The Editors of the National Review weigh in on the Valerie Plame investigation, succinctly and with scorn: "Today, nearly three years on, we are basically right where we started. There's a lot of blame to go around. First up is Armitage. There was absolutely nothing illegal about the original leak he committed, but he chose to remain silent while others - principally Rove and Libby - endured years of accusations in the press. (Armitage's close friend Colin Powell also deserves a dishonorable mention for keeping quiet after learning of Armitage's role.)

"The administration's leftist adversaries in and out of government who have spent years shrieking 'traitor' should be ashamed of themselves. Likewise the New York Times editorial board, which screamed for an investigation until it got bit it on the backside in the form of the media subpoenas. Fitzgerald should ask himself whether his wild goose chase has shown the judgment and discretion one expects from such an experienced prosecutor. Finally, the higher-ups at the Justice Department - Ashcroft and Comey in particular - bear great responsibility for buckling under political pressure when their own investigators knew there was nothing to the story.

"It's a sorry mess. And yet the investigation continues. If common sense suddenly prevailed - a remote possibility, we concede - it would be shut down. Now."

Weekly Standard staffer Stephen Schwartz is suggesting that it is one particular root of Muslim extremism that is responsible for terrorism based in Britain: "Contrary to common wisdom, Muslim radicalism in the United Kingdom is not rooted in grievance against British, American, Israeli, or other Western policies. Nor is it a reaction to fear or prejudice by non-Muslims. It originates in a specific ideology imported to the country by two generations of Sunni Muslim radicals from Pakistan. The domination of British Islam by that ideology, generally known as Deobandism, produced the 7/7 bombings and the trans-Atlantic airline terror plot, and has made Britain the epicenter of jihadist violence in Europe.

"Deobandism is not an ancient Islamic tradition. It began in India after the 1857 mutiny against the British raj, and was originally a fundamentalist, but peaceful, movement, convinced that the failure of the mutiny made religious teaching and cultivation a preferable alternative to violent combat against foreign rule.

"In the aftermath of the Afghan war of the 1980s, Deobandi students ('Talibs') in Pakistani madrasas, being already fundamentalist, were noticed by Saudi agents in the Pakistani military and intelligence services. They were trained in totalitarian and terrorist methods and took over Afghanistan as the governing Taliban. From Pakistan and Afghanistan their message disseminated through mosques and madrasas where Pakistani Sunnis congregate - especially in Britain, America, and Canada. Because of their financial resources, proselytizing, and intimidation, they came to dominate Pakistani Sunni communities abroad."

Claudia Rosett analyses Iran's defiance of the UN in the Wall Street Journal this morning: "Some of Mr. Ahmadinejad's behavior can be discounted on grounds that he is a messianic crackpot. But there is plenty of evidence that he is making a highly rational calculation about the ease with which the UN can be corrupted, divided, delayed and defied - without serious penalty.

"UN sanctions programs depend on the agreement and cooperation of member states under a set of rules dictated not by the interests of the modern free world, but by the decayed, despot-infested collective that is the contemporary UN. And, as prefigured under UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, major players, like Russia and China, will almost certainly cheat. Iran, with 10% of the world's known oil reserves, and the world's second largest proven reserves of natural gas, has enough resources to grease the way.

"Indeed, the general greasing of Iran's important UN connections is already well advanced. Much as Saddam fought sanctions by dangling fat oil development deals and doling out lucrative Oil for Food contracts to win friends and influence politicians, Tehran has already cultivated a global web of current and prospective business partners. Were Iran a more benign energy-rich state, such activity might pass for nothing more than normal enterprise. But under UN sanctions, this setup would translate into a constant fount of pro-Iranian lobbying pressure, and incentives to cheat, within a slew of UN member states."

Here's an interesting thought - short circuit the international community's failure to define terrorism, and failure therefore to provide a firm legal basis for dealing with them, by categorising what they do as a kind of piracy. It's suggested by the journal Legal Affairs. "At first glance, the correlation between piracy and terrorism seems a stretch. Yet much of the basis of this skepticism can be traced to romantic and inaccurate notions about piracy. An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism. Viewed in its proper historical context, piracy emerges as a clear and powerful precedent...

"Until 1856, international law recognized only two legal entities: people and states. People were subject to the laws of their own governments; states were subject to the laws made amongst themselves. The Declaration of Paris created a third entity: people who lacked both the individual rights and protections of law for citizens and the legitimacy and sovereignty of states. This understanding of pirates as a legally distinct category of international criminals persists to the present day, and was echoed in the 1958 and 1982 UN Conventions on the Law of the Sea. The latter defines the crime of piracy as "any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends." This definition of piracy as private war for private ends may hold the crux of a new legal definition of international terrorists...

"To understand the potential of defining terrorism as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law." Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy. This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Ironically, it is the very effectiveness of this criminalization that has marginalized piracy and made it seem an arcane and almost romantic offense. Pirates no longer terrorize the seas because a concerted effort among the European states in the 19th century almost eradicated them. It is just such a concerted effort that all states must now undertake against terrorists, until the crime of terrorism becomes as remote and obsolete as piracy."

Good one, Stephen. Thanks.

NOTE TO READERS: Pondblogger's taking a holiday. Posting will be suspended while fun is being had. Back on September 18, all things being equal.

Mario Loyola is described as a former assistant for communications and policy planning at the Department of Defense. I don't want to be disrespectful, but his article in the National Review is just waffle, showing he's lost his grip (in my opinion) on what's going on in the Middle East. He says: "The most immediate effect of a robust European-led presence may indeed be to chill Hezbollah activity in south Lebanon. The current ceasefire could turn out to be a lasting interregnum. But with our without the fighting, one thing is increasingly clear. In seeking deviously to outsmart the Israelis and the Americans, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan may have outsmarted themselves."

Loyola is using the logic of the period before the Lebanese War to judge what's going to happen after it, without paying attention to what happened during the War.

Hizbollah's vastly enhanced new stature, after it successfully tweaked the nose of the giant, Israel, has made what happens in the south of Lebanon almost irrelevant. Its future now may well be as a political organisation, not a band of guerrilla fighters. If its leaders survive, and if it continues to be as smart as it has been up to now, it probably needn't fire another rocket in order to get closer to its goal of destroying the state of Israel.

Hezbollah's achievements, and the Israeli establishment's poor performance in this crisis, amount to a reshuffling of the Middle East cards. This DEBKAfile article probably (you can never be sure with DEBKA) is a first sighting of two highly significant events.

First, it says "Israel's intelligence chiefs have formed a new lobby to put their warnings in the public domain when they see the Olmert government failing to properly address grave security threats to the country."

Shin Bet's director, Yuval Diskin, is evidently going to be the group's spokesman. It is made up of the heads of the three intelligence services - Diskin, AMAN’s Maj.-Gen Amos Yadlin and Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad, as well as the counter-terror departments of these services and of the IDF Southern Command.

It's a product of great Israeli dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, particularly with Olmert's poor strategic decision-making. Israel probably doesn't have the stomach for an election just now, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a Cabinet shuffle soon, whose effect would be to shift Amir Peretz out of Defence, a portfolio he really should not have been given in the first place. I would be surprised if Lt Gen Dan Halutz didn't retire. And I wouldn't be surprised if Olmert himself didn't fall on his sword in due course.

Second, Diskin's first announcement, made to the Knesset's foreign affairs and security committee on Tuesday was "that Palestinian terrorists, notably Hamas, were employing Hizballah's Lebanon tactics and building a Katyusha deployment, bunker network and anti-tank missile arsenal in the Gaza Strip. The northern West Bank, he said, had been taken over by Hizballah agents and radical Jihad Islami terrorists since its evacuation by Israel at the same time as the Gaza Strip last summer."

Is it any wonder that the Arab League, long an organisation so riven by rivalries and disagreements as to be almost incapable of positive action, seems to have come up to a new speed already? The New York Sun has coverage. The League got to work just after the war began on a plan for the Middle East to replace the Road Map, which Arab leaders are agreed is a dead duck. The League hasn't made its new plan public yet, but it does stand a chance of taking the initiative away from the US, Europe, Russia and the UN if its ideas are any good. Even a near miss would establish the League as a newly-enlivened and significant player in the new Middle East.

Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has died in Cairo. The Guardian writes: "Over the course of 50 novels, five plays and a score of short stories and essays, Mahfouz depicted life in Egypt, balanced between tradition and the modern world, with startling realism. The action of his novels was often confined to the 1,000-year-old Islamic quarter of Cairo where Mahfouz was born, a crowded neighbourhood of alleys and mosques which was the setting for his 1950s masterpiece, the Cairo Trilogy, which deals over the course of three books (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street) with the fluctuating fortunes of a Muslim merchant family not unlike Mahfouz's own...

"Long established as one of the Middle East's finest and best-loved writers, and an ardent advocate of moderation and religious tolerance, Mahfouz's acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1988 brought him to international notice. But a wider readership came at a price: in 1994, an attacker inspired by a militant cleric's ruling that one of Mahfouz's novels was blasphemous stabbed the then-82-year-old writer as he left his Cairo home. The attack damaged the nerves leading to his right arm, effectively putting an end to his former practice of writing for hours in longhand."

Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the CIA leak case, the New York Times says, quoting a lawyer involved with the case. The fact that Armitage was not a member of the Bush White House team, bent on spinning a negative story, casts a new light on the Valerie Plame case, and makes the special prosecutor look more like a political Don Quixote than before. Don't expect him to stop, though, as an obviously fed-up Wall Street Journal thinks he ought. "There is more to be said at a future date about the specific case against Mr. Libby. But for now the Armitage news should concern one man in particular, and that's the President of the United States. How much differently would he have behaved had he known about Mr. Armitage's role in 2003? Would he have kept echoing the media-liberal spin that there was some nefarious White House leaker to discover, and continue to let the aides who most believed in his policies - Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove - be hounded by a special counsel? And why has he tolerated so much insubordination to his policies?

"Someday we hope Mr. Bush will tell us. Meantime, as he absorbs the partisan and ultimately trivial truth of this case, why shouldn't he pardon Mr. Libby and put the entire sorry saga to rest?"

"Byblos, a UNESCO World Heritage site 22 miles north of Beirut, is a pretty tourist village with remains dating back 7,000 years that is considered by some scholars to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Seafood restaurants that depend on the sea for fresh fare rim its harbor, which is dominated by a 13th century Crusader castle. But the harbor is now an oil sump, with thick black liquid leaving its mark at the waterline on the stones of the castle." It's a town I visited just three months ago. The San Francisco Chronicle says that in many ways, Lebanon has been turned into an environmental disaster site.

Almost no action was taken while the war was going on, and the oil has coated the coastline for miles, killing marine life and turning beaches into health hazards. Despite that, "volunteers and environmental groups such as Green Line had encountered nothing but obstacles from the Lebanese Environment Ministry. The ministry has only just begun issuing permits needed for cleanup projects to begin, and it had not yet sent its own employees to help get the job done."

Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College of the University of London, writes in the New York Sun about the Middle East's biggest lie about Israel: "In discussions of the contemporary Middle East, few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict constitutes the source of all evil and that its resolution will lead to regional peace and stability.

"While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively, even invidiously, wrong. For one thing, violence was an integral part of Middle Eastern political culture long before the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and physical force remains today the main if not the sole instrument of regional political discourse.

"At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world's most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria's massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq's Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias, not to mention the ongoing bloodbath in Iraq.

"As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression. In the Yemenite, Lebanese, and Algerian civil wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians perished; the Iran-Iraq war claimed nearly a million lives.

"Nor have the Arab states have ever had any real stake in the 'liberation of Palestine'. Though anti-Zionism has been the core principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the mid-1930s - it is easier, after all, to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty - pan-Arabism has almost always served as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaim it."

This is a fascinating little move forward for newspapers which are read online in countries whose laws differ on what may be published and what not. The New York Times published a story yesterday which could not be read in Britain, whose laws governing what may be published before a case is tried in the courts is much more restrictive than that in the United States: "Web readers in Britain were intrigued by the headline 'Details Emerge in British Terror Case', which sat on top of The New York Times's home page much of yesterday, (but) they would have been disappointed with a click.

"'On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,' is the message they would have seen. 'This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.'" The newspaper adapted technology intended for use with targeted advertising, apparently.

The article in question is here. It will, of course, be available to readers in places like Bermuda, whose laws are similar to those in Britain, because this particular law is designed, not as a blanket ban on publication, but as a ban on publication in the country where the case is being tried. Its purpose is to keep potential jurors from being 'contaminated' by information prejudicial to the defendants.

Thanks again, Brenda.

It might have been Israel and Hezbollah doing the fighting, but when the smoke cleared, it was Hamas which had lost. Haaretz quotes "a senior Palestinian Authority official" as having agreed that "'Hamas lost in this war. A few days ago, a parliament member from Fatah, Jamal Abu Rob, made a speech in which he called on Hamas to learn a thing or two from Hezbollah about organization and order. They like to call themselves the Resistance, like Hezbollah. But the only resistance that exists today is in Lebanon. They were angry and protested, but today everyone understands the difference between trained guerrilla fighters and Hamas.

"'The ability of the Palestinian organization is limited to firing a few plastic missiles that make a lot of noise [Qassam rockets], and this shows how weak they are. Why do they hardly mention Hezbollah, and why don't they celebrate its victory, like the other Palestinian organizations?' he continued. 'Irrespective of the Lebanon issue, the status of Hamas in the territories is not what it was. The Palestinian government is not functioning; Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers lack authority, and are having no effect on the course of events."

Even Hamas admits it. The New York Times is quoting a spokeman for the organisation has having said: "'When you walk in the streets of Gaza City, you cannot but close your eyes because of what you see there: unimaginable chaos, careless policemen, young men carrying guns and strutting with pride and families receiving condolences for their dead in the middle of the street.'

"'Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs,' Ghazi Hamad, a former Hamas newspaper editor and the spokesman for the current Hamas government, wrote in an article published Sunday in Al Ayyam, the Palestinian newspaper. After so much optimism when Israelis pulled out of Gaza a year ago, he wrote, 'life became a nightmare and an intolerable burden.' He urged Palestinians to look to themselves, not to Israel, for the causes. But he appeared not to be placing the blame on Hamas or the Palestinian Authority's prime minister, Ismail Haniya of Hamas. He said various armed groups in the Gaza Strip - most affiliated with Fatah, Hamas's rival - were responsible for the chaos."

Cricket, despite the scandal of the last few days, is still the world's last refuge of scrupulously fair play in sport. Sir Clyde Walcott's obituary in the Times is a reminder of the unequivocal respect the game confers on those who are good at it: "No other Test side in history ever had such a gifted triumvirate in its middle order as West Indies did with Worrell, Weekes and Walcott, in the decade after the Second World War. It remains one of the game's more romantic facts that three such notable batsmen should have emerged simultaneously from a thinly populated island of only 166 sq miles.

"The most powerful batsman of the Ws trio, Walcott stood 6ft 3in and weighed 15 stone. Although he had found batting difficult in his early days, after making his debut for Barbados at the age of 16 (one reason he took up wicketkeeping was to keep his place) he developed into a player who could hit the ball off either foot with intimidating power."

Max Hastings is writing in the Guardian, in the wake of a large weekend poll, about extraordinarily large number of British expatriates around the world. "All those British families who told the weekend pollsters that they are thinking of quitting these shores because they do not like the way we are doing things should ask themselves a simple question: are you willing to sign up for the values and policies of whatever other society you choose to join? In France, for instance, the beauties of Burgundy or Provence are undisputed, but could you bring yourself to regard President Chirac with respect? Some friends of ours have just sold their Italian home after 25 years, because they are weary of local corruption. Yet to demand Italy without the corruption is like wanting John Prescott without the embarrassment."

Thanks for the tip, Brenda.

Guardian art critic Philip Hensher is writing about the V&A's collection of Islamic artefacts, and their role in helping make Islam a three-dimensional culture in Britain. "It is known as the Arbadil carpet, and is one of the great treasures of the museum since it was acquired for 2,000 pounds in 1893. William Morris called it 'the finest eastern carpet I have seen', adding that its design was 'of singular perfection, defensible on all points, logically and consistently beautiful'. It is doubtful whether it has ever been surpassed in quality since it was made in 1539. By chance, I was in Vienna the day after seeing the Ardabil carpet, and went to see the famous 'Emperor' carpet, given to Leopold I by Peter the Great; the Ardabil is, somehow, more romantic and enveloping.

"Surrounding the carpet in the V&A's new gallery are hundreds of magical objects from half the world - Mameluke mosque furniture, tiles from Uzbekistan, the court treasures of Suleiman the Magnificent, Iranian pottery, entrancing calligraphy, glassware, metalwork, exquisite paintings - all beautifully lit, displayed and explained. I've dropped in a few times since, and it's always been busy, with visitors taking their time to look at everything."

The Guardian reports on the death a few days ago of a controversial Israeli writer: "Variously described as a voice of conscience or national traitor, florid stylist or literary genius, the Israeli writer Yizhar Smilansky, known by his penname of S Yizhar, always evoked strong emotions in his native land. Decades before revisionist 'new historians' unveiled the grizzlier aspects of Israel's 1948 war of independence, Yizhar, who has died aged 89, covered similar territory in fiction."

In Haaretz, another Israeli author, Benny Ziffer, writes: "Yizhar was our James Joyce and our Marcel Proust and our Samuel Beckett all in one. And the idea of The Days of Ziklag does resemble Waiting for Godot, in that on a certain hill in the south, during the War of Independence, young soldiers don't know what they are fighting for there and why, and the main thing is that their furlough will come, like Godot. And they invent the meaning of their being there as things progress, like the decision that the hill on which they are standing, opposite the hovels of an Arab village, is the biblical Ziklag, because of the pottery shards their feet trampled, and because it was logical that if Lachish is over here and Gat is over there, then this must be Ziklag."

Here's an odd story about the Internet, (soon, there'll be a million of 'em), that is well worth reading. New York Times: "The piece that funtwo played with mounting dexterity was an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon, the composition from the turn of the 18th century known for its solemn chord progressions and its overexposure at weddings. But this arrangement, attributed on another title card to JerryC, was anything but plodding: it required high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver called sweep-picking.

"Over and over the guitarist's left hand articulated strings with barely perceptible movements, sounding and muting notes almost simultaneously, and playing complete arpeggios through a single stroke with his right hand. Funtwo's accuracy and velocity seemed record-breaking, but his mouth and jawline - to the extent that they were visible - looked impassive, with none of the exaggerated grimaces of heavy metal guitar heroes. The contrast between the soaring bravado of the undertaking and the reticence of the guitarist gave the 5-minute, 20-second video a gorgeous solemnity."

I was a subscriber to the Boy's Own Paper in the 1950s, (to say nothing of reading everything GA Henty and Arthur Ransome ever wrote) so I know what these guys are on about. The Times Literary Supplement says: "The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden is the latest in what seems to be a publishing trend (Julian Barnes's Arthur and George being another recent example) that exploits a nostalgic sentiment for the days when books looked like books. Cloth-bound, gold embossed, reassuringly heavy, it mercilessly tugs at the heartstrings of anyone old enough to have ever read a Boy's Own annual. The authors lament, in their introduction, that they did not have this book when they were young (not surprising since one of them was born in 1972 - the Boy's Own Paper stopped publication in 1967), and have produced the present volume in order to preserve a part of their culture they 'really don't want to see vanish'.

"They seem to be entirely serious in their quest, and with only traces of irony they have compiled a book that is packed with articles on such atavistic topics as conker fights and the manufacture of water bombs, invisible ink and the rules of cricket, as well as restoring to prominence some of the pricklier tales from British history - the Battle of Rorke's Drift, the life of Douglas Bader and the story of the British Empire (the longest chapter in the book). Even the staunchest anti-imperialist will need a heart of stone not to be moved by the story of Scott's last expedition, or the fact that British schoolboys have been deprived of its tragic power for so long."