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Britain's Ministry Of Defense Closes UFO Department

2009-12-04T12:24:38Z

LONDON — The truth – and the UFOs – may be out there, but nobody in the British military is listening anymore.

Britain's Ministry of Defense has quietly shut down its UFO hot line as a cost-cutting measure and will no longer investigate any sightings. Veterans of such investigations more worthy of "The X-Files" say it will end work on one of the biggest mysteries of all time.

William Bradley: Barack Obama's War: 10 Key Things To Know

2009-12-04T10:38:17Z

It's Barack Obama's war now. Here are some key things to know about this curious, complex war -- in which the newest Nobel Peace Prize-winner has placed himself at the helm of the largest military force ever sent to Afghanistan, the historic graveyard of empire -- along with the likely road ahead.

** Along with NATO, we already have as many troops in Afghanistan as the Soviets did in the 1980s. With Obama's newest escalation, we will have more troops than the Soviets had in Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama outlined his new strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan in this speech from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

** The Soviets were winning their war in Afghanistan. Before we intervened with massive covert funding and weapons. Of course, they were pursuing brutal scorched earth tactics, like those they used so notoriously to put down the persistent revolt in Chechnya. Even if Obama, who receives the Nobel Peace Prize next week, weren't horrified by such tactics, and I have no doubt he would be, they would ruin his big effort for a rapprochement with the Islamic world, launched successfully with his address six months ago in Cairo.

** The Soviet Afghan War was won with only a handful of Americans in Afghanistan. Defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan -- in effect, making Afghanistan the Soviet Vietnam -- was key to ending the Cold War and bringing down the Soviet Union. There were virtually no Americans on the ground in Afghanistan. Instead, we worked through cutouts, principally the Pakistanis. The goal wasn't to control Afghanistan, a country with no intrinsic strategic significance for America. The goal was to deliver a stinging defeat to America's enemy, the Soviet Union.

Of course, totally ignoring Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets and the end of the Cold War created a vacuum which, after years of infighting, was finally filled by a new and even more radical group, the Taliban (fundamentalist religious students). A case of penny-wise, pound-foolish, typical of America's lack of historical perspective.

"The Forgotten War" no more.

** The post-9/11 Afghan War was won with only a few hundred Americans in Afghanistan. A relative handful of Intelligence agents and special forces operators utilized air power and worked with Afghan forces opposed to the ruling Taliban to chase Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and to bring down the Taliban government when it would not serve up Osama bin Laden, who had finally established his base there after being chased out elsewhere. (Bin Laden, incidentally, was not created by the CIA and was completely tangential in the Afghan war against the Soviets, barely setting foot in the country.) The goal was to defeat the enemy which attacked America on 9/11, the cadre of Al Qaeda. The Bush/Cheney Administration didn't want to risk the potential backlash from having large numbers of American troops on foreign soil. Certainly not something they worried much about any time after that.

** The epic fail of Tora Bora echoes very loudly today. We might not be talking much about Al Qaeda, a diminished force, were it not for the incredible failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, President Bush vowed to get him, dead or alive. But when it came time to take him, almost exactly eight years ago, in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan where he was trying to make his way to a new safe haven in Pakistan, it didn't happen. Read the new Senate report on this, and weep. The Bush/Cheney Administration turned down repeated reqests, saying it didn't want a heavy foreign presence on the ground, so he was allowed to slip away.

** Bill Clinton was criticized for failing to destroy the Al Qaeda training and operational bases in Afghanistan with cruise missiles in the late 1990s. Instead, it was said that he should have used special operations forces to wreck the Al Qaeda operation. Notice that no one seriously suggested that he launch a full-scale invasion to accomplish this. It wasn't necessary for the mission. Why we have to control Afghanistan now to stop Al Qaeda from using it as its base of operations is a bit of a mystery, as we can readily smash any such bases in Afghanistan.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says President Obama's new surge-and-endgame strategy in Afghanistan will help military forces find a better focus for their mission.

** Barack Obama ran for president on a program of escalating the war in Afghanistan. He was very clear about this. The fact that he is now doing what he said he would do when he ran for president should be no surprise to people who supported him. Or to those who did not.

** The Pakistan quandary looms very large. Of course, being president is more complicated than being candidate for president. Perhaps the biggest complication with regard to Afghanistan is Pakistan. It's the only Islamic nuclear power, knock on wood with regard to Iran. So allowing it to fall into the hands of jihadists would be, as the saying goes, bad. Fortunately, Pakistan has pushed back successfully this year against what had been major Taliban gains around the country, gains which happened as a result of inaction during the Bush/Cheney Administration. But its more remote provinces still provide a safe haven for Afghan Taliban -- in some ways invented by Pakistani intelligence -- and for Al Qaeda.

American escalation in Afghanistan may push more jihadists into Pakistan, risking destabilization, as Pakistan's leaders have pointed out. They are noncommittal so far about the new Obama strategy in Afghanistan. And, though they've pushed back hard against local Taliban threatening their own rule, they haven't been so supportive of efforts against other jihadists. With at least some sort of American exit strategy now in place for Afghanistan, it may occur to the Pakistanis that the Taliban will outlast America in Afghanistan, and end up controlling much if not most of the country. Yet Pakistan can be very helpful with intelligence about the Afghan Taliban, who are likely to infiltrate the Afghan army and police we say we are trying to build up while the present surge lasts.

** Is defeat in Afghanistan inevitable? No. Remember that the Soviets were winning before America lanched its massive covert intervention in Afghanistan. Not that we could pursue the same sort of ruthless tactics.

Here's one early window on the reaction of the Afghan people to Obama's new strategy.

The answer really depends on how you define success. Is it likely that Afghanistan is going to be built into a truly functioning nation-state any time soon? No. Are we going to stick around for decades to make that happen? No. Is it likely we can train large numbers of illiterate recruits (Afghanistan's literacy rate is 10%) into professional security forces? It's very difficult. Can we deny Afghanistan as a base for "The Base," Al Qaeda? Yes. But we've been able to do that for the past eight years, with no escalation necessary. What seems most likely is that friendly forces can continue to control northern Afghanistan, providing basing to chase down Al Qaeda concentrations in Taliban-friendly southern Afghanistan and along the Pakistan border if need be.

** So what happens next in what may well be an extended exercise on the politico/military equivalent of a stairmaster?

Obama gave his big speech at West Point. Which was not one of his best, as he seemed rather nervous and didn't establish a rhetorical rapport with the crowd of cadets and the long military tradition with which he was there to resonate. Still, he got the message across. He will send 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. When it's all said and done, there will be about 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. There are over 40,000 troops there from American allies, principally NATO nations. Nearly 10,000 of those troops are British.

He's ordered the generals to have most of the new troops in place in six months, much faster than previously assumed possible.

He wants NATO to provide another 5000 troops. NATO leadership says it will provide 7000 new troops. But that decision won't be taken in terms of actual commitments from NATO nations till an international conference on Afghanistan at the end of next month in London.

Obama plans to protect big population areas while heavily degrading Taliban forces and spinning up the training of Afghan forces.

And Obama wants to withdraw most American troops in three years, reiterating that he'll start withdrawing troops in the middle of 2011. But how quickly those troops are withdrawn is up in the air.

The plan is predicated on pushing back the Taliban, which the military says presently control a third of the provinces, to provide a space for a rapid build-up of Afghan security forces.

A lot of things have to go right for this very ambitious plan, which sounds a great deal like Vietnamization, which worked wonders for Richard Nixon, to work. But you can bet that Obama wants most American troops out of Afghanistan by the time of his re-election.

You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.

UN to investigate climate email row

2009-12-04T08:01:10Z

Panel on climate change to probe claims UK scientists manipulated global warming data.

Read more: United Kingdom, Home News

Methodist preacher who attended Morris County grad school pleads guilty to sexual abuse in U.K.

2009-12-04T06:46:07Z

A former Methodist lay preacher who attended graduate school in Madison pleaded guilty in a United Kingdom court for a series of child sex offenses, a report in the Daily Record said. Keith Morton, 43, told the court he committed...

Read more: United Kingdom, Home News

Target's MePa Pop-Up Will Be a Drive-Thru Starring Rachel Bilson

2009-12-03T16:30:59Z

Click the image above to view the full photogallery. Target is on fire today, people. First, they confirmed their upcoming collaboration with flower powerhouse Liberty of London. Then, they finally released the much-desired, long-embargoed images of their full Rodarte line. Meanwhile, WWD featured the upcoming Target To-Go pop-up shop in...

British MPs To Go "Clubbing" To Investigate Cocaine

2009-12-03T16:02:06Z

British MPs are to enjoy a night out "clubbing" in order to learn more about the cocaine trade.

The BBC reports that the House of Commons home affairs committee, led by Labour's Keith Vaz, will be investigating drugs and drug prevention at "Student nights" in nightclubs.

The BBC writes:

The student nights are of interest because technology, such as scanners to detect cocaine and "knife arches", is in use.

Mr Vaz said: "This [cocaine dealing] is a very, very serious crime and what we want to do is make sure is that the police get as much help as possible."

However, The Telegraph spoke to an anonymous police source, who suspected the MPs may be in for a bit of a shock when they head to the clubs.

"Some of these clubs are real rave ups with people doing all sorts.

"I imagine some of these MPs haven't been to a club since the 70s - and it's a long way from the Bee Gees and Abba these days."

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Meanwhile, in the U.K. ...: Lily Allen told a British radio...

2009-12-03T09:00:53Z

Lily Allen told a British radio show this morning that she was planning on quitting music for two years to start a fashion boutique. The singer already designed a collection for New Look and did a jewelry line, and her new plan is to work with her sister and open...

Read more: United Kingdom, Home News

The Big Muslim Problem

2009-12-02T11:07:43Z

Malise Ruthven
The New York Review of Books

"Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West"
by Christopher Caldwell
Doubleday, 422 pp., $30.00

"What I Believe"
by Tariq Ramadan
Oxford University Press, 148 pp., $12.95

In April 1968, two weeks after the riots that devastated US cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the British Tory politician Enoch Powell (who as minister of health between 1960 and 1963 had presided over the large-scale recruitment of nursing and health staff from Britain's former colonies) predicted that a similar destiny was facing Britain. "We must be mad," he said,

literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Quoting a phrase of Virgil's that would resonate famously down the decades, he warned: "I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

Though the Tory party leader Edward Heath immediately fired him from his post as opposition spokesman on defense, Powell's speech had struck a powerful chord. Within ten days he had received more than 100,000 letters of support, with only eight hundred expressing disagreement. In London more than a thousand dockworkers went on strike in protest at his dismissal. Anxiety about immigration had a significant part in the unexpected victory that restored the Conservative Party to power in 1970.

Powell, who died in 1998, has been castigated as a racist and condemned, not to say vilified, by the liberal left; but as Christopher Caldwell argues in his provocatively titled book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West", his demographic predictions have proved remarkably accurate. In one of his speeches Powell shocked his audience by predicting that Britain's nonwhite population of barely a million would reach 4.5 million by 2002; according to the Office of National Statistics, the size of Britain's "ethnic minority" population actually reached 4.6 million in 2001. His predictions for the ethnic composition of major cities such as Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Inner London were similarly on target. Britain's Commission for Racial Equality predicts that by 2011 the population of Leicester will be 50 percent nonwhite, making it the first major British city without a white majority.

This pattern is being replicated in cities throughout Western Europe. According to Caldwell, Europe is now a "continent of migrants" with more than 10 percent of its people living outside their countries of birth. The figure includes both non-European immigrants and citizens of countries belonging to the enlarged European Union who are permitted to move freely within its territory. But it also includes a substantial body of immigrants--namely Muslims--whom Caldwell regards as posing "the most acute problems" on account of their religion (an issue never mentioned by Powell in his speeches).

The statistics are highly variable since many countries do not register the religion of their citizens. However, it is generally assumed that there are now upward of 13 million Muslims, and possibly as many as 20 million (Caldwell's preferred figure), living in the European Union. The largest concentrations are in France with more than 5 million, Germany with around 3 million, Britain with 1.6 million, Spain with a million, and the Netherlands and Bulgaria with just under a million. Overall, the proportion of Muslims now residing in the European Union (including the indigenous Bulgarian Muslims) remains at 5 percent, a proportion twice that of the "nearly seven million American Muslims" mentioned by President Barack Obama in his Cairo University speech last June.

Individual cities, however, have much higher concentrations. Karoly Lorant, a Hungarian economist who wrote a paper on the subject for the European Parliament, calculates that Muslims already make up 25 percent of the population in Marseilles and Rotterdam, 20 percent in Malmö, 15 percent in Brussels and Birmingham, and 10 percent in London, Paris, and Copenhagen. If the French national figure of around 5 million were proportionately reproduced in the US, it would make for 24 million American Muslims. Moreover, given that immigrant Muslims have a higher birthrate than indigenous white Europeans or other immigrant groups such as Eastern Europeans or African-Caribbeans, that population seems set to increase, regardless of tighter controls on immigration now being imposed by governments. The US National Intelligence Council expects that by 2025 the Muslim population of Europe will have doubled.

In the first part of his book Caldwell takes some Enoch Powell-like swipes at the policies--or lack of them--that allowed this situation to develop. In the aftermath of World War II, European countries overestimated the need for immigrant labor. Instead of investing in new technology, they drove down labor costs--and undermined the power of labor unions--by importing cheap workers without regard for the social and cultural consequences. Caldwell challenges the assumptions of economists who argue that immigrants increase national wealth. With old industries such as textiles already in decline, immigrant workers merely delayed the necessary process of restructuring. In macroeconomic terms the wealth they generate is nugatory--approximately one three-hundredth of the advanced countries' output. In any case much of the supposed added value contributed by immigrant businesses that appears in economic statistics is absorbed in the costs of accommodating them in their new environment, or is sent back to their home countries. In 2003, for example, Moroccans living in Europe sent home r3.6 billion ($4.1 billion) in remissions.

The picture Caldwell paints is complex, paradoxical, and sometimes at variance with the anti-immigration thrust of his argument. While he dwells on the obvious aspects of political and cultural dystopia--the terrorist outrages in London and Madrid, the riots in the Paris banlieues, the growing Muslim prison populations, and the horrors of unreconstructed patriarchy in the form of "honor killings," systemic homophobia, and the bizarre medical "hymen repair operation" that allows young women to recover lost virginities--he acknowledges some of the positive contributions that immigrants make to society. In the case of Italy, for example, he observes that the country's agriculture, food, and its superb urban landscape--features that lie at the heart of its attractions as the center of European culture--are largely sustained by immigrants:

Italy has lately received more than half a million immigrants a year from Africa and the Middle East, mostly to work in its farms, shops, and restaurants. The market price of certain kinds of Italian produce, so Italian farmers say, is in danger of falling below the cost of bringing it to market. Under conditions of globalization, Italy's real comparative advantage may lie elsewhere than in agriculture, in some high-tech economic model that is remunerative but not particularly "Italian."...

Traditional ways of working the land may be viable only if there are immigrants there to work it. You can make similar arguments about traditional Italian restaurants, which in the present economy may be able to hold their own against soulless chains only with the help of low-paid immigrant labor. Ditto the country's lovely public parks, which have traditionally required dozens of gardeners, a level of manpower that the country's shrinking population cannot supply, except at a high price....

Some natives may feel "swamped" by the demographic change, but immigration, though not ideal, may be the most practical way of keeping Italy looking like Italy. As the novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa once wrote, "If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change."

Caldwell does not suggest that the paradox of foreigners "keeping Italy looking like Italy" is necessarily unsustainable. His concern is that a majority of migrants belong to a religion that a skeptical, post-Enlightenment Europe cannot be expected to contain or resist. The level of Muslim immigration is unprecedented. Whereas in the past, groups of immigrants--"Jewish and Huguenot refugees, a few factory hands from Poland or Ireland or Italy"--were "big enough to enrich the lands of settlement but not so big as to threaten them," the sheer volume of Muslim immigration endangers the indigenous cultures of Europe, not least because those cultures have become precariously fragile. Political correctness, anti-racism, and multiculturalism, born of guilt about colonialism and shame about the Holocaust, are eroding national cultures, while failing to produce a coherent vision of a common European identity.

No reasonable person would deny that there are problems with some of Europe's immigrant communities, or that multiculturalism challenges traditional boundaries separating citizenship from ideas centered on loyalty, identity, and allegiance. For the late Sir Bernard Crick, George Orwell's biographer and a leading educator, "Britishness" is a legal and political structure that excludes culture: "When an immigrant says 'I am British,' he is not saying he wants to be English, Scottish or Welsh." As Caldwell comments:

This was the EU model of belonging: You are one person for your culture and another for the law. You can be an official (legal) European even if you are not a "real" (cultural) European. This disaggregation of the personal personality and the legal personality sounds tolerant and liberating, but it has its downside. Rights are attached to citizenship. As soon as your citizenship becomes a legal construction, so do your rights.

In Caldwell's view, immigrants to Europe are able to exploit their rights not just as citizens but as residents, by claiming the health and welfare benefits to which natives are entitled. "The postwar Western European welfare states provided the most generous benefits ever given to workers anywhere." Germany's job market was the archetype of the systems replicated across Western Europe, with short working hours, seven-week vacations, full health coverage, and wages for unionized workers reaching almost $50 an hour. Although--unlike some other countries--Germany's jus sanguinis denied full citizenship to immigrant workers, who were mainly from Turkey and Morocco, the economic effects were ultimately the same.

The welfare burden has impeded investment, stifling real risk-based entrepreneurship epitomized by the "small, flexible start-up companies that drove most of the innovation in recent decades," especially in the information economy. The US, by contrast, is less indulgent: here, contrary to the myth of American openness, immigrants are pressured to conform. An immigrant may maintain his ancestral culture, but "if it is a culture that prevents him from speaking English well or showing up to work promptly, he will go hungry. Then he will go home."

In Caldwell's vision Europe's welfare states have been succouring alien intruders: as the native population grows in age and declines in proportion to immigrants, so the value they add to the "social market" economy by contributing to its welfare systems is eroded by their claims on benefits. In Spain for example, the Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has predicted that the ratio of workers to retirees, currently 4.5:1, will fall to 2:1 by 2050. In Britain the Office of National Statistics predicts a population increase of ten million people--two thirds of them immigrants or their children--over the next quarter-century, with the number of people aged eighty-five and over expected to double. For Caldwell the short-term relief that immigrants bring to the welfare state is unlikely to match their longer-term claims on it:

In the extremely short run, a baby bust such as Europe has undergone can enhance living standards, because it reduces the number of dependents per worker. But in the longer run a reckoning awaits, and the longer run has arrived.

The most egregious examples of Caldwell's aliens are Muslims, because, as he sees it, they are less susceptible to European cultural influences than other immigrant groups such as Slavs, Sikhs, Hindus, non-Muslim Africans, and African-Caribbeans. He flatly ignores evidence produced by numerous scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Tariq Modood, Philip Lewis, and Jytte Klausen that Muslim identities are shifting to meet changing circumstances, that a majority of younger British Muslims, for example, "share many aspects of popular youth culture with their non-Muslim peers," and that their problem is not so much with the majority culture as with "traditionally-minded parents who seek, usually unsuccessfully, to limit their access to it."

Caldwell pours scorn on writers who emphasize the diversity of the Islamic traditions in Europe. "For all its pleasing glibness," he says, "this harping on diversity is misguided." His reading of Islam takes an essentialist perspective of a primordial religion impervious to change, as if he were oblivious of the way that essentialist views of religion have long been under sustained intellectual attack. No one remotely familiar with the work of scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh (who ruminates on the diversities of "Islams" and "modernities") or the political scientist Jytte Klausen, whose brilliant work on European Muslims investigates emerging hermeneutics and epistemologies of faith, would dismiss them, as Caldwell does, as "glib." Al-Azmeh and his colleagues provide plenty of support to refute "the cliché," as al-Azmeh writes, "of a homogenous collectivity innocent of modernity, cantankerously or morosely obsessed with prayer, fasting, veiling, medieval social and penal arrangements,"[1] while Klausen has demonstrated convincingly that European Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to extremism, support democratic processes, accept the duties of citizenship, and are evolving distinctively local styles of Muslim identities.[2]

Nor does Caldwell exhibit any familiarity with the rich literature describing the spread of Islam in peripheral cultures such as sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, where a religion originating in Arabia proved every bit as adept as Christianity in adjusting to local conditions. He has similarly failed to familiarize himself, even superficially, with the vast literature charting the encounter between Islam and modern Western society. In his review of Western attitudes toward Islam he prefers to celebrate the prejudices of writers such as Ernest Renan (in 1883) or Hilaire Belloc (in 1938) than to engage with significant Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman, Muhammed Arkoun, or Abdullahi an-Naim who might challenge his essentialist assumptions. Caldwell's "Islam" owes more to tabloid headlines than to responsible research. To borrow a phrase of Philip Lewis, it exemplifies the need for greater religious literacy in the post-September 11 era.

Nevertheless, in arguing that "Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind," Caldwell makes some useful points. European societies have yet to find satisfactory ways of institutionalizing Islam within their national polities. This is partly due to the fragmentary and contested nature of Islamic spiritual authority, in which (with the partial exception of Shiism) no formal priesthood stands between the individual and a god who reveals himself in texts that are subject to a wide variety of interpretations.

Umbrella bodies intended to act as interlocutors with governments, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM), are rejected by many Muslims for being too political, or not political enough, or simply not representative of people who may be difficult to represent, or may not want to be represented as "Muslims." It is clear that as a religion formulated during an era of political ascendancy, the mainstream traditions of Islam have yet to find comfortable moorings as minorities in the contested public spaces of a secular, pluralist West.

Two thirds of the imams in France live on welfare, as do a similar number in Britain. A majority are foreign-born and trained, and have received little instruction in British culture or its values. A small minority of them have been exposed in the press as "preachers of hate." The funding of European mosques and Islamic institutions from ultraconservative countries should be a real cause for concern: in France, for example, the Union of Islamic Organizations (UIOF) --an umbrella group of doctrinaire Muslim youth organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood--gets a quarter of its annual budget from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and other foreign donors.

The British laissez-faire model of leaving immigrant communities to manage themselves has allowed extremism to flourish in all sorts of complex ways. Missionary organizations such as the Tablighi Jamaat, known for its pietism and declared abhorrence of politics, nevertheless encourage a separatist spirit in which extremism can be incubated: most of the men convicted in September for the plot to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives smuggled in soft-drink bottles had connections with the Tablighi Jamaat, as did two of the suicide bombers who murdered fifty-two people in the London transport system in July 2005.

Paradoxically, even marriage can be an agent of radicalization: whereas the first generation of migrants' children pleased their parents by marrying cousins imported from Pakistan or Bangladesh (thereby swelling immigrant numbers), their children's insistence on marrying Muslim partners of their choice is leading to the creation of a Muslim identity that transcends the older patterns of "encapsulated" settlement based on differences of region, culture, language, and biradiri (extended family networks).

This novel pan-Islamic identity both feeds on and contributes to the perceived hostility of the host society: the Rushdie agitation in 1989, the row over the "insult" to Islam conveyed by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in publishing a cartoon showing Muhammad with a terrorist bomb as his turban, the marches in France protesting the headscarf ban in schools, the riots of youth in Parisian suburbs, and episodes of Islamophobia reported on al-Jazeera television or in the Muslim press all contribute to the sense of an embattled community that is also flexing its collective communitarian muscles.

Despite the legal, institutional, and cultural differences of the European host cultures in which Muslim immigrants find themselves, the narrative that Caldwell extrapolates from a complicated web of data points in an alarming direction. The bottom line is that Islam is a religion of believers. Most Europeans are not only skeptical, but--as heirs to the Enlightenment--they regard religious skepticism as essential to their outlook and identity "as part of the essence of European-ness." He writes:

A fast-shrinking population of several hundred million Europeans lives north of the Mediterranean, while a fast-growing population of several hundred million lives south of it, with a desire to take up residence in Europe that seems unshakable. What is more a certain part of it is dedicated to Europe's destruction by armed violence....

Europe's basic problem with Islam, and with immigration more generally, is that the strongest communities in Europe are, culturally speaking, not European communities at all. This problem exists in all European countries, despite a broad variety of measures taken to solve it--multiculturalism in Holland, laïcité in France, benign neglect in Britain, constitutional punctiliousness in Germany.

Clearly Europe's problem is with Islam and with immigration, and not with specific misapplications of specific means set up to manage them. Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe's religion and it is in no sense Europe's culture.

Impressive though he may appear in marshaling a disparate army of sources (ranging from government statistics, social surveys, and think-tank reports to novels and newspaper stories in eight or more languages), the impression he gives is spurious and not supported by real evidence. Caldwell selects a multitude of facts or quotations that support his central premise of a "believing" Islam pitted against a doubting or skeptical Europe. This conclusion, however, is not supported by surveys of actual religious behavior. While the figures--and methodologies used to arrive at them--vary considerably, the conclusion to which they point is that Muslims do not greatly differ in religious behavior from other Europeans. For example, a French study in 2001 found that only 10 percent of Muslims were religiously observant. A study by the demographer Michèle Tribalat the same year found that 60 percent of French Muslim men and 70 percent of women were "not observant," though the great majority respected "cultural attachments" by abstaining from eating pork or drinking alcohol and by fasting during Ramadan. Caldwell mentions none of this work.

The failures in this book are not limited to its flawed and biased research. A troubling example of Caldwell's method involves the misuse of translation in order to further his argument that unlike other religious traditions, Islam cannot be assimilated into European culture. In an extended critique of the work of Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic and articulate advocate of a distinctive European Islam, Caldwell argues that Ramadan's project for Muslim integration into European societies is basically asymmetrical:

The integration of Muslims into Europe will happen on Muslim terms. Or, as Ramadan puts it, "It will succeed when Muslims find in their tradition elements of agreement with the laws of the countries in which they are citizens, because that will resolve any questions of double allegiance." This is an extraordinary statement: Only when Europe's ways are understood as Islam's will Muslims obey them.

The word Ramadan uses in the original French text of this quotation is not "tradition," but "références." "References" in this context sounds slightly odd in English, but "tradition" is too comprehensive, tipping the semantic scale toward inassimilable Muslims. A better translation might be "sources." This is not splitting hairs. As Ramadan explains in "What I Believe", in which he defends himself against charges of "doublespeak," the idea of "reference" is fundamental to his approach:

Adapting one's level of speech to one's audience, or adapting the nature of one's references, is not doublespeak.... To avoid doublespeak, what matters is that the substance of the discourse does not change.

Ramadan writes that his most distinguished defender, the philosopher Charles Taylor, exonerates him from the charge of "doublespeak," arguing, as Ramadan puts it, that his "discourse is clear between two highly ambiguous universes of reference." Ramadan's aim is to "build bridges" between these two universes. As a Muslim scholar and intellectual he applies the discipline of ijtihad (interpretative reasoning); the Arabic term has the same root as jihad, "moral striving"--a word that is often translated, too restrictively, as "holy war."

Ramadan presents his new book, "What I Believe", as "a work of clarification, a deliberately accessible presentation of the basic ideas I have been defending for more than twenty years." The ground is broadly the same as that which was covered in two books of his previously reviewed in these pages.[3] There I argued that Ramadan's belief that Islam can avoid the processes of secularization that afflicted Christendom after the Reformation was flawed by his failure to accommodate the tragic narrative of Shiism and also his failure to recognize that the institutionalization of religious differences--a prerequisite for religious peace among Muslims--would ipso facto initiate a process of secularization.

In a chapter on "Interacting Crises," Ramadan addresses some of the issues that Caldwell raises in his book: the Muslim presence in the West, he says, should not just be seen and engaged as a problem of religions, values, and cultures, but as a psychological one as well. It is not just Muslims who face challenging issues of self-identification. "Western societies in general and Europeans in particular are experiencing a very deep, multidimensional identity crisis" flowing from the double effects of globalization and supranationalism. Everywhere landmarks of national identity and cultural memory are being eroded. The presence of immigrants adds to feelings of confusion.

While aging populations need immigrants to sustain their economies, the incomers threaten ideas of cultural homogeneity that are already endangered by globalization and the revolution in communications. Europeans are trapped in an irreversible logic. Economic necessities are in conflict with the cultural forces around which European identities accrue. Muslims living in the West face similar predicaments. Their identity crisis generates anxiety leading them toward attitudes of "withdrawal and self-isolation."

A "Manifesto for a New 'We,'" with which Ramadan concludes his book, urges European Muslims to have more confidence "in themselves, in their values, in their ability to live and to communicate with full serenity in Western societies." There needs to be "a revolution in trust" built on the confidence that Muslims must have in their own convictions. Their task must be "to reappropriate their heritage and to develop toward it a positive yet critical intellectual attitude." Contra Caldwell, he demands--without qualifications--that Muslims "respect the laws of the countries in which they reside and to which they must be loyal."

The tone is lofty, the language high-minded. It is the preacher, rather than the intellectual, who speaks. Ramadan does not stoop to engage directly with his critics. As he grandly writes in his introduction, "I will not waste my time here trying to defend myself." This is a pity. The charges of doublespeak against Ramadan are not just based on what he describes as "double-hearings," malicious, deliberate, or otherwise. The claims of his most trenchant critic, the French journalist Caroline Fourest,[4] are specific and detailed and documented, based on the tapes of Ramadan's lectures to youthful Muslim audiences as well as his published writings.

Fourest presents Ramadan as a fundamentalist wolf in reformist clothing, a position at variance with his declared advocacy of a "critical intellectual attitude" toward Islamic tradition. Most of her charges depend on family links he refuses to abjure--his maternal grandfather Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, his Islamist father Said Ramadan, and especially his brother Hani, a more strident critic than Tariq of "Europe's atheistic materialism" who has publicly justified the stoning of adulteresses "as a punishment" that is also "a purification." Tariq, by contrast, notoriously argued in a 2003 television debate with Nicolas Sarkozy that the penalty of stoning should merely be subject to a "moratorium" while scholars debated the issue.

Other troubling details that emerge from Fourest's vigilant, even obsessive, trawl through the Ramadan canon include explicit condemnations of Kant and Pascal and fence-sitting, not to say "double-talk," on Darwinism. A work published by the Islamist publishing house with which he is closely associated explicitly denies evolution, while his audiotapes advocate creationism as a "complementary instruction" to the teaching of evolution in schools. Yet when asked in a television interview whether he accepted evolutionary theory, he "preferred to agree," rather than express his true convictions in front of the general public.

In one sense Fourest's critique can be seen as reassuring: Ramadan's teachings --on sexuality, evolution, and moral behavior generally--fall into grooves already furrowed by the Christian right. Secularists may abhor any alliance between anti-Enlightenment God-fearers from among Abraham's quarrelsome children, but any such alliance may have an important advantage: it may mask or defuse religious conflicts surrounding the contested symbolic languages that afflict the contemporary world, where ancient certainties clash with what Anthony Giddens usefully calls "the institutionalisation of doubt."

Paradoxically, as the sociologist Steve Bruce has pointed out, alliances between clashing fundamentalisms can serve to bridge sectarian divisions. For example, in the early 1970s when Mormons, conservative Jews, and Catholics collaborated over issues such as opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment for women or abortion, they had to suppress their theological distaste for allies whose religions they regarded as false. While such alliances may have seemed threatening to liberals and especially to women, they marked a significant step away from fundamentalist certainties, since the different parties were forced to compartmentalize their beliefs, to separate their distinctive religious outlooks and practices from "the moral crusades which the religion has produced." Social problems such as the "binge drinking" and drug abuse that afflict European cities are obvious candidates for collaboration across religious boundaries. In Britain at least one Orthodox rabbi is working alongside a local imam on such problems.

One of the strongest statements deploring the Danish cartoons came from the Vatican, along with the World Council of Churches, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Danish Evangelical Church. While such expressions of "faith solidarity" may have disturbing implications for the rights of free expression cherished by Europeans, they carry the seeds of longer-term accommodations that are likely to bring the more conservative and isolated strands of Islam into the cultural mainstream. Interdenominational collaboration on any issue is a stage in the process of secularization, pushing believers toward a recognition of religious pluralism and dethroning particular dogmas as the unique and nonnegotiable sources of truth. Ramadan can afford to be more upfront about his fundamentalist views. When defensive religiosity turns into moralizing, there is space for social engagement and constructive debate.

Malise Ruthven is the author of "Islam: A Very Short Introduction", "Islam in the World: The Divine Supermarket" (a study of Christian fundamentalism), "A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America", and "A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam".

Notes

[1]"Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence", edited by Aziz al-Azmeh and Effie Fokas (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 209.

[2]Jytte Klausen, "The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe" (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[3]"To Be a European Muslim" (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1999) and "Western Muslims and the Fate of Islam" (Oxford University Press, 2003); see my "The Islamic Optimist," The New York Review, August 16, 2007.

[4]"Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan", translated by Ioana Wilder and John Atherton (Encounter, 2008).

Read more at The New York Review of Books.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, Mocks Rival David Cameron's Eton Past (VIDEO)

2009-12-02T10:56:00Z

Gordon Brown produced his most combative Commons performance for many months today as he mocked David Cameron as a smooth-talking PR man who dreamt up his tax policies "on the playing fields of Eton".

Lincoln Mitchell: Echoes of Bush in Obama's Speech

2009-12-02T09:48:31Z

There were moments during President Obama's speech last night when if you closed your eyes, imagined the grammar a little mangled and a few words mispronounced, you could easily make the mistake of thinking you were listening to President Bush. Not only was the announced troop increase what one might have expected from the Bush administration, but much of the rationale for the decision was as well.

Early in the speech, Obama referred to Afghanistan's election as "although it was marred by fraud... produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution." This reflects what we have come to expect from the Bush administration when speaking about election, a tendency to too strongly conflate elections with democracy as well as a willingness to overlook fraud when the outcome of the election is what the U.S. would have liked.

Obama recognized the seriousness of the current economic crisis in language stronger than what Bush might have used, but after referring to "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression", did not even mention the economic impact of the continued war effort and how that will take resources away from our domestic economic problems. He also argued that "the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own", but again overlooked the obvious point that his plan in Afghanistan makes that task harder. While the president may not have stressed this, it is unlikely that this point was lost on the American people.

George Bush frequently underestimated the cost of the Iraq War which some experts now place at over $3 trillion. Last night Obama asserted that the cost for his "new approach" will be "roughly $30 billion for our military this year." Even if he is right, that is a lot of money, but unfortunately most wars end up costing significantly more than originally thought. There is little reason to think this war will be any different.

For much of the last five years of his presidency, George Bush consistently insulted the intelligence of the American people by referring to what was largely an American and British, and, since April of this year, just American, effort in Iraq as an allied effort. While other countries such as Poland and Georgia sent troops to Iraq who were courageous and served the effort well, the overwhelming majority of troops were from the U.S., and arguing otherwise was simply talking down to the American people. Obama did the same thing last night claiming that "I've asked that our commitment be joined by contributions from our allies... there will be further contributions in the days and weeks ahead" and referring to a "broad coalition of 43 nations." Again, the sacrifices made by these non-American troops are real and should not be overlooked, but the estimates that 75% of the troops in Afghanistan will be American are real too.

Lastly, in a departure from previous statements, Obama seemed to reflect the elite bipartisan consensus that of American exceptionalism stating that "Our union was founded in resistance to opposition. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources." While one can expect the president of the United States to say things like this, the rhetoric is a little tired. Regardless of what the U.S. "seeks" to do, it occupies other nations, establishes military bases all over the world and aggressively covets other nation's resources. This rhetoric is dangerous because if we are constantly telling ourselves we do not seek to occupy other nations, it is easier to ignore the reality when we are doing just that.

Much of Obama's speech was different than what we were accustomed to hearing from President Bush as well. Obama voiced a strong critique of the decision to go to war in Iraq, downplayed the need for nation, actually state, building in Afghanistan and focused more on Pakistan and the need to look at Afghanistan and Pakistan together. However, he also a Bush like failure to explain why 30,000 more troops will be enough to achieve U.S. goals and what the exit strategy, as opposed to simply the timeline will be.

Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan is a surprise to nobody as it was clear that in recent weeks he had eschewed all other options. Obama did not make this decision rashly or quickly, but based it on months of deliberation and consultations. In that respect he was very different from Bush. Nonetheless Obama's decision, at the very least, raises many questions. Last night when seeking to explain why he is sending more troops to Afghanistan, Obama left too many questions unanswered and offered unconvincing and unoriginal answers to others. Obama has surprised us in the past, particularly during his campaign. It would be great if he surprised us again on this issue, but last night' s speech did not make this seem likely.

U.K. Zionists 'bemused' by British Jews' support for Goldstone report

2009-12-01T21:31:06Z

British Zionist activists reacted on Tuesday with "bemusement" to a letter cosigned by hundreds of pro-Palestinian Jewish compatriots urging Gordon Brown to adopt the Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its operation last winter in the Gaza Strip.
...

Read more: United Kingdom, Israel, Home News

Evie Wyld, British Bookseller, Wins UK Literary Prize

2009-12-01T12:12:57Z

Evie Wyld, 29, defeated rivals including Aravind Adiga, who took the Man Booker last year, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize victor two years ago, to take the 5,000 pound John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best work of literature by a UK or Commonwealth writer aged 35 or under.

Tony Blair: The Guardian Investigates His Mysterious Finances

2009-12-01T11:08:51Z

The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as "Byzantine" and "opaque". The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.

Empire State lighting schedule for December 2009

2009-11-30T17:45:27Z

The Empire State Building's top three tiers will light up for the holidays, according to the skyscraper's official lighting schedule.

From Dec. 4 through 6, the to will shine all blue for the Cambridge in America's celebration of Cambridge University's 800th Anniversary.

Starting Dec

Patrick Stewart Finds Acting, Cause In Response To Childhood Domestic Abuse Trauma

2009-11-30T14:20:57Z

Actor Patrick Stewart wrote an illuminating column in Friday's Guardian about his childhood as a victim of domestic violence in Yorkshire, England.

Stewart's father was a regimental sergeant major who was as well-respected for his military achievements as he was feared by his family for his violent temper.

He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down. For those who struggle to comprehend these feelings in a child, imagine living in an environment of emotional unpredictability, danger and humiliation week after week, year after year, from the age of seven. My childish instinct was to protect my mother, but the man hurting her was my father, whom I respected, admired and feared.

Luckily, as Stewart grew older, he found his refuge in acting. On the safety of the stage, he described, he could escape into other places, times and personalities. But Stewart is not alone in his experience. One in four English women will experience domestic violence at some point in her lifetime and every week two women are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales. To combat this, Stewart became a patron of Refuge, a british domestic violence charity.

Thanks to Refuge's tireless campaigning, attitudes have changed. Police tactics have improved and most men are no longer able to get away with beating women. Yet the statistics still make for grim reading. More than two thirds of the residents in Refuge's network of refuges are children. I cannot express how sad - and angry - it makes me to think that we still cannot ensure the safety of women and children in their own homes.

To read more of Stewart's column about his experience with domestic violence or to learn about Refuge's latest campaign, Four Ways to Speak Out, visit the Guardian.

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Chilcot Inquiry: Tony Blair Says Lord Goldsmith Was Not Bullied Into Declaring Iraq Invasion Legal

2009-11-30T10:38:33Z

Tony Blair has denied a claim that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general at the time of the Iraq war, was "bullied" into declaring that the invasion was legal.

Moira Cameron: 2 Beefeaters Fired For Bullying Female Colleague At Tower Of London

2009-11-25T13:27:54Z

LONDON — Two ceremonial guards known as Beefeaters at the historic Tower of London were fired Wednesday after an internal investigation found that they harassed their first and only female colleague.

The Tower of London said it conducted a thorough investigation after allegations arose that Moira Cameron – the first female yeoman warder at the popular tourist attraction that is home to Britain's Crown Jewels – was a victim of a bullying campaign by her colleagues.

Foreign stocks rise as traders mull economy

2009-11-25T05:01:14Z

APA man walks by a screen showing stock prices at the London Stock Exchange in the City of London.Asian stock markets rose modestly today in a session damped by evidence that recovery in the world's biggest economy is likely to...

Eric Margolis: The White Man's Handshake

2009-11-24T14:27:44Z

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton swept into Kabul last week like an angry nanny to give Afghanistan's delinquent, US-installed leader Hamid Karzai's a sound spanking for being such a corrupt bad boy.

Just as Karzai's second inauguration ceremony was getting under way, Mrs. Clinton commanded Karzai to reduce rampant corruption in Afghanistan so Washington could justify sending more troops. Karzai had suffered similar public humiliation from visiting US Senator, John Kerry.

Mrs. Clinton, we recall, was the former first lady of Arkansas, a state acclaimed for its high ethics and good governance.

Perhaps she brought election monitors from Chicago, where the dead regularly rise to vote for the Democratic Party machine. From Ohio, where funny voting machines allegedly helped George Bush win re-election, or from those bastions of Athenian democracy, New Jersey and Florida. They have so much to teach wayward Afghans.

Of course Afghanistan is corrupt, like all third world nations, but compared to his western critics, poor Hamid Karzai is a mere beggar in the Kabul bazaar.

Take Britain's indignant prime minister, Gordon Brown, who imperiously commanded Karzai to root out corruption.

PM Brown knows about corruption. It was Imperial Britain, after all, that gave rise to the delightful African term for bribery, "the white man's handshake."

Three years ago, Exchequer Chancellor Brown and boss Tony Blair quashed Britain's biggest ever criminal investigation by its Serious Fraud Office into accusation the British arms firm EADS paid over 2 billion pound sterling of secret contract kickbacks to high Saudi officials, one of whom was a close associate of the Bush family. The European Union even rebuked Britain for its tolerance of corruption.

France's president, Nicholas Sarkozy, also blasted Karzai over corruption. Sarko's rebuke came right after a major judicial investigation of three thieving but useful African dictators who had stashed away billions of swag in France was quashed - at Sarkozy's orders, claimed some of the French media. One of the parties, Teodorin Obiang, son of the dictator of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, recently spent $35 million on a Malibu, California mansion and $33 million on a private jet. Another, Gabon's late Omar Bongo, is said to be France's single largest property owner.

Next, Transparency International, a respected NGO monitoring state corruption, published its annual honesty survey.

New Zealand was named the world's least corrupt nation. Canada was eighth most honest, and least corrupt nation in the Western Hemisphere. Hats off to Canada.

Embarrassingly, the United States ranked a miserable 19th. The report noted, "the US Congress is most affected by corruption." Mark Twains described Congress as, "America's native criminal class."

Western Europe and Japan were way ahead of the US. America's ally Israel ranked a sorry 32nd. Other US Mideast allies had awful scores, but the Gulf emirates Qatar and the UAE, came in way ahead of the rest of the Mideast in honesty- including Israel.

An important Los Angeles Times investigation reports hundreds of millions of dollars, a full third of CIA's foreign budget, has been going in payoffs to Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI.

American `black' programs deliver more tens of millions to Pakistan's ruling People's Party and leader, Asif Zardari, known to all Pakistanis as "Mr. 10%," and other senior Pakistani politicians, generals, and media figures.

Critics are now calling Pakistan, "Rent-a-Stan."

Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, has been dogged for decades by serious corruption charges. He denies them and claims they are all politically motivated.

The US has given Pakistan more than $15 billion over the past eight years to support the Afghan War, not counting huge bounties for capturing or killing suspected enemies, and "black" payments.

In Iraq, some estimates say $10 billion delivered to that nation's US-installed regime are missing. American `contractors' and large corporations in Iraq are accused of gargantuan fraud. Pallets of US $100 dollar bills vanished into thin air. And on it goes.

Ironically, across the Muslim world, the same western powers scourging Karzai are seen as major sources of corruption, keeping repressive regime in power by buying dictators, generals, and politicians.

Many Afghans support Taliban because it is seen as an enemy of corruption and an enforcer of justice, however harsh. In Palestine and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbullah enjoy wide popularity and respect for the very same reason.

The Transparency report finds, to no surprise, that places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Nigeria are the world's most corrupt nations. But it must be remembered that citizens of these benighted nations pay no income taxes. So each government official levies his own little personal taxes. What we call corruption is inevitable and normal.

President Karzai will of course establish an anti-corruption commission. Some big turbans will be prosecuted to please Washington. But this charade will fool no one but US voters.

Most Afghans see Karzai as a US puppet. But maybe the exasperated puppet will turn on his string-pullers, open real peace talks with Taliban, and demand the USA and its allies pull their occupation army out of Afghanistan. That, of course, could very well be a life-ending gamble for Karzai.

Meanwhile, India is said to be waiting to take over the care and feeding of the Karzai regime. Recall that India also was a principal backer of the post-1989 Najibullah Communist regime until it was overthrown by Taliban - which swiftly rose to power by imposing law and order and clearing up corruption.

William Bradley: Tony Blair's Cautionary Tale For Obama

2009-11-24T11:58:47Z

Tony Blair's recent travails, last week over his bid to become the first president of the European Union and today with the start of Britain's Iraq War inquiry, stand as something of a cautionary tale for President Barack Obama. Blair was long the favorite to become the first president of the European Union. But in the end, pilloried on the left for his leading role in the Iraq War and still not supported by the right, he was supplanted by a little-known Belgian bureaucrat.

Just as America had Obamamania in 2008, Britain had Blairmania in 1997. "Things Can Only Get Better" blared, as it were, the ubiquitous Blair campaign song.

Tony Blair's farewell speech.

"Everybody voted for him. He wasn't a politician; he was a craze." That's how the title character puts it in the deliciously vicious roman a clef novel by former Blair friend Robert Harris, The Ghost (as in ghostwriter of the ex-prime minister's memoirs), which was was being made into a movie by Roman Polanski when he was arrested in Switzerland.

Blair ushered in an era of "Cool Britannia," which many critics say morphed into Cruel Britannia as he swapped his famous friendship with Bill Clinton for an infamous friendship with George W. Bush.

As Britain's Opposition Leader in 1994, Blair, along with Clinton, swiftly emerged as a chief advocate of the the global "Third Way," between the sclerotic sort of socialism which made Labour a consistent loser in Britain and a hyper-capitalism which hollowed out communities. With Blair, Labour became New Labour, a remade force able to take on the reigning Conservatives. Well, more than able to take on the Tories. Able to shatter them, actually, which Blair proceeded to do.

"Things Can Only Get Better," the ubiquitous campaign song of Tony Blair and New Labour.

Blair reinvented a moribund political party, won three national elections (the only Labour politician to do so) beginning with his landslide win in 1997 -- the largest in 165 years -- and quickly became a very major world figure.

Under Blair, Britain "modernised" as "Cool Britannia," and indicators on the economy, the environment, and crime improved for his decade-plus as British prime minister. He made Britain a more inclusive society. And he settled the bloody, decades long conflict in Northern Ireland. Blair and Clinton formed a strong working partnership as Blair became a global player.

Fatefully, Blair became quite the interventionist abroad. He took Britain to war, in one form or another, five times. First when he and Clinton decided to conduct an air war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq when the Iraqi dictator proved intransigent on weapons inspections and other matters. Next when, at Blair's determined instigation, NATO launched an air war to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and bring down the Serbian dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. Then Blair intervened in the African nation of Sierra Leone, with British forces landing to end a brutal civil war.

Then came 9/11, and Blair, who had formed an unlikely friendship with George W. Bush, was quick to spring to America's side. British resources, notably intelligence, and forces, including its crack special ops forces, were instrumental in helping America overthrow the Taliban's theocratic dictatorship in Afghanistan and rout Al Qaeda from its redoubt.

Bush and Blair address the people of Iraq as the invasion begins.

Then came Iraq. The war far too far, to borrow a phrase and change it a bit. By 2002, it was apparent that Tony Blair had developed a taste for intervention and for turning out dictators, as well as a commitment to his alliance with the US in the 9/11-derived war on terror. Iraq was next on the agenda of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the coterie of neoconservative theorists around them, as it had been all along. Initially skeptical about an Iraq invasion, Blair was caught up in the move. Blair and his people believed that he had major influence over Bush, having banked a great deal of credit with the Afghanistan operation, intel/special ops moves around the world, and world diplomacy in the UN and elsewhere. It turned out that, despite all that and their personal friendship, he did not.

Saddam Hussein was unpopular in much of the Arab world and was a largely secular dictator who was actually oppressing much of his population, especially the Shia. But the Bush/Cheney team, as we've seen, closely associated with various charlatans in the Iraqi exile community and elsewhere, had a totally unrealistic view of how Iraq might be secured and governed in the aftermath of victory in a conventional war. Blair wanted a strong UN role in the governance of Iraq, but Cheney and his allies worked assiduously to undermine Blair's influence with Bush on that and other matters. Such as engagement with Iran and Syria, which Blair has always advocated. To the hardline neoconservatives, Blair, actually a man of the center-left, was a socialist who did not share their view of a civilizational war, and that was that.

A BBC retrospective on Blair.

The other big problem was how to sell an Iraq war. Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator, but that hardly made him unique in the world. His links with Al Qaeda were slight, and there was no serious evidence linking him to the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, despite what Dick Cheney and the neocons said. You couldn't actually say that we were invading Iraq for its oil. Which, of course, never did pay for the occupation, a later claim of Donald Rumsfeld's. That left WMD (weapons of mass destruction).

Which Saddam Hussein, for all his understandable bluster, didn't really have. He maintained the facade of having them -- consistently blocking weapons inspections -- to maintain fear and order within and to seem more powerful to other countries. Incidentally, merely because an irritating country says it can do things doesn't mean it should be taken seriously. Otherwise, we would believe that North Korea was about to take over the world. It's the job of intelligence services and their decision-making masters in government to determine what is bullshit and act accordingly.

But Bush and Cheney pushed the myth of Iraqi WMD, and its supposedly imminent threat. Because it served their nitwit purpose to do so. Blair lent his credibility to this nonsense and took Britain to war. A war which, as we saw at the Azores Summit prior to the invasion, Blair was far better at explaining and selling than was the falteringly inarticulate Bush.

A war which played right into Al Qaeda's hands, which wanted the West tied down in military operations in the middle of the Islamic world, both to drain America's resources and to inflame a new generation of jihadists. A war which provided Iran with the opening to become the great power of the region, an ambition which has not yet come to fruition.

A war which hamstrung Tony Blair, festooning his once glittering reputation with streamers of screaming charges of "B.Liar," that he not only used his very considerable powers of persuasion to help sell an unsellable war but also facilitated the torture of British citizens at the hands of CIA and Pakistani interrogators.

The Ghost teaser trailer.

Could something like this happen to Barack Obama? Could he pin America down in another faraway quagmire, going far beyond what is needed to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become the base for "The Base," Al Qaeda? Could he see his shining stand against torture slide into a de facto policy of torture?

Blair, who never officially announced his candidacy for the European presidency, made several late moves to try to find his way through the complex thicket of European politics, with calls to various leaders and a speech in Switzerland where he appealed to the continent's dominant center-right faction by warning against too much governmental intervention to overcome the global recession.

But it didn't work. Blair was too big a figure for some of the smaller countries and for some leaders of the larger countries with global aspirations of their own; too controversial for the left and too left for the right. And so the old political dictum that you can't beat somebody with nobody was proved wrong, at least in this instance.

He continues as special Mideast envoy of the Quartet (America, Britain, Russia, and the European Union). But the question of Israel and Palestine continues to be largely intractable. His supposed ally Secretary of State Condi Rice imagined she would negotiate a peace -- at which she clearly failed -- and pushed Blair off to the building up of the Palestinian Authority. Which is only a fraction of the equation. A friend who visited the region last week said that the Israeli and Palestinian leaders she saw barely mentioned Tony Blair.

You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.

Burberry Opens Madison Ave. Stores for Brit, London

2009-11-24T09:30:59Z

Image via WWD Popular British plaid purveyor Burberry is opening two new stores today for its Burberry London and Burberry Brit lines under its Madison Avenue headquarters. Burberry already has 62 stores in the U.S. and Canada, but these are the first stores in the world that are devoted...

Iraq War Inquiry Begins In Britain: Tony Blair Will Be Witness

2009-11-24T04:46:04Z

LONDON — An inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq war kicked off Tuesday with top government advisers testifying that some Bush administration officials were calling for Saddam Hussein's ouster as early as 2001 – long before sanctions were exhausted and two years before the U.S.-led invasion.

Critics hope the hearings, which will call ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and are billed as the most sweeping inquiry into the conflict, will expose alleged deception in the buildup to fighting. However, they won't establish criminal or civil liability.

U.K. Straight Couple Applies for Civil Partnership

2009-11-23T16:30:34Z

Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle hope to make history on Tuesday by becoming the first straight couple to apply for a civil partnership in the United Kingdom.

Read more: United Kingdom, Home News

GlaxoSmithKline pulls application for new uses for Avodart drug

2009-11-23T14:46:51Z

2006 AP FILE PHOTOIn this May 10, 2006 file photo, the company logo of GlaxoSmithKline is seen on the headquarters building in a London. TRENTON -- British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline PLC said Monday it is temporarily withdrawing its application for U.S....