Bollettino The most depressing news of the day comes from the NYT article about the one murderer who was taken in Beslan. “Among the most arresting television images here on Monday, along with the parade of coffins and the keening of crowds of mourners, was the face of a terrified man, gripped tightly by two masked soldiers, who was identified as the only hostage-taker to be captured alive."By God, I did not shoot!'' he mumbled when asked if he had fired on fleeing hostages. "By God, I have not killed!''Asked by the soldiers if he had not had pity on the children he had held for 51 hours without food or water, he pleaded: "Yes, I did have pity! I have children, too.''Speaking in a slurred voice, he said, "They gathered us in a forest, a person known as 'commander,' and they said that we must seize a school in Beslan.'' He said the orders had come from Aslan Maskhadov, a Chechen rebel leader, and Shamil Basayev, a militant warlord.”Maskhadov is not just a “Chechen rebel leader,” but was the president of the late Chechen Republic in 1999. At that time, it was Maskhadov who was accusing the Russians of surreptitiously supporting Basayev, who was attacking villages in Daghestan with his usual brutality. Maskhadov, at that time, declared his hostility to Basayev and his ‘criminal gang’ quite clearly. He was not able to control him, however, and soon the Russian attack on Chechnya brought down the fragile Chechen state. Fastforward five horrible years. Maskhadov’s forces have kept distinct from Basayev’s. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which has some of the best sources about the Chechen conflict, reported in March that Russian attacks on Maskhadov’s forces were weakening them, and consequently strengthening Basayev’s “extremist” forces. “The capture this week of the pro-independence Chechen defence minister Magomed Khambiev, following on from the death of influential commander Khamzat Gelayev, has radically changed the balance of forces within the rebel movement fighting the Russians. The developments have strengthened the extremist wing of the Chechen rebel movement and badly weakened pro-independence president Aslan Maskhadov, and may have far-reaching consequences for the future of the conflict in Chechnya Maskhadov, a moderate nationalist who is still resisting the Russians more than four years after the start of the second conflict but rejects terrorist methods, has now lost two of his closest supporters. He must now rely on only two commanders for close backing, Vakha Arsanov and Isa Munayev. By contrast, the radical Islamist side has four powerful figures in Shamil Basayev, Saudi-born Abu Walid, Dokku Umarov and Abdul-Malik Mezhidov.”If the man quoted by the NYT is telling the truth, the alliance of Maskhadov and Basayev spells the end of the ‘rational’ Chechen resistance, and its collapse into an utter nihilism that threatens to create more Beslans. The thought is almost unbearable. If the man’s confession was, on the contrary, ‘fed’ to him by way of extensive beating, then we see the continuance of Putin’s strategy, which has always been to demonize the Chechens in order to stir up a genocidal hatred of them. Our instinct is that the second possibility is the more probable. It is, to say the least, odd that the NYT seems so ignorant of Maskhadov’s name. The best commentary on the response to Beslan, and its larger meaning, comes from Figaro, a conservative paper. Laure Mandeville’s article intelligently recognizes that the Western voices condemning the Children’s Massacre at Beslan have not been raised, in the past, to prevent that train of causes that led up to the massacre: “In France, only the president of the UDF, Francois Bayrou and the late president of the Commission on Foreign Affairs, Jack Lang (PS) have shown themselves critical. The first calls the responsible politicians to “adopt new political strategies” in order to avoid “such dramas,” the second denounces the “French authorities” whose “complaisance towards the Putin regime … has ended by becoming simply repugnant.” “Our country should demand explanations from the Russian government on the circumstances of this drama.” The incapacity of the West to ally amicable solidarity to a critique of Putin’s choices in the Caucasus is explained by different and conjoining causes, according to whether one is positioned in Washington or Europe. Even if Americans were recently put in the position of criticizing the decline of liberties in Russia, President Bush – busy with his electoral campaign, the quagmire in Iraq, and his mission as commander in chief of the struggle against international terrorism – has every interest in presenting the crisis in Beslan as a manifestation of the hydra of terror. Europe, under the influence of France and Germany, has difficulty putting in question the ‘anti-war axis’ Paris-Berlin-Moscow that presidents Chirac and Schroeder went to celebrate at Sotchi a week ago. However, true questions must be posed about both the taking of the hostages and the upcoming dangers arising from the Russian political strategy in the Caucasus.
…In holding to its diplomatic formulas, the West is pretending to forget that Moscow is reaping what it has sown. The late Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, while condemning the taking of hostages, has underlined the role of Russia in radicalizing the guerrillas. “The cause of the Beslan tragedy and the infinite spiral of violence in Chechnya and in the region is the political strategy of Putin’s, who is guilty of massive crimes,” Mashkadov protests. “A quarter of the Chechen population, among which we count 40,000 children, have been exterminated in the last ten years.” (No one knows how many Chechens have disappeared since the beginning of the conflict in 1994.)”The truth is, Beslan reveals the radical dissymmetry between the moral and the political world. In the moral world, nothing justifies the murder of children, and their parents. Nothing justifies murder. Nothing justifies the murder of innocents. Nothing justifies the murder of the guilty. Dickering with blood – the pretence that the absolute prohibition on murder can only be guarded by its state sanctioned violation – is an appeal from principle to history that history repudiates. There is no final murder – murders come in terms of ‘another.” Another murder, another murder, another murder – this is how the series has unrolled since Cain. But if Cain was the first murderer, he was also the first politician, with the politician’s eternal question: am I my brother’s keeper? And the politician’s eternal impulse to limit brotherhood, to initiate hatred, to turn it into systematic gain.
Sometimes, LI thinks that the post 9/11 landscape is characterized by one thing: we have reached the exhaustion point in the political system globally. And as the strains appear, in Iraq, Ossetia, Chechnya, Moscow, New York, etc., we, who have been raised specifically not to perceive these questions or to answer them, cocooned in suburbs and by infinite tv, are experiencing a vast, unconscious helplessness. This is not our field. This is not our expertise. These emotions that are called up can find no objective satisfaction, except in childish calls for aggression, to which the state responds with the child's favorite toys: the bomber, the neat always improved missile, the gun. To be met with the improvised bomb, the hostage, the box cutter.
And for most, I think the answer has to be: turn away. Don’t look. I can't really say I think that impulse is wrong. But at the moment, I am having trouble making my own internal migration.

Bollettino

LI has been grimly trying to accommodate ourselves to the thought that Bush will be the president for the next four years. This looks more and more probable. The NYT includes a story about the laughable Kerry campaign – a campaign that has spent a month focusing on foreign policy without suggesting what Kerry’s foreign policy would actually be, which is quite a feat – with a story of how the Kerry-ites are trying to reinvigorate themselves by connecting to Clinton. The story includes this immortal line:

“On Saturday, Mr. Johnson drew applause from Democrats assembled for a weekly strategy meeting at Mr. Kerry's headquarters when he reassured aides that the campaign had settled on a clear line of attack against Mr. Bush, people at the meeting said. “

Is there anything more pathetic?

Since the Dems rolled over about Iraq – after all, isn’t the real issue that Kerry was a GENUINE hero back in the days when Mick Jagger was young? – the media has been left in a vacuum. As the Post explained long ago about its systematically flawed coverage of the WMD issue, since both ‘sides’ – there are only two sides, Democrat and Republican, in our wondrous freedom loving Flatland for the media – agreed about the issue, the newspaper found it hard to get outside of the narrative, which would mean taking seriously the protests of all those silly anarchist types in the street. My God, the Post didn’t even want to report on them – much less take a thing they said seriously. Since the two sides again agree that the occupation of Iraq was a good idea from the beginning, merely flawed by a few Iraqi bad eggs, the sidelessness of it all has pushed stories about Iraq into the B section. There were a thousand American wounded last month. Today, seven Americans died in a bomb near Fallujah – yesterday, another helicopter was downed. These are all yawners to the media, and evidently to Kerry. At least, we haven’t heard him refer to those injuries, or to Najaf, or to anything pertinent happening in Iraq. He does think it would be nice if more wine was served among the coalition of the willing.

Looking back on the Democratic primaries, one has to marvel at the Howard Dean effect. For a brief time, he galvanized the party into something that looked like life. It lumbered around like life, and it even occasionally spouted a truth that was like life – as in Dean’s derided opinion that capturing Saddam Hussein wouldn’t make Americans any safer. I am not sure of the numbers, but I believe since the capture more Americans have been killed than before – but to contemplate this is the utmost impoliteness, and it isn’t countenanced at tables in D.C. Why, it makes one sound like Michael Moore. So the Dem party walked and talked, and we all thought: the zombie days are passed. LI thought, at the time, that this was so obviously a good thing that maybe the former zombie would drop by a spine store and pick up a spare. Alas, then came the convention, with Kerry reporting for duty in what has turned out to be Daschle’s Navy -- a wacky bunch of hapless vets who just can't get it together in the face of mighty Bush and his fiercesome genius, Karl Rove (who is to genius as Schlitz is to beer -- the cheapest variety).

At least LI is hoping for some consolation in the upcoming Dem defeat -- that is, that Daschle will be going down with the ship. But that is, perhaps, to project more rationality on this party than it possesses.

Bollettino

We are still stunned here about events in Beslan. The best report about the hostage taking is this extremely frightening story in the Washington Post. According to the people the Post interviewed, there were no “Arabs” at the scene, just Basaev’s Chechen jihadists. However, given the grotesque and largescale nature of the seizure of the school and the segregation of the hostages, it is hard to tell whether the Russian claim is correct or not.

LI has been rather stunned, too, by the ignorance or indifference shown in the American response to Beslan. For example: one of the blogs we go to daily, Crooked Timber, is made up of some of the Internet’s best and brightest academic bloggers, yet in the two comments they have posted so far, it is as if no background knowledge about Chechnya whatsoever has penetrated to this group – and, by inference, outside of the small circle that has been concerned with the inhumane and sinister war that has devastated Chechnya since 1995. The CT post on the school begins with a point that is simply nonsense … “the hideous events in Beslan are the property of the people who lived there” … as if victimage was a sort of intellectual property right – and proceeds to make two points that seem particularly ill judged:

“2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?
3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?”

LI isn’t sure what ‘strain’ is being talked about. And as for what the hell has gone wrong, that is a long story of Western complacency about the destruction of Chechnya as well as a story about how the circle around Yeltsin protected itself from prosecution for its massive thievery and abuses of power, with the complicity of the Clinton administration and the EU. It is a story about the roots of Putin’s own power, and a story about the covert cooperation between the Russian security forces and the guerrillas around Basaev in the nineties, who wished to drive a wedge into Chechen society.

Perhaps the idea of the Moslem strain CT mentions relates vaguely to the significant differences between, on the one hand, the Wahabi faction – or vakhabi -- which has penetrated into the Chechen struggle via Basaev and various foreign fighters, and the dominant form of Islam in Chechnya, the Sufi brotherhoods, who have developed a form of resistance to the Russians that goes back two hundred years. For the Sufis, it is ridiculous to talk about jihad. The vakhabi faction is vehemently opposed to the cult of saints, to Sufi ritual, and to the theology of Sufism in general. There have been clashes between the two groups. LI, no expert on Chechnya, has at least been to the library in the last two or three years and read up on the topic in two or three books. One would think that among the CT collective, somebody would know something about Chechnya. Apparently not.

The vakhabis are supported by two factors. One is that the Russian government has used them on the principle of divide and conquer. Thus, in the late nineties, the circle around Yeltsin kept an odd connection going to Basaev. Berezhovsky, the ignominious oligarch, was the point man. He was definitely involved in some manner that has yet to be cleared up with Basaev’s incursion into Daghestan – the formal cause of the second Chechen war. The vakhabis have also received massive financial support from the usual suspect – Saudi Arabia.

This is one summing up of the religious aspect of the Chechen conflict (one that, in LI’s opinion, gives far too much intellectual leeway to the assumption of the generosity of Russian intentions) by four scholars at the William R. Nelson Institute at James Madison University:

Thus, Vakhabites challenged the official Chechen leadership (President Maskhadov and its supporters) and posed a serious threat to the foundations of the Chechen society. As a result, official Grozny was becoming more and more critical of vakhabism in its statements and declarations. However, Maskhadov took no decisive action, as he feared that would exacerbate the situation in the republic. Confrontation between traditionalists and radicals resulted in violence several times; for instance, as noted above, Vakhabites clashed with Sufi Muslims in May, 1998 in Gudermes and Urus-Martan and then again in Gudermes in July, 1998 (approximately 50 people were killed that day). Fearing that fundamentalists will destabilize the situation in the republic and attempt to rebel against Grozny, Maskhadov declared the state of emergency, dissolved and disarmed the Shariat Guards and Islamic regiment, and ordered to exile the well-known warlord Khattab, a mercenary from Jordan who allegedly cooperated with radicals. On July 23, 1998 there was an attempt in Grozny to assassinate Maskhadov, an attempt probably organized by Vakhabites. Observers from Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya itself agreed that at that point the republic was on the brink of civil war.

Despite their relatively strong positions, Vakhabites were not able to assert their influence throughout the republic, much less impose their ideology in its entire territory. However, they went ahead with their plans to occupy neighboring Russian regions and invaded Daghestan in August, 1999. Although members of Sufi brotherhoods may have participated in the invasion as well, the idea and its implementation are blamed by the Russian government and the local population primarily on Vakhabites. Subsequent investigations and the fact that the officials Grozny from the very beginning announced that they did not have anything to do with the events in Daghestan and condemned the aggression further convinced Moscow that fundamentalists had started their jihad and the situation in Chechnya was out of control. Vakhabites were perceived as a major threat to peace and stability in the Northern Caucasus and the territorial integrity of the Federation. The invasion of Daghestan and the Vakhabites' plans to wage a holy war against Russia until the creation of a "purely" Islamic state in its southern territories were the top reasons that prompted the federal government to start a military operation in Chechnya immediately after the defeat of those who attacked Daghestan.

As the federal troops advanced into Chechnya, however, they had to fight not only Islamic extremists but also the members of Sufi brotherhoods who, like in 1994-1996, Russian control for various reasons opposed. Unlike fundamentalists, Sufi Muslims do not fight for a religious cause and tend to have more reasonable positions on issues. Moreover, their dissatisfaction with the situation in the republic in the 1996-1999 period encouraged them to cooperate in a number of cases with the Russians. As a result, many of the Sufi communities engaged in negotiations with the federal representatives and avoided armed conflict. Some of them openly supported the military operation and organized volunteer troops to fight against both Sufi and Vakhabite rebels on the Russian side.”

We think that the “some” fighting on the Russian side were definitely in minority. The Russian occupation, which has seen the planned destruction of major Chechen cities, massacres of Chechen men, and the routinization of kidnapping by the Russian army, has alienated the vast mass of Chechens.

As for Basaev, the Jamestown Newsletter, which is a very good source for information about Chechnya, has published an interview with a French journalist, Sophie Shihab, who is very conversant with the situation in Chechnya.

“On Berezovsky’s responsibility for the outbreak of the second war: “It has never been proved, but it has also never been disproved – and the evidence for it is considerable…The offensive [of Basaev’s forces into Dagestan] provided the pretext for renewing the war. Very soon the rumor circulated that Basaev was financed by the Russian warmongers, headed by Berezovsky….There is a whole pile of evidence suggesting the common responsibility of Berezovsky and the FSB…for the attacks in Russia in August and September of 1999, which precipitated the war and the election of Putin. Thus were created bonds between them, but also hatred. Their lines [i.e., Putin’s and Berezovsky’s] diverged in December 1999, when Berezovsky, conscious that the generals around Putin had taken the initiative away from him, announced that he favored negotiations with the most radical Chechens. But even in exile Berezovsky has kept major financial interests, and thus political power, within Russia. And his impunity on the subject of Chechnya, like Putin’s, remains complete.”

LI hopes that this post isn’t taken to excuse what happened in Beslan. Our point is, rather, that what happened in Beslan has causes that go to the heart of the legitimacy of Putin’s government. There is a demonic synergy between Basaev’s terrorists and Putin’s FSB. Many of Putin’s more curious actions, which have been attributed to his desire for power – his war on Berezovsky, for instance, and on the other oligarchs – can be explained as compulsive acts of disguising by a man who legitimized his power with a massive lie, precipitating an at first popular war against a suspect people. Putin, like Claudius, the King of Denmark, believes, evidently, that arms provide the kind of authority that covers all crime, and that he can drown his guilt in other people's blood. But such rulers are always beset with ghosts. Beslan, the planes that were downed, the black widows blowing themselves up in stadiums and subways, the siege at the theatre, all are the unending results of that primal crime.

We’ve pushed this point over and over again in various posts we’ve written about Chechnya. For those who are interested, look up our posts starting at October 17, 2003.

Bollettino

From the Figaro:

“The story resembles a bad film, but it happened, and it is disquieting for the fate of Russian journalism. Wednesday, attempting to go to North Ossetia by airplane, two famous reporters who have continued to cover the fighting against Chechnya independently could not land. This was because of an “aggression’ organized against them by alien muscovite forces. The first, Anna Politkovskaia, is well known for her courage and her pleas against the war in Chechnya.
She has served before as a meditator in the hostage taking in Moscov, October 2002. However this time, this was not possible. For Anna Politkovskaia was poined in the airplane that took her to the North Caucasus, after having drunk some tea. Falling violently ill, she was hospitalized at Rostov, then repatriated to Moscow. The form of the intoxication alerted her paper – the editor in chief of said paper, the Chekotchikhine journal, having been killed by a poison.

The fate of Andrei Babitski is also unclear. This Radio Liberty journalist was stopped by the police at the airport under the pretext that dogs had smelt a suspect odor in his baggage. As he tried, nevertheless, to board the plane, he was attacked by two individuals while a guardsman intervened. With the result that Babitski was accused of hooliganism and is now under provisional arrest. Yesterday, a court condemned him to five days of imprisonment. Why?”

Anna Politkovskaia's book of reportages from Chechnya was one of the best LI has read so far. One wonders: what is happening?

Bollettino

After I wrote the post below, lamenting the lack of attention paid to the connections between the Chechen guerillas and Al Qaeda, I read this dispatch in Liberation:

“Selon l'une des sources d'Itar-Tass, la prise d'otages de Beslan aurait pu être financée par un dignitaire wahhabite, Abou Omar as Seïf, émissaire d'Al Qaïda en Tchétchénie.”

“According to one of Itar-Tass’s sources, the hostage taking in Beslan might have been financed by a wahabi dignitary, Abu Omar as Saif, emissary of Al Qaeda in Chechnya.”

This is the organization that Bush claims to have mightily defeated. Claims, when he can be bothered to speak about the topic at all, to have directed such successful operations against the group that 2/3rds of the leadership has been disabled.

Funny, for a defeated group, they seem to have had a successful week – 2 planes down in Russia, one subway bombing, and now the massacre in Beslan. Further information on the connection between Al Qaida and the Chechen guerillas can be found in this interview Jacques Sapir in Humanite:

“You are talking about people who come from the exterior. Who are they?
Jacques Sapir: There has existed since the beginning of the 20th century a Chechen diaspora in the Middle East. A certain number of the members of this diaspora have been influenced by extremist groups linked to the Al Qaeda network. The disapora Chechens were present at the end of the first Chechen war in the territory of Chechnya. There role, which was then rather feeble up to 1997, has progressively acquired an influence which, while still remaining in the minority, has not stopped growing. The links between these militants and the Jordanian cadre of the Al Qaida leadership could explain the radicalization and the mode of operation of the last terrorist actions.”
(Vous parlez de gens qui viendraient de l’extérieur, qui sont-ils ?
Jacques Sapir. Il existe depuis le début du XXe siècle une diaspora tchétchène au Moyen-Orient. Un certain nombre de membres de cette diaspora ont été influencés par les groupes extrémistes liés à ce qu’on appelle la nébuleuse d’al Qaeda. Ces Tchétchènes diasporiques ont été présents dès la fin de la première guerre de Tchétchénie sur le territoire même de la Tchétchénie. Leur rôle était faible jusqu’en 1997, mais ces groupes ont acquis progressivement une influence qui, tout en restant minoritaire, ne cesse de s’accroître. Le lien entre ces militants et un certain nombres de responsables d’origine jordanienne d’al Qaeda pourraient expliquer la radicalisation et le mode opératoire des dernières actions terroristes.)

Bollettino

Perhaps there is something grimly apposite about the fact that the day the Republican Rapture winds down, hundreds of children apparently die in the storming of a school in Ossetia by Russian troops. There’s an odd parallel between Russian and American history – bombs go off in Moscow, in 99, and planes are driven into the WTC in 2001; Chechnya is made a living grave for political reasons in 95, and again in 99, and Iraq is being made into a democracy without democracy in 2004 with the U.S. using Grozny tactics in Falluja and Najaf.

So is this the future?

According to the Post story, the militia group that took the school was a mix of Chechens and others – including Chechen women with the bombs strapped to their body. We know these tactics, since they preceded the other Chechen wars. In 95 and 99, there was a sinister convergence between the interests of the Yeltsen and Putin cliques and the Chechen 'warriors'. Russia's political oligarchy, pursuing policies of self-enrichment and legalized banditry, was as unpopular as any government in Russia's history. So they took a leaf from Stalin's book, re the Patriotic War of 1941-1945, and made themselves a mini-Patriotic war.

That convergence has now been broken. The pieces from those other Devil's pacts are now running free. Chechnya was the original victim -- and now any area can be the victim, any group.

The close connection between the war in Chechnya and Al Qaeda’s operation, first in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, still seems to escape most American commentators. A Chechen faction that saw itself as performing two tasks: destroying the Sufi heresy that predominated in Chechnya, and destroying Russian hegemony in Chechnya, has consistently innovated strategies that are taken up elsewhere by Al Qaeda and its associate groups. The Russians, meanwhile, have reverted, in their war against Chechnya, to the standard of military operation perfected by the Nazis. The destruction of Grozny, unprotested by the world, has left a deep impression on certain groups in the Moslem world.

As for a counter-strategy? How about this?

“I have been insulted! I have been hurt! I have been beaten! I have been robbed! Anger does not cease in those who harbour this sort of thought. 3

I have been insulted! I have been hurt! I have been beaten! I have been robbed! Anger ceases in those who do not harbour this sort of thought. 4

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law.”

Bollettino

Must recommend an op ed piece in the Asia Times this morning. The intro graf of Ehsan Ahrari’s piece poses the question:


“If national-security issues are driving the US presidential race - and they certainly are - then why is President George W Bush not doing worse than his numbers currently show? …

The security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is worsening; however, the focus of presidential debate is not whether Bush misled the United States into invading Iraq - by harping on the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, or that he should have stayed in Afghanistan and finished the task of eradicating al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Bush's misinformation about Iraq and his faux pas regarding Afghanistan have been taken as facts. Yet the voters don't seem to want to punish him. At least that is not the case when one looks at these numbers. Perhaps the fault lies with Kerry.”

You think so? Why, Kerry, as all the Dem blogs assure us, is with us – in his heart. Sure, he would have voted to invade Iraq all over again – but that is a nuanced position! Sure, he has no plan to withdraw American troops – but watch him get French troops in there! Sure, his comments about what is happening in Iraq are undistinguishable, for the most part, from Dick Cheney’s – no support for elections, no comment on the American attempt to change, by invader’s force, Iraq’s whole economy in the face of overwhelming opposition, no grappling with the fact that, according to polls sponsored by the CPA itself before its self-administered euthanasia, the most unpopular force in Iraq right now is the U.S. Army – but he isn’t connected to Halliburton! Kerry’s margarine approach is astonishing – by this point he should have figured out that we actually want to hear about the larger problems posed by Iraq – namely, how to get along in a Middle East that is ruled by elites that are having a hard time holding a pro-U.S. line in the face of mass anger at this country. Kerry’s every instinct, when meeting a crisis, seems to be to form a committee. Surely, though, he can’t be that brain dead. And then there is the record on Israel, which it is just as well we don’t examine – it is too depressing.

Kerry’s me-too-ism has had one advantage over Bush – one’ s impression is that he is a more competent man. Even if Bush’s plans and goals are terribly wrong, the wrong is compounded by the way those plans are carried out – with awful and stupid negligence. Kerry has so far given the impression that he isn’t the type to allow an obvious idiot like Paul Wolfowitz to go around chewing out the Commander in Chief over a purely military question. This image of competence, though, is being damaged by Kerry’s response to the Swift Boat nonsense. If he can’t deal with a little dirty campaigning, voters rightly are going to think, the guy isn’t so competent after all.

This is where Ahrari’s piece gets interesting:

“The preceding are some of the reasons Kerry could not establish himself as a distinct and a different leader. But an additional factor should also be considered. The real problem with Kerry's candidacy is that he is a politician whose comfort zone has always been close to the center of a political spectrum. Consequently, he has gotten used to responding to his natural instincts, proclivities and impulses for moderation. In the post-September 11 era, such a politician cannot impress the voters, even when the record of the sitting president on the awesome issues of wars - to be precise, on the post-military campaign performance - in Iraq and Afghanistan is mediocre. The best Kerry seems to be offering to the voters right now is the Democratic Party's version of a mediocre presidential leadership. Why should the American voters defeat the sitting president with a mediocre record on national security and elect a senator who has thus far proved himself to be very much at home with playing it safe, remaining at the center, but never demonstrating courage as a politician to damn the torpedoes and moving full speed ahead on issues of national security? It may still not be too late for Kerry to do just that, accentuate his bold measures, especially regarding Iraq. A 2-5% lead for Bush is entirely spurious; it might dissipate almost instantly, but only if Kerry can imminently articulate the difference between him and his opponent. What should be the specifics of his bold approach? Well, only Kerry can articulate that approach, if he is serious about convincing the voters that there is indeed a Kerry difference that should be in White House for the next four years, instead of George Bush. “

Much better than all the bs that has been emanating, lately, from the lefty cheerleader blogs.