ANTI-TERROR BUST in the UK: eight people have been arrested. They intended to kidnap a person -now under police protection- behead him and post the video on the internet.

C'MON, ADMIT IT. You hate modern art and atonal music as much as Asia Times' Spengler does:

An enormous literature exists on the relationship between abstract painting and atonal music, and the extensive Kandinsky-Schoenberg correspondence can be found on the Internet. For those who like that sort of thing, as Abraham Lincoln once said, it is just the sort of thing they would like.

The most striking difference between the two founding fathers of modernism is this: the price of Kandinsky's smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg's music. Out of a sense of obligation, musicians perform Schoenberg from time to time, but always in the middle and never at the end of a program, for audiences flee the cacophony. Schoenberg died a poor man in 1951, and and his widow and three children barely survived on the copyright royalties from his music. His family remains poor, while the heirs of famous artists have become fabulously wealthy.

Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract impressionists, most famously Clement Greenberg's sponsorship of Jackson Pollock in The Partisan Review. It is not supposed to "please" the senses on first glance, after the manner of a Raphael or an Ingres, but to challenge the viewer to think and consider.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery, but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but reluctant to live under communism.

When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control. You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it. You are in the position of the fashionably left-wing intellectual of the 1930s who made the mistake of actually moving to Moscow, rather than admiring it at a safe distance.

Read the rest.

WELL, THAT DIDN'T LAST LONG, did it?:

Gunmen shot dead a Hamas commander in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday and the Islamist group blamed a Fatah-dominated security service for the first killing in the territory since a ceasefire went into effect overnight.

ISLAM IN THE UK, a growing concern if it goes like this:

A growing number of young Muslims in Britain are inspired by political Islam and in favour of Sharia law, Islamic dress for women and faith schools, according to a study.

The survey of 1,003 Muslims by pollsters Populus for the independent Policy Exchange think-tank also suggested there was greater support for militant Islamist groups among the young.

UPDATE. A warning from Bernard Lewis.

THIS IS the wicked mind of ETA sympathizers:

The National Court has decided that eleven people arrested for vandalising the grave of Partido Popular councillor, Gregorio Ordóñez, on Saturday are to be charged with terrorist offences.

Ordóñez was murdered by the ETA terrorist organisation in 1995.

They were arrested for destroying floral tributes which were laid down on his grave in a homage ceremony which took place on Friday, and which was attended by the former Partido Popular Prime Minister, José María Aznar.

THE TOP TEN MYTHS of the Iraq war.

GOOD ONE. (via Fausta)

"HURRAY, WE'RE CAPITULATING!": German mag Der Spiegel publishes -in English- an excerpt of a forthcoming book by Henryk Broder in which he explains how the West is already surrendering before Islamism:

Ten years ago, in the spring of 1996, the world still seemed more or less okay. The towers of the World Trade Center dominated the Manhattan skyline, the American president had an affair with an intern, the Helmut Kohl era was coming to an end in Germany, and intellectuals killed time by debating over whether Francis Fukuyama was right in claiming that we have reached the "end of history" and whether capitalism had truly triumphed or socialism had merely lost the first round. In those days few were aware of the fine distinction between Islam and Islamism.

One had to look very closely to recognize the first signs of a brewing crisis. In Berlin, the Rote Grütze theater group was performing an enlightening piece called "Who Said Anything About Love?" To advertise the play, posters depicting a young man and a young woman, naked and full of innocence, were handed out in schools.

The schools had no qualms about displaying the posters, until a school official from Berlin's Tiergarten district requested a permit from the city's education authority. The agency turned down the request, arguing that the poster could hurt "the feelings of non-Christian pupils." The education authority was acting preventively and with what amounted to exaggerated concern for a cultural minority that had yet to be integrated into permissive German society. No Muslim pupils had complained about hurt feelings, nor had their parents expressed concerns about immoral harassment.

That was 10 years ago. Today everything has changed, except the resolve not to hurt the feelings of Muslims. The issue today no longer revolves around a group of Berlin pupils with an "immigration background," but around 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide -- many of whom are thin-skinned and unpredictable. At issue is freedom of opinion, one of the central tenets of the Enlightenment and democracy. And whether respect, consideration and tolerance are the right approach to dealing with cultures that, for their part, behave without respect, consideration or tolerance when it comes to anything they view as decadent, provocative and unworthy -- from women in short skirts to cartoons they deem provocative without even having seen them.

The controversy over the 12 Muhammad cartoons that were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 and led to worldwide protests and unrest among Muslims was merely a taste of what is to come, a dress rehearsal for the kinds of disputes Europe can expect to face in the future if it does not rethink its current policy of appeasement. As was the case in the 1930s, when Czechoslovakia was sacrificed in the interest of peace under the Munich Agreement -- a move that ultimately did nothing to prevent World War II -- Europeans today also believe that an adversary, seemingly invincible due to a preference for death over life, can be mollified by good behavior, concessions and submission. All the Europeans can hope to gain in this asymmetric conflict is a temporary reprieve, a honeymoon period that could last 10, 20, or maybe even 50 years. Anyone on death row breathes a sigh of relief when his execution is postponed to some indefinite time in the future.

Keep reading at the link; it's long but worth your time.

HE'S BEEN LESS THAN A MONTH in the job, but UN's new Secretary General is already kofiannanning:

For just one day last week, it looked like Ban, in the first real test of his self-proclaimed mission to “restore trust” at the U.N., had risen above the bureaucratic evasions of his scandal-plagued predecessor, Kofi Annan. That day was Jan. 19, shortly after FOX News and The Wall Street Journal broke the story of U.S. State Department accusations that the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), violating its own rules, had allowed hard currency to flow to the now-sanctioned rogue regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The State Department told of UNDP offices in North Korea dominated by officials of the regime, “sham” audits of programs to hide the cash flow, and an extended cover-up of the situation by the UNDP itself.

Ban came out that same day for a public housecleaning, with guns blazing. In a break with the stonewalls of the U.N. when faced with Oil-for-Food and other scandals, he promised to call for what his spokeswoman described as “an urgent, system-wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programmes.”

For this, Ban earned immediate praise, even from some of the U.N.’s most diehard critics. And he seemed intent on sticking to his guns. When a reporter dropped by the office of Ban’s spokeswoman, Michele Montas, late that same Friday evening, she took time to offer assurances that yes, indeed, the audit would be rigorous, complete and independent. Asked, specifically, if outside, private auditors would be employed to ensure integrity, she said, “Yes.”

But by Monday, Ban was backtracking faster than you can say “ACABQ” — which is the acronym for the U.N. General Assembly’s own budget oversight body, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions — which Ban was suddenly proposing to use as the overseer of his promised housecleaning.

ANOTHER GREAT REPORT by Mohammed Fadhil from the "quiet, too quiet" streets of Baghdad as government forces are regaining control of areas in the city dominated until now by insurgents. He also explains the 'lively' debates in the new Parliament; don't miss it.

OPERATION BAGHDAD: a special report from the streets of the city by Mohammed Fadhil of Iraq The Model and Pajamas Media's Baghdad editor. Read it in full, it's worth it.

SECOND LIFE, the virtual world online game, is a pyramid scheme, an analyst says.

SAUDI ARABIA seems to be waging a sort of underground war with Iran with oil prices as a weapon:

Oil traders and others believe that the Saudi decision to let the price of oil tumble has more to do with Iran than economics.

Their belief has been reinforced in recent days as the Saudi oil minister has steadfastly refused calls for a special meeting of OPEC and announced that the nation is going to increase its production, which will send the price down even farther.

Saudi Oil Minister Ibrahim al-Naimi even said during a recent trip to India that oil prices are headed in the "right direction."

Not for the Iranians.

Moreover, the traders believe the Saudis are not doing this alone, that the other Sunni-dominated oil producing countries and the U.S. are working together, believing it will hurt majority-Shiite Iran economically and create a domestic crisis for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose popularity at home is on the wane. The traders also believe (with good reason) that the U.S. is trying to tighten the screws on Iran financially at the same time the Saudis are reducing the Islamic Republic’s oil revenues.

For the Saudis, who fear Iran’s religious, geopolitical and nuclear aspirations, the decision to lower the price of oil has a number of benefits, the biggest being to deprive Iran of hard currency. It also may create unrest in a country that is its rival on a number of levels and permits the Saudis to show the U.S. that military action may not be necessary.

MORE INDICATIONS THAT Litvinenko's death may have not been an assassination, but rather a smuggling operation gone wrong, the former ex-KGBer being a member of the network.

THE SITUATION in Alcorcón, a town near Madrid, is increasingly tense after this weekend's fighting between Latin American and local gangs: "It is believed that controversies are initially caused by the use of public basketball and voleyball playgrounds. According to Alcorcon young people, latin inmigrants try to charge a fee for using these public facilities."



But Spanish authorities officially have a different approach towards those gangs.

THIS IS WHAT Bush should say in today's State of the Union address, according to Jules Crittenden.

SOME CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS are beginning to wonder if they have oversold their global warming alarmism:

Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world.



Yet, it took the dramatic images of a hurricane overtaking New Orleans and searing heat last summer to finally trigger widespread public concern on the issue of global warming.



Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new Democratic-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.



Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer's heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.



In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.



"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.



Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties — a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public.

Read the rest.

SOME CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS are beginning to wonder if they have oversold their global warming alarmism:

Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world.



Yet, it took the dramatic images of a hurricane overtaking New Orleans and searing heat last summer to finally trigger widespread public concern on the issue of global warming.



Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new Democratic-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.



Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer's heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.



In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.



"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.



Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties — a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public.

Read the rest.

YOU WANT TO WATCH movies and TV shows free on the internet without the hassle of downloading them from eMule? Sure, the quality is not superb, but it's instantaneous and you don't have to pray that the file is not incomplete or spoofed.

UPDATE. It seems the site structure has change and the above links don't work anymore. Try the homepage and navigate from there.

WHEN PAJAMAS MEDIA reported for the first time of iranian dissident Zahra Kamalfar's ordeal, she had been trapped with her two children in Moscow's airport for 73 days.

Two months later, they're still there. That's a real legal limbo, not the one people say Gitmo inmates are in. After all, the latter are enemy combatants captured in combat; Zahra and her children are inocently persectuted.

THE SECOND HOLOCAUST will be different.

WOW, THE iPhone is much more than a phone, eh?:

CARTER, THE WORST EX-PRESIDENT: read Joshua Muravchik less than sympathetic portrayal.

GOOD POST from Neo-Neocon on the accusation that the US supported Saddam Hussein in the past.

AL-QAEDA fleeing Baghdad in anticipation of the surge.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: Amir Taheri writes on a very telling anecdote in Iraq:

JUST outside Um al-Qasar, a port in south east Iraq, a crowd had gathered around a British armored car with a crew of four. An argument seemed to be heating up through an interpreter.



The interpreter told the Brits that the crowd was angry and wanted U.K. forces out of Iraq. But then a Kuwaiti representative of Amnesty International, accompanied by a journalist friend, approached - and found the crowd to be concerned about something quite different.



The real dispute? The day before, a British armored vehicle had an accident with a local taxi; now the cab's owner, backed by a few friends, was asking the Brits to speed up compensating him. Did these Iraqis want the Brits to leave, as the interpreter pretended? No, they shouted, a thousand times no!



So why did the interpreter inject that idea into the dialogue? Shaken, he tried a number of evasions: Well, had the Brits not been in Iraq, there wouldn't have been an accident in the first place. And, in any case, he knows that most Iraqis don't want foreign troops . . .



Since 2003, Iraq has experienced countless similar scenes, with interpreters, guides and "fixers" projecting their views and prejudices into the dialogue between Iraqis and the outside world.

Read the rest. Oh, by the way, I'm back after a stomach bug, or something I ate, that left me down for a couple of days.

NO, TODAY'S DEMONSTRATION in Madrid -taking place as I type this- doesn't mean that people have finally grown a spine (I found no link in English yet, probably because it's still ongoing).

After Zapatero's controversial initiative to negotiate with the Basque terrorist group, done in a pure partisan manner with no attempt to reach bipartisan consensus with the opposition;

After ignoring ETA's re-arming while that negotiation was taking place, and paying no attention to any critic who was saying that ETA's cease-fire was more a hudna than a real truce;

After December 30th car bomb in Barajas, the answer is this demonstration taking place right now in Madrid:


Does that look like a firm position against a group who has been killing hundreds of people over the last 40 years? Demonstrators are calling for peace and against terror; of course, one way to achieve peace and end terror is to fight the terrorists and win. Another way is to surrender.

Guess what the crowd is choosing, considering all those white doves printed in the signs people are carrying. And considering the chants of "Dialogue! Dialogue!" that they are singing.

UPDATE. There a first report from Reuters which includes a blatant lie:

[T]he main opposition Popular Party was absent from the Madrid march, the first time a major party has not attended an anti-ETA demonstration since democracy returned to Spain in the 1970s.

This is absolutely false: there's been several million-man demonstrations in the last months, against Zapatero's negotiation with ETA. Zapatero's Socialist party -PSOE, did not attend any of those.

UPDATE II (Sunday, Jan. 14). I'm glad that the demonstration, seen from the ground, was not as surrender-ish as it looked from TV and news report; Robert Mayer @ Publius Pundit, who writes from Madrid, says things were a bit different. But I still suspect the political lesson for the Zapatero administration won't be that any further negotiation is out of the question but the opposite: it will be seen, I'm afraid, as a vindication that, in spite of the bomb in Barajas and the two dead, negotiation is still worthwhile because people have been calling for peace and dialogue (much more explicitely in the other demonstration in Bilbao, where the official slogan said so: see the picture).


We'll have to see what happens in the next weeks. I'll be happy if I'm wrong but, alas, I think I won't.

Meanwhile, Joe Gandelman writes:

The bottom line is that to many Spaniards of many political persuasions ETA — and the Zapatero government — have a long way to go before many of them will accept that the ceasefire is more than yet another hiccup in the wave of violence and sea of blood that has marked ETA’s history in Spain. During the Franco era, even though many repudiated its tactics and violence, some privately considered it a kind of folk hero organization, battling the dictatorship.

But now Spain is most assuredly a democracy. Some Spaniards have lived all their lives being given assurances that some day a ceasefire would be put in place with ETA that would endure.

They’ve heard it all before.

UPDATE III. The New York Times' Elaine Sciolino repeats the same lie that Reuters did:

Ultimately, the Popular Party chose not to take part, the first time a major party has avoided an anti-ETA demonstration since democracy returned to Spain in the 1970s.

This is false, unless the NY Times doesn't consider Zapatero's PSOE a major party. For the record, I think the PP should have gone to the demonstration, particularly after the slogan was modified to include the word "Liberty" that they were asking as a condition to attend. They thought the organizers wouldn't include it, but they did. If you ask for something as a condition and the others comply, you can't bail out afterwards. Even if you don't like it, and even though you were expecting the others not to comply, you simply swallow your 'pride' and go. Period.

THIS IS FOOTAGE from surveillance cameras at Madrid's Barajas airport in the very moment that the ETA car bomb exploded. Look at the people in the walkway above: they're miraculously alive.



UPDATE. For some reason the video is not showing properly in the homepage, but it does in the individual post page. Click here if you don't see it, or here to watch it in YouTube itself.

ORWELLIAN TIMES in the UK? Look at a real poster currently displayed there.

HANSON. Read it.

HOW'S THAT for a silly statement?

The Basque separatist group ETA said Tuesday a cease-fire it declared in March still stands, even as it claimed responsibility for a Dec. 30 car bombing that killed two people in Madrid.

By the way, don't miss this interview with Spanish interior minister at the NY Times; sounds much better than it really is, but I don't have time right now to comment at length. Will do, if I can, later during the day.

Also, there's a notice about an incoming outage at Blogger in a short while which will last for a couple of hours, so if you don't see this blog later don't worry: it'll be back.

MORE GUNS, MORE CRIME?

As reported in American Rifleman, recently released FBI data demonstrate that in 2005, “the nation’s total violent crime rate was 38 percent lower than in 1991, when violent crime hit an all time high.”



AR, a publication of the National Rifle Association, also notes the rather interesting anomaly, of the crime rate in relation to the availability of firearms. They note: “Defying the anti-gunners’ claim that more guns means more crime, from 1991 to 2005 the number of privately owned guns increased by more than 70 million. The FBI’s report showed that only one in four violent crimes were robberies and aggravated assaults, and most were committed with knives and bare hands.”

IF THE ECO-SNOBS had their way, none of us would go anywhere, writes Janet Daley @ the Daily Telegraph:

Just as ordinary working people had begun to enjoy the freedoms that the better-off have known for generations - the experience of other cultures, other cuisines, other climates - they are threatened with having those liberating possibilities priced out of their reach.

Perhaps there is still a bit of the Marxist agitator in me: when I hear rich people trying to deny enlightenment and pleasure to poor people, I reach for my megaphone.

Read the rest.

AARON HANSCOM writes on the Islamification of Europe's cathedrals; and Spanish bishops are worried.

STEM CELLS from amniotic fluid? Information at Associated Press, Newsweek and New Scientist.

THOSE OF YOU who use FeedBurner will be happy to know thay they have just launched a metrics and site statistics package; you don't need to install anything, just activate it in the control panel. And if you're not a FeedBurner user you can also install it in your site/blog: it's much better than most counter/statistic services that people usually use.



Everyday I'm happier I made the switch...

AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW by Richard Miniter to Flemming Rose, the former editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, of the Mohammed cartoons fame. Don't miss it.

AND YET TWO more stashes of explosives belonging to ETA have been found, and Bilbao airport was evacuated after a bombing threat. The escalation is officially in full swing, and still Zapatero is convinced of his quest for peace...

THE SECOND BODY of Madrid's Barajas airport car bomb by ETA has been located; rescuers are trying to rescue it from the rubble:

A spokesman said the body of Diego Armando Estacio had been found in his car on Thursday evening by workers using a miniature camera. The removal of the body is expected to take several hours.



The two male victims, both Ecuadorean immigrants, were buried under 40,000 tonnes of steel and concrete brought down by the bomb which wrecked a multi-storey car park at the recently opened Terminal Four building.



The other victim, Carlos Alonso Palate, was found on Wednesday. His remains were returned to Ecuador for burial on Thursday.

GENERALISSIMO ALI KHAMENEI is still dead: a source close to Pajamas Media has learned that Iran's supreme leader has finally succumbed to cancer.

Saddam has a new playmate in hell.

UPDATE. Perhaps we'll have to wait a little; we have been updating the post and added new information. Although the fact that Khamenei didn't deliver the Eid message in person is very significant, truth is that it's not yet possible to confirm the news of his death.

SPANISH POLICE FOIL ANOTHER ETA ATTACK:

Police in the Basque region said Thursday they had found a bomb in northern Spain, five days after a car bombing in Madrid that was blamed on the separatist group ETA and killed one person.

Nearly 220 pounds of explosives were found in a drum near an abandoned car outside the Basque town of Amorebieta, and they were rigged to be used in an attack, a spokesman for the Basque police said.

Zapatero, however, is still hopeful for peace. I wonder about at what price.

WORKING AT GOOGLE must be cool, eh?

THE FIRST BODY of ETA's car bomb in Madrid's Barajas airport last Saturday has been found. There's still one person missing.

STILL THE SAME: "UN staff accused of raping children in Sudan"

The abuse allegedly began two years ago when the UN mission in southern Sudan (UNMIS) moved in to help rebuild the region after a 23-year civil war.



[...] The first indications of sexual exploitation emerged within months of the UN force's arrival and The Daily Telegraph has seen a draft of an internal report compiled by the UN children's agency Unicef in July 2005 detailing the problem.



But the UN has not publicly acknowledged that there is a problem and when contacted repeatedly by this newspaper UN headquarters refused to comment.



The allegations will be deeply embarrassing to the new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, as the UN is pushing to be allowed to launch a new peacekeeping mission to help end the humanitarian crisis in Sudan's north-western region, Darfur.



The Telegraph understands that the Sudanese government, which is deeply opposed to the deployment of UN troops to Darfur, has also gathered evidence, including video footage of Bangladeshi UN workers having sex with three young girls.

ONE OF THE PEOPLE mentioned by name in Robert Fisk's tirade, former US intelligence officer Rick Francona, responds to his "allegations".

JASON BURKE at the Guardian:

In 2003, back in Sulaymaniyah, I sat down in a prison cell with a captured Baath party torturer. 'How old was the youngest person you ever tortured?' I asked him. 'Oh, about two or three,' he said unapologetically. 'We didn't torture the kids themselves obviously, but holding a toddler over a boiling saucepan is a very good way of getting their parents to talk.' Why do I return to all this? Because I can't help but be happy that Saddam has been executed.

Exactly.

THERE GOES Robert Fisk again, mourning the death of Saddam and regurgitating the canard that the US had collaborated with him and how he just took all the secrets with him to the grave. Silly because while it's true that the US collaborated in the past, the countries who have good reasons to be relieved are the ones opposing the military intervention, most notably China, Russia and France. I'd say it's the leaders of these countries who sleep better at night now (not much, though; there's still paperwork!)

But more than that: what gives if the US 'collaborated' with Saddam's Iraq several decades ago? To begin with, the era of the Cold War is absolutely different to the current times. Failure to grasp this should mean one is not qualified to write on these matters unless it's in a junior high newspaper.

But the main think is this; Fisk is one of many European commentators who blame current US administrations for something done by previous occupants of the White House. Even when they correct something that these critics were against! They shout 'hypocrisy' until they're blue in the face, as if one president now couldn't act differently to his predecessors.

I hate to break it to Fisk, but this is what happens: while it was the same Saddam in power back then and until a little over three years ago, in the US there's one thing called elections. Every 4 or 8 years there's a new administration. And actually the president who gave Saddam the green light to launch the war against Iran was none other than the European left's US president hero, Jimmy Carter (still more of a hero than Clinton, since 1/ Bubba was the Balkans warmonger after all and killed people!, and 2/ Bubba doesn't criticize Israel as much as Carter does. But I digress). Carter wanted to do something to counter the spectacular, cosmic failure of his Iran policy, and supported Iran's arch-enemy. Later, it was Bush Sr. who went to war against Saddam and expelled him from Kuwait. From that moment, and since the world had changed, there's been no more support for him. What's the big deal?

I mean, it isn't like it's the first time a country changes its alliances as circumstances change. If it wasn't so, in Spain we'd still be supporting the Romans...

SPAIN CATHEDRAL shuns Muslim plea:

The Roman Catholic bishop of Cordoba in southern Spain has rejected an appeal from Muslims for the right to pray in the city's cathedral, a former mosque.

Yeah, and a Visigoth temple before Muslims razed it when they arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century.