India’s government is a bit pissed that the United States has designated Pakistan as a key US ally. As you might imagine, being that the “war on terror” is our number one priority, India has a hard time understanding how we can give special status to one of the world’s foremost state sponsors of terrorism. I understand as well as anyone that Pervez Musharraf’s government is the only thing preventing some very bad potential outcomes in Pakistan, but everyone knows darn good and well that Pakistan has happily hosted any number of terrorist training camps, which in turn export terrorism into India. From India’s standpoint, I’d say we look like hypocrites.

Today I devoted a good chunk of time to reading Lawrence Wright’s lengthy biography of Ayman al-Zawahiri republished from the New Yorker. It originally ran in September 2002. Anyone who’s interested in what we must do to defeat al-Qaeda and its ilk should read this article. Osama bin Laden gets a lot more press than Dr. al-Zawahiri, but in many ways his story is less interesting, and more importantly, less applicable to learning about the types of people that al-Qaeda recruits. The evolution of al-Zawahiri from young Islamist political activist to leader of global terrorism is enlightening. It includes of all the ingredients that people talk about when discussing the conditions that terrorism thrives under. Egypt’s dictatorship, which alternately encouraged and brutally suppressed Islamists, failed states where terrorists can hide out with impunity, and conflicts involving Muslims that are magnets for would-be martyrs. If we’re going to put a dent in terrorism in the long term, we have to find a way to eliminate the conditions that encourage intelligent, educated people to choose the path of al-Zawahiri.

Last April, the Bush administration told us that our share of the reconstruction costs in Iraq would top out at $1.7 billion. Nice guess.

Juan Cole (at Salon): Welcome to the quagmire. America’s favorite professor of Middle Eastern history published a one year anniversary piece on our invasion of Iraq. It’s a nice summary if you haven’t been following his weblog for the past year.

Scott Rosenberg’s latest column discusses a reunion of old school software developers who were interviewed 20 years ago for the book Programmers at Work, discussing the future of software. He’s also going to be writing a book on the same topic.

Boy, it looks like the Socialist victory in Spain opened the floodgates for bailing out on Iraq. South Korea is backing out on its commitment to send 3000 troops to Iraq. Poland’s President is talking about checking out early, and other countries have been making noises about throwing in the towel as well. One thing I’ve wondered about is whether the utility of the small deployments from coalition countries is magnified because when a country sends a small detachment, they send highly trained and/or specialized troops that can contribute at a high level. Only a small percentage of US troops are trained for the sort of nation building work that occupation of Iraq demands, the rest are people trying to adapt to the situation as best they can. You’d think that if Spain sends a few thousand troops, their skills would be highly relevant to the task at hand.

In other news, Slate had a whole battery of Spain-related stories today. They reported that Spain’s Socialists aren’t socialists, that the bombings weren’t really about Iraq, and that Spain’s demands for keeping its troops in Iraq aren’t absurd or even out of line with what the Bush administration wants.

Update: I made a mistake in mentioning South Korea above. They have refused to send their 3,000 troops to Kirkuk due to security problems, but they will still be sending those troops elsewhere in Iraq.

Brian explains why there’s a cult of IDEA. I use Eclipse these days because of the nice version control integration and price, but IDEA is the best IDE I’ve ever used. (Via Erik.)

I’m old enough to know that any sort of competition eventually becomes a race to the bottom, but that doesn’t change the fact that this inevitability discourages me.

One of my minor pet peeves about the Eclipse IDE was its rather limited flexibility when it came to code formatting. In Eclipse 2.x, the code formatting options were rather limited when compared to IDEA or JBuilder. I downloaded the latest Eclipse 3.0 milestone release the other day, and learned that this minor weakness has been eliminated with gusto. Not only are there more code formatting options than you can shake a stick at, but you can create and save multiple code formatting schemes and switch between them. The only thing missing now is the ability to assign code formatting schemes at the project level. That’s a minor complaint, though, overall I’m incredibly pleased. Oh, and the code formatting schemes can be exported so that you can share them with other people on the team, or even better, version control them.

If you think I post too much political stuff here (for what it’s worth, I think I do), you should see my email correspondence. I’m on a mailing list with some old college friends, nearly all of whom are conservatives. Anyway, here’s a message I sent to the list today about President Bush that I wanted to archive for future use. (Maybe I’ll inflict it on my family members later, they’ll love that.) The topic is how Bush has done based on the results of those policies rather than the process by which those policies are arrived at. Quoting:

Afghanistan: we successfully dislodged the Taliban, but then hurried off to Iraq without catching or killing the principals from the Taliban or al-Qaeda. They’re still festering somewhere out there, and most of Afghanistan outside the capital is either run by warlords who are nearly as bad as the Taliban, or the resurgent Taliban. To me, Bush gets a low grade on Afghanistan.

Iraq: we spent a ton of credibility and a ton of money to invade Iraq, and although we successfully dislodged Saddam, the rest has been an unmitigated disaster. Yes, I know that some things are better in Iraq, but the country doesn’t seem to me to be on a path toward successful self governance, has a huge security problem, and is not being rebuilt at an incredibly rapid pace. I’m with anyone who says that rebuilding is hard and slow, but we’ve thrown $300 billion into this hole and I really fear that we’re not going to come away with much to show for it in the end. Invading Iraq and turning it into an example of democracy that all the Middle East could follow was a low percentage play. Lots of people did pre-war planning but if their analysis didn’t come to, “They’re going to love us,” they were ignored. I won’t bore you with citations, but believe me, there are plenty that support this. And the proof is in the results. From the fact that the citizens of Iraq immediately started looting and destroying everything they could get their hands on as soon as we entered Baghdad to the fact that we have a huge insurgency problem that doesn’t seem to be going away, we’ve done a bad job. And that’s to say nothing of the load of crap we were told to get us to support the war. President Bush said in October 2002 that Iraq was a threat of “unique urgency.” Can anyone honestly say at this point that that was true? (I’m certain he believed it when he said it, but that doesn’t speak well for him.) Anyway, even if you’re happy we invaded Iraq, it seems pretty strange to be happy with the results so far.

Tax cuts/economic stimulus: If the purpose of the tax cuts was to give people (especially rich people) more of their money back, then yes, they were an unqualified success. If the purpose was to stimulate the economy, then they were not, were they? The stock market is doing pretty well, but we’re still down 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office. Anyone who blames Bush for that job loss is an idiot or is dishonest, but the tax cuts were pitched as a way to reverse the downward jobs trend. I have to say that the results there have been a failure thusfar. Last month, the economy created zero private sector jobs. That’s horrific, especially considering 150,000 jobs created per month is the break even point to keep up with the growth of the labor force. Given that the tax cuts have played a huge part in giving us a massive structural deficit that kind of freaks me out, it seems like the cost of the tax cuts was not worth the benefits, if the benefit was supposed to be economic stimulus and job growth.

Immigration and faith based initiatives: Both of these were just proposals that never went anywhere. I thought Bush’s immigration proposal was a decent but flawed idea, better than most of the stuff he comes up with. Unfortunately, when it was proposed it was known to be a non-starter with Republicans in Congress, and was widely percieved as a sop aimed at the Hispanic vote.

To me, when you look at the costs of the things Bush has done, the results ought to have been a heck of a lot better. Again, I know half the country doesn’t see it the same way as I do. So when I look at the way the methods are reported and the results they’ve led to, I’m not impressed. It strikes me that the only thing one might be really pleased with is Bush’s intentions, but we know about intentions.