Profiles Encouraged
Under the cirumstances, we must be wary of young Arab men.
By Peggy Noonan

Suddenly to our right, on the sidewalk, we saw two "Mideastern looking men," as we all now say. They were 25 or 30 years old, dressed in jeans and windbreakers, and they were doing something odd. They were standing together silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat's, top to bottom. We watched them, trying to put what we were seeing together. Tourists? It was a funny time of day for tourists to be videotaping a landmark--especially when the tourists looked like the guys who'd just a few days before blown up a landmark.

We watched them. After a minute or so they finished taping St. Pat's and turned toward where we were. We were about 20 feet away from them, and we eyeballed them hard. They stared back at us in what I thought an aggressive manner: a deadeye stare, cold, no nod, no upturned-chin hello.

They stared at us staring at them for a few seconds, and then they began to videotape Rockefeller Center. We continued watching, and I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car. I looked over at the men again. They were watching me. The one with the camera puts it down for a moment. We stared, they stared. And then they left. They walked away and disappeared down a side street.

Let me tell you what I thought. I thought: Those guys are terrorists.
(...)

No one likes "racial profiling," "ethnic profiling," "religious profiling." But I see it this way: If groups of terrorists took out two huge buildings and part of the Pentagon and killed 5,000 people and then decided to unleash anthrax and it emerged that those terrorists were all middle-aged American blond women who tend to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts and like to go by Catholic churches and light candles, I would be deeply upset not only because the terrorists had done what they'd done. I would also be upset because they were just like me! I fit their profile! I look like them! I act like them! Everywhere I went people would notice me and give me hard looks and watch what I was doing. I would feel terrible about this. But you know what else I'd do? I'd suck it up. I'd understand. I wouldn't like it, but I'd get it, and I'd accept it.
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I just bet she would understand. Yesterday I listened to a talk radio host taking calls after reading excerpts from this column. Xenophobe after xenophobe called in and agreed we needed to watch "these people". "We shouldn't be letting these people into the country." "They're aggressive. One almost ran me off the road the other day." "They're not like us."

It's easy to support racial profiling when it's not your race being profiled. But wait! I'm sure that Ashcroft and Ridge (our homegrown religious thought police) will get around to the rest of us soon enough. It makes you proud to be an American.

US 'surprised' by Taleban tenacity

The US Pentagon has admitted that it is taken aback by the tenacity of the Taleban as the US bombing campaign continues into its third week.
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thanks to BookNotes

Lets see...The Ahghans were able to defeat Russia in ten years of fighting and the Pentagon didn't notice? They thought they would just roll over for the US? It's the same arrogant mind set we saw in Vietnam. After all, we were just fighting a bunch of gooks in pajamas. What kind of threat could that be?

Here is some more background on how we got into this mess and how we are busy making new messes we don't even begin to comprehend.

Unintended Consequences

All wars have unintended consequences. No matter how cautious generals and political leaders are, war sets in motion waves of change that can alter the currents of history. More often, generals and political leaders are not troubled by long-term side effects; they are sharply focused on achieving a victory and war's aims. The result is that the unseen and unintended occur, at times as a bitter riptide which overwhelms the original rationales for engaging in armed combat.

This unpredictable cycle of action and reaction has thwarted U.S. policy in southwestern Asia for 50 years. It began with attempts to contain the Soviet Union and control the oil-rich fields of the Persian Gulf, and continues today in the popular assault in Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qa'ida terrorist network. In that half century, nearly every major initiative led to an unexpected and sometimes catastrophic reaction, for which new military remedies were devised, only again to stir unforeseen problems. The cycle, regrettably, may be repeating again.
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thanks to BookNotes

The Geopolitics of War

There are many ways to view the conflict between the United States and Osama bin Laden's terror network: as a contest between Western liberalism and Eastern fanaticism, as suggested by many pundits in the United States; as a struggle between the defenders and the enemies of authentic Islam, as suggested by many in the Muslim world; and as a predictable backlash against American villainy abroad, as suggested by some on the left. But while useful in assessing some dimensions of the conflict, these cultural and political analyses obscure a fundamental reality: that this war, like most of the wars that preceded it, is firmly rooted in geopolitical competition.
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

This is a personal account of what it is like to live in the West Bank under Israeli occupation.

Life Under Occupation

For the last three days I have spent much of my time doing one of three things: First, I have been watching Bethlehem Television as the lines of breaking news flashed on the screen. (We announce the death of ... Citizens: Beware when walking in the streets or in your homes, there are Israeli snipers in the hills. We announce the death of our sister ... Citizens: Stay away from the area of Bab AL-Ziqaq, Israeli tanks are headed there. We announce the death of 16-year-old ... There are a large number of wounded, area hospitals request doctors who are able to come assist. We announce the death of ... ) This is just part of the succession of announcements that occurred in the space of about two hours.
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thanks to BookNotes

The real battle lines
What is making the U.S. most vulnerable to terrorist attacks, especially bioterrorism, is not a depleted weapons arsenal but a crumbling public sector, says NAOMI KLEIN

Only hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Republican Representative Curt Weldon went on CNN and announced that he didn't want to hear anyone talking about funding for schools or hospitals. From here on, it was all about spies, bombs and other manly things.

"The first priority of the U.S. government is not education, it is not health care, it is the defence and protection of U.S. citizens," he said, adding, later: "I'm a teacher married to a nurse -- none of that matters today."

But now it turns out that those frivolous social services matter a great deal. What is making the U.S. most vulnerable to terrorist networks is not a depleted weapons arsenal but its starved, devalued and crumbling public sector. The new battlefields are not just the Pentagon, but also the post office; not just military intelligence, but also training for doctors and nurses; not a sexy new missile defence shield, but the boring old Food and Drug Administration.

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thanks to SmirkingChimp.com

And Dan Gillmore has a column on our favorite monopolists.

Entertainment control freaks have an ally in Microsoft

Also Thursday, as you may have heard, a large software company based in Redmond, Wash., is holding a coming-out party for Windows XP. This is Microsoft's next-generation operating system, and one piece is potentially just what the entertainment moguls ordered.

How so? The Windows Media Player software built into Windows XP contains copy controls for audio and video content using Microsoft's proprietary media format, called WMA. Many companies are planning to use WMA for their distribution, given how ubiquitous it will be once millions of XP-configured PCs have been sold.

That latest version of Media Player, which I recently downloaded, comes with a remarkable user license. It says, in part: ``You agree that in order to protect the integrity of content and software protected by digital rights management (`Secure Content'), Microsoft may provide security related updates to the OS Components that will be automatically downloaded onto your computer. These security related updates may disable your ability to copy and/or play Secure Content and use other software on your computer. If we provide such a security update, we will use reasonable efforts to post notices on a Web site explaining the update.''

In other words, Microsoft asserts the right to remotely change your PC's configuration and otherwise muck with your system. What's a reasonable effort to post notices? Who knows?
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There is no way in hell that I will be going to XP.

Living Without Microsoft

thanks to Dan Gillmore