Those who confidently predict a “containable and deterrable” nuclear Iran should consider the suddenly not-so-deterrable nuclear Russia and ask themselves whether such confidence is warranted.
 

When I was writing The Strange Death of the Soviet Union, an account of the collapse of Communism, I interviewed General Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Directorate of the KGB, in charge of international affairs. Calmly he told me that the disintegration of the Soviet empire was only a temporary matter. Russia has such weight geographically and materially that the day would arise when it would reconstruct its empire over all the nearby peoples of lesser weight simply through circumstance. . . .

It is too late to defend Georgia militarily. The logic of the situation now is that the West will duly let Georgia be dismembered and have as its next president someone ready to accommodate the Kremlin. In which case, Russian tanks will once again have determined the boundaries and the governments of other countries. Russian minorities live in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia and they too can be used in the future to manufacture some mendacity about genocide, leading to invasion and their re-incorporation into the Russian empire. . . . [W]ithout the necessary resolve and imagination to devise a policy in defence of democracy and its allies, a Soviet Union Mark Two will have emerged with the potential to leave the West demoralized and defeated.
 

I think I'd rather not participate in a documentary presented by a journalist who has written that he believes it is his role "to reflect and not condemn" Muslim radicals.
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/aug/06/mondaymediasection.
politicsandthemedia

There is a saying in the Talmud that those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind, and I strongly suspect that this observation will apply only too aptly to Mr. Rees' work for al Jazeera.

Best regards,
David Frum

"A few minutes later," Frum writes,

I received an unintended reply. The producer had meant to forward my message to her associates - but the forward button is so often hard to distinguish from the reply button!

From: Giti Sorayyapour<giti@outofofficefilms.com>
Date: August 7, 2008 10:40:17 AM EDT
To: David Frum

Subject: David Frum: absolute bastard!!!

I wrote back to thank the producer for her very illuminating reply - I could not have asked for a more emphatic confirmation of my suspicions of the production's actual intentions.

Figuring he simply misspoke, I didn't hold Caplan's blunder against him. Then today I listened to (most of) a speech he gave a year or so later in which he uses the same phrase with the same intent (about 34:40 in). And tonight via an Everyzing search I found another podcast in which he uses it twice (about 42:40 and 46:42 in).

Caplan must be a smart man, but every time I hear him refer to "a Berlin Wall" on the Mexican border I think, "This guy's an idiot." If you know Caplan, and he isn't in fact an idiot, please do him and me a favor and suggest to him that he stop employing the image. It should embarrass him particularly because among his primary assertions is that economists tend to be smarter and better-informed than other people.

*Caplan reveals elsewhere that the non-economist is Caplan's father.
 

The U.S. State Department has already warned Americans traveling to the Games:

All visitors should be aware that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public or private locations. All hotel rooms and offices are considered to be subject to on-site or remote technical monitoring at all times. Hotel rooms, residences and offices may be accessed at any time without the occupant’s consent or knowledge.

Why are the Olympic Games being held in a place like this?
 

Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy. Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe? He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent. He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets. Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff. Of course, much of it was. But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before. Mr. Crabbe was as dead as mutton, but Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I have read desultorily the writings of the younger generation. It may be that among them a more fervid Keats, a more ethereal Shelley, has already published numbers the world will willingly remember. I cannot tell. I admire their polish—their youth is already so accomplished that it seems absurd to speak of promise—I marvel at the felicity of their style; but with all their copiousness (their vocabulary suggests that they fingered Roget's Thesaurus in their cradles) they say nothing to me: to my mind they know too much and feel too obviously; I cannot stomach the heartiness with which they slap me on the back or the emotion with which they hurl themselves on my bosom; their passion seems to me a little anaemic and their dreams a trifle dull. I do not like them. I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

As the Jerusalem Post reports, fierce fighting in Gaza between Fatah and Hamas over the weekend, in which 11 people died and dozens more were wounded, resulted in 180 Fatah refugees fleeing from what they called a ‘war of genocide’ by Hamas against Fatah supporters. And where did they flee to? Why, to Israel, of course. . . . These refugees say they cannot return to Gaza because they will be killed. How fortunate, therefore, that their own Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, can give them sanctuary in the West Bank!

But hang on – Abbas won’t let them in. Yup, with the exception of five individuals whom he did allow in, he’s denied them all sanctuary. He says they should go back to Gaza. . . .

So now Israel, with its iron commitment to human rights, is to hear a court case today where it will be argued that Israel has a moral duty to grant asylum to these Fatah men.

So let’s get our head round this: Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel fled from other Palestinians committed to the destruction of Israel into Israel, which is providing them with sanctuary and medical treatment, while the president of their putative state who bases his claim against Israel on its alleged refusal to admit Palestinian ‘refugees’ refused to allow actual Palestinian refugees fleeing Palestinian violence access to that same putative state, while Israel agonises over whether to grant them permanent asylum. . . .

As Phillips writes, "[J]ust consider what that coverage would have been like if it had been Israel rather than Hamas that had behaved like this."