You say you want democracy in the Middle East. You may think the best hope is to bring democracy by gunpoint to Fallujah or to Sudan.

I disagree. I think you people have it mostly wrong.

Support this guy.

Take it with the requisite grain of salt:

Asia Times Online has learned from sources in Saudi Arabia that as many as 10,000 Saudi youths might be in or going to Iraq. And with the strong presence of organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in such countries as Syria and Jordan, it can be safely estimated that jihadis from these countries are also flooding into Iraq, or are preparing to do so.

Like flies to paper.

Via Worldchanging, two cool things by a talented designer named Jonathan Harris.

10x10, a kind of arsty photo collage version of GoogleNews done using flashy Flash:

And hip new Terror Alert T-shirts for sale. My favorite:

There's also a fun-yet-annoying animation here.

Ain't capitalism grand?

No surprise there:

J. Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, resigned, the State Department said.

Black "informed the department several weeks ago that a transition between administrations would be the right time for him to explore new professional opportunities,'' State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said. Black did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

Somehow I missed this earlier. I wonder if Black was purged for leaking damaging stories, quit out of disgust a la Clarke, Beers et. al, or, as this Reuters article mysteriously states, that he quit because of a "botched terrorism report."

Black was the one who wowed Bush after 9/11 by telling him that "When we're through with (al-Qaida), they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," but apparently was also one of the guys who leaked that the Pentagon let Bin Laden get away. Rumsfeld fired him and the State Department picked him up, but it looks like nobody is protecting him anymore. Welcome to round two.

After reading this very creative James Fallows piece (subscriber only) detailing a mock wargaming exercise concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program, I can understand why some folks might be attracted to the idea of a velvet revolution as a solution to America's Iran problem.

The Atlantic assembled a group consisting of some usual suspects: retired USAF Colonel Sam Gardiner (who penned a typo-laden expose of the Pentagon's GWII psy-ops), Reuel Marc Gerecht (everyone's favorite former spy--sorry, Robert Baer fans), David Kay (of "We were almost all wrong" fame), Kenneth Pollack (author of the new book, Oops I screwed up on Iraq, howsabout Iran?), and a few other guys I'd never heard of.

Playing the role of CENTCOM (and sometimes the CIA), Gardiner gave an extensive PowerPoint presentation (one that would certainly give Edward Tufte fits of apoplexy) to kick off the game.

The article itself is tough to summarize, so I've taken the, ahem, liberty, of excerpting some of the slides for the benefit of our loyal readers here. (The slides, by the way, are also riddled with typos).    more »