WiserBlog runs a letter home from Farnaz Fassihi, staff reporter and Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. It is a devastating portrait of the situation in Iraq. Here’s just a snippet:

Despite President Bush’s rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a ‘potential’ threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to ‘imminent and active threat,’ a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess ‘the situation.’ When asked ‘how are thing?’ they reply: ‘the situation is very bad.”

What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn’t control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country’s roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war.

…The Sunnis have already said they’d boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war

The New Yorker has an article this week that paints a bleaker picture in another dimension. Hussein’s ethnic cleansing, dispossessing Kurds to make for ethnically pure cities, has created fault lines that are already cracking wide open. It is an ugly, frightening future.

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Email from Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager:

President Bush spoke clearly and from the heart last night about the path forward – toward victory and security – in the War on Terror. The President spoke candidly about the difficulties facing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as these countries prepare for their first free elections. The terrorists will continue to fight these steps toward freedom because they fear the optimism and hope of democracy. They fear the prospects for their ideology of hate in a free and democratic Middle East.

President Bush detailed a path forward in the War on Terror – a plan that will ensure that America fights the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan – not in America’s cities.

John Kerry failed the one test he had to pass last night: he failed to close the credibility gap he has with the American people as his record of troubling contradiction and vacillation spiraled down to incoherence.

More here.

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ToTheSource reviews What the Bleep Do We Know, a movie that pretends it’s scientific but is actually a recruiting tool for Ramtha, “the 35,000 year old ‘Ascended Master’ and ‘warrior spirit’ god of Atlantis who channels himself through JZ Knight.” The article says that Knight

…has even copyrighted Ramtha. A psychic in Vienna had the audacity to claim in 1992 that Ramtha had also contacted her. She started channeling Ramtha for fun and profit just like Knight does. Knight sued her and won exclusive rights to all of Ramtha’s relayed messages.

Wow. You can copyright a god! And those bioethicists think copyrighting strands of human DNA is controversial.

See AKMA’s blog for a less light-hearted example of copyright abuse.

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After spending Tuesday at the Bellhead/Nethead conf (live blogging begins here) that brought together FCC officials, telecomm folks, and some telco rebels, the magnitude of the gap in thinking is more apparent to me than ever. And it does not make me feel good.

As I meet more and more FCC folks, I find I’m having the same reaction as I do in general with Microsofties: What terrific, bright, well-meaning, funny, serious people…so how does the overall entity end up working against my interests so consistently?

As I see it — and believe me, I am waaaay out of my depth here — the basic problem with the FCC is that they have a set of goals that are often worthwhile (from my POV, natch) taken in themselves but that don’t match up well to the nature of the Internet. So, they either propose altering the Internet itself or introducing “small” changes that could have huge effects. It’s like approaching the ocean with the aim of farming it. Nothing wrong with farming the ocean, except that your tractor rusts. So, you suggest changing nothing about the ocean except that it’s wet. (I am willing to admit that this is not necessarily the finest analogy humans have ever devised.)

The fundamental “problem” — the wetness of the Internet ocean — is that on the Internet, all bits look alike. The bits carrying Osama’s voice setting up an attack are indistinguishable from the bits carrying a photo of Pamela Anderson’s pubic hair. We’re not used to that with our communications networks; the telephone network knows much more about the messages traveling over its wires. So, it seems quite reasonable for Congress to tell the FCC (via CALEA) that the FBI is allowed to wiretap calls going through Voice over IP just as they can wiretap calls done over the normal phone network. But, in order to make that possible, you have to get everyone who makes software that could conceivably be used to carry voice over the Web to comply with putting in back doors for the FBI. Instead of having a wildly innovative environment where anyone can try out any crazy idea on the Net, companies will have to get vetted by the FBI first. Sure, this should only apply to telephony companies, but would you risk the penalties if turns out someone can use your app in ways you didn’t intend? Likewise, it’s reasonable for Congress to want to impede copyright violations, but because there’s no way to distinguish protected from unprotected bits, the FCC gives us the Broadcast Flag requirement that adds bits to the stream…and then requires makers of the digital playback devices to respect those bits. Bit by bit, so to speak, the Net ecosystem is being altered. As with any ecosystem, small changes can — will — have unexpected consequences.

I don’t know how to meet the demands of various stakeholders in our culture and economy. But monkeying with the wetness of the Internet ocean seems to me to be the worst possible way. And we seem to be losing the conceptual battle to convince the FCC that it should not be trying to regulate wetness at all.

Susan Crawford knows an awful lot more about this than I do. I highly recommend her reflections on the conference.

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Back when Dean was Da Man, one of the things that kept me going was the thought him and W squaring off in a debate. So, having seen Kerry last night, do I think Dean would have done better?

I actually think not. If Dean were debating W, I would expect more jabs. Kerry has the rhythm of a howitzer. But it worked for him. I think Kerry gained more votes for himself than Dean would have. I think Dean would have done well, but Kerry is more presidential, i.e., he talks slower and is taller. Yes, here in America we’re focused on the essentials.

Of course, W wouldn’t have had the same flip-flop charge to repeat ad nauseum (which I thought Kerry answered definitively only in the very last line of the debate: Hussein was a threat, but the question is how you respond to that threat). Karl Rove would certainly have come up with another theme with even more devastating results. Maybe it’d be that the ship of state needs a calm and steady hand, not an angry nut job. Plus the Republicans would have (rightfully) pressured Dean to unseal his gubernatorial records, and then would have spent 3 months finding and distorting everything they could.

On the other hand, I still believe that Dean’s campaign strategy was better than Kerry’s: Instead of running for the center in a fight over the handful of undecideds, run as a real alternative and hope to energize the I Don’t Vote party. On the third hand, Dean would have provided so many opportunities for the Republicans to trash him. By now, we’d probably have heard $80M worth of ads claiming that Dr. Judy Steinberg, his wife, had once prescribed cough syrup with alcohol in it to a 12 year old. With their politics of unerring irony, the Republicans would claim that Dr. Steinberg believes drinking is good for minors.

I am still deeply disappointed by the demise of the Dean campaign, but more because of the character of the campaign than because of the candidate. And I believe that someday — not in this election even if Kerry wins (please please please please) — we will take our country back. Or at least what’s left of it.

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Perhaps you could hear my long sigh of relief. I thought Kerry was clear, concise, determined and offered a better set of solutions. Bush looked startled and confused and, for my money, kept repeating lines that Kerry’s very presence refuted.

The bad news is that I was certain that Gore creamed Bush, Mondale creamed Reagan, Carter creamed Reagan…

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