Although some, including the New York Times, had speculated that Kim Jong Il, the Beloved Leader of North Korea, had been injured or even killed in the blast there last week, it appears that he was uninjured. From the Straits Times:

“SEOUL – North Korean leader Kim Jong Il inspected an army unit in his first public appearance since last month’s devastating train disaster in the country, reports said yesterday.
Mr Kim, accompanied by top military officials, inspected Unit 4302 and watched soldiers in training, said the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). ”

An emergent phenomenon in a complex system is a large scale, group behavior that cannot be predicted by an understanding of workings of the individual components of the system. There’s a word used to describe the condition under which such phenomena emerge–synergy–and a description: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Quite a few of the things that are absolutely the most important to us are emergent phenomena: life, consciousness, history, the Market (Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand), and the workings of a free and democratic society are all emergent phenomena and, as such, are highly distasteful to those who look for a simple, tidy, elegant, and orderly universe. And that group, in turn, includes a truly remarkable group of unlikely allies including both Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, Marxists, and bureaucrats of every religion, philosophy, and political party.

In his recent post Inelegance, Steven Den Beste re-visits a subject he’s touched on before: the idea that the conflict we’re involved in is a three-way conflict.

“One of the three sides is identified mostly with radical Muslims, who are engaged in Jihad to try to fulfill a perceived religious mandate to dominate the world. But some who have been part of that side have had other motivations, such as Saddam’s pan-Arabism (which was essentially agnostic). Of the three, this force is also the most well organized and structured, and the only one which exists because of a deliberate campaign.
At one point I referred to this side as “Arab Traditionalism”, but that was never a very satisfactory label. Some have called it “Islamofascism”, but these days the term I’m most comfortable with (which is to say, not very) is “Islamism”. One of the reasons I’m uncomfortable even with that label is that Islamism is not congruent to Islam. There are millions of Muslims who are not part of it. There are many Muslims who are strong supporters of one of the other sides, and some of those who do support it are not devout Muslims. Even so, of the three sides this one is easiest to perceive and characterize; they’re all cloudy and indistinct, but this is the least indistinct.
Of the three sides, Islamism as a political force appeared the most recently, within the last 150 years.
The other two sides are derived from Western philosophical roots. For them I’ve had to invent my own names: “p-idealism” and “empiricism”.”

Read the whole thing.

As in so much else I think that Den Beste is really onto something here but, perhaps, not in the way he thinks.
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“War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.”

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

In his recent post Trepidation, Steven Den Beste reviews some of the shortcomings of what appears to be the U. S.’s progress in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror, generally:

“The biggest danger from the uprising by militant Sunnis in Falluja and al Sadr’s extremist Shiite militia was that it could embolden others and begin a general uprising. But that’s very much a matter of momentum and perception, and the initial decision to stabilize the situation and to execute a controlled pause of about a week before reacting was probably a good one. By the time our forces began efforts to destroy the insurrection, that particular danger was pretty much gone.

And this uprising had the potential to actually be a significant opportunity for us to eliminate the hard core of the opposition facing us, since that hard core had obligingly changed from “voicers of dissent” (which we must tolerate) into “armed insurgents” (which we would be free to crush).

Of course, there were other hazards. Heavy handed military operations in Najaf could have been viewed by Shiites as desecration of holy sites, for instance, and might well have set off a more general uprising.”

I think he’s pretty much on the money in his notes on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But I don’t entirely agree with him on the situation in Iraq.
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One of my emails has been printed on NRO’s The Corner.

Blogs and bloggers I visit frequently get to seem like old friends even if you’ve never met and they’re half a world away. One of these is The Religious Policeman. The Policeman is a rarity–an adult Saudi blogger. He’s funny, sad, brave, and real. Read the back posts. They’re all you’ll get to read for a while.

The Religious Policeman is on hiatus. He’s afraid of being caught.

I eagerly await his return. I’ll keep mentioning him every so often until he comes back online.

In the most recent post on the Belmont Club, Retreat, Hell!, Wretchard provides typically clear and detailed insight into the tactical and strategic significance of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force’s activities in Fallujah:

Although the appearance of the Fallujah Protection Army (FPA) and its effects still remain to be seen, the mystery of it origins has been solved at last. It appears to be a creature of the Marines themselves, tricked out in Iraqi uniform. This would go a long way toward explaining the kind of training Marines were providing to Iraqis in southeastern industrial area of the city. They were training locals who will be assigned police duties.

Read the whole thing.

I sincerely hope that Wretchard’s analysis is correct. A more disquieting possibility is that the Marines are turning Fallujah over to the very force that they were fighting. I also wonder how we–or CENTCOM–could tell.

UPDATE:

Wretchard wonders the same thing (via email):

This is the essential question. It will be settled in a couple of days, at most.

Connie du Toit, Kim du Toit’s wife draws an interesting contrast between World War II and Viet Nam in Life magazine covers.

There’s an interesting confluence of ideas coming together in several news stories today. The first is in an opinion poll from Iraq that finds an increasing number of Iraqis viewing the U. S. as occupiers rather than liberators:

But while they acknowledge benefits from dumping Saddam a year ago, Iraqis no longer see the presence of the American-led military as a plus. Asked whether they view the U.S.-led coalition as “liberators” or “occupiers,” 71% of all respondents say “occupiers.” […]

“I’m not ungrateful that they took away Saddam Hussein,” says Salam Ahmed, 30, a Shiite businessman. “But the job is done. Thank you very much. See you later. Bye-bye.”

This is a disturbing trend. It’s hard to see how we can achieve our objectives in Iraq with a deteriorating level of cooperation from the Iraqi people.
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I’ve been reading the letter sent by fifty British foreign policy experts to Tony Blair.

We the undersigned former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials, including some who have long experience of the Middle East…

Or, we’ve spent nearly 1,000 years all told letting the the Middle East get into the state it’s in. Okay, what are they concerned about?

The decision by the USA, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a “Road Map” for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds.

I thought so. It’s Israel’s fault.
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