I've posted a little about this US Joint Forces Command report on Iraq before, but Foreign Affairs has published a long, thoroughly worthwhile article about it, including very recently de-classified bits.

In an editor's note, FA says: "The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened one of the most secretive and brutal governments in history to outside scrutiny. For the first time since the end of World War II, American analysts did not have to guess what had happened on the other side of a conflict but could actually read the defeated enemy's documents and interrogate its leading figures.

"To make the most of this unique opportunity, the U.S. Joint Forces Command... commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here."

The Palestinians are furious about decisions by the US and the EU to cut off aid until they recognise Israel's right to exist. Aljazeera says "The Palestinian prime minister and president have lashed out at the United States and European Union for halting direct financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. On Friday, Ismail Haniya, the prime minister and a Hamas leader, denounced the decisions as 'hasty and unjust'."

You might be right to think the word 'hasty' contains just a tiny sliver of hope that Hamas's feet are a little closer to the ground these days than they have been in the past. The Telegraph is reporting that Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, is to discuss the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian president and Fatah leader. That would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

And Haaretz says this morning that "Hamas has been sending go-betweens to Israel recently with an offer to reach an unofficial understanding on 'quiet in return for quiet.' According to the proposal, conveyed to Israel by, among others, Egyptian envoys, Hamas would pledge not to carry out any violent actions against Israel and would even prevent other Palestinian organizations from doing so.

"Israel, for its part, would pledge by means of a third party not to take action against the organizations operating in the territories. Hamas is even prepared to declare a unilateral hudna (cease-fire), should Israel not want to appear to be maintaining contact with a body that calls for its destruction. According to this offer, Israel is supposed to respond with positive measures of its own. "

Brits with enough money to worry about how to mitigate the effect inheritance tax might have as they pass it on to their children, are furious about a below-the-belt Budget move by Gordon Brown to levy a new tax on trusts. The move Brown is making amounts to a radical change in the Government's philosophy on trust law, and applies retrospectively to trusts already set up. The Telegraph quotes George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, as having said said: "This amounts to the kind of wealth tax we last saw in the 1970s when the last Labour chancellor, Denis Healey, wanted to make the pips squeak."

In an editorial, the Telegraph warns that "Like earlier stealthy attacks on pensions and family homes, the new tax will affect people who entered into binding contracts many years before. As the accountant David Rothenberg explained last month: 'Everyone who has made a will leaving assets in trust for their surviving spouse should review what they have done so they are not caught out.'

"...the man who would be Prime Minister should beware of the intense resentment inheritance tax arouses. Most estates arise out of income and gains which have already been taxed. Mr Brown should remember that you can shear a sheep several times, but you can skin it only once."

Even Brits who are in favour of what seems to have been the national sport almost since the end of the First World War, mindlessly stripping nobs of anything that smacks of wealth and privilege, like Times columnist Matthew Parris, are dismayed by the dishonest way Brown stuck this momentous change in policy away down in the fine print, where few noticed it.

Parris writes: "There was not a word in his speech. The signal for these changes was buried in the detail of the background paperwork, issued by officials. Mr Brown does not appear to have consulted anyone; so, like some other Brown initiatives, after close study this one may unravel. Had the Chancellor let anyone know his thoughts in advance, an intelligent discussion might have been possible, rather than screams of hurt caused by a big proposal of which we had no warning. Mr Brown gave the distinct impression he hoped we would not notice...Mr Brown's omission from the Budget of his plans to change the law on trusts was worse. It was dishonest. How else can such behaviour be explained? Can it really be that a speech which explained plans to fund a few 'scholarships to American business schools for young British entrepreneurs'; undertake a 'pilot for smart metering and a new labelling scheme' for energy efficiency; and announce 'a new gap-year volunteering scheme', had neither time nor space even to mention that a change to the rules on inheritance, affecting millions, was planned?

"Perhaps you expect me to conclude that Mr Brown is turning out to be a wily fellow: a politician of devilish cunning. On the contrary, he's just a chump! That wasn't clever. What selfish purpose is served by a crass attempt to hide something that stands no chance at all of escaping notice? This behaviour is self-defeating - and especially so because where Mr Brown scores (so far) best on pollsters' charts is for straightforwardness. The silver lining to his reputation for grumpiness and gracelessness is that people see him as a man who does not pull punches. So by behaving in a shifty way he squanders one of his most valuable assets as a personality. It is not rational.

"I have a more worrying explanation than self-interest for Mr Brown's evasiveness. I think it is infantile. Have you ever encountered those disturbed children who refuse to look at you, refuse to seem to hear you - as though, by not acknowledging you, they can somehow cause you not to be there? Whether or not Mr Brown does this to people, he does it to facts. He exhibits something bordering on Freudian 'denial' that the unpopular parts of Government are anything to do with him - as though the Chancellor spends, but it is the Treasury that taxes. It fools nobody, but somehow comforts him, like sucking your thumb and looking the other way.

"'Wily' is not the word for this, and nor is it smart. The Chancellor's behaviour is at best unsettling, at worst dysfunctional."

I've been struggling with yet another DSL breakdown this morning - this one at my ISP. I have a pretty full day, so have no time now to post. I'll be back tomorrow.

I was in a bit of a quandary about this story this morning. It's a piece written by (I suspect for is a better word, but that's another story) Sinn Fein head Jerry Adams, who is backpedalling at speed from the murder of Denis Donaldson, the IRA man who was spying for the Brits. Adams suggests he was killed by British intelligence: "I think his killing was to make sure that his secrets died with him. The timing may or may not be significant. Yes Denis Donaldson betrayed his comrades and friends in the republican cause but he also betrayed those he worked for in British military intelligence and the Special Branch."

I was going to pair it with this story, also published in the Guardian, which is a piece by one of the founding members of Blondie, backpedalling from the ugly behaviour of Debby Harry as the group was being inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame recently.

My point was that both denials have a certain grubbiness about them...a certain equivalence in the significance department, which is to say, very, very close to none at all.

My difficulty was that I couldn't not throw a third story into the mix, one of an utterly different quality. This one is in the Times of London, and it concerns the killing of Denis Donaldson. It turns out that he may well be the one man involved in the Northern Ireland mess who will be remembered a century from now. Camus will be very angry at having missed this story.

Politicians are worrying about who gave the order to kill him...someone said yesterday that if it really was the IRA, it would be a bigger scandal than that bank robbery they were said to be mixed up in. But I think the truth of the matter is that no one in the IRA needed to give the order to kill Donaldson, or any informer, any more than you or I need to be given an instruction to kill a mosquito. IRA people knew he had to die. Some IRA people knew they were responsible for that kind of thing. Donaldson knew he had to die...agreed with the sentence. Exile was never a possibility for him. He didn't try to hide in that cottage in the country, it was a known IRA safe house. He went there to await his executioners.

For the Times, David Sharrock has written a fine piece about it, of which this is a part:

"Alone, shunning company, Mr Donaldson seemed like a man caught between his secret past and an uncertain future. 'I couldn't understand why he was living as he was,' Hugh Jordan (reporter for the Sunday World who tracked Donaldson down) said. 'In the winter months you can pick up a house for rent with the comforts of heat and electricity for next to nothing.

"'Yet there he was living in those squalid conditions. It made me think he was being made to live like that, as if it were part of his penance, like he had been sent to the Provo gulag.'

"That certainly seemed to chime with remarks made by Mr Donaldson in the brief interview at the door of the cottage. He said that he was not in hiding, but nor was he in contact with any of his old party colleagues.

"The straggly beard, combat trousers and walking boots were a far cry from the sharp suits and fashionable clothes he once favoured.

"Asked how he felt about his public dismissal by his former friend Mr Adams, Mr Donaldson shrugged and said: 'I don't want to be in touch with anyone. As you can see, I'm in the middle of nowhere.'

"He concluded his brief interview by saying: 'All conflicts end in political solutions - it's the only way.' Asked about his future, he replied: 'This is it.'"

That's enough for today.

Denis Boyles writes in National Review about what those demonstrations reveal about France and the French: "In principle...the protests are significant because they show the future of economic reform in Old Europe. Today's French lesson: You cannot take back entitlements from people who have been told they're entitled to them. Yet this tiny 'reform' is a first step, as the protesters and the government both know.

"They're also about democracy - or the corruption of it by a truly cancerous political class, such as the one that has governed France since World War II. The problem is that no matter how people vote in regular elections, the ruling elite puts its own self-interests ahead of everything else, including ideology. Therefore, if you want to your vote to mean anything in France, you don't cast a ballot, you cast a cobblestone. So what we're seeing in Paris isn't a demonstration. It's more like a bad election.

"However this particular contest won't amount to a hill of haricots because the only people rioting are the usual suspects - kids and commies. The slacker set has been taught that among 'the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man' is the God-given right to be incompetent without bothering to get a government job first. The CGT - a basket of backward unions - is the last bastion of communist and hardline leftist influence in France. Middle-class French people aren't in the streets, except to go to work. Why should they care about laws protecting spoiled students? Yes, bus drivers have taken to the streets - but only because they're driving buses."

According to the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, his boss, Osama bin Laden, was a meddler whose indiscretion and poor judgment threatened to derail the terrorist attacks. The Los Angeles Times says the "repeated conflicts between the two Al Qaeda leaders emerged last week during the penalty phase of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept 11 attacks. Jurors heard new details of the plot from the interrogation summaries of several captured Al Qaeda officials, including an extraordinary account of a series of interrogations of Mohammed."

The media tend to react to hurricane stories in much the same way as they react to stories about violence in Iraq - they try to wring as much drama from them as they can. Spero News (whoever that might be) sets the pace with a story about yesterday's publication of Colorado State University's predictions for the coming season. "Another very active season," is the lead on the story.

Actually, 2006 is expected to be considerably off 2005's blistering pace, although CSU says it will still nearly twice as active as is average. The University quotes Professor William Gray as having said "Even though we expect to see the current active period of Atlantic major hurricane activity to continue for another 15-20 years, it is statistically unlikely that the coming 2006-2007 hurricane seasons, or the seasons that follow, will have the number of major hurricane U.S. landfall events as we have seen in 2004-2005."

Gray said, once again, that he does not attribute changes in recent and projected Atlantic hurricane activity to human-induced global warming.

I can't find the original article in English, but Caribbean Net News says el Pais is carrying extracts of a new biography of Fidel Castro due out in Spain at the end of this week. The book's called Biography With Two Voices, and was written by French journalist Ignacio Ramonet, based on a series of interviews he conducted with the Cuban leader in late 2005.

Caribbean Net News says: "Cuban President Fidel Castro is not worried about his succession since the revolution does not depend on a cult of personality, according to extracts from a book to be published Friday. But he thinks his brother Raul will take over when he dies. The post-Castro leadership 'will not in the short term present any kind of problem; and not afterwards either because the revolution is not based on a cult of personality'."

Coincidentally, an American researcher, Brian Latell of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami, has published an article recently about one of the areas of his life Castro doesn't talk much about - his childhood - in Canada's National Post, reprinted on Canada.com: "By so many measures, Fidel Castro has been the modern world's most transparent leader. Even today, weakened by Parkinson's disease and approaching his 80th birthday, he makes frequent public appearances. Numerous biographies and hundreds of other tomes have been published about him. He has submitted to scores of probing interviews by foreign journalists. And in thousands of speeches during 47 years in power, he has entered more words on the public record than any political figure in history.

"Yet in that otherwise uninhibited mountain of verbiage, there is scant autobiography, precious little that illuminates his unique psychology. Unconstrained when holding forth about everything else, he is incapable of genuine introspection. Thus, although Castro has been the world's most recognizable and voluble leader since the late 1950s, he remains after all these years a strangely elusive personality.

"The best clues to his inner life, it turns out, can be found in his exotic and troubled childhood. The second son of Lina Ruz, an illiterate scullery maid, Fidel suffered extreme psychological traumas as a boy growing up in the late 1920s and 1930s in Cuba's wild eastern frontier. As a child, he was known by his teenage mother's surname and was not legally recognized by his much older father, a Spanish immigrant named Angel Castro, until he was 17.

"When Angel employed and seduced the young servant girl, who bore him seven children, he was still married to another woman, and had two children with her. Most of Fidel's biographers have ignored or skimmed over his illegitimacy, and none until now ever described the young Fidel's excruciating experiences living in a squalid foster home."

I found the article, to give credit where it is due, on my most excellent home page, Arts & Letters Daily.

Morocco has apparently foiled an al Qaeda plot to bomb a church in Bologna, a train station in Milan, the headquarters of the French intelligence services in Paris, and the US Consulate in Rabat. Aljazeera says: "Security forces in Morocco are holding nine suspected al-Qaeda activists who were part of a ring that plotted bomb attacks in France, Italy and Morocco...The nine suspects, arrested and brought before Rabat appeals court recently, are accused of setting up a criminal gang in view of preparing and carrying out terrorist attacks within the framework of collective plot."

The New York Sun is reporting more bad blood between Mark Malloch Brown, who was promoted from UN chief of staff to deputy secretary-general on April 1, and the staff of the UN in New York. At a meeting yesterday, one of a series designed to allow him to open a dialogue with his staff, speakers accused Malloch Brown of duplicity, an inability to punish senior officials who were charged with wrongdoing while firing lower-level staffers, and of advocating gender and national diversity in hiring while assuming a high position himself.

"At one point during the meeting,", the Sun says, "Malloch Brown denounced the 'toxic, cancerous rhetoric that we heard this morning.' Last year, as the oil-for-food scandal prompted reporters to seek information damaging to the UN, he said, some staffers cooperated with Turtle Bay enemies, striking yet 'one more nail in the organization.'"

No prize for guessing that by 'Turtle Bay enemies', he means those who were trying to investigate the oil-for-food scandal.

Having spent the last three or four years vilifying the Americans for having the audacity to point it out, Britain is finally waking up to the blindingly obvious - the Geneva Convention is just not capable of dealing with terrorists. The Guardian says "John Reid demanded sweeping changes to international law yesterday to free British soldiers from the restraints of the Geneva conventions and make it easier for the west to mount military actions against other states.

"In his speech, the defence secretary addressed three key issues: the treatment of prisoners, when to mount a pre-emptive strikes, and when to intervene to stop a humanitarian crisis. In all these areas, he indicated that the UK and west was being hamstrung by existing inadequate law. Mr Reid indicated he believed existing rules, including some of the conventions - a bedrock of international law - were out of date and inadequate to deal with the threat of international terrorists.

"'We are finding an enemy which obeys no rules whatsoever', he said, referring to what he called 'barbaric terrorism'."

First songs, then movies, now books. The New York Times reports that "Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury moved into the digital era on Tuesday, launching its first 24 digital downloads after a year in which the boy wizard helped boost profits by 24 percent.

"Our first 24 titles went up an hour ago, and it's a very exciting initiative because although its not a big area now, it will be in the future," Chairman Nigel Newton told Reuters. 'We want to stake out our territory,' he added."

You can have a look at Bloomsbury's eBookstore. Prices seem reasonable, too.

Aljazeera is saying that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been fired as political head of the rebels in Iraq. The news service is quoting the son of Osama bin Laden's mentor. Hudayf Azzam, who has close contacts with the fighters as having said, from Jordan, that "The Iraqi resistance's high command asked Zarqawi to give up his political role and replaced him with an Iraqi, because of several mistakes he made...Zarqawi's role has been limited to military action. Zarqawi bowed to the orders two weeks ago and was replaced by Iraqi national Abdullah bin Rashed al-Baghdadi."

Among al-Zarqawi's mistakes was the creation of an independent organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and making attacks in neighbouring countries, like Jordan.

It started with popular songs. Now moving into the world of online downloads are movies, and classical music. Let's hope that Warner Classics doesn't suffer from the appalling greed which has apparently led Hollywood studios to price downloadable movies at twice the price of a DVD.

Lord William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times, was once in the rare book business. He reckons that Shakespeare first folio that is about to go on the block will sell for more than $8.5 million. "The most recent price record for a comparable copy was $5,600,000, sold by Christie's in New York in 2001. That would now convert to 3,200,000 pounds, which alone would justify Sotheby’s current estimate of 2.5 million to 3.5 million pounds.

"In the past five years, the value of the great iconic books has been rising sharply. I may be mistaken, but, if I were still an antiquarian bookseller, I would advise a client that he would have little chance of buying the Dr Williams Folio for less than 5 million pounds, a 50 per cent rise on five years ago."

The Christian Science Monitor is worrying that when Mexico's president Vicente Fox steps down in July at the end of his term, the country may move sharply to the left. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist leader of the Democratic Revolutionary Party has consistently polled ahead of his rivals over the last year and is expected to win July 2 presidential elections.

"A former mayor of Mexico City who endeared himself to many with folksy speeches, handouts to the poor, and big public works projects - and a person sometimes compared to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - Obrador is a frequent critic of various aspects of current Mexico-US ties. If elected, he would add to the growing number of leftist leaders in Latin America."

Mexico has always managed to stand, with a certain dignity, as a kind of buffer between the excesses of its southern neighbours and the stability of the United States. It would be a truly ugly development if it were to align itself with yo-yos like Chavez. Obrador says comparisons with Chavez are mistaken, but the president of Mexico's Center for Economic Studies of the Private Sector calls him "a retrograde and dinosaur-like leftist" who would spook investors and threaten the nation's hard-won economic stability.

Claudia Rosett has written a long analysis of corruption at the UN for Commentary magazine, in which she attacks attempts by Kofi Annan and his aides to downplay its extent: "Oil-for-Food has been described by Annan and his aides as a mistake in a good cause; such, they suggest, is the occasional if regrettable cost of doing the world’s humanitarian business. Structurally, however, Oil-for-Food was not an exception. It was a template of what the UN has become.

"A hallmark of Oil-for-Food was that it was funded not by an assembly of UN member states but directly by Saddam as a function of his oil sales. This effectively bypassed the UN's version of the appropriations process, and was hardly the kind of setup envisioned when the organization was founded. As US Ambassador John Bolton has noted, 'It is the member states who are supposed to control the money.'

"Nevertheless, the UN negotiated terms with Saddam under which the Secretariat would collect 2.2 percent of his oil revenues to cover its costs in running and monitoring the relief program. With oil sales topping $64 billion, that meant $1.4 billion for the Secretary-General's administrative spending over the seven-year life of the program. In other words, the UN Secretariat was being paid big money by Saddam to supervise Saddam - an intrinsic conflict of interest that surely played a part in the expansion and easy corruption of the program. On top of whatever bribery he managed to deploy, Saddam became for a time one of the largest direct contributors to the Secretariat's budget. Publicizing itself as Saddam's probation officer, the UN in effect became his business partner.

"But Saddam was only one, if the most virulent, of the many questionable business partners the UN has acquired over the past decade or so. These days, 'partnering' at the UN goes far beyond enlisting the help of Angelina Jolie to visit refugees or of Bono to lecture Americans on development policy. Under Annan's management, the UN has been avidly seeking liaisons with foundations, non-governmental organizations, and private business - especially big corporate donors endowed with ready cash. This has been hailed in many quarters, including in Washington, as an innovative way of funding good works. It is rather more alarming than that."

South Korea, the world's most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life, says the New York Times. "The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society.

By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers."

Well, I suppose that's good news, except that the human race doesn't seem to have developed to the point of having a healthy attitude towards pets, forget about robots. Read this Guardian reader's comment on how badly he wishes his three cats were dead. And don't miss the comment (first on the list) from the appalling little tit who says: "There's very little moral justification for spending money on pets whether healthy or not considering that there are millions of human beings suffering and starving on the planet."

Mark Kramer, who is the director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a senior associate of the university's Davis Center for Russian Studies, thinks there may be a silver lining in the cloud over whether the Russians leaked US war plans to the Iraqis. In the Washington Post, he writes: "The attempts this past week by Russian officials to link the publication of the Pentagon report with the ongoing debate about Iran in the U.N. Security Council are far-fetched: The notion that the 210-page study was suddenly conjured up to serve a transitory diplomatic interest is preposterous.

"Even more preposterous is the claim by Sergei Oznobishchev, head of the Moscow-based Institute of Strategic Evaluations and Analyses, that Pentagon officials issued the report because they are irritated by Russia's strengthening position in the international arena. This statement reflects a high degree of wishful thinking about Russia's place in the world today.

"...the erroneousness of some of the intelligence suggests that U.S. commanders may have deliberately floated false information. (Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the war, alludes to such a plan in his memoirs.) The American commanders, like the rest of us, knew from press reports that GRU officers were in Baghdad apparently assisting the Iraqis. The Americans may have counted on the likelihood that false information would be picked up by Russian military intelligence and divulged to the Iraqis. If this was indeed the case, the US scheme worked brilliantly."