Today’s essay comes from a former Muslim radical called Ed Husain. He writes of his experiences in Saudi Arabia in an essay in The Australian called Barely veiled menace. I doubt that what is recounted here will surprise anyone, but it is an interesting essay none the less.

I have one quibble with the essay though. The author repeatedly refers to the Saudi youth as being sex starved and he blames the strict separation of the sexs for many of the problems that he observes. But I think he has the cause and effect mixed up.

There are a lot of non- Islamic cultures in the world who have worse sexual problems than the author describes in Saudi Arabia. Sub-Sahara Africa springs to mind right off the bat. So do some Caribbean countries.

I think that popularity of many of seeming harsh sexual regulations in Islam stems from the fact that many woman fear that things would be even worse for them without those regulations. Certainly a large part of the Taliban’s popularity stemmed from the fact that they gave greater protection to the woman of that country then the Warlords did.

This Pakistani blog is interesting in its own right if you like to get the perspective of people who actually live in an area. But I was particularly interested in the comments on this post here.

Their English is not the best so it will take a little parsing. Also one should remember that these are all English speakers and so not a good representative sample of the people of Pakistan. Still, it was quite interesting to read their comments.

In an article in the Asia Times Online, Syed Saleem Shahzad claims that Musharraf has given NATO the green light to cross the border into Pakistan. Shahzad’s claims are pretty far reaching. Read this passage….

KARACHI – Since last September, North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Afghanistan have been pressing Islamabad for the right to conduct extensive hot-pursuit operations into Pakistan to target Taliban and al-Qaeda bases.

According to Asia Times Online contacts, NATO and its US backers have gotten their wish: coalition forces will start hitting targets wherever they might be.

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf is expected to make an important announcement on extremism during an address to the nation in the next day or two.

The ATol contacts in Islamabad say that coalition intelligence has pinpointed at least four centers in the tribal areas of North Waziristan and South Waziristan on the border with Afghanistan from which Taliban operations inside Afghanistan are run. These bases include arms caches and the transfer and raising of money and manpower, the latter in the form of foot-soldiers to fight with the Taliban-led insurgency.

Operations inside Pakistan might be carried out independently by the United States, probably with air power, by Pakistani forces acting alone or as joint offensives. In all cases, though, the US will pull the strings, for instance by providing the Pakistanis with information on targets to hit.

Musharraf has apparently already told his military commanders, the National Security Council and decision-makers in government of the development.

If Shahzad is not just blowing smoke and Musharraf has really agreed to this one wonders what pushed Musharraf over the edge? Is it the problems with the Red Mosque? Did Cheney threaten to stop the flow of money if Musharraf’s did not do more to help?

I doubt Musharraf will be able to hang onto power if NATO starts crossing the border. But then, I doubt that Musharraf will be able to hang onto power for long no matter what he does. So maybe Musharraf is willing to take the gamble. Or maybe Shahzad is lying through his teeth.

I don’t know what to make of this essay. You should never judge people by how they come across in print. Especially when the print in question was written about them by somebody else.

But as I read this essay profiling Aaron Cohen I was inclined to dislike him. He just struck me as the kind of guy who might make stuff up.

In fairness to Cohen though, his personality also reminds me an awful lot of a man called John Fairfield who rescued a lot of slaves in the mid 1800s. Fairfield was always showing off his bullet wounds and talking up all his close calls and he was definitely for real. So maybe Cohen is too.

Why worry about this question? Well, how much credibility you are willing to give to Cohen makes a big difference on what you think of this passage from the essay that I linked to above….

Later that day, Cohen was taken to see the area’s uranium mines — where the Shans told him soil samples had been extracted by the Russians as well as A.Q. Khan, the well-known Pakistani nuclear-weapons-scientist-turned-dealer: “These mounds are everywhere, where samples were being unearthed by other partners as well, including the Iranians and the North Koreans… I am the only Westerner [to see this],” Cohen wrote.

The intelligence minister then handed Cohen documentation of Khan’s entries into Myanmar and told him that the SPDC was selling Shan uranium to the Iranians, who were processing it into material for nuclear weapons. The route from Myanmar, the minister showed him, led straight through China to Natanz, Iran. “I’m no expert on weapons-grade uranium,” Cohen admits. “But they wanted me to leave with samples of what I saw.” Restating his human-rights mission, Cohen refused to discuss transport of the nuclear material. (“It’s a death wish to have that kind of stuff on you,” he says.) But he agreed to put a stack of evidence, including photographs of the Burmese and Iranian facilities, in the right hands when he returned to Thailand and the U.S.

A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program, confessed in 2004 to having been the mastermind behind a clandestine network of nuclear-arms proliferation that stretched from Pakistan through Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His network sold blueprints for centrifuges to enrich uranium as well as illicit uranium centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride — the gas that can be transformed into enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.

Khan is already known to have provided complete centrifuge systems to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and sentenced to house arrest after declaring on television that Musharraf’s government had not played a role in his schemes. Western governments have been denied access to Khan, but the British think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies recently published a report indicating that Khan’s network is very much alive, even without its decapitated head.

Eerily, the Pakistan-Myanmar link is backed up by a 2002 Wall Street Journal article detailing Myanmar’s nuclear ambitions: “The program drew scrutiny recently after two Pakistani nuclear scientists, with long experience at two of their country’s most secret nuclear installations, showed up in Myanmar after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. Asian and European intelligence officials say Suleiman Asad and Muhammed Ali Mukhtar left Pakistan for Myanmar when the U.S grew interested in interrogating them about their alleged links to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, who Washington believes wants to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Burmese exile magazines, blogs and Web sites are rife with alleged wicked SPDC plots. But one question pops up over and over: Is there a link between Myanmar, which mines and refines uranium ore, and Iran, which requires uranium for its own nuclear projects? And, specifically, is Burmese yellowcake finding its way to uranium centrifuges in Natanz, Iran?

Cohen’s testimony suggests that the answer may be yes. From the mining sites, he was taken to meet several Shan men who said they worked as drivers for the SPDC at clandestine nuclear processing facilities near Taungdwingyi, Chauk and Lanwya. These men swore to Cohen that the SPDC was overseeing the production of yellowcake there and in several other locations, then transporting it on North Korean and Iranian ships as well as over land through China and Afghanistan, via a courier network, to the (then secret) underground Iranian plant in Natanz. They handed Cohen the coordinates for the facilities, saying that as ethnic Shans they could no longer do this work for a regime that was systematically attempting to wipe out their people. They had thrown their support behind the Shan State Army, they said, and wished him luck.

A few weeks later, Cohen hand-delivered that information to a source at the Pentagon. The following day (April 19), the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran was running more than 1,300 centrifuges at its underground plant in Natanz (latest estimates put it closer to 3,000). Iran’s plan to install 50,000 centrifuges there to enrich uranium made headlines, with the BBC running satellite photographs of the facility. But no major media outlet noted the Myanmar connection, and the story was soon buried in the subsequent frenzy over the Virginia Tech massacre.

There is more in the essay, but you get the picture. The question is, how much of it should we believe?

From the Associated Press….

Iran is using the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah as a “proxy” to arm Shiite militants in Iraq and Tehran’s Quds force had prior knowledge of a January attack in Karbala in which five Americans died, a U.S. general said Monday.

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner said a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative, Ali Mussa Dakdouk, was captured March 20 in southern Iraq. Bergner said Dakdouk served for 24 years in Hezbollah and was “working in Iraq as a surrogate for the Iranian Quds force.”

And what were they trying to accomplish in Iraq? This from CNN…

U.S. sources and Iraqi militia sources have said the carefully planned operation was meant to take captives who could be traded for five Iranians held by U.S. troops since a January 10 raid in Irbil, in northern Iraq. But the Karbala attack went awry, resulting in the deaths of the five Americans.
Qais Khazali, a onetime spokesman for anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army, was one of the men sought by American troops in connection with the attack. By the time of his March arrest, he had left the Mehdi Army and was leading one of the “special groups,” according to U.S. intelligence.

In searching for Khazali, U.S. and allied troops found computer documents detailing the planning, training and conduct of the failed kidnapping. And they found Daqduq, whom intelligence officials said has admitted working on behalf of Iran.

Contacted by CNN, a Hezbollah spokesman in Lebanon said he would not dignify the U.S. allegations with a response. And it remains unclear why Hezbollah’s leadership would risk sending advisers to Iraq: American intelligence officers suspect Hezbollah — which is indebted to Iran for decades of military and financial support — had no choice.

Iran seems to think that taking captives furthers its goals. In recent history they have taken both Israeli and British personal captive. If they want American captives, I would expect them to eventually be successful. One wonders if that would lead America to attack Iran with all the attendant problems that would bring.

(hat tip Defense Tech)

Those who read the Wall Street Journal will have already have general idea of what this week’s essay is about. But for those that don’t, a little explanation is in order.

The most severe shortage that the army currently faces is lower level officers. They more or less have enough grunts to meet their authorized strength and they have high level officers in spades. But lieutenants and captains are leaving the force at record levels. In part, this is because of the hardships of war. But an even bigger factor is frustration with upper level leadership.

In this essay, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling gives vent to those frustrations and the reception that this essay has been getting has rocked the military world. One general even went so far as to call all his subordinate officers together so that he could publicly rebut this essay.

Since this essay reflects the sentiments of a lot of junior officers currently serving in the military, I think that it is worth reading. But I would remind people that just because old guard is corrupt doesn’t mean that new crew has better ideas. Just think of the French and Russian revolutions.

Mankind is capable of more then you can imagine. There was a time when nobody would have believed that man could make it too the moon. There are people today who can’t believe that men are capable of things likes this….

Later in the day, some of the soldiers from the unit I share a tent with, the C-52, told me that one of their Kit Carson scouts (comprised of some of our previous enemies who have turned on al Qaeda) had pointed out an al Qaeda who had cut off the heads of children. Soldiers from C-52 say that the Kit Carson scout freaked out and tried to hide when he spotted the man he identified as an al Qaeda operative. Just how (or if) the scout really knew the man had beheaded children was unknown to the soldiers of C-52, but they took the suspected al Qaeda to the police, who knew the man. C-52 soldiers told me the Iraqi police were inflamed, and that one policeman in particular was crazed with intent to kill the man who they said had the blood of Iraqi children on his hands. According to the story told to me on 30 June, it took almost 45 minutes for the C-52 soldiers to calm down the policeman who had drawn his pistol to execute the al Qaeda man. That same policeman nearly lost his mind when an American soldier then gave the al Qaeda man a drink of cold water.

The above is from Michael Yon’s latest post and he has pictures of some of the exhumed bodies from the graves if you can stand that sort of thing. Be warned, the pictures included one picture of a pile of rotting heads.

News reports are pouring in regarding the recent riots in Iran. From the Houston Chronicles we read…..

TEHRAN, Iran — Iranians smashed shop windows and set fire to a dozen gas stations in the capital Wednesday, angered by the sudden start of a fuel rationing system that threatens to further increase the unpopularity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The rationing is part of a government attempt to reduce the $10 billion it spends each year to import fuel that is then sold to Iranian drivers at less than cost, to keep prices low.

What if everyone has been fearing he wrong problem. Maybe the real threat to world’s prosperity comes not from Iran’s nuclear weapons but from Iran’s complete collapse. Has anyone thought about what a collapse in Iran would look like?

For this Week’s essay of the week we bring you a post by the Ape Man. Frankly, it is more of a rant then an essay, but it is late at night and we are desperate to meet the deadline. Besides, it is long enough to be an essay even if the quality of the idea is not up to snuff.