Things are wierding up in Taiwan: More.

 
The revelation of Jack Kelley's fabrications has reached a critical mass. So many lies, coverups and doubts have been exposed as to invalidate his entire body of work.

Although the Kelley story is being extensively reported -- and with 700 stories to go through, there's probably material for more yet -- it's hardly garnered the attention that the Philip Glass or -- perhaps more tellingly, the Jayson Blair -- stories did.

In part, perhaps, it's because USAT hardly has the reputation that the Grey Lady does (unfairly, although USAT's improved hard-news position was in large part indebted to Kelley himself). In part, the press is burned out on stories of its own malfeasance. In part, Jayson Blair's race and youth made him a target, though in retrospect his sins probably didn't merit his being called a "comulsive [sic] liar, traitor and plagiarist" by Andrew Sullivan, or compared to "Joseph [sic] Mengele" by Slate's Jack Shafer.

Perhaps it's simply that many reporters have trouble believing that such a well-respected reporter lied about so many stories and plagiarized in so many others. He was on location, he had the contacts, and the news was happening all about him; yet he lied from nut graf to byline and beyond.

Kelley's fake reports are all the more important because of the international beat he covered. So far, he's lied about Palestinian suicide bombers, Cuban refugees, Bosnians and Serbs, Islamist madrassas, the hunt for al'Qaeda, Russian money-laundering, and Jewish-Israeli extremists. Compared to the pathetic lies of Blair, the gonzo creations of Glass, and the other examples of journalistic misconduct, Kelley towers amongst them like a god of lies.

I've argued before that nothing is so disreputable as a respected profession; when journalism became an A-list career for the sons and daughters of the Ivy League, their concern shifted from reporting the truth to maintaining their privileged position within their community -- a status that generally comes from hardening the conventional wisdom that passes for analysis amongst that community.

UPDATE: "You've got to live with yourself." Kelley on media ethics (and claiming to have been shot at "two or three hundred times" at the Newseum. (MP3 clip)

 
The Kurdish riots in Syria are causing a great deal of consternation in the Middle East and abroad. The Washington Times sees the Kurds as democratic freedom fighters, but this is too-simple a view of a complex situation. (Some interesting views, including video of the rioting, can be found here.)

Syria's Kurds have not traditionally been secessionist; arriving from Turkey to escape Ataturk's anti-Kurdish pogroms in the 1930s, they were perhaps not tempermentally suited to creating the kind of armed movements that Iraqi and Turkish Kurds have championed. It can hardly be said that Syria has treated the Kurds any better than its neighbors; although Kurds comprise around 10% of the Syrian population (or 1.5 million), they are often treated with obvious discrimination. A 1962 census of the north, believed to be the first step in a "Arabization" campaign, arbitrarily stripped some 120,000 Kurds of Syrian citizenship; today, 142,465 to over 200,000 Kurds are considered aliens in their own land. These unfortunates have essentially no rights: issued special red ID cards, they are marked out as not possessing even the most basic rights: they cannot vote, marry, own property, or travel inside or outside of the country; nor can they run for office, be employed by a government agency, practice certain professions (such as medicine or engineering), cannot be admitted to public hospitals and are denied public food aid. Some Kurds are in an even worse position: known as maktoumeen, "unregistered," they not only face the hardships of the specially-registered Kurds, but must fight to prove they even exist. Human Rights Watch notes that enrolling a maktoumeen child for school, while possible, requires the approval of Syria's State Security, a daunting prospect for anyone; one Kurd interviewed by HRW told them, "My children do not have identitycards. They do not exist. Cows are higher than my children. Cows at least have registration cards."

The Kurdish successes in Iraq have led to an increase in tensions in Kurdish Syria. On March 12, violence erupted at a soccer game between Syrian Arab and Syrian Kurdish teams in Qamishli as Syrian Arabs carried portraits of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and chanted anti-Kurdish slogans. (Soccer's role in ethnic conflict is well-documented; for example, Catholic and Unionist violence frequently breaks out in Irish soccer games, and the Serbian leadership used its soccer clubs to foment ethnic violence, eventually using fan clubs as genocidal militia.) The next day, as funerals were held for the dead, further rioting broke out and spread across the northeastern province of al-Hassaka. Around 14 were killed in the first two days, while the local governor, Salim Kabboul, said five Arabs were killed in the subsequent days of fighting, and Interior Minister Ali Hammoud puts the number of Arab and Kurdish dead at 25 (Kurdish sources say 36 people have been killed in the fighting). Hundreds were wounded, and train stations, schools, and government buildings were damaged or ransacked, and smoke from fires could still be seen today.

The Syrian government has denied that ethnic tensions are to blame, despite the long-simmering problem of Kurdish disenfranchisement; official Syrian reports blame "foreigners" and outside agitators. However, this week's riots point to problems within Syria that extend far beyond the Kurdish borders. Bashar Assad has sincerely tried to reform the Syrian economy and political system, but has run into opposition from the entrenched kleptocracy that runs the government bureaucracies. Consequently, the government has opened in some ways, but the underlying problems of poverty and corruption have not been addressed; people are thus as frustrated as ever, but able to publicly voice their resentments. To put it another way, the lid that was internal terror has been lifted on a political pot that's rapidly boiling over.

Although Syria is a rogue state, it has shown signs of a reorientation, in particular Assad's sharing of anti-terrorist intelligence with America and in the attempted reforms of its public and private sectors. But Assad's grip on power is shaky, and he's already facing opposition not only from domestic reform groups (which are not generally opposed to Assad himself), but also Islamist political forces and a considerable revanchist military and bureaucratic alliance that has been publicly yearning for the more stable if tyrannical days of Hafez Assad. As the Cato Institute notes, if Damascus slips into internecine factionalism, there's no certainty who might win, and what that could do to our hopes for peace and stability in an always-fractious region. Rioters are not freedom fighters, even if motivated by great injustices; and simple-minded interventions into complex situations rarely provide the results desired.

 
From a recent Slate article:

After the Madrid attacks, a number of journalists, academics, and other experts picked up on the idea ... that al-Qaida may not be what many people think it is. It's not one vast organization with tentacles everywhere; it's a kind of franchise that helps with cash here, logistics there. Most important, it is the brand name of an umbrella ideology that all the jihadists subscribe to, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat and Salafia Jihadia, among others. Bin Laden is just the public face.

This is a very important point, and one that we don't consider often enough. "Al'Qaeda" and "bin Ladin" have become global brands, in the sense that terror groups are starting to use supposed al'Qaeda affiliation as a kind of badge of authenticity. The "Abu Hafs al-Misri Brigades," a radical Islamist group that has become very accomplished at assault by press release, has used bin Ladin's name to make various spurious claims, including taking credit for the 2003 American blackouts and the 3/11 bombings, and arguing that the Ashura bombings against Shiite Iraqi mosques were caused by Americans. (That last communique, from March 2nd, somehow forgot to warn that Spain would be a target in a matter of days.)

Saad al'Faqih, mentioned earlier, sees al'Qaeda in this way, noting that the bin Ladin brotherhood didn't even use the term "al'Qaeda" to refer to themselves until after 9/11. For al'Faqih, al'Qaeda's power comes from the elevation of it by America and its allies as a symbol of terror and evil; if he is to believed, our public hunting of bin Ladin since the African embassy bombings represents a serious misstep.

Al'Faqih's thesis, though well-researched and argued (as an Islamist himself, his political goals are consonant with bin Ladin's, though al'Qaeda's terroristic violence is not), is controversial, and the fact that we are now living in a world polarized between Bush and bin Ladin may make his argument moot. But we have always lived in a world where al'Qaeda is not the only, and perhaps not the most important, Islamist terror threat gathering against us.

Interviews with al'Faqih can be found at the Jamestown Foundation, and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin.

 
The conseravtive wisdom on Spain is that the country is rolling over, exposing its soft belly to Islamist terrorists. While I have no doubt that the Spanish elections will be seen by the terrorists as a victory, I have equally strong convictions that Spain is not turning appeaser, no matter the muddled insistence of Tom Friedman.

The Socialist government -- which, in the grand Continental tradition of meaningless party names, is politically and economically middle-of-the-road for Europe -- is threatening to pull its troops out of Iraq if we don't make the handover deadline this summer, a target that is looking increasingly hard to hit. If we are still conducting OOTW this summer, and there's no reason to think we won't, any Spanish pullout will affect the Polish effort, for whom Spain is handling logistics, communications, and force deployment in the central-southern security area. This will result in a minor hitch in operations as America moves to take over the role, and will certainly embolden Islamist and nationalist critics of the Coalition occupation.

Nonetheless, Spain will remain an ally in the war against terror, even if it drops out of the war against Baathism. And it's important to remember that Spain is hardly the most questionable ally we have in the war against Islamist terror.

Things are murky in the world of counterterrorism: France led the coalition of the unwilling during the runup to Iraq one year ago, but is front and center in the hunt for bin Ladin; Britain is seen as our closest ally in the war on terror, but its asylum laws have protected virulent Islamism in the middle of London, and French intelligence officials privately believe Downing Street let Algerian terror groups run free in Britain as long as their violence remained off the shores of Albion. Russia is an ally, but its continuing protection of Transdniester has effectively kept the global arms bazaar open for terrorists, and a large number of high-tech weapons such as the RPG-29 Vampir anti-tank missile have shown up in Iraqi hands. Saudi Arabia's deals with terrorists have surely led to the al'Qaeda attacks on America, while Pakistan not only supported terror groups and the Taliban, but also ran a global black market in nuclear weapons, though now it seems poised to capture bin Ladin's right-hand man. Syria is a rogue state, but one with a vested interest in helping us defeat Islamist terrorism; India, a strategic ally, is making things worse internationally through BJP-aided clashes between Hindu militants and Indian Muslims. In Somalia,  Hussein Aideed, son of the warlord (and ally of Islamist radicals) who we tried to kill in the early 1990s, is helping us roll up al'Qaeda forces in that war-torn country.

The "wilderness of mirrors" that is counterterrorism does not admit chiaroscuro views of the world, and pretending that such an image is accurate will cripple the delicate diplomatic, military and intelligence efforts needed to protect our nations. Hopefully, this fit of pique against the Spanish will quickly dissipate, and we can return to the serious work of keeping ourselves safe -- all of us.

 
Rumors from Pakistan place Pakistani troops within miles of Ayman al'Zawahiri, weeks after Islamabad began a fresh offensive against revanchist Pashtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier Province. That offensive -- and the use of American troops in the area -- was a surprisingly open quid-pro-quo for America's silence on Pakistan's creation of an international black market in nuclear arms.

Since 9/11, Pakistan's intransigence in allowing American forces to operate in the Pashtunistan area has consistently hampered our efforts to ferret out the last major elements of al'Qaeda in Afghanistan. During the anti-Soviet jihad, the porous border was a geographic ally of the United States, since the ISI was able to move weapons and men into Afghanistan with relative ease. Today, we're caught in the same trap: if we tighten down in Afghanistan, al'Qaeda and other targets simply take advantage of the mountain border and move into the NWFP, where we couldn't operate.

If al'Zawahiri is caught, only a few weeks after the real Pakistani offensive began, it will suggest that the real obstacle to our shutting down the Afghani leadership was our putative ally, something that would surprise very few of us.

Al'Zawahiri is perhaps a more important target than bin Ladin. Saudi oppositionist Saad al'Faqih, an Islamist leader generally considered one of the top experts on al'Qaeda, has argued that al'Zawahiri was the real mastermind of bin Ladin's jihad against America and the West, transforming al'Qaeda from a small and largely unknown radical group to the personification of extremist Islamism and its terror. If bin Ladin is the financial source of al'Qaeda and its affiliate groups, al'Zawahiri may be the mind behind it -- and if he is caught, at least some of the impetus behind radical terror today may slacken.

 
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a must-read article on the dearth of sociological studies of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.

 
For those collecting links, here's the mailing list European counterterror officials believe was used by al'Qaeda to disseminate strategy plans. (Arabic only, logically enough, so it's useless to me.)

 
La reconquista islamica seems to have netted a significant recoup for the Islamist terror groups most likely behind the 3/11 bombings. It's absolutely true that the fall of the conservative government will be seen as proof that terrorism can weaken the resolve of the West; it's also true that such a conclusion is not in itself reason to support the now-outgoing party or, for that matter, to assume that the Islamist attacks against Coalition countries means that the invasion of Iraq was in any way an attack against al'Qaeda and its ilk. (The war was justifiable on entirely different grounds.)

However, the pullout of Spanish troops from Iraq will certainly embolden Islamist groups of all stripes to undertake further attacks against Europe. Reports have suggested over the past year that bin Laden has come under criticism from other radical Islamists for having energized America and its allies to mount a substantial effort against Islamist terrorists. If Spain is seen as having knuckled under to al'Qaeda, that view might be revisited and reversed, leading other groups to support terror attacks against the West.

This is no small matter for Europe, because the Continent is arguably already enemy territory. Unlike America, where our terrorist fears revolve around enemies who slip into our country, the arrest of Spanish citizens in the 3/11 attacks shows that in that country, as in France, Germany and Britain, there is already a fifth column living in Europe. Small local populations coupled with increasing inflows of immigrants from Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian countries have created crises in European societies, never particularly disposed to accepting strangers in their midst. Unlike the United States, where Muslim immigrants have by and large been absorbed into the greater American society (while adding their own garam masala to our national dish), Europeans have managed to alienate, marginalize and impoverish Muslim immigrants to the point that they virtually compose a para-state of their own.

Although some Europeans are beginning to re-evaluate their opposition to American policies against terror, others are resorting to the old shibboleths of "root causes:" it's poverty, the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel. Largely, I tend to dismiss these arguments, having read more than enough Islamist primary sources to see in them a contempt for everything we have achieved since the Reformation and Enlightenment -- the 9/11 killers were motivated by cultic faith, not their own poverty. However, should "old Europe" continue to argue that America is the cause of its own misery, it should equally look inwards and see how it has hatched a serpent at its heart.