This seems like good news:

In his memoirs, Sharif recalls serving time with Zawahiri in 1981 after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Sharif specifically accuses Zawahiri of informing on his associates to get out of prison. He also calls Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden cowards, accusing them of running out of Afghanistan and leaving wives and children behind to die in the American invasion. He wants them tried before a shari’a court, which would be at least poetic justice for the radical Islamists.

Zawahiri could give a press conference at CENTCOM and still not live down those kind of accusations. The entire mythos of AQ relies on the personal courage of its leaders, who claim to have bested a global superpower in personally liberating Afghanistan. Leaving behind women and children while fleeing a battle doesn’t quite match that mythology. If it gains resonance in the ummah, Zawahiri and Osama will discover that interviews with Western journalists won’t make up the lost ground.

Critics of Sharif claim that he has been tortured into his recantation. Undoubtedly, the Egyptian authorities have applied their usual techniques to Sharif, but Rohan Gunaranta says it matches a trend in Egypt over the last few years. The author of Inside al-Qaeda believes that Muslims have begun to see the disaster that 9/11 has brought to their standing in the world, and even the radicals want a new direction. The personal revelations of Zawahiri as a snitch may make it easier for them to make that transition, and for us to then destroy what remains of AQ.

I think that Ed is a little overoptimistic on that last, but it would sure be nice if he’s right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s some more good news that would seem to be related:

We have failed to offer a robust response to the brutal wave of human sacrifice. This failure has allowed extremists to garner headlines and define the agenda without meeting an equally passionate response from the moderate center. It is long past time to mount a vigorous campaign against the cult of death and reaffirm a culture of life.

An essential first step is admitting we have a problem. The terrible attacks of recent days occurred during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s most solemn act of atonement. The introspection and self-criticism of this sacred time offer an ideal moment to acknowledge the sacrilege of terrorism and the sin of being a passive bystander.

We must also avoid the temptation to rationalize murder. “The attack is wrong,” goes a common refrain, “but we must understand the root causes.” There can be no “buts” – no qualifications or justifications that indulge the political grievances and religious sanction claimed by extremists.

More of this, please.

When even the Grauniad can’t avoid reporting it, you know things have to be getting pretty good:

Not so long ago Sunni and Shia gunmen were fighting for control of the suburb, near the road to Baghdad’s airport. As a result, the once religiously mixed housing projects that lie either side of al-Amil’s main street soon separated into Shia or Sunni enclaves.

But Muhammad, a Sunni Arab, and his Shia colleagues in the neighbourhood watch group are determined to reverse the ethnic cleansing. Last month, the group agreed to protect a Sunni mosque in his street from local Shia militias. They have also been mediating between the divided communities either side of the highway.

The result was an understanding: Sunni families would return to their former homes in the heavily Shia areas, while Shia families crossed back into the mainly Sunni streets. The two communities agreed to guarantee the safety of the returnees. Such was the popular backing for the deal that even the local Mahdi army commander had to acquiesce.

“We’ve been neighbours for 25 years and we feel like brothers,” said Muhammad. “We will help them to guard and respect their mosques, and they won’t harm me or my family.”

Nobody tell Harry Reid. Or if you do, make sure that he doesn’t have any sharp objects around, in his despondency.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

Some thoughts on fear of religion.

I’m not a big Giuliani fan, and a lot of people have been talking up McCain as tough on the war, but I found this an interesting contrast. I’d have trouble pulling the lever for McCain. He’s not Jimmy Carter, or Huckabee, but I don’t think that he’d have any problem with the current State Department, which is one of the many federal agencies that needs to be azed and rebuilt.

[Update]

A good (and related) point about Giuliani:

Frum argues, in response to a post of mine, that Giuliani is the anti-terrorists’ candidate because he has a proven track record of riding herd on the bureaucracies beneath him to accomplish his objectives. This line of argument would be a lot more persuasive if, in the years preceding Sept. 11, Giuliani had managed to get his fire and police departments to be able to communicate with each other in emergencies.

Because we put birds inside other birds.

Just an extreme example of the lunacy and denial on the part of the left about the Islamists.

And here are some related thoughts on denial in Canada about the Religion of Peace™:

It’s cultural, it’s because of colonialism, it’s because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islam.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

Here’s another example of the insanity of the War on (Some) Drugs, and its incompatibility with waging a real war:

It’s a bad idea to keep so many people in prison, and it’s a worse idea to do so and then have them exposed to radical “clerics.”

Yes. A really bad idea.

Not from me, but from Victor Davis Hanson. Here are a couple:

Why would a country that produces 4 million barrels of oil per day at $90 per barrel not use its windfall profits to expand and refurbish an ailing oil industry to get in further on the obscene profit-making, rather than divert resources in the billions for the acquisition of a reactor that is not needed for power production (natural gas is still burned off at the wellhead)?

We suffer collective amnesia in suggesting that the chill in Iranian relations was a phenomenon of the last few years alone. Not restoring formal diplomatic relations was a bipartisan policy, presumably based on the notion that neither the Carter nor the Clinton administration ever got genuine positive feedback from their efforts to expand diplomatic channels with the Iranians. After all, what President wanted to be responsible for opening-and losing-another embassy in Teheran? In this regard, the recent hostage-taking of British soldiers abroad reaffirms that Iranian ways have not changed much since 1979.

They are food for thought.

[Thursday morning update]

Some more thoughts, from John Bolton:

…the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported. It implies that Iran is susceptible to diplomatic persuasion and pressure, yet the only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, not exactly a diplomatic pas de deux. As undersecretary of state for arms control in 2003, I know we were nowhere near exerting any significant diplomatic pressure on Iran. Nowhere does the NIE explain its logic on this critical point. Moreover, the risks and returns of pursuing a diplomatic strategy are policy calculations, not intelligence judgments. The very public rollout in the NIE of a diplomatic strategy exposes the biases at work behind the Potemkin village of “intelligence.”

It is amazing how many people who have been quick to criticize the NIE in the past have been so eager to embrace it now.

Ron Rosenbaum is worried about Pakistan. With good reason, I think.