Juan Cole had a lot to say today about the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin by Israel’s government. I hadn’t really considered the degree to which this would further compromise the safety of US troops in Iraq, but Cole is certain that it has. It really is amazing that Ariel Sharon’s government was incredibly eager for the United States to invade Iraq, but has done next to nothing to help the US succeed in democratizing the country.

Billmon has another of his amazing quote collections up, this time regarding the White House response to any criticism from former insiders.

Phil Carter of Intel Dump has an informative post on the implications of the Richard Clarke interview and of Condoleeza Rice’s performance as National Security Advisor in general.

The Gartner Group reports that only 32% of Java developers have “genuine knowledge.” That doesn’t surprise me — many developers are terrible. The article basically gets turned into a press release for some crappy modeling product, so there’s no reason to bother reading it. The real problem is that most companies are completely are unable to differentiate between developers with “geniune knowlege” and those that just suck. Therefore both compensation and hiring are completely screwed up. This is one area where offshoring only makes existing problems worse. It’s hard enough to hire top notch developers who are local to a company — trying to hire good developers who live twelve time zones away is nearly impossible, and that’s true whether you’re looking for individual developers or companies that do custom development.

It will probably hurt my liberal cred to admit that I haven’t read Al Franken’s book, but the truth is that I’ve never even picked it up. By neglecting the book, I missed out on Franken’s chapter on the Bush administration’s approach to fighting terrorism prior to 9/11, entitled Operation Ignore. It’s available online, and is a nice complement to Richard Clarke’s recent revelations. (Via Oliver Willis.)

Israel succeeded in assassinating the spiritual leader of Hamas today, when attack helicopters blew up his car while he was on the way home from a mosque. Leaving aside whether or not Yassin had it coming, does anyone think that this will lower the violence in Israel in the short term or the long term? I’m doubtful.

So this morning I read Condoleeza Rice’s response to Richard Clarke’s 60 Minutes interview last night, wherein she says that al-Qaeda really was the Bush administration’s first international priority, even though they couldn’t really do anything about it before 9/11. Here’s how she describes the plan, which didn’t have a chance to come to fruition prior to the attacks:

Through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda — which was expected to take years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets — taking the fight to the enemy where he lived. It focused on the crucial link between al Qaeda and the Taliban. We would attempt to compel the Taliban to stop giving al Qaeda sanctuary — and if it refused, we would have sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime. The strategy focused on the key role of Pakistan in this effort and the need to get Pakistan to drop its support of the Taliban. This became the first major foreign-policy strategy document of the Bush administration — not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda.

Is it just me, or does this paragraph make hash of the repeated insistence by the Bush administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was necessary because of his links to al-Qaeda. The fact that Rice specifically says that Iraq was not part of this master plan is telling, isn’t it?

Jay Rosen: Die, Strategy News

Josh Marshall’s analysis of the significance of Richard Clarke’s interview on 60 Minutes tonight is worth reading.

Today’s fun technical challenge is figuring out how to duplicate MySQL’s sha1() function in Java. You can use the Java MessageDigest class to create a SHA-1 hash of a string, but the MySQL version encodes the string as a hexadecimal number, and there’s the rub. After a few fruitless Google searches, I’m turning to the MySQL source code …