act of a desperate player and there is little evidence that the gambit is working. While we have the routine denunciations by the Euroweenies and the feckless Arab states, no one wants to get involved in this pooch-screw. Chris Wallace dangled bait in front of Condoleezza Rice this morning with talk of "shuttle diplomacy"; Henry Kissinger's soft shoe performance masking U.S. impotence in the Levantine dust-up of that era. Rice wasn't buying--Israel is kicking butt and rewriting facts on the ground--best to stay out of the way.

For all the grave tones emanating from the chattering classes, this is business as usual--conflict and Israeli gains. It seems that the only time Israel "loses" is when the diplomats get involved. Its nice to finally see the U.S. make the right move and stay the hell out of it.

Hezbollah went thataway... -->

While Iran's role in prompting precipitive action by Hezbollah to provoke Israel is acknowledged and its goals understood to some degree, Syria's role in the affair, while evident, is less motivated by some obvious gain. In fact, Syria may well be facing implosion if the conflict is not quickly brought under control.

Syria simply cannot stand toe-to-toe with Israel and the other Arab governments in the region understand this all to well. What they fear is that current conflict will spill over into Syrian territory and lead to the destabilization of an already shaky Syrian government.

No one is really keen on the Assad regime, but the alternative is even less pleasant--imagine Iraq without American forces to moderate the violence in that country. Such messes don't stay neatly contained, and the after effects will spill over into the rest of the region, creating problems for everybody.

Recently, Egypt sought to prevent a U.S. military campaign against Syria, following Washington's accusations that Damascus was behind all of the terrorist attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The countries of the region have interceded on many occasions to protect Syria from all possible attacks.

The question is: Can an angry Israel be kept away from Syria this time, especially since no one knows if Washington will look the other way?

Now there are signs that Israel might repeat its the invasion scenario that it undertook in Lebanon in 1982, but this time in Syria, taking advantage of its overwhelming military superiority. This possibility doesn’t escape Damascus, which is aware of the gravity of the situation.

According an Arab official familiar with the details of this situation, Iran is trying to drag its feet by using Syria to escalate the situation and avoid its own direct involvement. Iran is using Damascus like a chess piece to manipulate a regional conflict. Tehran is in a state of conflict with the West over its growing political influence in the region and its nuclear program, and is now prepared to move the crisis to the level of direct confrontation.

If such an open confrontation does take place, Iran knows that it has little to lose, being a large country with a strong military, and with an established political system and lots of oil in high demand.

Syria's situation is different, situated as it is between the hammer of American and anvil of Israeli, with a broken-down economy and unable to cope with Israeli power on its own.

Like the person afraid of seeing a demon, the Arab official said that there has always been a fear that such a war was likely to happen, and now it looks like the present war might spin out of control.

The Saudi view, as expressed here, is widely shared throughout the region and explains the rather frantic calls for a ceasefire.

I find the Saudi position refreshingly sober, but will it be taken into account by the Bush administraton? I suspect it will. While Syria is a pain-in-the-neck, a bad regime into control of its territory is better than a good regime that isn't, particularly in light of what we're trying to accomplish in Iraq and Lebanon. The considerable trick here is going to be to threaten Syria enough that they will cooperate without actually having to effect "the price" that so many conservative commentators seem to be calling for. If it works, the forces of democracy will have made considerable progress in the region and effected greater security for the Israelis to boot.

Its a very interesting situation--a large risk with commenserate rewards if successful. The irony here is that the a "cowboy" president maybe just the ticket to win this. While Democrats and the left generally like to blame Bush for the current belligerency of Iran and North Korea, they might consider some blame for the Clinton administration as well in being too willing to compromise. When you know the other party is going to cave, you plan your negotiating position on it. Similarly, if you know your adversary is "crazy", you'll tend to avoid confrontation. Assad has to be wondering how crazy George W. Bush is, particularly if he reads the New York Times. If he believes that Bush will simply stand by and let the Israelis chew on his ankles, Assad will have to consider making some important concessions.

Lots of things could go wrong of course, and maybe they will. Its not really known to what extent Assad has control within his own country--is it even possible for him to rein in the conga line to the Sunni triangle? That may also factor into the calculus of this situation. If Assad has already lost control, then pushing him over may be what's required. I bet a lot that there are a lot of calls being made into Syria to get the lay of the land and kick the tires on a coup.

"The attack on a group of Western tourists in Jordan on Monday should be condemned by all standards as an act of terrorism, but..."
Done that. Heard it before. Writes itself. Don't buy it.

But.Me.No.Buts.

Tim Blair unearths some interesting and not widely-reported facts about the West Bank and Gaza.

Birzeit University pollster Nader Said, who has monitored emigration attitudes for 12 years, says the percentage of Palestinians willing to relocate once hovered just below 20 percent. When that figure jumped to 32 percent in a September survey, Mr. Said says he was shocked.

The catalyst, the pollster says, has been Palestinian disillusionment following Hamas’s half-year in government. “What the Israelis were unable to do - try to push the Palestinian out of the country - the internal strife is achieving,” he says.

Wow. Talk about your law of unintended consequences.

It seems we can expect a lot more unintended consequences in the very near future according to Bret Stephens notes developments in Gaza that suggest Hamas is staging for war">Bret Stephens.

Here, then, is the third circumstance: The rise of Hamas, with ties to Iran and potentially a secure territorial base of its own, is an even greater long-term threat to the brittle regime of Hosni Mubarak than it is to Israel. Consider the Kabuki dance being played around the fate of Cpl. Shalit. The Egyptians have been negotiating his release for months, probably in good faith: They fear that indefinite detention might lead to a full-scale Israeli invasion of Gaza, which would have spillover effects in the Sinai. At the same time, Mr. Mubarak has been ratcheting up the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas's sister organization in Egypt, by canceling elections the Brotherhood seemed likely to win and tinkering with the election law to further shut it out of the political process. Poor 19-year-old Cpl. Shalit is being played by Hamas as a card in two separate games: with the Israelis for the release of Palestinian prisoners and with the Egyptians for political concessions in Cairo.

The political heat between the two sides was noticeably raised last week when Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar reportedly warned Egypt that if it failed to open its border with Gaza "there will be no border." Equally extraordinary was that the statement was widely reprinted in the Egyptian state media, playing into the broad suspicion that the Brotherhood, as a religious organization, is fundamentally anti-Egypt in the national sense. "Now the line is, 'No more foreign ministry,'" says an Egyptian source, suggesting the Mubarak regime is quickly moving away from diplomacy to more aggressive forms of persuasion with Hamas.

If Egypt or Israel had the luxury of choice they would abandon Gaza to its own miserable devices, or--even better--to each other. But that's not how it works in the Middle East. The war for Gaza is coming, no matter who does the fighting. Whoever stays out of it wins.

The USS John Bolton took on most of the rest of the world on Friday.

Bolton was furious over the adoption by the General Assembly of a resolution which said the assembly regretted the deaths of 19 civilians in an attack by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Hanoun last week.

The United States, and Australia joined Israel in voting against the motion, together with four small Pacific island nations. All countries in Europe, including Britain, voted to support the resolution.

I'll be proud to help pay Bolton's salary should the Democrats defeat his nomination. The President should continue to nominate 1st class people like Bolton, Roberts, Alito and let liberal Senators defile themselves in full view.

Iranian sci-fi.

I hope the Saban center didn't spend too much on this poll:

The survey of 3,850 people in six Arab countries rated President George W. Bush as the most disliked world leader, while the United States and Israel were viewed as significantly greater threats than Iran.

But hey, here is a unique solution:

... the negative image could be repaired if Washington brokered a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement.

Ever get the impression the Arab world would also consider a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement the solution for global warming, psoriasis, and ring around the collar?

..in modern British military training:

The one female crew member, Faye Turney, wore a blue headscarf and jacket.

An unidentified crew member said: "I'd like to say that myself and my whole team are very grateful for your forgiveness. I'd like to thank yourself and the Iranian people... Thank you very much, sir."

Falstaff:

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it.

In 1938 the English football side, including the great Stanley Matthews, gave the Nazi salute in Berlin as instructed by the Foreign Office. Now British Royal Marines apologize and smile to the Iranian hostage-taker-in-chief. In 1939 war broke out.

Update: A different angle -

Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail takes no prisoners:

... I don't hold the hostages responsible for what happened to them, or how they responded while in captivity. They and thousands more like them do a brave, thankless job on our behalf.

But I despair at what their ordeal and the response to it tells us about the kind of country we have become.

After ten years of Tony Blair, Britain is now a neutered, international laughing stock. The United Nations and our EU 'partners' hold us in contempt.

The feminisation of our entire society has utterly destroyed whatever credibility and moral fibre we ever had. The emotional incontinence which flooded the country at the time Lady Di popped her Jimmy Choos is now our stock in trade.

I wanted to retch when I saw the father of one of the captured marines cuddling his wife and sobbing on live television in front of a tree festooned with yellow ribbons.

Of course he's got every right to be upset, but he shouldn't be sharing it with Sky News. His other son looked deeply embarrassed, as if a dog had just peed up against his leg. It was the most skin-crawling moment I have seen since The Mellorphant Man paraded his family in front of a five-bar gate.

And What about the outside broadcasts from assorted pubs around the country, as various friends and relatives showed their solidarity by drinking themselves senseless?

...

The broadcast media covered the whole affair as if it were an episode of Big Brother. Gormless women cackled away about the hostages in the same silly psychobabble as they discuss 'relationship ishoos'.

And this in case you think Littlejohn's exaggerating:

As for Britain's government, perhaps the harshest comments issued during the entire fiasco came from British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The object of her ire? Prisoner Turney's smoking. "It was deplorable," Hewitt tut-tutted. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."
..
But the fatuousness of Hewitt's comment perfectly echoed that of new U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who also "thanked" Ahmadinejad.

Faye Turney is not a traitor. She is a decent young mother put in a tough spot by blackguards, incompetents and PC commissars. Her first duty was to get home safely to her 3yo daughter and a woman should not have been in the front-line compromising the morale of the male captives, tho God knows quite a few of them compromised themselves.

3rd in line for Commander-in-Chief.
What's her excuse?

Another caustically definitive post by the Telegraph's US editor on the Royal Navy's humiliation in Iran. Sample:

Our two interviewees should take the money and go off and do something else. They clearly aren't cut out for the armed services.
LS Turney? You tell it how it effing is. How about manning the checkout at Tesco .. or mucking out stables?
OM Batchelor? You're a chirpy, sensitive chap. Maybe you could work in a pet grooming salon or start a window-cleaning service - if you're not afraid of heights.
And the Navy? Back to the drawing board, I'm afraid. As a former naval officer and lieutenant on board HMS Cornwall, it gives me no pleasure to say that it will take a decade or two for the Senior Service to live this one down.

Military expert Col. Ralph Peters (rtd):

The once-proud Brit military has collapsed to a sorry state when its Royal Marines surrender without a fight, then apologize to their captors (praising their gentle natures!) while criticizing their own country. Pretty sad to think that the last real warriors fighting under the Union Jack are soccer hooligans.

..the Brits were going into extremely hostile terrain, outnumbered, without helicopter support, relying instead upon timing, terrain, maneuverability, firepower, and sheer audacity.

The British soldiers he’s embedded with notched 26-27 kills and suffered no casualties of their own while engaging the enemy in a major gun battle. Michael said to me in an email about the Brits he’s riding with, “These guys fight like animals!”

In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others - Voltaire, Candide.

there was more truth in [Voltaire's] epigram than perhaps he knew, for the execution of Byng had a profound effect on the moral climate of the navy … the fate of Byng taught [officers] that even the most powerful political friends might not save an officer who failed to fight. Many things might go wrong with an attack on the enemy, but the only fatal error was not to risk it. Byng's death revived and reinforced a culture of aggressive determination which set British officers apart from their foreign contemporaries, and which in time gave them a steadily mounting psychological ascendancy. More and more in the course of the century, and for long afterwards, British officers encountered opponents who expected to be attacked, and more than half expected to be beaten - NAM Rodger, A Naval History of Britain.

In scenario planning it's reasonable to assign a base case. The base case for Israel is this:

Olmert goes, Netanyahu takes over, Netanyahu acts with or without the US to halt Iranian nuclear weapon production.

The current US policy drift on Iran is dangerously unrealistic.

This just in: you can't trust Syria, you can't trust Iran, you can't trust N.Korea. It appears that the Israelis just destroyed Syrian materials for nuclear warheads stored 50 miles from the Iraqi border.

Andrew Semmel, a senior US State Department official, said Syria might have obtained nuclear equipment from “secret suppliers”, and added that there were a “number of foreign technicians” in the country.

Asked if they could be North Korean, he replied: “There are North Korean people there. There’s no question about that.” He said a network run by AQ Khan, the disgraced creator of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, could be involved.

But why would nuclear material be in Syria? Known to have chemical weapons, was it seeking to bolster its arsenal with something even more deadly?

Alternatively, could it be hiding equipment for North Korea, enabling Kim Jong-il to pretend to be giving up his nuclear programme in exchange for economic aid? Or was the material bound for Iran, as some authorities in America suggest?

As a bonus, the Israelis proved they could penetrate the Syrian air defence system, which is stronger than the one protecting Iranian nuclear sites.

This from the Iranian news agency:

International rules require the United States, as the host to the UN headquarters, to issue visa for other countries' envoys to the United Nations and to refrain from disrupting the operations of the world body.

Due to similar incidents in the past, Iran has called on the UN member states to change the UN headquarters from New York to Geneva or a more convenient and impartial place.

Actually move the UN to Tehran. Ok it might inconvenience the next Australian PM when he wants to get sloshed in a strip club while on an official visit to the UN, but what's that compared to the sheer appositeness of the world's foremost forum for hypocrisy and anti-Americanism re-locating to Iran.

Colin Powell in Kuwait:

Asked if he sees a U.S. war on Iran coming, the retired U.S. general said although no American official will say the option was "off the table," he did not see prospects of a military conflict.

There is no base of support among Americans for such an action, Powell said, adding that the U.S. military already has enough on its hands in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US President is bluffing. Go ahead and call him.

The US President is bluffing. He can't stop Iran. You'd better find your own deterrent.

A British citizen is in a spot of bother in Sudan. She 'insensitively' allowed a 7 yo pupil to name a teddy bear 'Muhammed' after himself.

"Spitting hatred, thousands of hardline Islamists called for British teacher Gillian Gibbons to be shot yesterday."

We should send the Royal Navy to let the Islamosavages know that bad acts have bad consequences. Oh, wait...